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Hetare King

Instance: piefed.social
Joined: 9 months ago
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Reminds me of pattens, except they’re for shoes that already have soles.


Even without the social issues (some of which aren’t really solvable), there are still the matters of the lack of control and predictability, qualities that make it very valuable to fakers, but pretty much worthless to serious artists.


Kind of looks like a bamboo shoot.


The etymology is a bit different from that. Otaku does mean “your house” (important distinction: it’s always the second person’s house, not your own), but it’s also used figuratively as a formal way to refer to your family or just you. There was a culture, at least in the 70s and 80s, for enthusiasts in non-mainstream fields of interests, whether that be TV manga anime, science-fiction, wargaming etc., to talk to each other in a weirdly formal way, so they kept calling each other “otaku”.


I was wondering what they were going to do, given that the show feels like it’s going to end soon, but Winds & Waves won’t be out until next year. Looks like it’s going to be a story based around Pokopia, which makes sense, but how are they going to connect it to the larger storyline? They can’t exactly do the “we weren’t thorough enough the first time” a second time.

Oh, Ult is still there? What a shame…




In my pockets, my keys (including a NitroKey for accessing my passwords), which are literally chained to my trousers, my phone and a little towel the size of a handkerchief.

I also carry a little, what to call it, pochette? It’s a little carrying thing around the size of my hand, that is either clipped to the strap of my messenger bag or carried on its own with a shoulder strap. It contains my passport, public transit pass, bank pass, just-in-case-cash, pen, mechanical pencil, cloth for wiping glasses, and a folded ecobag.

As for the messenger bag, it contains a carbon steel folding umbrella, which folds down to around the size of a glasses case and is very light, a larger ecobag, notebook, headphones, a bunch of USB cables and adapters, a USB memory stick, and a teeny-tiny nail clipper. Not for actually clipping my nails, but you know how sometimes a little triangle of skin around the corner of a nail gets loose and all hard and annoying? It’s for that sole purpose. Also, I typically carry the bag when traveling a longer distance (like my commute to work), so there’s usually a book and a 3DS in there.


Doesn’t that make them in violation of truth-in-advertising laws? If they’re marketing it as a serious productivity tool, but legally it’s “for entertainment purposes only” , then their ads claim its something that it’s not.


What is there to check? All the information that wasn’t in the prompt, right or wrong, is information that didn’t come from the user. This is important especially in this case where it’s a book review and most of the information is supposed to be this guy’s opinion, making information that didn’t come from him worthless. So if he did actually write down the information that is valuable, because it would have been in the prompt and whatever parts of the review he wrote himself, what is there to check in the worthless information produced by the LLM?

Of course, in most cases it’s a journalist’s job to relay information, not to be the source of it. But I’d say that part of that job is understanding that information well enough so that they can relay it responsibly. And one of the most effective ways of both confirming for yourself that you understand it and to deepen that understanding, is to think about how to put it in words, i.e. write it down. It’s not perfect, and many journalists have been screwing up this part long before LLMs were a thing, but it’s certainly better than checking whether whatever an LLM regurgitated matches your shallow understanding.


The Earth is blue, and full of girls kissing.

–Yuri Gagarin


This looks less like a highway and more like a provincial road, though, which is pretty likely to have its own separated bicycle path.


In fiction, when someone important to the protagonist dies, they’re often buried near the edge of a cliff, which always seemed like a precarious place to bury someone to me. I guess this is what happens to graves like that in the long term.


Early Persona 5 is pretty rich in set pieces as it slowly introduces its many systems, but it does open up quite a lot after a while. It’s a content-rich 100+ hour long game, it kind of has to. It still has a lot of cutscenes even after that, but they’re mostly of the gamey yapping portraits kind, with cinematic cutscenes and anime FMVs left for climactic moments.

Persona 3 and 4 are similar in style, though not quite as cinematic, and you get to the meat of the games faster.

Persona 1 and 2 are completely different beasts, and what you dislike about Persona 5 so far will have no bearing on whether you’ll like those. The most modern versions are on PSP, however.

As for other JRPGs on Switch, from the same developer there’s Shin Megami Tensei V and the remaster of III. Even though they’re also from Atlus, they very much go in the opposite direction of Persona and are very stoic games where it’s mostly just you, the environment and the systems, and cutscenes are far and between.

Someone else mentioned the Trails games and I’ll second that. Like the Persona, they’re very story-rich, but not as budget-rich as Persona 5, which puts constraints on how that story is told. Also, if you like action RPGs, from the same developer (Falcom) there’s the Ys games. Ys: The Oath in Felghana is pretty much the pinnacle of the genre and is pretty short, so it’s a good snack between bigger games.


The big one is going to be once it stops being subsidised and people have to start paying the actual cost.

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There’s an adorable manga called Yuzu-chan wa Harinezumi ga Sasatteru about a girl with a hedgehog attached to her body (most of the time her head) by its quills, who is trying to become her pet.

