Spyke

Replies

196

Comment on

rule

Reply in thread

Didn’t he kill an employee with a box cutter? lol

I’d still rather hang with him than JP, you’re right on that.

gaming

Comment on

Critically acclaimed Dragon's Dogma 2 hits "mostly negative" on Steam after players raze it for microtransactions

The original dragons dogma had poor quality of life features and its arguably a large part of the appeal. No fast travel, no multiple saves. If you didn’t like your little ai character you had to advance pretty far to change it (and the same with fast travel, it sort of existed and was a surprisingly cool unique system but you had to get through a lot of the game for it). I’d compare it in a lot of ways to the first dark souls as far as not following gaming industry trends.

I was hoping dragons dogma 2 was more of the same honestly, I don’t think I care if travel stones can be purchased or whatever. Is it a bad game for those that liked the first one?

Comment on

My jaw hit the floor when I watched an AI master one of the world's toughest physical games in just six hours

Reply in thread

AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.

Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.

Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.

But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.

Comment on

*Permanently Deleted*

I’m a software developer with about twenty years in the field, spending my first half of that working in a Unix environment. I have tried so hard to make Linux my home desktop solution. I’ve come back to it every five years or so, hoping it’s finally figured out the UI/UX thing.

Things I like:

  • no comercial motivation
  • intrinsically programmer-oriented
  • free with available sources, as deep as I care to dig

Things I don’t like:

  • High barrier to entry (which distro?)
  • Poor support for newer hardware (not a fault of Linux but a reality)
  • Too much competition in very basic facilities like package managers and desktop environments
  • Well-intentioned but largely unhelpful community support due to the above points

I’m back using Linux again (Fedora) because at the moment I’m doing a lot of embedded and SoC work, and again I love the dev experience. But so far it seems like not much has changed wrt how fiddly daily driving can be. I can’t stand W11 for a lot of reasons, but I’m constantly tempted to try my luck with WSL as a better compromise.

Comment on

Automakers must build cheaper, smaller EVs to spur adoption, report says

Reply in thread

My kid is younger but we moved from the suburbs to a dense urban area shortly after he was born. I have to agree even though he’s not yet that independent. Some of my friends back in the burbs were like “what are you going to do with a kid in the city?” But we ride bikes to parks and gardens, go to different museums and the zoo, visit festivals for different cultures. It’s pretty awesome and almost every weekend is an eventful thing for us.

Comment on

In Denver, e-bike vouchers run out as fast as Taylor Swift tickets | Eliminates 170,000 vehicle miles traveled per week.

Reply in thread

They are a good fit here and my wife and I use ours a lot, but they are still early in traffic-calming efforts so it can be dicey actually getting to trails even on low-speed residential streets (drivers seem pretty aggressive and impatient here).

You are lucky if streets have a bike lane (but some places downtown have separated lanes which is sweet). The more common thing you’ll see is multi-use streets, which is just a picture of a bike painted on the street and does literally nothing to calm the kind of SUV/Dodge Ram drivers you’re most worried about. That said there are official bike routes pretty much anywhere in the city.

Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too. (Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)

Some of this sentiment is probably because my wife and I have only been urban biking for about six months and we’ll figure it out eventually, I wish there were better resources to gauge this concerns from fellow cyclists and not the city.

All in all I think the city planners are doing a good job to encourage biking and e-bikes with policy and changes to infrastructure, but it still has some ways to go.

Comment on

CNN blocks Firefox with uBo

Reply in thread

I got the same message on iOS Safari with no special config or UA switching (just an ad-blocker). I figure it’s a badly implemented feature. But holy shit I thought the browser wars settled out a long time ago and we had decent standards in place, guess we’re regressing back 20 years though.

196

Comment on

autism milk rule

Reply in thread

Not to mention meds to suppress expression of autism traits and behavioral therapies like ABA that make daily existence a constant effort. But hey, they make it less awkward for allistic people to share spaces with autistic people. Or god forbid, have them accept that some folks have different ways of engaging with the world.

news

Comment on

Trump Amplifies Call for "Citizens Arrest" of Judge and Prosecutor in New York Civil Case

Reply in thread

Assume that the tolerant party extends tolerance to the intolerant party. The goal of the intolerant is directly in opposition that of the tolerant, and the tolerant must then tolerate (i.e., not impede) this aim.

The only direction such a conflict can move in is toward the will of the intolerant party, because any push in an opposing direction would require an exercise of intolerance from the tolerant party (or an adoption of tolerance by the intolerant party).

Comment on

Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale

Reply in thread

If you don’t think anything unethical happens in the production of porn I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s getting better but exploitation, sex trafficking, revenge porn, etc. have been a thing since pornography was invented.

AI porn at least does not necessarily need to consider consent. Plenty of AI porn involves animated figures or photorealistic humans that don’t represent any identifiable person.

The only hang up I have is producing images of actual people without their consent, and I don’t think it’s a new problem as photoshop has existed for a while.

Comment on

'Limitless' energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots

Reply in thread

Half a trillion dollars over seventy years is nothing. How large is the waste site compared to the habitable surface? A few square kilometers is nothing.

The power needs of a small country is also essentially nothing over a seventy year span.

Nuclear energy is not ideal but it beats the hell out of coal plants, and it gives us a bridge to something sustainable. Solar has its own drawbacks and no nation is going to maintain a bunch of floating panels out in the ocean.

Comment on

this AI thing

Reply in thread

Yeah, I find it works really well for brainstorming and “rubber-ducking” when I’m thinking about approaches to something. Things I’d normally do in a conversation with a coworker when I really am looking more for a listener than for actual feedback.

I can also usually get useful code out of it that would otherwise be tedious or fiddly to write myself. Things like “take this big enum and write a function that converts the members to human-friendly strings.”

games

Comment on

Steam Deckbuilders Fest

Reply in thread

I didn’t expect to like Balatro as much as I did. I’m a big fan of deck builders but the poker theme was not super compelling to me. But wow, I’ve had a blast with it. Just boils down to a really good set of mechanics and some ridiculous fun builds. I don’t think it will hold my attention as long as like Slay the Spire or Monster Train but it was well worth the price.

Comment on

Opinions: What is a movie you genuinely like, that is rated below 60% on rotten tomatoes?

Hellraiser: Inferno. Producers should not have latched on to the Hellraiser franchise (I think it was a script rewritten for the purpose), but it has this cool premise of a guy entering an alternate, surreal reality.

I love the Hellraiser franchise and don’t really consider this part of it but I do rewatch this movie every few years for the cool daily-life-twisted feel.