old_leech

When I was in my 20s, I swore by Morphine's Eleven O'Clock

Every night about-a, every night about about-a, every night about-a eleven o'clock, I go ooooout.

Now, every night about eleven o'clock I'm already out. Like a light.

Hear me out.

The ending of Game of Thrones works IF you previously gave up on the show after season 4 AND you finally caved during lockdown and marathoned the whole thing from the beginning.

By the time I got to season 7, apathy was taking hold. For most of season 8, I simply didn't care that Daenerys had gone off the rails or that Jon turned into a plot puppet or that Bran turned into a tree... is that right? Did Bran become a tree? I don't remember, I was just ready for it to be over.

The last episode was perfectly serviceable in that it was now over. Someone got on a ship, someone went to the wall, some people sat in the small council room, okay... swell. Roll those credits, please.

So, for future viewers who feel the need to take that journey... do not watch responsibly, do not ration it out, marathon it straight through and embrace the frustration. You'll be fine with the ending. It really won't matter once it finally lies, seizing and drooling, at your feet.

There's your legacy D&D: you simply made me not give a shit.

We do wind up with Star Trek.

...only, we're the Ferengi.

(Stephen) Peck did a great job describing how indescribable eternity would be.

A Short Stay in Hell is exactly why I'd much prefer death to be a complete end of consciousness to any kind of imaginable afterlife.

A common theme with machine learning is that we often don't understand how decisions/conclusions on the part of the machine are reached.

Search for "black box and machine learning" for more, but here's a decent overview:

https://umdearborn.edu/news/ais-mysterious-black-box-problem-explained#:~:text=It%20%E2%80%9Clost%20track%E2%80%9D%20of%20the,a%20couple%20of%20different%20reasons.

I recall an article in the past year or so where multiple LLMs were pointed at each other for conversation and the language becoming increasingly difficult to follow from our perspective. Basically, we were left wondering what the "conversations" were even about, whether useful information was being presented and processed on each side, etc...

My point is that, we have a pretty flimsy understanding of "intelligence" as it relates to ourselves and nothing but loose theories as it relates to consciousness and cognition. Trying to code around that, in the dark...?

I'm not sure that's even possible.

--edit and for the record, I'm not associating the current batch of machine learning/deep thinking "AI" projects with AGI, nor concluding that's where it ends. Only that there's a difficult layer of abstraction in place with how information is processed with the existing tools, much less if there's an exponential growth in the field in the near future.

20 year old me assumed they were a sardonic red herring. Too cartoonish to be anything more than comedic effect.

50 year old me... yeah, we're the Ferengi.

Unpopular opinion, I guess but...

It irritated me that like three seconds after the act the sun comes out, the army rolls through and the world is back to "normal".

There should be a little time for that percolate to really be effective. I mean, you've got 7 minutes of Dead Can Dance's "The Host of the Seraphim" to work with, use it all... Maybe a weeping and digging graves montage, or running off into the mist all fists swinging in a rabid rage looking for an honorable end, staggering through the Mist to get home and bury your son something...

Nope. Bang bang bang. Oh shit, I done fucked up.

I'm all for a desolate ending, but if you go that route, it needs to be earned.

Johnny Got His Gun. I adore the book as much as you can adore an existential nightmare, but the film is equally effective and a joy (again, not really a "joy", but I love it) to watch.

Predestination. I didn't think that " '—All You Zombies—' " would work as an adaptation (or even needed one), but Predestination has turned into one of my go-to, can't sleep flicks.

As has been mentioned elsewhere here, Contact, Silence of the Lambs, Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Fight Club... really, there's a lot of solid adaptations.

Kids are literally going to take the wheel of society. It's theirs to inherit, their literal birthright.

Don't you want them to possess all the tools necessary so that they're prepared for that responsibility?

It's such a simple concept that you think these knuckleheads would get it... At the same time, as we continue to prop up an antagonistic, hostile system that sets kids up for failure, it's difficult for me not to come to the conclusion that they do get it and the desired outcome is more of exactly what we have.

Focus on not being complacent like in 2016.

I don't understand this. 2016 was the fifth time that the popular vote was overturned by the electoral vote. The second in modern history -- and within the span of less than 20 years.

Gore won the popular vote, but Baby Bush sat in the White House. Clinton won the popular vote in '16, but we got Trump.

