TheChurn @ TheChurn @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.

As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.

The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point

Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…

Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.

Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.

The law doesn't matter, it doesn't enforce itself.

The judges wanted it lowered for reasons, and so they lowered it.

The entire system is a lot more about people than most want to admit. The magic words on a page somewhere only exist to serve those in power, never to force them to do something they don't want to do.

Humans are intelligent animals, but humans are not only intelligent animals. We do not make decisions and choose which beliefs to hold based solely on sober analysis of facts.

That doesn't change the general point that a model given the vast corpus of human knowledge will prefer the most oft-repeated bits to the true bits, whereas we humans have muddled our way through to some modicum of understanding of the world around us by not doing that.

But the most current information does not mean it is the most correct information.

I could publish 100 papers on Arxiv claiming the Earth is, in fact, a cube - but that doesn't make it true even though it is more recent than the sphere claims.

Some mechanism must decide what is true and send that information to train the model - that act of deciding is where the actual intelligence in this process lives. Today that decision is made by humans, they curate the datasets used to train the model.

There's no intelligence in these current models.

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn't what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn't to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can't sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.

The raw spending figure isn't what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia's economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU's in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

This isn't a 'Russia stronk, Europe bad' post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn't, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.

Windshields have been laminated for decades. Side windows were tempered glass for decades, and since 2020 are mandated to be laminated glass.

A virus doesn't care if the host lives or dies. Just like evolution doesn't care if YOU live or die, so long as it happens after you have kids.

A virus only has to have a living host long enough to spread to others, and the long asymptomatic infectious period observed with this coronavirus already fits that bill.

Think of Rabies, nearly 100% fatal, still incredibly widespread and infectious.

SS and Medicare are largely funded by dedicated taxes (the payroll tax), and the spending is mandatory - it is spelled out in the laws that created these programs.

The discretionary part of the budget is where general taxes on income, inheritance, etc. go, and where everything else the government does is financed. Foreign aid, infrastructure investment, grants, disaster relief.. everything besides SS Medicare/Medicaid.

US Military spending is more than half of discretionary spending.

I'm household terms (which is a bad analogy) after paying the mortgage and utility bills, we spend more than half of what is left of the paycheck on guns and ammo.

The terms seem agreeable?

The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, ... The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?

Those terms seem agreeable?

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

Lina Khan has been extraordinarily ineffective at the head of the FTC.

While the agency has made a lot of noise about holding big tech accountable, all they've managed to accomplish is losing court cases and setting even more precedent against the government's ability to enforce anti-monopoly legislation against these companies.

Her heart seems to be in the right place, but results matter as well.

Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.

The government already has the power to do that.

If shit ever hit the fan, they could just invoke the DPA and force starlink to do exactly what they say.

The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.

Romney was wrong then and he is wrong now.

The greatest threat is and was China. Russia does not have the means to directly compete with the United States.

Loved the first one for fucking around with friends. I'll maybe pick it up after they add vehicles and we see a bit more of their long-term monetization strategy.

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.