Pigeon @ Lowbird @beehaw.org

Posts

10

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205

Joined

2 yr. ago

I don't know whether I'll participate in this one, as I'm an atheist (though I do I think experience the same emotions in other contexts and this looks like it's meant to be inclusive of that), but I'm happy to see it after seeing some blindly anti-all-religious-people (I don't know a good word for this) hate comments recently.

It's still buggy as all heck, and requires lots of troubleshooting even in the regular SteamOS mode. If you've used linux, especially if you've tried to game on it: it's like that. Even the "verified" steam games often don't work immediately without at least first fiddling with community controller profiles.

So from what you say I'd 1000% recommend going for the laptop.

I'm not prepared to call anyone still associating themselves with the GOP "reasonable" at this point. That's like joining a neo-nazi militia and claiming that you're just a member but not a neo-nazi.

Ditto for the people who voted for the Nazi party for "economic reasons" while turning a blind eye to... Fucking everything. They were not innocent. Very far from it. However 'normal' and 'socially acceptable' their day to day behavior may otherwise have seemed to those around them. Evil can be as banal and understated as anything.

Past a certain point, you just can't declare affiliation with an organization, make-nice with its 'more extreme' members and overlook their behavior and actions, etc, and still claim that you're uninvolved and not participating in and enabling what the organization has become as a whole.

Especially not when the GOP - in congress and in state houses - votes in near lockstep when it comes to their vilest culture war talking points. These supposedly "fringe" points that have such a mysterious tendency to become less and less and less fringe within the party as time passes and the line of what is or isn't "acceptable" (or even encouraged) is shoved farther and farther out.

Any actually reasonable members of the GOP bailed and became right-wing dems or independants or libertarians ages ago at this point.

Sites like this are a non-starter for me until and unless they make seeding whitelist only, so I have control over what I seed like I would with regular torrents. Because otherwise random users can and will end up unknowingly participating in the hosting of child abuse materials, nazi propaganda, and so on. I think this alone makes it nonviable as a youtube alternative at scale.

I'll take youtube's privacy violations over that any day.

Oi, careful with the Outer Wilds spoilers. That game is the last game people should know anything about before playing fpr the first time.

If you wait long enough, they won't be exclusive anymore, or you'll be able to emulate them.

Loads of other games to get hyped about in the meantime at least.

It doesn't matter if there's no hardware profit margin if the end result is, as it seems to be, more people buying more games from steam. That's no different than most console manufacturers anyways - so far as I know, none of them are in it to make profit off the hardware itself, just the exclusivity.

Granted, Steam Deck still let's you run non-steam games and connect other launchers, but even so most people will buy from steam for it regardless.

Fwiw, you can disable those Windows forced reboots in the group policy editor of Windows, at least in the Pro version. I don't even let mine give me the update notifications any more - I just see the option to install when I go to manually shutdown or reboot.

Edit: granted, Windows updates sometimes unexpectedly make problems anyway, albeit much less often for me than Linux ones.

The cloud windows headlines are kinda misleading, that's just about their business-aimed products, not windows for home users.

Uh, no. I tried Linux (Mint). I hated it. It doesn't even have a damn colorblind mode... The best you can hope for is a goofy workaround with some app that's meant for devs testing colorblind modes, and that may or may not even work. Colorblind mode is a rock bottom basic accessibility feature, especially in 2023, and the most highly recommended distro for people coming from Windows doesn't even have that.

And it rather shows that average or non-Linux-nerd users, and what they need from their OS, are not a priority at all, which means the system will never be friendly or appealing to them until and unless that changes.

I also personally hated the way it wanted me to install everything from a launcher, vs downloading exe's from their owners websites that have a lot more info than the generic Linux launcher does.

I hated all the crashes, the requirement for tinkering at random times when I really just needed my PC to work reliably, and the way so many people in the Linux community look down on and/or insult everyone who asks for help with anything or has any gripe about Linux (thus assuring helpful feedback from average users won't be reporter or heard, their problems won't be fixed, and confusing UI will remain confusing and bogged down in jargon).