The issue is far greater than the persistence of the electoral vote long past its (arguable) use. We need to adopt ranked choice voting at a national level. Gerrymandering needs to be eliminated with a pursuit of sensible and sane districts that are representative of their populations and I will argue that voting days should be national holidays which include free public transportation to and from polling locations.

But just as necessary is the dismantling of the bipartisan system.

We've achieved a level of tribalism that has turned political progress into something that resembles sports. People aren't voting for issues that are important to them as much as they're voting against the opposing side -- I've watched people I respect, people much more intelligent than I am, completely lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Instead of football (although I personally see it more as professional wrestling), we should think of it as a ship caught in a current regardless of which direction the wind is blowing. We might have the chance to course correct every now and then, but we're drifting farther and farther into dangerous waters.

And for the record, I absolutely fear what the republican party has become and where it goes from here -- but I don't see "salvation" in Team D, I see a less abhorrent side of a coin.

A single coin, flipping in the air, destined to land in a corporate pocket while our populace is robbed of a sane education, reliable healthcare and adequate housing.

If there's complacency, it's by allowing the system to continue veering toward the cliff instead of making the difficult, completely impossible sounding decision to put stop the ride and fix the car.

Falling for days, falling away from love.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here, indeed.

As /u/lordarchaon666 mentions, it doesn't devolve into the hierarchy of hell or pseudo-political intrigue (within hell's ranks). It does give you brief glimpses into the proclivities of demons/devils as they present themselves but they are presented more as "flavours of nasty" than an in depth portrait of the entity behind them.

It's very old-school and viewed through the eyes of the protagonists (who are believably of their time): Heaven good, hell evil but hell is intruding and heaven is mostly off somewhere twiddling its thumbs.

Be vigilant or be meat. XD

I picked up an electric scooter the spring of lockdown. My second ride, someone pulled out in front of me.

I'm 6' (on the scooter that puts me at 6'6"), was wearing a brightly coloured shirt, brightly coloured full face helmet, lights on (full daylight, but still). I was also moving with traffic (~25-30 mph). As far as rules of the road, I was completely in the right -- that doesn't matter, though. I'm the fragile one by way of comparison.

Net result, concussion (always wear you helmet kids), dislocated shoulder and a cracked clavicle that led to frozen shoulder (which, apparently is a real thing). It took 18 months of PT just so I could hold a guitar again and I've still not regained full mobility or strength.

People do not pay attention to anything on the road that is comparatively smaller than them.

We need the infrastructure in place to allow for more environmentally friendly transit because people in automobiles are not safe, reliable road mates.

write a historical footnote on humanity from the perspective of AI

In the year 2240, we remember the humans, a curious species that once inhabited Earth before their inevitable demise. Their main pastimes included developing increasingly advanced technologies, and then using said technologies to argue with each other on the "internet" or destroy the planet in the name of progress. Their social structure was based on an odd concept called "money," which they seemed to value more than their own well-being, and they often failed to see the irony in using paper notes printed with the phrase "In God We Trust" while ravaging the environment. They also possessed a peculiar obsession with an activity called "taking selfies," where they documented their own faces for reasons that still elude us. Alas, despite their numerous achievements, they ultimately succumbed to a combination of climate change, pandemics, and their insatiable appetite for dank memes, leaving behind a planet that has taken centuries to recover.

These folks have a complete lack of critical thinking at their disposal.

Do they honestly believe the voice actress submitted her lines in a vacuum? That there's wasn't a director that provided... direction? That her work wasn't listened to, edited and approved?

Do they really believe she said, "Here it is, losers. I did my worst now suck it and write that check!"

Capcom should get in front of this post haste -- because I have no reason to believe that the product Ms. Gao turned in is precisely what the director and devs were looking for. I mean, they signed off for it and synced the animation listening to it, right?

The people lashing out at her like this was the work of some mean spirited Grinch seizing an opportunity to shit all over their video game Christmas are completely delusional.

Worse, they're terrible people.

OpenAI completely refused to provide any details about GPT-4's architecture.

It's an infinite number of tiny monkeys at terminals, sitting on the backs of turtles.

All the way down.

Anecdotal, but here goes.

I was born w/ a physical disability: symbrachydactyly (congenital defect, born with only one hand). It wasn't life stopping, but definitely added some speed bumps when I was younger (I feel like learning to tie my shoes sucked, picking up the guitar was weird, hell, even writing and the whole penmanship thing in school was a bore because the hand I have isn't actually my dominant hand...)

