RandoCalrandian

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

about goddamn time

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Linux is perfect for teaching someone to be tech literate, which should be your ultimate goal.

Just because someone can follow a pictorial cookbook more easily is no reason to not teach them to read. Being tech literate is a little more important than people generally realize, just for having a cursory understanding of how things really work.

I recommend Ubuntu.

It’s development has been focused on teaching and enabling tech literacy across the world since its inception, and is designed to be very user friendly.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

So, what, people are only allowed to like your content? Can’t possibly be shit posts or anything like that, clearly it’s just all the downvoters who are wrong.

OR a downvote is as meaningful as an upvote, and it’s pretty childish to complain about them. (Especially considering that many instances don’t even count or display them)

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

See? I didn’t consider your post harmful, but I did consider it worthy of a downvote, simply due to how I felt it contributed to the discussion.

And people who don’t feel like I’m contributing meaningfully can downvote my posts. Almost as if that was the point of the button, to give an indicator of how much readers liked or disliked the content.

Negative opinions are every bit as valid as positive ones. Even more so in a culture where criticism is considered “rude” and socially suppressed.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

It is criticism, and certainly from a subjective standpoint it’s very valid criticism

But I’m free to downvote criticism I don’t like or agree with 😁just like you’re free to downvote a comment you felt was rude, in addition to pointing that out. It would also mean something different if you didnt downvote but also commented that I was being rude.

Almost like the downvote was providing useful information

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Beehaw is one, I think

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I love those two rules, when taken together. Seems these days communities just pick one, and both are worse off for it.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

The downvote is the feedback

If people are downvoting and not commenting there is probably an obvious reason why.

Usually you just said some type of heresy in that community, like going to a NASA forum and saying it’s idiotic to still be trying for manned space missions to the moon or elsewhere.

It’s so anathema to the community they don’t even want to engage in a discussion about it, they just want to say “you’re wrong/I don’t like this” and move on.

Far more civil than how religions used to deal with heretics, imo

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

The ones that disable the downvote button definitely all share similar characteristics, for sure

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

And this is why having true ownership over our own devices is so important, so that they can’t force this on everyone and if they try, we just replace the root certs.

This is why “trusted computing” has been pushed for so long, to remove control from the user specifically to enable bullshit like this

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Doesn’t Microsoft own blizzard now?

Approximately how often are we going to get Linux breakages like this, do you think, given the clear conflict of interest and Microsoft’s storied history of fucking over FOSS in pursuit of profit?

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I have never been as bothered by a catastrophic linux GUI crash that caused me to pull up a separate machine to walk me through recovering in the command line than I have been by Blue Screen's of Death.

And it's definitely because I know with the linux failure it was my fault, and won't happen again if i learn what caused it and change my behavior (or the system's behavior).

The same is very much not true with window's BSoD, where each time i simply lose more trust in the system.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Right? Even the "ick" parts of linux i'd take over osx or windows

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

You're right, but also, in my experience by the time i'm wanting those more advanced features i'd prefer to do it in the command line anyway, and so the Right Click |> Open in Terminal solves all my issues.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Would you mind listing which ones?

I'm a pretty prolific gamer, and haven't found one that doesn't work just fine on my linux desktop.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Still a minuscule fraction of its androcide rate, but don’t expect people to give a shit

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Are we counting all the suicides due to the ex girlfriend’s actions, or the ones who die in situations instigated by women, like when she lies about something and the males in her family seek retribution? Those stats seem suspiciously absent from articles like these. Proxy violence is routinely ignored

If we’re going to advocate against domestic violence, we should include all its forms and not carefully gerrymander the definition

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Or people could stop making not gendered issues into gendered issues, like the sexist fucks they are. There’s a very specific and insidious reason the narrative has switched from “domestic violence” to “violence against women” despite women being provably more safe than men in 99% of contexts, and only a minuscule fraction of deaths by violence. It’s a sexist intentional exclusion of an entire gender, for no good reason.

But you do you!

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Best I can suggest is keybase with an auto destroy message timer on conversations, so anything after a day or week is automatically wiped

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

This part about the zoom acquisition is true, but to date no sketchy things have been committed to the client repos, they’re open source

Personally I think the acquisition was to disrupt development, not to hijack it. You’re right that dev work essentially stopped at that time, outside of security fixes.