Linus Tech did a good youtube series on what Linux is like to encounter as a newbie. He had problems. When even one of the most popular tech/PC youtubers has problems right out the gate, how can you expect it to work for everyone else?

I want it to get better and become a real conpetitor to Windows, but it just flat out isn't yet except for specific applications like servers, and pretending it is only insures it won't ever be. The culture around it is holding it back.

Tl;dr: there are actually quite a lot of people like me who are aware of Linux and choose Windows or Mac instead.

The straightforward natural peanut butters, like Adams, that pretty much only have peanuts in the ingredients list, taste much better than the cheaper ones, for what it's worth. Also unsalted is way better, imo. Some brands add way to much salt and/or sugar and ruin the taste.

The no-stir ones might also taste different - I'm not sure since I've always just avoided those.

But ofc maybe it's just not your thing. Point is that different peanut butters do taste different.

Yuri on Ice. People who haven't watched it tend to only know that it's gay, which it is, but it's also just an incredible sports anime because a) it's very true to life in the way the sport and training for it works and b) the protagonist's opponents are portrayed as actual sports competitors instead of as villains - by the end, you almost don't care who wins because you want all of them to win. Also the competitions felt extremely tense and exciting to watch. Also they really crank up the animation budget for important competition scenes.

The first 3 episodes are hard to get through - way too awkward to watch - but after that it becomes an incredible show, imo.

Citizen Sleeper is incredible. The writing is absolutely top notch, and the dice rolls as daily action points (basically) system works great for a life sim/time management game and keeps the tension up but not too impossibly so.

Though the free dlc expansion isn't as well written imo (at least as of when I played it, when they were still working on at least the third part of it). I suspect they changed writers. It's still good, just a lot more straightforward and cliche, and the characters have less depth, imo. Granted it could also just be that I was in a worse mood when I played it or something.

Signalis is fantastic as a horror game, but it involves a LOT of backtracking to manage a tiny inventory. This is intentional and plays into the horror but can get annoying fast. It's a really atmospheric game, and it might appeal to fans of the original Resident Evil or its remake, and to space horror fans in general.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is really cool, but I never finished it because it's an absolute nightmare to try and navigate. Everything is blinding neon and you don't get easy landmarks nor an intuitive map. It was part of the giant Black Lives Matter itchio bundle I believe, so if you bought that you might as well give it a go! I'm glad I played it for a while even though I didn't finish.

The Outer Worlds went on a bit long for me, but it's really good fun, and it did feature an ace character, which is really really rare still and I appreciate it much. Especially since she's a human and not a robot or alien, like many ace, aro, or nonbinary characters end up being. It's lampooning of capitalism is sort of cathartic but also can get sort of really depressing after hours and hours in that world.

Outer Worlds is NOT to be confused with The Outer Wilds, which is basically a perfect game with its dlc. The Outer Wilds also counts as lgtbqia+ because you play as an alien from a race that refers to each other exclusively as "they"; they never use gendered pronouns. Whereas another race in the world does have 'he' and 'she' in their language. In an interview the writer said that the 2nd race also has nonbinary people in it too, but she just couldn't figure out how to work that into the writing in a clear way, because of the way the writing works in the game I guess. I'm trying to talk about this without spoilers so forgive me if this sounds muddled.

Anyway, The Outer Wilds is great if you want an open world mystery/archaeology game, though you need to be okay with the fact that you aren't told what to do at all - it relies on the player to bring their own curiosity and questions to motivate your exploration, and I've heard of that tripping some people up. But if you have a question, or notice something weird that you don't understand, in this game 99.999% of the time you can trust that it's not a bug and is a mystery for you to figure out if you want to.

Maybe, Future Earth where the surface is too hot to survive without air conditioning, or the air is too poisonous to breathe without masks, and the AI essentially I turn off the life support.

But yeah this is scare mongering. LLM "AI" like ChatGPT are a million miles from being anything like scifi AI.

This story is delightful, thank you

For Android, the ReadEra app, because it's the only darn ebook app I could find that allows a scrolling mode instead of page flip. And you can add the Twilight app also to change screen temp, and extra dim mode in the dark. It works really well.

