Post below this: It says gullible on the ceiling.

Religions claim to answer that need. But they’re bullshit. It’s all just made-up, and the made-up bullshit somehow means minorities don’t get civil rights.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

There are other ways it might work, like if there is a method of compression that is discovered that reduces the necessary RAM and Compute needs by 2-3 orders of magnitude. So models that are considered very large today (100-300 billion params at full quality) might be able to run effectively on a single 32GB GPU that costs a few thousand dollars.

You might want to check in on how well distilled / quantized models are doing, compared to gigundo datacenter versions.

They’re fucked.

Local models are already winning. Those benchmarked a year behind the biggest of big boys, a year ago. Six months ago they were six months behind. Yesterday Qwen released 3.6 27B and it outperforms 3.5 397B… from February.

Either we’re plateauing toward the asymptotic limit of LLM capabilities, and the endgame runs as well on a toaster as it does on a server - or breakthroughs use big fat models as a glorified search space to be rapidly discarded. Both options point toward neural networks as a lump of algebra that sits on your hard drive and occasionally spins your fans. Remote computing loses, as it basically always must, and the drastically reduced requirements for competing on local software favor clever new competitors who aren’t a bajillion dollars in debt.

The proper national lawsuit against this would be any woman from the middle east who feels a headscarf is appropriate, but happens to be an atheist.

Laicite should be a loanword, instead of getting translated to secularism. Keeping your religion private is not the same as keeping it a secret.

I understand the motivation. And for a little necklace, meh, tuck it in. But other cultural indicators create bizarre demands - like ‘You can’t serve school lunch unless we see your hair.’

This is slander against Lincoln’s wrestling career.

‘It went how critics said it would, and I my contrarian endorsement was completely wrong… but I’d do it again and regret nothing.’

Jail.

So ask the robot to simplify.

Spicy autocomplete will attempt whatever you ask for, and surely that includes golfing.

Take a slide rule to ancient Babylon because on some level I’m morally offended we didn’t figure that one out until the 17th century. Ideally this also snipes a variety of terrible numeral systems.

(Centurii-chan)

“I just wanna talk to him.”

But if you asked, gun to my head, ‘what was the best console?’ - it’s the PS2. It’s not even a contest. The video chip had such a disgusting fillrate that Xbox 360 remakes had to tone down the overdraw. Licensing remained dirt cheap, so weird shit could get on shelves at like two dollars per copy. The controllers were practically the platonic ideal. Just an incredible environment where innovation could look and feel complete.

What little was missing from that machine is abundant in its competitors. The Gamecube is a party toy with four controller ports and the wildest shader pipeline that’s not technically programmable. The Xbox showed the full potential of hard drives and online connectivity. PCs could increasingly take internet access for granted, where Flash games offered instant access with negligible oversight.

Through this period, cross-platform engines started abstracting away any hardware differences. “Ports” stopped being from-scratch recreations or high jank at low framerates. It was the inflection point for all hardware becoming a generic compiler target. The fact the PSP was supposed to get an Oblivion port, and it wasn’t just the PC game, already felt kinda weird.

I could call this a golden era for software - for developers making a game once-ish, and selling to nearly anyone with nearly any platform. Yet at the same time, the RTS genre was dying, EA killed a lot of important companies, and Bethesda had this silly little idea to sell you armor for your horse. It’s never just one thing.

Deep respect to Microsoft for the Xbox 360 Arcade. That SKU forced damn near every game to work without a hard drive. I think even GTA V could run off a USB stick.

But hoo boy did they fuck that up with the Xbox One launch. And Sony capitalized.

It’s never just one. They’re localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense… and I don’t think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn’t come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.

But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)

And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.

Right after that, the Game Boy Advance’s brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn’t the end of “the” golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.

All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.

Dude. The Idiot threatened to annex you.

I say “typically” because of Sri Lanka, which has ranked ballots, but is apparently too thick to use them. Most voters still pick one guy and cross their fingers. They have the option to vote for every candidate they do not despise, if their first-, second-, and tenth-favorite candidates cannot win. But for some goddamn reason, they act like their system is as broken as America’s.

Everyone has a vague idea of what ranked ballots should do, even if they’ve never tried to explain how that works. Condorcet is what they expect. RCV is just goofy.

Ranked Choice is a misuse of ranked ballots. Say an election goes like this:

40% vote A > B > C.
35% vote C > B > A.
25% vote B > C > A.

Plurality says A wins, because Plurality sucks. You don’t even need a bare majority. You just need everyone else to split.

RCV says C wins: B has the fewest top votes, so they’re eliminated. The race becomes 40% A > C versus 60% C > A. Better… but still wrong, because 65% of people would prefer B > C.

Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs get that right. They model every runoff: A vs B is 40-60, A vs C is 40-60, B vs C is 65-35. B wins every 1v1 and is obviously the best candidate according to these voters. The supermajority prefers B.