Lvxferre [he/him] @ lvxferre @mander.xyz

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drin

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News from the "users are cattle to be herded, not humans to be listened to. Instead listen to ME! ME! ME!" department.

...seriously. Steam is doing it because people want to know if the games are made with AI or not. If that goes against the best interests of Epic, let them eat cake.

From the top of my mind, Europa Universalis 4. Even the base game takes ages to install, and I don't think it's just the Linux version.

Incidentally, I checked it in FitGirl's site, found EU5 instead, and she's complaining about the exact same thing:

Installation takes 5-12 minutes (depending on your system, mostly on your drive speed – the game has more than 49000 small files, Paradox never learn from their mistakes)

Not quite a function but a small program: xdotool, that simulates keyboard and mouse activity. For plenty games xdotool and bash are all you need for an amazing (albeit simple) autoclicker. For example:

    
# Clicks the screen every 40ms. Great for Cookie Clicker and similar games.
if [[ $(xset -q | grep -o "Scroll Lock: off") == "Scroll Lock: off" ]]; then xdotool key Scroll_Lock; fi
  ScrollStatus=$"Scroll Lock: on"
  while [[ $(xset -q | grep -o "Scroll Lock: on") == "Scroll Lock: on" ]]; do
    xdotool click --repeat 4 --delay 40 1
    done

# Goes up, then down, then presses C. I use it to farm BP in Final Fantasy V, in an emulator.
if [[ $(xset -q | grep -o "Scroll Lock: off") == "Scroll Lock: off" ]]; then xdotool key Scroll_Lock; fi
  ScrollStatus=$"Scroll Lock: on"
  while [[ $(xset -q | grep -o "Scroll Lock: on") == "Scroll Lock: on" ]]; do
    xdotool key Up; xdotool key Down; xdotool key c
    done

  

This you assign the script to a shortcut, press it to turn it on, and Scroll Lock to turn it off.

It gets even better - with grabc (another small program, that probes the colour of a pixel), you can even make autoclicking scripts that react to changes in the game screen.

So you’re saying that all games should install like this?

Given other people addressed the same point, but unlike you they aren't disingenuously assuming words into my mouth, I think it's pretty safe to block you as dead weight.

I'm aware that compression rates are a trade-off between space and processing time, and that there's some balance to be had. However, I don't see this balance from plenty commercial games; what I see instead is disregard.

Here's a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

• to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
• to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

FitGirl will consistently pick the later option. And it would be fine if devs picked the former, or a middle ground... but they don't. Instead, often you get a 10 GiB file that takes 10 min to unpack, the worst of both worlds.

And it isn't just a matter of the compression algorithm. The developers also have the freedom to choose how they split files; but they often create 9001 files the size of an ant, that is going to hurt decompression times. (Paradox Interactive, I'm looking at you.)

Tagging @fiestorra@discuss.tchncs.de, as it addresses what they said too.

Fair point. I guess it would be more accurate to say "development studios" (you know, the organisation... including the bloody boss) instead of "game devs".

You're missing the point. The other user is highlighting why your typical player would go with those repacks. And, well, your typical player doesn't use Linux (...yet - Microsoft is fixing this real fast.)

(I typically use johncena141, but I don't recall having problems with FitGirl.)

Note plenty FitGirl repacks are lossless; as in, she isn't taking less important files out of the game, she's compressing it better. 90GB→35GB seems accurate; you often see ~1/3 of the original size, like this. And it shows plenty game devs

1. do an extremely bad job at basic tasks like compression.
2. give no flying fucks about players, who might have really slow connections.

And then those same developers get amazed at the fact FitGirl is so popular. "Maybe we're doing something wrong? ...nah."

How would you distinguish a sufficiently advanced word calculator from an actual intelligent, conscious agent?

The same way you distinguish a horse with a plastic horn from a real unicorn: you won't see a real unicorn.

In other words, your question disregards what the text says, that you won't get anything remotely similar to an actual intelligent agent through those large token models. You need a different approach, acknowledging that linguistic competence is not the same as reasoning.

Nota bene: this does not mean "AGI is impossible". That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying "LLMs are a dead end for AGI".

when at most they only deliver Wernicke’s + Broca’s area of a brain.

Not even. LLMs don't really understand what you say, and their output is often nonsensical babble.

English: [ɔ:]. It rhymes with "dinosaur".
\ Portuguese: [ä'uɾ]. Basically how it's spelled.

The main division was about why language appeared; to structure thought, communication, or both. But I genuinely don't think anyone serious would claim reasoning appeared because of language. ...or that if you feed enough tokens to a neural network it'll become smart.

Besides context, like Nemo said, sequences of letters that are legit for numbers are often invalid for common words. For example, in Latin you'll never see words with "MC" (because /mk/ is phonotactically forbidden), and yet you'll see it for plenty numbers. Or "III", it pops up all the time for numbers but almost never for actual words.

On the conlanging part: if you're using an alphabet, and your phonotactics prevent consonant-only words (pretty common restriction), you can ensure the numbers are obvious as numbers by using only consonants. Another alternative would be to create one grapheme to prefix numbers with; like, instead of writing "ID" you'd write "#ID".

Linguists have been saying this over and over, but almost everybody ignored it.

I think you and @rigatti@lemmy.world got caught in the words.

"History" can refer to the past events or their study. "Economy", to the system of production and consumption or its study. "Chemistry", to a set of properties of the matter or their study. And so goes on.

The same does not apply to "language". The word refers to a bunch of phenomena, but not their study. Their study gets a different name, Linguistics. So when OP is asking "what is linguistics for", they're clearly referring to the study; they are not asking "what are the phenomena called «language» good for?"

at least three: a human faculty, a communication system relying on that faculty, and concrete instances of the usage of that system.

Side note, Linguistics is great to catch this sort of hidden polysemy.

Sorry. I couldn't resist.

    
Um réptil demora a voar
E acaba virando o jantar
Dum outro animal 
Que então passa mal.

Passados milhões de anos,
Aparecem os humanos;
E um arqueólogo indômito
Descobre o fóssil do vômito.

  

(Reptile takes too long to fly / and ends becoming the dinner / of another animal / who then gets sick. // Past millions of years / humans appear / and an indomitable archaeologist / discovers the vomit fossil.)

This is almost a textbook example of the broken window fallacy.

It's a foundational science for language learning, much like biology is to medicine.

Discourse analysis makes you understand better what other people say. That has implications everywhere: legal matters, political speech, literary criticism. It helps even when you're dealing with that typical miscommunication between neurodivergent vs. neurotypical people.

It helps you to register and promote minority varieties. That isn't just a theoretical matter, as language plays a huge role on the sense of belonging of the speaker.

Semiotics is directly tied to linguistics. And it has applications everywhere you need to communicate through design.

Just some examples, mind you.

To be fair to the copyright troll, the Switch buttons are still in the same relative positions as they were in the SNES.

Not gonna lie, this actually looks amazing.