[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 13 points 2 weeks ago

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 49 points 2 weeks ago

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It's hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don't count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn't, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries "for free" (even though they already chip in).

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 17 points 1 month ago

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would've swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would've cared. I don't live to spare anyone else's feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family's respect and care while we're both here, and I don't need anyone else's shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn't living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for "saving" can eat shit. If you're reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it's a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents' child's life. Yours.

136
Physics lecturule (awful.systems)
submitted 1 month ago by it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems to c/196
[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we'll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it's all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

15

A couple months old by now, but I still find this a fascinating case study. A good old-fashioned NFT grift, unmoored from time and washed ashore as a sad, solitary UZDoom pull request in the year of the Common Era two thousand twenty six. The honorable representative of "Next Gen Software UK" seems to have taken the rejection in stride and without comment, seemingly only attempting to upstream the NFT features to promote their own fork, ODOOM.

What's the "O" stand for? Open Advanced Secure Interoperable Scalable-System obviously. That's right, they're not just making a Metaverse like in Snow Crash, they're making the OASIS like in Ready Player One, by putting a shitty social overlay into some FOSS game engines. I'm too tired to come up with a clever torment nexus joke to put here. Anyway, web3 is passé now. Their interoperability layer is web4. Their social layer is web5. Loading a WAD presumably makes it web6, and from there we'll be on pace to hit the web* singularity by 2027. That's right, AI is here too!

Now, as someone astutely pointed out, you might think that tying the ability to mint NFTs to killing enemies in a notoriously moddable game would be bad for the whole artificial scarcity thing, but our friends at Next Gen have a solution: enterprise blockchain holonic braid AI! From what I can tell, this is a delicate prompt caressing technique to write out a bunch of GOFAI symbolic logic in markdown and then get an LLM to pretty please evaluate the fuzzy logic. That's right, the cyberdemons are going to prompt so hard they'll beat you at deathmatch. In a game famous for being played at the pace of an LLM API endpoint. Blockchain-based anticheat is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. One look at their generically titled landing page makes the unimaginative grift clear. You buy a token to play, the tier of token you buy determines how many loot and "quest" reward NFTs you can mint in a week so you can corner the hypothetical market by preordering, and not only are they promising a roadmap, they're so gracious that if you pay for the top tier, they'll let you write the roadmap for them! Only 20 slots left! Buy now!

I know the standard NFT project like this is supposed to prey on people who want to join a fun discord server and/or know they're looking for the next bag holder to cash out, but it still surprises me that these devs think they can get something out of it this late to the party. Did their AI blockchain compliance automation thing fall through in the wake of the Delve scandal? Did they really spend a decade in the mines preparing their get-rich-quick scheme for launch and miss the boat? …Come to think of it, "10+ years" ago is around when the Ready Player One movie was announced. Are they just really, really genuine fans of Ernest Cline's Torment Nexus?

I don't know why I felt the need to write all this, but the economic, social, epistemological, and game design failures of this horseshit, and the amount of work people are willing to put into a Potemkin software project like this never fail to astound me. Twenty-twenty-six, everyone. The best part is, for anyone actually interested in alternating back and forth between playing Doom, Quake, and a bunch of other games connected by a social layer to complete shared tasks, Archipelago already exists and doesn't want you to buy their AI-extruded membership cards. Peace on Earth, gamers.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago

9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can't put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago

I'm struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX "remaster." Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward "more gooder" wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that's how you know the technology is getting Better.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 13 points 4 months ago

This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone! but I can't deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and what's on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.

Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.

146
Deltarule (awful.systems)
[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the "(whatever that means)" hits and it all falls into place.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago

how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?

For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less "block building game" than "robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for," and even though it's mostly against Mojang's TOS, all the kinds of monetization you'd expect have followed. When you hear "Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit," imagine "freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit" and you'll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.

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it_wasnt_arson

joined 1 year ago