Anyone wanting more like this, the meme format is called o the pelican, spawned from this wonderful image seven years ago:

I mean to say this as softly as possible: If they intended to murder politicians, this demographic most likely to own firearms, where was all the gun violence?

What happened is a massive problem that is far too ignored. That said, either these people are so mentally deficient that we don’t need to fear an attempted coup by them because they can’t remember to bring their fucking guns with them, or they (in general) weren’t actually out for blood.

It was incredibly bloodless for a failed supposed overthrow. There have been numerous political demonstrations at colleges with more violence/injury/deaths.

Pulling away the hyperbole, I find it hard to call it more than a massive protest gone quite wrong. Those involved, including the inciters, deserve to be locked up. But assassins they weren’t.

This should realistically be part of every company’s disaster recovery/business continuity plan.

Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.

Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.

I’ll tell you something you missed:

Steam’s DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don’t force DRM on their platform, it’s entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.

Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.

Let’s also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.

I really have a hard time accepting that they “pushed” the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.

Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn’t something new for them. What’s new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.

Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than “proprietary” and “too big”.

On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren’t doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.

Anyway, again I’ll say: I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond “proprietary” and “too big”.

This is probably the simplest option. I’ve seen a good number of simple yet functional and pretty sites built in markdown and converted to html via some simple tool like pamdoc.

The assets following you are here to help.

[email protected]

Probably weirder than you’re looking for, but fun.

No, in fact. The nuclear lobby has been historically raw dogged by the malding fossil fuel and coal plant industries for decades. Up until recently, traditional power lobbies haven’t seen renewables as legitimate competition due to issues of scaling to meet demand, issues of location restricting where they can be built, etc.

We’ve had reactor designs ready to use the spent fuel you’re so damn concerned about for years now. Turns it into even less dangerous more spent fuel as more energy is pulled out of it (if you’ll excuse the incredibly simple summation). Incredibly efficient.

Fully researched. Risks, benefits, construction costs mapped out, maintenance costs mapped out, decomissioning costs mapped out, how long they’d be safe to run mapped out.

Every single time construction of a new plant comes up, there is a massive fucking push from the older “burn dangerous shit to pollute the air and generate power” industry to drum up fear again until the local community "not in my back yard"s hard enough to stop it.

Let me make it as explicit as possible: People like you, freaking out about hypotheticals surrounding nuclear power that they have never taken the time to understamd themselves, are a huge part of the reason why greener energy production is so slow to take off.

If green energy is so ready to take the fuck over and make nuclear obsolete, how in the absolute fuck do you explain what’s going on in Germany right now? Are they just too stupid to do things the right, safe, sustainable way that has no drawbacks at all? Or maybe, just maybe, there are still issues preventing reasonable widespread adoption of renewables, and the smog belchers want us at each other’s throats instead of at theirs?

Fucking hell. Let me know when you start accusing people of being bots or paid shills so I can just fucking block you already.

Man, we could generate some good wind power with how fast those goalposts are moving!

A good chunk of the world is still stuck where the options are coal vs nuclear for base load coverage. Of course people are going to push for the safest option for large load needs.

We’re generations away from worldwide energy needs being met entirely by green renewables and battery banks. I’ll never be against expansion of those technologies, but nuclear is an important middle step that is far less dangerous than the most widely used technologies for meeting base load (coal).

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

What?

Coal plants are the ones that produce radioactive smog. Nuclear plants just put off steam. The radioactive material doesn’t come into contact with the clean water loop that is used to spin the turbine and generate power unless something is catastrophically wrong.

The dangerous byproduct, spent fuel rods, are stored in pools buried deep, and radioactivity is drastically abetted by the spent rods being submerged in water.

Seriously, you anti nuclear people are like anti vaxxers. It’s very minimal reading to learn how this shit works so that you can have valid critique, but no, that’s too tough.

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.

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.

That assumes that anyone can reliably be a single issue voter their whole life, and that people somehow only have to live in the reality they voted for instead of the reality of whichever politicians actually won.

It’s a very beguiling idea to simply blame the current problems of the world on negligence or a lack of effort by those who came before you. On strictly personal failings. It’s also incredibly short sighted to do so, and often leads to repeated mistakes.

Inb4 “then they should have tried harder to convince their friends/family! They should have protested! They should have stormed the capital in violent revolution!” Keep moving the goalposts so long as you can keep blaming the previous generations.

It’s a classic trap in business for newly hired managers: Come into a new to you situation, pick out the obvious as hell problems, insist upon the most logically simple solution. Ignore the history, company politics, confounding variables, and end up making the situation worse because you never understood how things got so bad to begin with.

In complicated situations, it is a trap to think that the obvious solution just hasn’t been tried or investigated because no one as smart as you has been involved yet.

Now blame where blame is absolutely due. There’s plenty to go around.

That said, very little of what the powers that be do is truly new. Blaming the older generations eliminates an opportunity for us all to learn from the past, identify patterns in history, and just makes it that much easier to keep us all oppressed.

A big takeaway I’ve found from elderly family members is that you absolutely cannot rely on inflation increasing at a standard pace. A fortune saved up 25+ years ago does not go anywhere as far as it used to.

Anyway, to try and cut my ramble short: We can sit around feeling smug about some perverted idea of “what goes around comes around”, or we can try to learn from the knowledge aand mistakes of previous generations.

We’ll all be old one day.

I would hope, but I’ve been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

Sorry buddy, but that capitalistic framework is where we all have to exist for the forseeable future.

Giving corporations more power is not going to help us end that.

Shitposting?

Ehhhhh… that’s a pretty shit take. Any site that allows uploads of files “allows” uploads of CSAM? See how that breaks down immediately?