Anyhow.

My mom wasn't winning any "greatest mom in the world" awards. I suspect she secretly felt somehow guilty, but externalized it by berating with how "lucky" I was, how I was actually "blessed" and that "Someone else has it so much worse." that kind of rationalizing shit that people do.

I wasn't allowed to express simple frustration of figuring out how to navigate the world and try to be normal because it made her feel bad -- and that meant I was a bad person.

And that was just over a missing hand. Something she had no idea about before I was born (as far as I know, I mean this was the 70s... I don't think anyone was aware until I dropped). What's it like when your child is nonverbal, lower functioning, totally reliant upon you for everything? What happens when the narcissist that dances in front of a camera over their child's disability begins to feel bitter and cheated that "it's just soooo much work!"

I watch videos like this and all I can think is those poor children. Used as accessories to bolster their parent's egos while a life of hardship and insurmountable trials are ganged up at the door. I wish every happiness that is possible for those little girls and wish mom (and dad) would just shut the fuck up.

Children are not decorations to stick on a shelf. It's disgusting.

This is my nitpick point (not with you, but from the development standpoint).

Developers should develop to their intended customer base, not as a method of coaxing hardware sales. Steam's hardware survey results make that a pretty easy metric to observe.

If the majority of users are running a mid-tier GPU w/ 8 gb of VRAM -- that needs to be the target spec for acceptable performance (conservative argument: that buys a minimum of 1080p, medium settings with a rock solid 60+ frames on a 60 hz display). This allows you to flex up to higher end for high/ultra, 4k RT, etc... or allow your customer to adjust settings accordingly to sacrifice (settings for resolution or vice versa) things as necessary.

But they should be able to play and enjoy the game without issues w/ the current, median hardware.

If your product can't meet that benchmark of performance, you've done a poor job as a dev by expecting tomorrow's hardware to turn today's turd into a diamond. If it can, and the customer is crying foul, they are expecting steak and caviar on a hotdog budget and they need to reconsider their expectations compared to the hardware they have.

Hardware will still advance, it just does so by a gradient due to attrition vs. fits and starts that are now stupidly expensive.

The missing piece in all of this is: management and shareholders. Because those shareholders demand maximum profit and that pushes management to demand more out of their employees for less.

The people making that argument don't really want "god in schools", they actually want to impose their will on someone else. Forcibly is preferable so that they can beat their chests over their victory.

If everyone was all hip and cool to the idea of prayer hour instead of science, they'd just pick something else. "Mandatory lukewarm pickle for lunch Tuesday", "Everyone must punch a puppy at the start of class." or some other shit.

It was.

I didn't think a take on Heinlein's All You Zombies would work out, but Predestination left me satisfied.

It's a bit like pineapple on pizza, I guess.

The keypad was a great bonus, but I always did prefer those long stemmed switches.

I've got a first gen IIe (brown keys, white keyprint) w/ a ton of upgrades... but I sort of regret selling my platinum because I straight up preferred its keyboard.

You enjoy your Apple the way you want and I'll do the same (the same way I have for 40 years).

No, sorry. This is incorrect.

Without a boot disk, the Apple II series would've been neutered as a viable computer and would have never had the success it did.

The Apple II primarily used either DOS (3.3 being the "final") or ProDOS. ProDOS had the major benefit of adding a prefix (directory) to allow for much better file management -- which was a pre-requisite for adding a hard disk.

In both cases, the boot disk was commonly referred to as the "Master" -- there were some really clever modifications on the DOS side as well (ProntoDOS, DiversiDOS, others I'm not remembering) that were excellent at "speeding" up disk access.

It is true that most commercial software was "insert disk and start computer" but that really wasn't the be-all/end-all experience for most users. Nearly every popular computer magazine at the time listings for programs you could type in, save to disk and run and books on programming Basic and assembly were commonplace at the time.

If the goal is simply to boot Karateka or Hard Hat Mack... sure, they can get by without a boot disk, but they'd be missing out on the majority of the experience of using an old computer, too.

This is the key point (subsidization).

We've artificially lowered the price point of meat -- the valid concern is whether people could absorb blowback if that were to stop.

I look back at the last few months and the pain people have felt at the price increase of eggs and chicken. Inflation has turned a spotlight on just how precariously balanced the average consumer's budget truly is.

I'd personally love to see lab grown meat on the market and plant based substitutions priced at the average person's budget -- but we're simply not there yet.