A beautiful essay on the alienating effect of "the tyranny of the quantifiable", i.e. capitalism as expressed through online social platforms and AI.

Hey all,

I'm losing my wits over not being able to find an article again that I've seen either on lemmy or reddit, and I figured this community might know.

It was about a research team somehow cracking open an LLM and looking at the way it does calculations, and I remember there was a sort of flowchart in the article, with the LLM grouping interim results into weird-ass categories, like "between 26-ish and 34-ish", and then using a separate process for figuring out the last digit.

I think the article might have been linked in response to a question like why LLMs mess up the last digit of number calculations.

Any of this rings a bell to someone? I've tried searching for it in any way I can phrase the idea, but all I get is a flood of ads and guides about "how to do math in LLMs".

Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH).

This statistic effectively means that 95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments. Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people who’s investments are now worthless.

I admittedly don't know much about its historical background, but I found this a fascinating read about the legacy of the nineties' Bosnian war that is still acutely felt throughout the region.

Following ChthonVII's idea, I'm mirroring my probably only interesting post on the subreddit :D

Finally got around to watch the 2-hours long GW1 segment of the recent Extra Life 2022 ArenaNet livestream. The devs had a lot of interesting insights and amusing anecdotes, so I made a bunch of clips - sharing them here in case someone else haven't had the time to watch the whole thing.

The participants were:

• Bobby Stein - writing team lead

• Darrin Claypool - level designer

• Colin Johanson - game designer

The clips in order of appearance:

• The unstoppable servers

• How GW1 shifted away from PvP focus

• GW1 was not really an MMO

• GW1 players about playable charr

• GW1-GW2 build design differences

• The original concept of the GW franchise

• GW1 current devs and population

• Pre-Searing and Gwen were added last-minute

• Legacy of the Tihark Orchard mime

• Workplace microtransactions :D

• GW1-GW2 voiced dialogue difference

• Why GW2 didn't get multi-classing 1

• Why GW2 didn't get multi-classing 2

• EotN, GW2 and the novels were all written at the same time

• Palawa Joko Bonus Mission hacks 1

• Palawa Joko Bonus Mission hacks 2

• Devs on playing own game vs. other games

• EotN locked-skillbar minigames

• GW1-GW2 development workload

• Returning to GW1's development constraints

• Hardest feature to make was the dynamic Kurzick-Luxon border

• Dhuum banning animation

• ArenaNet was almost based in Hawaii :D

A few more bits that were too short to worth clipping:

• Early in development there were no professions, you could slot any skill.

• They spent 4-5 months working on Sorrow's Furnace compared to their usual couple of weeks per zone.

• GW1 development team was around 70-80 at launch, and peaked around 100 with EotN. (GW2 had 350 developers at launch.)

Twitch only allows max. 1 min long clips, so sometimes I had to cut off an interesting follow-up - if you want to see how a clip continued, click Watch Full Video.

PS.: For the story of the hideous leopard-print couch go to this timestamp in the VoD :D