Also, it doesn’t track you, it allows you to post public proofs so you can choose to let the people you connect with verify your identify. It’s not mandatory.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I’m totally adding that back into my vocab now 😂

Wish it could sound more like Farquaad, but maybe that on its own is a good enough one. Kinda rolls off the tongue

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Worse is how he actually thinks he’s that

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I game on a linux mint desktop using proton all the time. The work they’ve done for the steam deck translates almost perfectly to every other Linux distro I’ve tried it on

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I switched my gaming pc to Linux over a year ago, never looked back and haven’t needed to

And I’ve never used a VM to game, either

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

DNA is highly likely to be unique, not guaranteed to be so.

This is a terrible idea. No one owns DNA or genes, and we already have problems with shitty company’s trying to patent or copyright genes we all already have. It’s bullshit that only benefits those at the top, and prevents others from getting there by restricting their rights.

Voices are the same. You can’t complain about an impressionist imitating you because you don’t like it, that childish nonsense. Everything we do is in some way a copy and recreation of what other people have done. AI just automated that process and people are upset it’s harder to rent seek and gate keep things that never belonged to them in the first place.

Seriously, the future you’re imagining has twins sueing each other for rights to their unique “identity”. It’s dumb as hell.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

South Park has some crazy lawsuits coming, if that person has their way.

I legitimately couldn’t tell they didn’t use the real Megan Markel!

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Is there a specific dollar amount where a creator isn’t allowed to create the way they want anymore?

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

Because it looks like blind ranting

You’ve completely ignored all the people who have been replaced by automation and had to adapt as “oh that’s not important enough in my eyes to force companies to use humans”

The future you want is far worse than the one you’re ranting about. Yours has only the wealthy and powerful enjoying protections from automation, while everyone else doesn’t matter (to you, based on your own arguments)

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

why should giant corporations be allowed to replicate and use it to make money without your consent

Because it wasn’t yours to begin with

Biometrics belong more to humanity than any individual person

Your argument would make it so even facial recognition would be illegal, because they scan and use your facial info without consent

Same with drivers license databases

You can’t say “this particular use of this existing practice bothers me, everyone else needs to change now so I feel better”

Rules on these things need to be consistent, and if they shouldn’t be allowed to use unique information that you consider yours without your consent you’ve just eliminated advertising, security checkpoints, drivers license pictures, filming cops, and a million other things both good and bad that all rely on using your likeness without your consent.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

So police can’t keep images of criminals faces (recreated and distributed to every cops computer in the nation through computer automation and often ai) without their consent?

And a private company can’t set that up and sell it to cops for profit?

Because I have some terribly bad news for you…

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

You’re complaining about scale, and pretending it’s a fundamental difference. It’s not

You have a severe misunderstanding of how your own brain works and why we call them neural nets in the first place if you think otherwise.

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

I do think it’s the jealousy, the fear of being replaced, but also the pride of thinking of ourselves as somehow special and important.

We’re not.

We’re dumb fucking monkeys who learned to sometimes not be so dumb, and then a bunch of us forgot we were pretending.

The real lesson in ai is not that they’re getting super complex or sophisticated, but more us realizing the limitations of our own cognition, and hopefully finding ways to extend it.

You’re spot on about calculators. It’s really just that our schools and schoolteachers are unable to evolve, just like with the insistence that cursive is still a needed skill. Hopefully it won’t take a generation or more to update the educators mindset to taking advantage of the tools available, instead of shunning them.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

And now the result of that trial could be a verdict with punitive damages

umm, why not jail time? This seems jail time worthy

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

And then we move to steganography with cat pictures

The government being an abusive piece of shit isn’t a good enough reason to stop trying to protect yourself

RandoCalrandian, 6 months ago

… why post a png?
Link to the service

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

I mean, it’s not like slavery or murder.

Being pro-FOSS does not mean you are anti proprietary software. There’s plenty of middle ground.

Video games, for example, where the company might not want to open source their server code for plenty of very legitimate reasons.

