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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Illegal vote suppression elected Trump, but even if it hadn’t, you should blame Democrats before blaming people who voted for third party candidates. Now, if you’re talking about people who “protest voted” by voting for Trump (in both the primaries and the election), then sure. Those people did, in fact, play an instrumental part in electing him.

    Why blame Democrats? Well, beyond just kinda being Republican-lites:

    • for opposing ranked choice voting (and alternatives)
    • for not rallying around progressive candidates
    • for not choosing Kamala via primary elections in 2024

    Democrats are the bare minimum “harm reduction” party, and I don’t bare any ill will toward people who voted for them rather than a party that would actually try to effect change, but the opposite mindset - blaming third party voters for not voting for Democrats - is very shortsighted. And as third party voters have never had the power to enact RCV or STAR voting or otherwise improve the system, blaming them instead of the Democrats who have had that power is inane.

    I’ve voted for a Democrat every single presidential election that I’ve been able to, but I honestly wish I hadn’t. I’d much rather there be more visibility for third parties, and for more people to feel empowered to vote for third party candidates.


  • Glaring doesn’t imply a negative meaning. In this case it’s used to mean “obvious”.

    Unless you’re suggesting that “glaring” means “obviously staring” (it doesn’t - that would be “glaringly staring”) this doesn’t make any sense.

    “[He’s] glaring at [direct object]” is an example of a sentence that uses the present participle form of the verb “glare,” which explicitly communicates anger or fierceness.

    If you’re not convinced, read on.

    —————

    The verb form that takes an object is:

    Glare (verb with object): to express with a glare. They glared their anger at each other

    The noun form the above definition references is:

    Glare (noun): a fiercely or angrily piercing stare.

    “Glaring” can be an adjective and one of those definitions does mean “obvious” or “conspicuous,” but the use of that form of the word doesn’t make sense in her sentence. Think about a comparable sentence like “The undercover operative is conspicuous at the bar,” where the bar is the location. (Even then, most people wouldn’t use “glaring” in that sentence, as “conspicuous” or “obvious” are much less ambiguous; the operative could be staring piercingly or angrily at the bar rather than being glaring while being at the bar.) Another example that makes a bit more sense is “The effect of the invasive plants is glaring at the park.”

    But for that interpretation to be valid here, you’d have to:

    • believe that the dude is trying to hide/blend in, or otherwise explain how he - not what he’s doing, but the dude himself - is conspicuous
    • believe that the woman’s referring to her own ass as a location
    • assume that she isn’t commenting on how the guy is looking at her ass, even though the joke depends on giving him something different to look at

    That’s a bit of a stretch.


  • There’s a whole history of people, both inside and outside the field, shifting the definition of AI to exclude any problem that had been the focus of AI research as soon as it’s solved.

    Bertram Raphael said “AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.”

    Pamela McCorduck wrote “it’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, but that’s not thinking” (Page 204 in Machines Who Think).

    In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter named “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet” Tesler’s Theorem (crediting Larry Tesler).

    https://praxtime.com/2016/06/09/agi-means-talking-computers/ reiterates the “AI is anything we don’t yet understand” point, but also touches on one reason why LLMs are still considered AI - because in fiction, talking computers were AI.

    The author also quotes Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence:

    Now we can see the entire picture. Nature first created animals such as reptiles with sophisticated senses and sophisticated but relatively rigid behaviors. It then discovered that by adding a memory system and feeding the sensory stream into it, the animal could remember past experiences. When the animal found itself in the same or a similar situation, the memory would be recalled, leading to a prediction of what was likely to happen next. Thus, intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory stream. These predictions are the essence of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it. …

    The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive memory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear, and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

    If Searle’s Chinese Room contained a similar memory system that could make predictions about what Chinese characters would appear next and what would happen next in the story, we could say with confidence that the room understood Chinese and understood the story. We can now see where Alan Turing went wrong. Prediction, not behavior, is the proof of intelligence.

    Another reason why LLMs are still considered AI, in my opinion, is that we still don’t understand how they work - and by that, I of course mean that LLMs have emergent capabilities that we don’t understand, not that we don’t understand how the technology itself works.



  • The witch turned the creep into a woman and the spell was complete by the time she flew away. Unfortunately, like many women, the creep was born with the body of a man (she’s AMAB). Maybe the witch could have changed her body, too, but that would have made things far too easy, given that the point of the curse was to teach her empathy.





  • This is an interesting parallel, but I feel like I missed some key part of it.

    In the US, at least, we historically killed off a lot of deer’s natural predators - mostly wolves - and as a result, the deer population can get out of control, causing serious problems to the ecosystem. Hunters help to remedy that. The relatively small violences that they perform on an individual basis add up to improving the overall ecosystem.

    That isn’t the same as being a bigot, or a sexist, or a fascist… and I don’t know why anyone would assume that a person holds those views because they’re mean and petty. They hold those views for a variety of reasons - sometimes because they’re a child or barely an adult and that’s just what they learned, and they either don’t know any better or haven’t cared enough to think it through; sometimes because they’ve been conditioned to think that way; sometimes because they’re sociopaths who recognize that it’s easier to oppress that particular group.

    It doesn’t really matter what their reason is. Either way, they’re a worse person because of it, and often they’re overall a bad person, regardless of the rest of their views, actions, and contributions.

    Being a hunter, by contrast, is neutral leaning positive.

    It makes sense that a rational person who loves being in nature, who loves animals, who wants their local ecosystem to be successful, would as a result want to help out in some small way, even if that means they have to kill an animal to do so. It doesn’t make sense that a rational person who loves all people, who wants their local communities to be successful, would as a result want to oppress and harm the people in already marginalized groups.

    I don’t think equating being bigoted with holding unjustifiable opinions does it justice. The way we use the word opinion generally applies to things that are trivial or unimportant, that don’t ultimately matter, e.g., likes and dislikes. Being a bigot is a viewpoint; it shapes you. For many bigots, their entire perspective is warped and wrong. And there’s a common misunderstanding that you can’t argue with someone’s opinions; because it’s just how they “feel.” But being a bigot, whether you’re sexist, racist, transphobic, queerphobic, homophobic, biphobic, etc., is a belief, and it’s one that, in most cases, the bigot chooses (consciously or not) to keep believing.

    If an adult with functioning cognitive abilities refuses to question their bigoted beliefs, then they’ve made a choice to be a bigot.






  • That makes sense, and that engine and some of the other games they feature look interesting.

    Does that mean that Balatro (and presumably other LOVE 2D games) is packaged like Doom with its WAD files, where there’s an engine (a generic LOVE 2D one) that runs the game, interpreting the Lua game code, which is basically just packaged like an asset? Or is there a Balatro engine that needed to be built for each platform? I saw that BMM downloads a base IPA and an APK patcher, so I’m assuming it’s closer to the latter, but I could see it going either way.







  • Paired with allowing people who own the original to upgrade for $10 (and I’m assuming something similar in the UK) when they’re charging $50 for the remaster if you don’t have the original, that makes sense. They’re just closing a loophole.

    I’d much rather they double the existing game’s price than for them to charge $25-$30 for the upgrade or to even just not have one outright.

    It sucks for anyone who’d been planning to play the original and who just hadn’t bought it yet, but used prices for discs should still be low, so only the subset of those people who have disc-less machines are really impacted.