RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @beehaw.org

Posts

10

Comments

218

Joined

2 yr. ago

I feel that those who jump on anti-capitalism have no real idea how products are made, and how things are bought, sold, marketed.

There seems to be a sort naive belief that we can return to an era of cottage industry, and that somehow we'd still have iPhones and power plants and such without folks owning land and machines and patents. But even if you imagine a power plant built without capitalism -- say, built by a beneficient government -- the people building it are capitalists. The people mining the coal and shipping it to the plant are capitalists. They want money in return, so they can feed their families and establish their personal economic security, so that they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, etc.

Folks say that history is just a record of the robber-barons robbing everybody, and I tend to agree. It seems likely that this is the case because only the robber-barons actually succeeded. I think the onus is on folks who claim we don't need the robber-barons to show that a system CAN succeed without them.

I feel like the long term answer is to let the robber-barons do their thing, but only to a degree, and use government directed by democracy to keep the abuses of capitalism under control. This is difficult, but it seems to work in most wealthy countries, except for a glaring few. If there's a better system, I have yet to see it in operation.

Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that's how games were and there wasn't enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

Old games didn't have the room for those kinds of indulgences.

October Passed Me By

Well dang it this is how it ends.

Before reading the article, I just assumed that N. Korea had hacked a game with loot boxes.

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hyjgqqz11a

Your math is off somewhere. Wikipedia claims that NYC has 302 square miles of land, while Singapore has 283.

This article estimates that the cost of owning a car in NYC is $3000-$5000 per month. So, you pay for the privilege, perhaps not as much up front.

But NYC is surrounded by places you can drive to. Singapore is not. The mainland city of Johor Bahru is a relatively poor city of only 500K people, and beyond that it's farmland until you get to the Malaysian captial, more than 4 hours away. So I wouldn't expect the two cities to have the same preferences for car ownership in any case.

And it won't need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It's great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don't really care.

It is tradition.

Is this news? Singapore is a city of 6 million on an island that is only 45km across at its widest point.

The sentence makes sense in context of the article. Detained in Dubai is asking the US State Department to warn travelers of the risk of unjust arrest and extortion, even though Ms. Polanco's ordeal has ended.

ChatGPT, program a Metroidvania 2d retro 16 bit graphics video game featuring a naked Emilia Clarke.

Do people still use emacs to code, for example?

Umm. Yes.

If someone is making you feel like you might be in danger, that’s a threat. It doesn’t matter their intent

That's a risible argument. The standard is what a "reasonable person" considers dangerous.

Whether an action is criminal can't be based on each individual's personal opinion of their own behavior. The perpetrator believing that they are right does not make it legal.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that's on them.

RiffTrax Friends, The Gizmoplex, and Twitch Turbo give me everything I need.

it’s basically impossible to tell where parts of the model came from

AIs are deterministic.

1. Train the AI on data without the copyrighted work.
2. Train the same AI on data with the copyrighted work.
3. Ask the two instances the same question.
4. The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

There may be larger questions of precisely how an AI produces one answer when trained with a copyrighted work, and another answer when not trained with the copyrighted work. But we know why the answers are different, and we can show precisely what contribution the copyrighted work makes to the response to any prompt, just by running the AI twice.

Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw do all that, but they're not bitmap editors.

What even is his complaint?

That he doesn't a fraction of the talent required to make a game this good.

There's also a strong argument that the Indiana licensing board that censured Dr. Bernard were activists who were bowing to public pressure. Many external authorities who reviewed Dr. Bernard's case do not believe that she committed any unethical disclosure.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/01/caitlin-bernard-indiana-abortion-10-year-old-advocacy/

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/03/1179941247/abortion-caitlin-bernard-indiana-doctor-medical-board

I can feel the saliva-moistened Cheeto crumbs being sprayed into my face.