For e-ink ereaders, I don't know what the best one is right now. Definitely not Kindle though. And Kobo has overdrive library integration. But e-ink in general is very nice for reading. Definitely go for 8 inches or more in screen size though if you want to read manga. Also physical page turn buttons are really nice.

It knows the probabilities that one word or sentence will follow another, based on the data it was trained on. That's it. It's like typing exclusively through a smartphone keyboard's predictive text, just much more complex and trained on a much larger dataset.

It has no way of connecting any word or sentence to what that word or sentence means or represents in the real world, and it's absolute pants at making up anything new, which is why AI generated stories are cliches from top to bottom.

Like, it knows what words and phrases are associated with the word cat, or with a description prompt like "a cute story about your cat", so it can imitate that text, or imitate it and mix it with imitations of other text patterns (" give me a cute story about your cat riding a dinosaur in a sarcastic tone"), but it's just a mirror that reflects back what humans put into it.

If it must be compared to a human brain, it's more like exclusively broca's area of the human brain - the part that handled language. If broca's area is damaged in a head injury, a human can end up with aphasia, unable to speak coherently but maybe still able to understand others perfectly well , or able to speak but unable to understand language from others, or both, but in all other ways the person can be completely fine and still able to live and solve puzzles and interact with other humans normally. (Granted, I am not a neurologist, and I'd imagine head injuries like these can probably get much more complicated.)

Anyway, hypothetically, if you were to take broca's area out of a human brain and keep it alive in a jar on its own, without the rest of the brain: I don't think it could be described as sentient or thinking on its own. Although the human brain is so complex and interconnected and poorly understood (beyond what area is generally associated with what function) and malleable/plastic based on experience (e.g. the brains of blind people re-purpose areas normally used for sight to he used for other purposes instead, absent visual input) that I could be wrong / it could be arguable.

The experiences of people who have had the two halves of their brain separated (this used to be a treatment for seizures, apparently), who then seem to have the two halves thinking and operating independently, or of people who manage to live largely normal lives despite missing half or more of their brain entirely, would suggest that maybe even a tiny piece of a brain could be a thinking being, I suppose.

There was an experiment a while back... MIT, maybe? Like a decade or more ago. Where they made little robots that had a kind of scaffold/medium in which they planted and grew neurons sourced from mouse brains. The robot brains, iirc, changed in reaction to the input the robots were given/their environment and sensors, and they showed personality differences in the way they behaved.

LLM's don't do anything like that, though, so far as I know. They don't restructure themselves in response to input like an organic brain can. They're a really complicated pile of if-thens, and while the inputs and therefore outputs change, the mechanism that turns inputs into outputs never does.

This comment is like 90% tangent at this point. Oh well.

Anyway, there's a really good classic metaphor for this that explains it much better, about a man in a locked room who receives mail in a language he can't speak through a slot in the wall, but he is still able to sort the mail in complex ways even though he can't understand the content of any of it. I can't remember the whole thing or the name of it off the top of my head though. I'll try to remember.

Punctuation that denotes pauses like , ; : should be placed based on where the writer wants a pause and how long the pause should be, or when needed to avoid ambiguity, NOT on the bullshit arbitrary grammar "rules" that got made up to sell grammar books and enforce the class divide.

It's very easy to find classics full of "bad" grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it's in fact not bad.

I did, when I tried going over there. The discussions definitely felt... redditier, in a bad way, to me. More immediately jumping to rage and personal insults.

But mainly the problem as I understand it is that lemmy.world has open sign-ups, whereas beehaw.org has strict, admin-approval sign-up. Beehaw.org was getting flooded with users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works who got in through their open sign-up and were then coming into beehaw, being assholes, and creating too much moderation work for the tiny volunteer mod team - they couldn't moderate such a large and unregulated influx well enough to preserve the safe space or community feel of beehaw communities. Especially when banned individuals could just make new accounts and come right back again.

There was another post though where they said they've talked to the sh.itjust.works admin and are likely to work something out with them in the future to allow for re-federating, though not yet. But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded, iirc.

I want a ublock origin list for this.