https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.

You’ve got me pegged lol, I already make my own.

That’s a very dumb name, but I really like the simple design and earth tone color of the bar itself.

On the other hand I don’t think I’d like to smell like beer.

I’ve successfully used a 1050 Ti and a 3060 Ti with Linux Mint and the proprietary drivers (selected through the GUI driver manager). So if anyone reading this is in a similar situation it might be worth it to try that.

It needs a port that you can attach your bag of caffeinated noodles to.

Did they add the sand worms to this game yet?

Are they helpful?

I think you may have misread their comment.

Copyrights (rights to media content) do not lapse because of failure to enforce them.

Trademarks (the right to call your product a specific name) can lapse if members of the general public start associating it with a type of product rather than your specific brand. This happened with “zipper”, “jet ski”, and “popsicle”. But you can’t sue Grandma Smith because she mistakingly referred to an Xbox as “a Nintendo”.

From watching the opening I didn’t like the writing of the dialogue.

Pretty good track record with videogames too.

Some ARM CPUs that are advertised as microcontrollers have 32 bit address spaces and roughly the same power as an i486.

I agree to some extent, as there are plenty of distros that don’t do anything significantly different from each other and don’t need to exist. I also see what you mean about desktop environments. While I think there’s space for all the small exotic window managers that exist, I would say we probably don’t need as many big fully integrated desktop environments as there are now. (Maybe we should have only one aimed at modern hardware and one designed to be lightweight.)

That being said, there is plenty of duplication of effort within commerical software too. I would argue that if commercial desktop GUIs currently offer a better user experience than Linux desktop environments it’s more in spite of their development model than because of it, and their advantage has mostly to do with companies being able to pay developers to work full time (instead of relying on donations and volunteers).

There are a couple reasons I think this:

• In a “healthy” market economy there needs to be many firms that offer the same product / service. If there is only a small number (or, worse, only one) that performs the same function the firm(s) can begin to develop monopolistic powers. For closed source software development this necessitates a great deal of duplicated effort.
• The above point is not a hypothetical situation. Before the rise of libre software there were a ton of commercial unices and mainframe operating systems that were all mostly independently developed from each other. Now, at least when it comes to running servers and supercomputers, almost everyone is running the same kernel (or very nearly the same) and some combination of the same handful of userspace services and utilities.
• Even as there is duplication of effort between commercial firms, there is duplication of effort and wasted effort within them. For an extreme example look at how many chat applications Google has produced, but the same sort of duplication of effort happens any time a UI or whole application is remade for no other reason than if the people employed somewhere don’t look like they’re working on something new then they’ll be fired.
• Speaking of changing applications, how many times has a commercial closed source application gone to shit, been abandoned by the company that maintains it, or had its owning company shut down, necessitating a new version of the software be built from scratch by a different firm? This wastes not only the time of the developers but also the users who have to migrate.

Generally I think open source software has a really nice combination of cooperation and competition. The competition encourages experimentation and innovation while the cooperation eliminates duplicated effort (by letting competitors copy each other if they so choose).

I vibe with this a lot. I don’t think the movie needed to exist in the first place, and if it did it would probably be better if it were fully animated, but nothing about the trailer provoked any strong emotions in me.

I’m not going to watch it but I also didn’t go “wow this is an insult and a tragedy”.

I guess I’m happy for all the tiny children that are gonna watch it and probably love it though.

Big Bang Theory is less like nerd humor and more like autism blackface.

This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.

I do think the complexity of artificial neural networks is overstated. A real neuron is a lot more complex than an artificial one, and real neurons are not simply feed forward like ANNs (which have to be because they are trained using back-propagation), but instead have their own spontaneous activity (which kinda implies that real neural networks don’t learn using stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation). But to say that there’s nothing at all comparable between the way humans learn and the way ANNs learn is wrong IMO.

If you read books such as V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s Phantoms in the Brain or Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat you will see lots of descriptions of patients with anosognosia brought on by brain injury. These are people who, for example, are unable to see but also incapable of recognizing this inability. If you ask them to describe what they see in front of them they will make something up on the spot (in a process called confabulation) and not realize they’ve done it. They’ll tell you what they’ve made up while believing that they’re telling the truth. (Vision is just one example, anosognosia can manifest in many different cognitive domains).