Completely unrelated to this, but I was reminded of it. Anyway, the lesson here is: people can get used to anything, for better or worse. Though she did go to the doctor once to complain about her head hurting all the time for some reason.


My first thought went to Gundam F91, but that’s still ten years earlier.


The highlights in Osaka’s eyes are in the wrong place. She’s an imposter! I bet she’s from Kobe or something!

Very cute regardless, though.


Wouldn’t it be the home they lived in the longest for most people? Wait a minute, I know what you’re up to! You’re trying to discover whether there are any bears on the internet, aren’t you!?


In order to be able to get information on the web, people need to put it on the web first. And for that to happen, there needs to be something to motivate them to do so. What those motivations are is going to differ between people and situations, could be a pure desire to contribute to the commons, could be part of how they make their income, could be any other number of things. But if putting something on the web means accepting that you’re going to be helping vile companies achieve their goals and the way most people may see this information is in a perverse form, riddled with falsehoods and with no attribution (or maybe worse, mostly falsehoods attributed to you), and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s going to put a damper on a lot of those motivations, and the ones that aren’t tend to be the less desirable ones.

And it’s not just information that’s on the web, it’s also collaborative efforts like open source software. Why do people release source code under licenses like the GPL? Because they believe those constraints lead to a better outcome than if they had just put it in the public domain. That their contributions to the commons lead to more contributions to the commons, even from people who may not be inclined or incentivised to do so. If it becomes trivial to undermine those licenses (and for the record, those licenses do get enforced and there have been companies that had to release the source code of their products because they violated the license), that may undermine the reasons for many to contribute to the project.

You can be all cool and cynical about how social contracts are made up and whatnot, but let’s be honest here; if someone beats you to a pulp because they didn’t like the way you looked at them, you’re not going to just coolly accept your broken nose and displaced ribs as just the way things work.


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Hook them up to a turbine and it would produce infinite energy.


That reminds me, in the first draft of the script of The City on the Edge of Forever, there’s a scene in which an orator on a literal soapbox makes a speech to a crowd about how foreigners are to blame for all the country’s ills, yada yada yada, the usual bullshit, and when seeing Spock and believing him to be a foreigner, sends the crowd after him.

Spock gets quite… emotional over it.


Elegant and well-executed, but, and this is probably just my lack of imagination as someone who is not colour blind, I’m having trouble coming up with uses cases, and most of the examples on the site aren’t really convincing to me.

Usually when we try to communicate something with colour, it’s not the colour itself that matters, but the colour being distinguishable and/or the associations we have with it, which someone who is colour blind may not even have. Like, if you have a big, red emergency stop button, it being red isn’t really what matters; it’s red because it stands out and because we associate it with danger. Adding a dot isn’t going to help with that, so to make it accessible to colour blind people, it needs additional features to make it stand out and instantly convey its purpose.

That said, I did bookmark the site, in case something comes up where it’s the colour itself that’s important.


Wouldn’t his mom also be British? And in order to pound her, wouldn’t she have needed to court her first, i.e. talk to a British person?

Waiter! There’s an internal inconsistency in my absurd joke!


Not quite the same, but there is a game called Zwei!! (German for two). Its sequel is just called Zwei II, though.


Yeah, that’s the big irony of this all: natural language is pretty much the worst way of conveying information for any task that’s even slightly technical. There’s a reason why architects don’t just tell the construction workers what the building is supposed to look like.

The one thing it does have going for it is accessibility, but unfortunately, it doesn’t lead to transferable skills. Like, if you do something like building with Legos, cardboard crafts, make collages from magazine clippings etc. and you want to start doing something more advanced, say, carpentry or graphic design, then what you’ve learned previously is still valuable. But if you just vaguely order an AI around until in produces something that “looks about right”, all you’ve gained is the skill set of a clueless executive and the limits of the model are your limits.


Even listening to an audiobook is a worse experience in a car though, because you’re distracted from it, I would hope, by paying attention to traffic. And of course, there’s also lots of other things you can do in a train that you can’t in a car: read non-audio books, watch videos, play video games, take a nap, etc. Depending on what kind of work you do, it might even be possible to do some work and go home earlier. Even as a passenger, doing most of these things in a car is a good way of getting car sick.

The point is that almost always, the time spent on a train is of considerably higher quality than the time spent in a car.


Huh, that’s interesting. I already expressed my thoughts on consumers making their own physical media in another post (tl;dr: I don’t think it makes much sense), but if there are recordable discs with lifespans comparable with pressed discs, maybe a print-on-demand service could be a solution for developers that can’t afford to order a batch of a thousand discs and cases and rely on digital distribution because of that.


