BlemboTheThird @ BlemboTheThird @lemmy.ca

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They also care about ruining trans people's lives in any way possible. I'm sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven't thought the bathroom thing through, but don't forget the other reason they'd be happy to put passing trans men in women's bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women's toilet, you think they're going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that'd just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they're least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

They do often talk about "it needs to be new," but for the most part the things they release don't actually follow that philosophy. Artifact was trying to follow the likes of Hearthstone. CS2 is a glowup of CS:GO. DOTA2, League. Deadlock is the closest they've come to something genuinely innovative in at least a decade, but even that is still following on the heels of MOBA/FPS hybrids like OW and Paladins, just taking more elements from MOBAs.

And the "not caring about money" thing wasn't true in 2008. They were probably getting to that point around 2012, as Steam began to turn into a money printer and their microtransaction games took off, but that wouldn't have been until after HL3 had been cancelled at least once. At some point Valve talked about the difficulties in selling Portal 2 (I think it might have been in the dev commentary? Idk it's been years) and one of the points they bring up was how even a huge success like that game wasn't living up to their other titles. They tried to implement microtransactions with the co-op mode, but they learned lessons about how that model only worked in bigger multiplayer games. One of the big stories they tell in both the HL1 and HL2 documentaries were the troubles they ran into with funding, and I guarantee they were not looking to repeat those experiences by continuing work on a game that had far less potential for return on investment. Again, that might have changed by 2012, but by then the momentum was already gone.

I'm not sure I believe that Valve ran out of ideas for HL3. That's clearly the image they want to project, and maybe even what they tell themselves, but judging from the ideas they did have for Episode 3 they showcased in that documentary, there was more than enough to justify releasing a game. Certainly there was as much or more new stuff than there was for either EP1 or 2. I think it's much more likely they simply decided their other projects at the time--CS:GO, DOTA 2, even TF2--had way more moneymaking potential. And I mean, they were right! They made a ton of money off of lootboxes and cosmetics for their multiplayer titles. I don't think Steam had totally taken over the market yet, so they were hedging their bets on multiplayer microtransactions.

I dunno. The whole "it needs to be new" philosophy they constantly espouse to hasn't really been true at least as far back as Portal 2. Even Alyx wasn't particularly revolutionary as far as VR titles go. Maybe doing that type of design was new to Valve, but the only standout features that distinguishes Alyx from other games are the graphics and the (genuinely very good) grabbity glove object pickup system. Pretty much everything else is several steps behind other VR shooter games in the name of Accessibility™, from movement to weapon selection to the painfully dumb AI.

They didn't run out of ideas. The movement FPS genre is alive and well for a reason, even today: there's lots to be done. They just lost interest in it themselves, and I believe the reason for that is primarily monetary.

Next week: Trump claims to be an Eldritch being that coalesced out of Jesus's anger while up on the cross over 2000 years ago

Gonna have to double check the next phone I buy has a screen first

Go big or go home. "Russia starts using nukes and us government blames ukrainians for it"

I mean the version of him in this pic was strong enough to straight up kill Spidey. It just varies from story to story

At the point where we're making lab-grown dinosaur meat, I suspect the cool factor is way more important than silly things like efficiency. T-Rex meat all the way babyyy

I don't understand how someone can look at things and go "yeah no need to look any deeper, I know enough already

I swear some people never grow out of the "I'm a big kid now!" mindset. Just like how little kids always seem to think

<age they currently are>

Pride is a hell of a drug.

Literally none. DEI straight up means treating everyone the same. They're working on giving it some fucked up negative connotations the same way they have with "woke" and "critical race theory," but if you look at the history and reality of where those words come from and what they mean, it becomes clear they're playing with language, trying to avoid looking racist to the general public while still implementing racist policy.

If by "this," you mean the reference towards Tubman, then you're wrong. Talking about the accomplishments of anyone who isn't a straight white Christian man IS promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion! DEI is a good thing! Opposing it is explicitly racist!

Because as everyone knows, political change only happens spontaneously, without any organization in the lead up, and people are famously fired up by sitting around at home until we all get the magic signal to go cut politicians' heads off

I did not but I'll give you an upvote anyway

Not sure which of the cabinet said it first, but for anyone wondering--this isn't satire. The "which 24 hours" is a real line Trump supporters are regurgitating.

When you absolutely have to visit Reddit for whatever reason, you should use an alternate frontend. The one I'm familiar with is called libreddit and functions similarly to nitter for twitter. You can do a search to find a large list of instances, but all you do is replace the "http://reddit.com/" part of the URL with the name of the instance. I usually use eddrit.com or safereddit.com

The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you've never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it's actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn't do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

I recently read a neat little book called "Rethinking Consciousness" by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren't present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don't experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn't exist in them.

Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does--in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It's not something you have to think about--often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you've noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog's to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

It's possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain--our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing--though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

All that to say the things we're currently calling AI just don't have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don't have--what, near as I can tell, we haven't made any meaningful progress on at all--is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

Right now, when marketing departments say "AI," what they're describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It's one small piece of the whole that's required when science fiction writers say "AI."

TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we're capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.

I've always known the average voter is a huge idiot with a tiny attention span, but articles like this really put into perspective how bad it is. How the fuck do you manage to forget the COVID pandemic? Did everyone really buy the "Chinese bioweapon" propaganda in order to avoid blaming Trump or something?

Trump was awful before and already ballooned the debt once. How do you not expect it to happen again?

I'm not disagreeing in a general sense, but it's funny to make that argument here when this info basically fell into the journalist's lap. Very little actual journalism went into making this story possible

I'm probably just old but it's always faster to type :) than it is to find the 🙂, same goes for every emoji really.

Also they convey slightly different emotions