• 3 Posts
  • 359 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • No, we need to stop using all AI systems as soon as possible. Show the companies behind them that there is no market, no interest, no future profits.

    They’ve been dumping all this AI crap for free or way too cheap. The idea is to create a market which can be exploited in the future. However this isn’t sustainable, they have poured billions into this, there is no way they are ever going to make that money back. It’s just a matter of time before the bubble collapses and it will make the dotcom bubble popping look like a fish farted in the ocean. And for you people too young to remember what that bubble bursting was like, it was bad. The sooner the bubble bursts, the less bad it will be.

    This all wouldn’t matter as much, fuck the companies right? Except the little side effect of this whole thing is us using up our precious resources, using up our planet, bringing about horrific scenarios at an alarming pace. We’ve barely seen what climate change can do, but at this pace we are going to find out.

    And don’t get your hopes up on the technology improving and becoming more useful. More and more indicators have shown the diminishing returns are hitting hard. And it was a kind of one time thing, one opportunity to train models on all the data humans created and put on the internet. Now that more and more of the internet is being AI generated and people closing access to AI crawlers, the well has been poisoned. All that crappy data created worse performing models, not better. Sure with more raw power and clever tricks the performance can get somewhat better, but it needs to be much much better to do what companies tell you it can do, in order to sell it.

    And I haven’t even mentioned the morality issues, copyright issues, propaganda/control and educational issues. Let alone accidentally hitting the singularly and wiping out humanity due to some paperclip problem.

    Exceptions exist, like expert systems / machine learning in data processing and analysis. But we’ve had those for decades and just recently got the AI label to ride the hype.

    AI needs to go away, sooner rather than later.


  • Far Cry 5 is by far my favorite of the franchise. Interesting world, good gameplay, fun mechanics. It doesn’t take itself very seriously, but still has a more serious story. Everything meshes really well and it’s a ton of fun in coop.

    Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it. Lots of re-used assets, dumb game mechanics, story very predictable and not interesting. When it released performance was terrible with lots of crashes and bugs. And not the fun kind of jank like in most FC games, the this is annoying my mission is softlocked kind of bugs. Plus it felt like 3 games in 1 which didn’t really have anything to do with each other. Later I found out this was because multiple teams worked on the different parts which didn’t really communicate as much due to covid.



  • The name for the insect probably originated in the Caribbean. Then brought over by the Portuguese and transferred to Spanish. The English got it from the Spanish, where other languages like French and Dutch got it from the Portuguese.

    In English it went from the Spanish cacarucha to the English cacarootch. Which later changed to cockroche and eventually became cockroach.

    The original Caribbean word was most likely kakalaka. This went to cacalacca in early Portuguese and then into the Spanish cacarucha. Interesting enough the newer Portuguese word of caroucha was based on the Spanish word. So the word went from Portuguese to Spanish and back again.

    People always forget languages are a living thing and words for a lot of things were very different hundreds of years ago.









  • Yeah it’s so dumb, like we have amazing technology, yet the software is fucking terrible.

    For example with most keyboard you can have a heat map of where you hit each button. So you can clearly see where the buttons should most comfortable be. However I’ve never seen any keyboard that could ever make use of that data to morph the shape of the buttons to my patterns. It seems so obvious, otherwise why collect that data?

    Instead we keep making the same shitty keyboard over and over again. And big companies monitor all our keypresses because number must go up. And put dumb ass AI powered autocorrect that are trained on all data ever instead of my personal data. I swear that thing “corrects” the right word into the wrong word more often than the other way around.

    Somehow touchscreens and keyboard have also gotten worse. I remember my old IPhone 4 I could type so fast without errors. And that screen was fucking tiny. Maybe I’m just too old but modern phones make my hands hurt and I still have errors all the damn time.




  • What are you talking about? It looks like shit, it plays like shit and the overall experience is shit. And it isn’t even clear what the goal is? There are so many better ways to incorporate AI into game development, if one wanted to and I’m not sure we want to.

    I have seen people argue this is what the technology can do today, imagine in a couple of years. However that seems very naive. The rate at which barriers are reached have no impact on how hard it is to break through those barriers. And as often in life, diminishing returns are a bitch.

    Microsoft bet big on this AI thing, because they have been lost in what to do ever since they released things like the Windows Phone and Windows 8. They don’t know how to innovate anymore, so they are going all in on AI. Shitting out new gimmicks at light speed to see which gain traction.

    (Please note I’m talking about the consumer and small business side of Microsoft. Microsoft is a huge company with divisions that act almost like seperate companies within. Their Azure branch for example has been massively successful and does innovate just fine.)



  • It’s not just the cloud cover and going through more atmosphere, it’s also the amount of energy per square meter hitting the ground. But a large part of it is most solar panels aren’t tracking and even if they are it’s usually in the horizontal and not in the vertical.

    It’s impractical to mount solar panels at such an extreme angle, but it also won’t help very much since the sun is so close to the horizon shadows will be terrible. Imagine two rows of panels, once you set up the first one almost vertical, the second row won’t get any sun. And that’s if there is even a clear view to the horizon, in most places that’s not true. It’s also very hard to mount panels at such an extreme angle because the wind will catch it more easily. Mounting flush to the roof is usually preferred, or at a fixed angle with struts for flat roofs.

    Because the panels don’t track, higher latitudes are less efficient, as the sun varies more in angle during the year. From just peaking out over the horizon in winter, to high in the sky in summer.


  • Yeah it’s the difference between playing an old game today and remembering what it was like to play in the past. Not the same thing at all.

    Plus a big part of old games these days is decompiling it, so you can recompile to run with higher framerates, higher resolution and without emulation. It’s also possible to add nice QoL features and entire new game modes.

    Just look at what Ship of Harkinian has done with OOT. It looks great, it feels like OOT still, but has the nice quick buttons. And if you want to experience the game like it’s brand new, there is the randomizer. And similar projects exist for other old games.

    And there’s also people going through the code, figuring out glitches. And how certain mechanics worked, nobody understood very well back in the day. Discover Easter eggs that were never found.

    That’s game preseveration, not some AI fever dream if you squint a bit it kinda sorta looks like the old game.

    A lot of the AI stuff I’ve seen from Microsoft also sucks hard and they know it. But they operate under the assumption these LLM systems will get better and better. Like this game thing they admit it sucks now, but imagine what it could be one day. However the reality seems to show more and more the point of rapidly diminishing returns has been reached. Throwing more data and processing at the thing isn’t going to make it a lot better.

    They are also so busy inventing new AI features nobody wants. Putting new flashy buttons everywhere and doing awful tech demos. They completely forgot to make actual useful features. For example a thing that happens a lot when working with less computer capable people, is people sending screenshots of Excel data. How awesome would it be if instead of helping write a new signature, the AI would go: “Wow what an asshole, sending a screenshot like that. Here is the original data so you can copy paste.”. Or when trying to send an email without the attachment that really should have an attachment, it warns you. It already does this, but I think it just triggers on certain keywords like attach. This would be an excellent use case for an LLM, where it doesn’t even matter much if it’s wrong some of the time.

    For me personally “AI” in the form of LLM can fuck all the way off. It certainly has it’s uses, but this all in use it everywhere for everything has made me hate it. And the misleading marketing making people think it’s basically AGI is wrong on so many levels.