BlemboTheThird

When you absolutely have to visit Reddit for whatever reason, you should use an alternate frontend. The one I'm familiar with is called libreddit and functions similarly to nitter for twitter. You can do a search to find a large list of instances, but all you do is replace the "http://reddit.com/" part of the URL with the name of the instance. I usually use eddrit.com or safereddit.com

The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you've never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it's actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn't do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

I recently read a neat little book called "Rethinking Consciousness" by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren't present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don't experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn't exist in them.

Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does--in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It's not something you have to think about--often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you've noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog's to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

It's possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain--our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing--though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

All that to say the things we're currently calling AI just don't have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don't have--what, near as I can tell, we haven't made any meaningful progress on at all--is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

Right now, when marketing departments say "AI," what they're describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It's one small piece of the whole that's required when science fiction writers say "AI."

TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we're capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.

I've always known the average voter is a huge idiot with a tiny attention span, but articles like this really put into perspective how bad it is. How the fuck do you manage to forget the COVID pandemic? Did everyone really buy the "Chinese bioweapon" propaganda in order to avoid blaming Trump or something?

Trump was awful before and already ballooned the debt once. How do you not expect it to happen again?

Considering the amount of shit he's had to deal with on Christmas, he'd be well within his right to

I'm not disagreeing in a general sense, but it's funny to make that argument here when this info basically fell into the journalist's lap. Very little actual journalism went into making this story possible

I heard those kittens were eating people's pets.

I think you meant to say he isn't not unwrong

I was gonna say "there's tons of em on .ml" but one of em was nice enough to prove it right in this thread

My parents got one and swore by it for about 2 months before storing it in the basement, and I haven't seen it since. They also have a high end convection toaster oven and it seems to do the exact same thing, except it takes up less space and is way easier to clean. I could see getting a cheap air fryer for anyone who doesn't want to spend a fuckton on a toaster oven but generally they seem way overhyped

Fire in series of tubes

the current climate for GPUs is terrible with no relief in sight.

Not only no relief: it's gonna get so much worse. Between the buying power of the dollar spiraling into the depths of hell and the tariff war heating up, this might be the last opportunity for a lot of people to buy cards for the foreseeable future. It'll be years at the very least.

I was online when the 9070 listings first went live and had to fight not to impulse buy, which I was proud of at first. Then they instantly sold out and the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to regret it lol.

That's just my perspective, though. Maybe with Americans no longer buying cards they'll drop the prices internationally to try to boost sales... but the cynic in me knows they'll boost prices even further to try to make up the difference.