Mail is a super important utility. For physical mail, it’s a felony for anybody to open it. For digital mail, gmail open, reads, and inserts ads before handing it to you. It’s ok to think some things are important enough to mandate FOSS, and some things not.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

And what they're saying is that those elements are fun to the people who play these games.
Weighing different priorities to choose the best or preferred option for the future is flexing some very serious psychological muscles. Developing strategies to do it well is these types of people's version of practicing 3 point shots.

Reading you complain about it (which is fine, it doesn't have to be your sort of game!) is like listening to someone complain about how many times they have to throw the ball in basketball. "I just wanted to dribble and dunk, what are all of these other silly elements for? They're just getting in the way!"

If you want a really good comparison between these types of gamers and others, look at Path of Exile versus Diablo 4. Diablo took the mass-market appeal route, and de-prioritized many of the elements that more serious gamers enjoyed.

Now Path of Exile is a free to play money printing machine, and Diablo gets headlines for how poorly it's doing. There are many detailed analysis' online about why, and most of the reasons come down to removing the 'complicated' parts you're talking about.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

That’s all well and good but the game often doesn’t give you the knowledge required to make those choices thoughtfully

This is a complaint. One that other commenters have addressed.

It’s often an intentional and critical part of the vision of the game and why people play

Elden Ring, specifically, hides information from the player on purpose, intending for them to discover things through experience.

It doesn’t hold your hand at all and is arguably one of the better games in the last decade, in no small part due to features you are referencing.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Perhaps this conversation would be more constructive if you told us some of the games you do like, instead of the ones you don’t.

Because I’ll tell you right now, unless you prefer interactive novels which are only arguably games, every game is based on repetitive gameplay.

Specifically, building repetitive gameplay on top of repetitive gameplay is what makes games, games.

Like with chess. You have a repetitive “chess game” loop which has many “your turn” loops inside.

What I’m asking is how you sort it out

To address this specifically, this is what the community of the game is about. It’s why wikis are created and maintained. And so the answer would change based on which game you’re talking about and your goals in that game

For borderlands specifically, a few quick heuristics you can use is to ignore all weapons of not legendary color while in lower level areas, or to stop picking up lower tier items when you don’t need the cash, or to skip everything that isn’t a shotgun because that’s the only piece you need to update

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Aren’t most gamers technically mobile gamers? Pokémon Go has a user base most PC games only dream of

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Ok, then don’t play them. No one is forcing you.

You said BG3 was a gift, so it’s not costing you anything to not play something you don’t like.

Given what you’ve said, I would suggest avoiding anything with an RPG label anywhere.

For BG3, if you want to keep playing, you can skip the character creator. They have a dozen prebuilt options you can play without doing the detail work.

For inventory, you can ask your brother to handle it and send everything to camp.

But even with those, you’ll likely not enjoy BG3 because even the fighting mechanics are based around that type of complex decision making, making you pause all the time so that you can make those decisions.

It’s ok to tell your brother you don’t enjoy the gameplay. You don’t have to like it just because other people do.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

That particular decision was to keep them immersed in the game, and exploring.

But back to your warning label topic, what do you expect that to look like?

“E for e=mc^2”? Or “S for Seseme Street approved”?

We already have shenanigans in the rating system, this would be monumentally worse.

I am really curious what a metric for game complexity would even look like

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Pulled up a self hosted option last week to try it out. It’s not gpt4 level, but it’s damn close and I don’t worry giving access to my local documents

PrivateGPT for anyone interested

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

In my tests, the self hosted options that have access to a 30xx or 40xx graphics card return results far faster than gpt4

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1 is the default, i'm downloading the Llama2 model to test it with now, but many models on HuggingFace should still work

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

Mistral for chatgpt, and i'm not saying it gives better answers, just that it's much faster than my web portal to gpt4

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

I didn’t say better, I said comparable
And faster, without handing over my data and conversations for monetization

Given the locally hosted benefits, and the ability to go to chatgpt for any answer minstrel gives that doesn’t satisfy you, makes it strong competition to chatgpt as the default tool

Hosting it yourself also means you can swap llm’s out based on context and what they’re trained on. Highly tuned models perform better than chatgpt at the things they are meant to excel in.

RandoCalrandian, 7 months ago

You think this particular issue doesn’t have full bipartisan support among the elites?

You’re delusional