It feels like it would kind of defeat the purpose. If you like the ritual of physically picking a game and putting it into your machine, there are more practical ways of going at it, like those NFC card-based systems like Zaparoo. If you like having a physical collection, it seems to me that having a bookcase full of labels made with a home printer and with none of the legitimacy of them being “the real thing” would feel rather empty. You can’t legally resell it or lend it to others and if you care about preserving the game without being dependent on an external service that can go down at any time, you’re probably better off keeping several backups of your hard drive than counting on flaky recordable media (hard drives don’t last forever either, but you’re more likely to regularly check on the health of a couple of hard drives than potentially hundreds of BD-Rs and SD cards).

Basically, very few of the advantages of physical media would end up remaining.


All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.


Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.


I have to say, some of the song and dance around money is just baffling to me. Aren’t the Scottish and Northern Irish pounds already legally defined as being equivalent to GBP and accepted as legal tender?

I get that some English and Welsh businesses might be suspicious of them because they’re unfamiliar, but what is having a piece of paper with the boss of the bank’s signature on it in a safe somewhere that most people don’t even know exists going to do about that? It seems to me that this is a problem better solved with an information campaign. If they can’t take the Bank of England’s word for it that this is real money, then the very existence of a £100,000,000 note or even the value of the British Pound itself become suspect.


This is the cover art for the single of the first opening theme, so the artist might be Oota Kazuhiro, the character designer of the show. This is not guaranteed, however.

Also, you can get a better version here. It doesn’t look like it on the page, but it’s actually pretty high resolution.


I always have a hard time putting things into rankings, because different games have different qualities that make them hard to compare to each other, but if I had to choose, there is one game that I keep coming back to and is pretty much my “comfort food” game: Twinkle Star Sprites.


I don’t remember the details, but they definitely mentioned that you can’t just copy the doctor. The real reason is, of course, so that there’s some actual tension when the doctor gets sent off the ship and to avoid having to deal with the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from that (it’s also probably just the writer of an episode shooting from the hip as usual), but if I’m allowed to switch over to my thick-framed glasses and come up with a plausible in-universe reason:

Perhaps in order to properly reproduce human-like intelligence, you need to take advantage of quantum phenomena, so the state of the doctor’s program is in a quantum state. And since it’s not possible to perfectly copy a quantum state without destroying the original (Nebula), even with a Heisenberg compensator that works very well, any movement of the state of the doctor from one device to another would have to be a “transfer” and not a “copy”.

However, even if the state of the program is in a quantum state, the program itself may not be. In present day attempts at quantum computing, the program itself is still written in plain old text. If that’s the case, it would be possible to create copies of the doctor in their initial state, without any memories or experiences, which explains the miners and the EMH on the Enterprise-E.

As for undo, it may be possible to undo removing something from the state of the program if the data doesn’t actually get destroyed but the program is just blocked from accessing it. Similar to how if you delete a file from a drive, it doesn’t actually the destroy the file, it just removes the entry from the file system, and if you’re fast enough you can often still restore the file.


Throwing bricks through windows provides markets for glaziers, so clearly we need to incentivise this behaviour. My recommendation to the government is to subsidise the purchase of bricks for the purpose of throwing through windows as well as take measures to prevent brick-fraud, so that people don’t secretly build houses with subsidised bricks.


Subs, always. I don’t really consider dubs an option, unless there’s really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.

Take the line “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Probably, you know exactly what I’m talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven’t). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it’s spoken in, all that’s left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it’s going to typically be written with the assumption that it’s going to be spoken in Japanese.

Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it’s typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a control freak perfectionist, that you can tell he’s directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he’s worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn’t fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there’s no consistent (figurative) “voice”.

But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There’s a whole spectrum between “This language just sounds like gibberish to me” and “I’m fluent enough in the language to not need a translation”, so as long as you’re not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you’re not actively trying to learn it.


I consider these to be the main ethical issues with specifically LLMs and generative AI in general:

  1. Using people’s work as training data without consent.
  2. The high cost of training a model meaning that only a few entities in the world can actually do so and so, only few people get to decide what the knowledge base and “slant” of the model is. This is true even for open source models.
  3. The high resource cost of using a model relative to the value of its output.
  4. People with malicious intent being empowered by it far, far more than anyone else.
  5. The model producing the response to the query directly instead of leading to the source, leaving both the source without any way to benefit and the user from having any context queues they can use to verify the reliability of the information.
  6. Infinite and automated production of misinformation, libel and psychological manipulation.
  7. Inducing psychosis in people.

Point 1 can be resolved by the people training AI just making different choices. Many won’t unless they’re forced to, but in principle they could.

Points 2 and 3 could hypothetically be resolved in the future with better technology.

The rest are basically inherent to the technology and you can at best try and mostly fail to reduce the risk. So as far I’m concerned, what it would take to build AI ethically is to train it for very specific purposes and have it be used as statistical models by people who know what they’re doing.

Though I do see some potential for ethical LLMs by using them to perform vector searches instead of generating text, basically turning them into smarter search engines.


That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.


That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.

It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.