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chowells

3,795 karmajoined قبل 13 سنة

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chowells
·قبل 10 ساعات·discuss
You can not-quite-trivially download all versions of a game that have been uploaded to steam, as long as you own the game. And that's a download like as an installers you can run, not just overwriting your current active steam install.

I actually rely on this quite a lot, indirectly. Beat Saber is a fun game, but it doesn't support a lot of fun features, like walls with boundaries that aren't aligned to the coordinate system. There are mods to add those features, but they haven't all been ported over to the new line of the game since it upgraded the version of unity it's using. So I use one of the mod managers that supports, among other things, maintaining multiple versions of the game in parallel so you can choose what you want to do when you start a game. This feature very explicitly relies on downloading older versions from Steam. Because that's a thing you can do with Steam.

In the same week that Sony announced they'd be ending production of optical media, they also removed hundreds of movies from user libraries that they'd lost the right to sell. I don't really care if they have yet to do the same with games - they've demonstrated they're willing to remove access from paying customers for their own reasons. And there's nothing the owner of a locked-down console can do about it.

Steam exists in a different universe than digital-only games from PSN. Conflating the two because they use the same method of delivery is ridiculous.
chowells
·قبل 12 ساعة·discuss
Is that actually true? Just because English treats scents as only describable by analogy doesnt mean all languages do. There are a number of languages with scent descriptions for aspects of a smell that are transferrable. [1] That suggests everyone is capable of decomposing a scent into components the same way.

If that's true, we're left with a question equivalent to "does everyone see the same red?". As far as I know, the pure version of that question cannot be answered because subjective experiences of sensation cannot be transferred. And at that point, I'd say the manner in which they're experienced differently is equivalent.

1. https://youtu.be/w3KswMaEBiI
chowells
·أول أمس·discuss
Improve at what? Pretentiousness?

Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read.

(Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade. And skip things that aren't enjoyable to actually read.)
chowells
·قبل 7 أيام·discuss
If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.

This is why the question is interesting. You can't just suck water to the top of a 60 meter tree. There must be some kind of positive-pressure pumping involved.
chowells
·قبل 12 يومًا·discuss
No, that's actually more destructive in the short term. That was the OP's point. If they actually become something effective, they will utterly destroy the economy. If they fail, they will drag the economy down around them as they go. The least destructive possible outcome is becoming eternal parasites.
chowells
·قبل 12 يومًا·discuss
No, it's correct. The best (short-term) case is that they become eternal parasites. If they fail to do that, they'll bring a lot down with them when they fall.
chowells
·قبل 12 يومًا·discuss
Oh, it's worse than that. I've seen a rise in mutation testing, intended to ensure any change in implementation is caught by tests. Think about that for a moment. It's giving a fancy name to creating brittle tests than fail if any line of code is changed.

And this is seen as a good thing, because LLMs are really bad at confining their changes appropriately. Testing is really in a dark place right now.
chowells
·قبل 15 يومًا·discuss
It's a difference of degree. People expect something that "parallelizes well" to show near 1-to-1 speedup. Double the hardware, double the speed. This is "you can always speed it up, but the hardware requirements can increase at any polynomial rate".
chowells
·قبل 15 يومًا·discuss
You're describing an interaction with a good server at a good business. (Off of peak hours, if you can take hours and they don'thave anything to say about it.) What do QR codes add except for technical issues?

I honestly cannot recall the last time a server tried to upsell me with even as much as a "do you want a dessert?". But... I suppose that's selection bias. I only go to restaurants that don't require servers to do that BS. They don't want to do it either, you know?
chowells
·قبل 18 يومًا·discuss
"generally make it flow" is exactly the problem. It's a process of smoothing over any interesting features of the text to replace them with plastic. It's submerging the actual information you wish to convey under a layer of low-entropy noise. The whole signal may still be there, but having to find it under a uniform glossy finish is work for the reader. It's work you didn't need to delegate to the reader.

LLMs generate low-entropy text. That's their entire purpose. But good writing isn't about being as low-entropy as possible. It's about producing peaks and valleys. As a person who's been participating in human-to-human communication your entire life, you probably have a pretty well-developed sense of how to structure the flow of a piece of communication. The small arcs with their ebbs and flows of tension and density provide the reader a rough surface that gives them enough traction to easily move from point to point. Don't let an LLM smooth out all the gaps. It makes it hard for a reader to keep their footing in the text.
chowells
·قبل 27 يومًا·discuss
I worked at a company that displayed user-uploaded photos online and in email newsletters. Some small portion of photos displayed very incorrectly only in the email newsletters as displayed by outlook. They were fine everywhere else.

After a lot of investigation, we discovered that only photos uploaded by one specific (prolific) person had this issue. And it was caused by their software putting some nonsense exif DPI data in the image that was ignored as nonsense by every renderer except outlook. The format is a minefield of features with inconsistent support.

But I suppose that's part and parcel with actually being used. And that's somewhat better than the alternative.
chowells
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Everything we experience is far larger in time than space, so of course time effects dominate on scales we perceive.

But this just raises the question of what it means to be larger in time than space. You can look at it in terms of multiples of Planck distance or time, but I think there's a more enlightening way to look at it. If you express the speed of light in those Planck units, it's 1. But the speed of light is also the maximum speed of causality. Any causally-bound system must run long enough for chains of causation to propagate, usually far below the speed of light in practice. This means that basically anything that exists within the bounds of our manipulation must be happening at scales where there is far more time involved than space.

We all exist below the diagonal because the diagonal is the bound at which the ways chemistry and biology work no longer even are theoretically possible.
chowells
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Hah. Not sure I've ever seen relational algebra abbreviated that way, but yeah. It makes sense.
chowells
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
The heading saying "Simple (SPJ)" caught my eye, because I'm not sure SPJ has ever talked about simplicity in an especially referenceable way. Were you thinking of Rich Hickey's "Simple made Easy", or did SPJ do a presentation I missed out on?
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Yeah, 12px is fine (27" 1440p, no display scaling). It is on the small side. I'd go a bit larger for something I made. But it's not a small enough to slow down my reading.
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
No, I think that ycombinator, who provides this forum... shouldn't.

This thing where we've traded societal trust for profits for the companies destroying it is a bad choice, and section 230 is what enables it. Let it all burn. Bring back small communities with internal trust relationships. Growth is not an automatic good.

(No, pointing out that I wouldn't be allowed to post this isn't a clever gotcha. The whole point of advocating for change is that it would affect me too.)
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Hahahaha....

What if the goal of an economic system was to support everyone instead of maximizing the upside for winners? Perhaps that's the sort of change necessary for improvement. Perhaps having billionaires is the failure state.
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
What's culture got to do with it? If I wanted LLM responses, I'd have prompted for them myself. This is true in every single culture. The very fact that I asked a person means that I want the information they can provide, not LLM information. There is no culture in which that is false. So there is no culture in which providing LLM content is a useful response.

How you politely communicate that you don't have anything to add? That varies by culture. That LLM content is not a useful response? That does not vary by culture.
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
> And the program definitely still does something, whether specified or not.

No. It most definitely does not mean this. Go read the series this is part of: https://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should...

It is absolutely critical that people programming in C understand what real compilers in the real world do.
chowells
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Glad to see Simon Marlow didn't just vanish into Facebook.