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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t base your decision on what Lemmy says. They’re pretty unreasonably salty about the game. Reviews from players are very positive and the game’s only $23 right now.

    • Despite what they’re saying, there is actually a lot of legitimately interesting and sometimes fantastical biomes and this update has added even more.
    • There are a lot of different parts of the game that you can pretty casually engage in. Various missions, settlements, settlement management, ship collecting, manufacturing, fleet management, trading, piracy, archeology, and more.
    • It’s a relaxation game for me. Just hop on, pick a direction, and go. Do whatever piques your interest in the moment.

    If “casual” and “relaxing” are dirty words for you, then it probably isn’t up your alley. It’s certainly not going to be intense and action packed (though it does have its moments). But it’s a good game if you, like me, sometimes get tired of the sweaty online shit, crunchy brain melting games, and the overall weight of life in the real.


  • I work at a pretty progressive company (comparatively but definitely not perfect) and DEI there has nothing to do with preferential treatment, nor does it need to be.

    The fact is that if you want to hire the top X people in the labor market, but your hiring and business practices exclude, say, half of that market, you absolutely will not get the actual top X. You will have to reach deeper into your half and be forced to pick people that are less qualified and/or capable.

    So DEI, at least where I’m at, is about widening that pool so that you can actually get top talent. That means reevaluating your business practices to figure out why you’re excluding top talent. Maybe your recruiters always go to specific colleges for recruitment and certain websites. Maybe just the way they’re talking to candidates is more attractive to a certain type of person. Maybe you’ve got hiring requirements and an interview process that is not actually predictive of success. Maybe candidates are looking for some benefit that you’re not offering. Everything needs to be looked at.

    For example, “Women just want more flexible working arrangements so that’s why we can’t get them” is something I hear often. Well, have you actually evaluated why your company is so inflexible? Is it actually necessary? Or are your executives a bunch of people who learned how to manage in the 20th century and haven’t changed since then? Maybe there are things you can do to enter the 21st century and make room for more women, not just because they’re women, but because you gain access to people who are actually better at their job than the ones you’ve had. Not every company can be supremely flexible, of course, but the number of times that inflexibility is actually necessary of much smaller than its prevalence.

    The demographic breakdown of your workforce is a quick and easy weathervane to help figure out how these efforts but of course they’re not everything. Diversity comes in maybe forms, not just skin color and genitals. But in my company they’re used in a backwards looking manner, to see how new policies are working, not for quota filling and preferential treatment.





  • If we’re in a simulation, it’s probably a massive universe-spanning one. We’re just a blip, both within the scale of the space of the universe and within the history of time of the universe. In that case, we’re not important enough for a simulation creator to even care to adjust our capabilities at all. They’re not watching us. We’re not the point of the simulation.







  • a much stronger one would be to simply note all of the works with a Creative Commons “No Derivatives” license in the training data, since it is hard to argue that the model checkpoint isn’t derived from the training data.

    Not really. First of all, creative commons strictly loosens the copyright restrictions on a work. The strongest license is actually no explicit license i.e. “All Rights Reserved.” No derivatives is already included under full, default, copyright.

    Second, derivative has a pretty strict legal definition. It’s not enough to say that the derived work was created using a protected work, or even that the derived work couldn’t exist without the protected work. Some examples: create a word cloud of your favorite book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet. All of that is absolutely allowed under even the strictest of copyright protections.

    Statistical analysis of copyrighted materials, as in training AI, easily clears that same bar.


  • The examples they provided were for very widely distributed stories (i.e. present in the data set many times over). The prompts they used were not provided. How many times they had to prompt was not provided. Their results are very difficult to reproduce, if not impossible, especially on newer models.

    I mean, sure, it happens. But it’s not a generalizable problem. You’re not going to get it to regurgitate your Lemmy comment, even if they’ve trained on it. You can’t just go and ask it to write Harry Potter and the goblet of fire for you. It’s not the intended purpose of this technology. I expect it’ll largely be a solved problem in 5-10 years, if not sooner.


  • Soooo… Interstellar was wrong with all the shaking of the camera?

    All for the cinematography :) I will say that there’s a small caveat in really extreme situations like close to a black hole. Spacetime gets so warped there that your head and your feet take very divergent paths through spacetime, enough to stretch you out and even break you apart at the atomic level. You’d definitely notice that…

    In case of accelerating ship, I wonder what would happen in local frame once you hit/get really close to c. You’d get decelerated out of nowhere? Just as if you hit something?

    Oh boy, special relativity is another fun one. So here’s the thing: there’s no “universal speed” that you’re moving so you’re never any closer to c no longer how long you accelerate for. To accelerate is to change your reference frame and there are no special reference frames.

    Which is to say that any physical test you could run inside your ship will give you the same result, always. Accelerate for 13 billion years at any rate and check the the how fast light moves within your ship, the answer is always c.

    This is where the name relativity comes in. You have to think in terms of relative speed. Your speed relative to earth will indeed advance closer and closer to c but never reach it. There’s a bunch of really wild and crazy implications behind this.

    Like that acceleration doesn’t change the relative speeds of things uniformly. Keep accelerating at 1 meter per second per second and every second Earth’s relative speed changes by less than 1m/s. And look up relativity of simultaneity, another consequence of special relativity. It’s fascinating stuff.


  • One mind-altering fact that I love is that there’s no “acceleration due to gravity,” once you’re in free fall, until you hit the ground. Hop in a space ship with no windows and fly off straight in some direction. Turn off the engines and watch an accelerometer. It’ll never read anything until you run into something.

    You could fly past a planet, a massive star, even a black hole. Your path through space could be full of curves and loops but you’ll never feel it. It’s popular to think of those things as like crazy high G turns but they’re not. You’re just flying in a straight line through space time.

    On the flip side, say someone knocks you out and puts you on that ship. You wake up and instead of being weightless, you can walk around the ship like normal on earth. Are you on earth or is the ship in space accelerating at a constant rate? Again, there’s no way to tell. They are, physically, the same.