It is V.S Ramachandran’s belief that there are two processes that occur in the Brain, a confabulator (or “yes man” so to speak) and an anomaly detector (or “critic”). The yes-man’s job is to offer up explanations for sensory input that fit within the existing mental model of the world, whereas the critic’s job is to advocate for changing the world-model to fit the sensory input. In patients with anosognosia something has gone wrong in the connection between the critic and the yes man in a particular cognitive domain, and as a result the yes-man is the only one doing any work. Even in a healthy brain you can see the effects of the interplay between these two processes, such as with the placebo effect and in hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation.

I think ANNs in general and LLMs in particular are similar to the yes-man process, but lack a critic to go along with it.

What implications does that have on copyright law? I don’t know. Real neurons in a petri dish have already been trained to play games like DOOM and control the yoke of a simulated airplane. If they were trained instead to somehow draw pictures what would the legal implications of that be?

There’s a belief that laws and political systems are derived from some sort of deep philosophical insight, but I think most of the time they’re really just whatever works in practice. So, what I’m trying to say is that we can just agree that what OpenAI does is bad and should be illegal without having to come up with a moral imperative that forces us to ban it.

Make the page 15x more bloated with JavaScript popups and it’ll be “modern”.

The ads are subliminally manipulating the sort function of my spreadsheet that calculates the unit cost of every product in a category.

You’re right that I’ve never read the 2e and 3e sourcebooks, just 5e and some OSR stuff, but nothing in between.

Most of my experience playing DnD comes from playing in homebrew settings. Maybe the real problem in that case comes from trying to use a roleplaying system that has a bunch of cosmology and mysticism baked into it in a setting that either lacks that or has metaphysics that actively clash with it.

But if so I think that’s probably a pretty common experience with how 5e is played.

I’m gonna respond to your points a little bit out of order, because it’s more expedient for me to set up the topics I’m going to talk about that way.

Yes, you can just get rid of long-lived species if you like. You can also modify the world to match the fact near-immortals exist and I don’t think it’s that hard. It’s your decision, ultimately, but there’s a lot of ways to solve it.

I agree with this. One of my favorite settings, World of Darkness (specifically the Vampire versions of OWoD), is completely defined by the fact that immortal beings are present in the world, and their machinations dominate everything about it. And one of my favorite DnD-like settings, Arcanum, deals pretty heavily with how humanity interacts with longer lived races, and major parts of its backstory are defined by the actions of the longer-lived elves and dwarves.

The thing is neither of my DM friends that I mentioned in my original comment wanted to deal with the elven illuminati and they didn’t want to make elves senile. Their world was also not very Tolkien-esque, so “elves spend most of their lives doing nothing” didn’t fit the vibe they they were going for.

And a fourth point, Elves may not care/notice at all. If the Elves are insular and live in the woods they’re extremely unlikely to bother remembering the Human king, after all he only lives like a scant 100 years at most so why even know his name?

This is what my friends originally did with elves before they got rid of them, but they had another issue. Very often they would like to end one campaign, do a 100 year timeskip, then start another one in the same setting. If a player character was an elf that meant that they should still be around, and in good health. This was problematic because these campaigns were generally fairly low level, and they didn’t want to have a high level NPC running around.

I’m sure there are ways to deal with that too, but with all of the other issues elves created I gather they decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Depending on your depiction of Elves the effect is the same (provided the group is Elves) because they’re often predicted as just slower/more leisurely in their approach to life (although I’m not sure what you mean by the statement in the first place, because something being older than you intended doesn’t sound like an actual problem).

So, I should have made this more clear in my original comment, but there are no non-human races in the world that I am building (it’s not even for a DnD campaign). That anecdote was just about me finding out the hard way how long 15,000 years is.

As to why it’s a problem if the knowledge keepers ended up being older than I had originally intended it’s because it’s really hard to keep a cohesive organization with the same goal around for thousands of years. The core of the Jewish religion is probably the most successful at this, and it’s extremely impressive. Some native American and Australian Aboriginal cultures kept accurate oral records for even longer, but that was within a completely different social context.

So I didn’t want my fictional group to do a 2x or 3x better job than real life people. Likewise I didn’t want massive empires lasting way longer than real life empires.

I can go into more detail about my world if you’re interested, but I didn’t want to make this comment any longer lol