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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.

    He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.

    As far as I understood things, he’s always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.

    Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I’ve got them blocked and I’m not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.


  • While I’m not against an anonymous stand for what’s “right”, that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

    It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things “for the lulz”. It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

    The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn’t care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.






  • That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

    My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

    Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.



  • So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

    It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

    At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

    Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

    The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

    Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

    Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

    So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4n states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

    Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.


    My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

    People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

    Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.


  • Most people don’t want their kids eating slop all the time.

    Beyond that Minecraft is a considerably old game now, especially if you got into it in the very early days. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are older people paying attention to this.

    I was in notch’s old threads on /v/ in the very beginning back as a young teen (yes 4chan, I was totally 18 years old, pinky swear). I’m in my 30s and have a kid now who is too young to play, but I will probably introduce her at an appropriate age if she likes computer games.

    I’m not raging or anything, but I’m definitely paying attention enough to know if this movie is garbage to steer my kid away from in the future.




  • The world is a wildly different place now, and the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.

    This is not nearly as comparable.


    Beyond that, very few people had an issue with AI as fuzzy logic and machine learning. Those techniques were already in wide use all over the place to great success.

    The term has been co-opted by the generative, largely LLM folks to oversell the product they are offering as having some form of intelligence. They then pivot to marketing it as a solution to the problem of having to pay people to talk, write, or create visual or audio media.

    Generally, people aren’t against using AI to simulate countless permutations of motorcycle frame designs to help discover the most optimal one. They’re against wholesale reduction in soft skill and art/content creation jobs by replacing people with tools that are definitively not fit to task.

    Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.


  • You’ve missed my point entirely.

    Blame absolutely is fair, but people can’t vote on just the best options for SS alone, ignoring everything else. Also, as seen in recent presidential races (cough cough 2016), you can have a massive contigent of voter will just effectively erased by very thin margins or technicalities. On top of all that, voters can’t directly effect what the policy makers actually do in office.

    My point is, it’s not useful to blame such a wide and diverse swath of people. Painting with such wide brush strokes only serves to create an us vs them situation that distracts from the actual policy makers, lobbyists, and news media complex with far more direct influence over all of this. Most of those people are boomers, but all boomers are not part of those groups.

    The shortsightedness is thinking that new generations are the first people to go “Hey, maybe we need to pay into SS for enough money to be there. Maybe we shouldn’t waste money on proxy wars on false pretenses.” plenty of Boomers were shouting this from the rooftops as this shit was happening. Your objections and concerns are not new.

    Basically, please stop talking about boomers as some singular homogenous entity. Please stop thinking that the situation we now find ourselves in is caused by some sort of lack of sense from older generations instead of politicians doing what is best for them at the expense of the general populace. Please stop blaming the average populace from before your time for the choices made by politicians.

    Trump should be a burning hot example that politicians actions and the peoples’ will are often very disconnected.


    We do have to find a way to fix this. Taking time to dunk on people just as downtrodden as us is wasted effort that could be put towards trying to fix things.



  • What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?

    If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.

    I love that they worded it as the age old ban appeal reason. Always someone’s brother on their account breaking the rules.

    Rough going, but it’s better than having cheaters just make a rotation of child accounts they can hide behind.