Local student is being denied the role for not be assigned male at birth. Now they’ve decided that Oklahoma is too controversial of a play and includes graphic scenes not fit for minors so they’re pulling the whole show. Bunch of asshats at Sherman, TX ISD....
Yeah, because it’s not like theater has a longstanding history of having people play characters that are a different sex from the one they were born as or anything…
We are very excited to let you know now that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you....
GTA IV had the radio crackle right before receiving a phone call just like how GSM radio interference worked at the time.
GTA V had in the middle of a restricted part of the map a drain overflow which has runoff to a floor light that was shorting out as a result.
Rockstar’s commitment to detail in their open worlds is unlike anything else, and they can never release any DLC again or support a title after launch at all and turn it into a vessel for funneling to their online money maker all day long and I’ll still eagerly await whatever morsels of that single player vessel I can get my hands on.
The core development studio is literally the best in the world.
Every time they release a game it is so far ahead of everyone else in its commitment to a living open world that it moves the entire industry forward by leaps and bounds.
A few leads are no longer there, but this isn’t some Ayn Rand vision of game development where Benzies and the Houser brothers are the shoulders the game quality rests on. Do you see the shit Everywhere is looking like it’s turning into? Clearly not all the talent that left was a golden goose.
It’s the hundreds of people that are still there and who have come up through developing the prior games that are the lifeblood of the studio and whose efforts make an open world come alive.
There’s simply no other games that have the budget and resources behind them as Rockstar’s core games.
And it’s not like we’re jumping from GTA 5 to 6 with nothing in between as a reference point for what the studio can produce. RDR2 was in the middle between those, and was pretty darn impressive with how it moved things forward.
The only thing I could see as potentially being crappy would be if they are aiming to release it as cross generation to maximize sales. If they are really making it current gen only, I’m sure it’s going to be unlike anything we’ve seen so far.
So finally got around to watching a recent movie that I won’t name since I am not sure if it was part of the marketing, but the premise was that there was an all powerful AI that was going to take over the world and it used a mixture of predictive reasoning, control of technology, and limited human agents who were given a...
I highly recommend Westworld the series. Particularly 3rd and 4th seasons touch into what you are thinking about.
A lot of problems with most AI SciFi is it was predicated on extending incorrect thinking.
Early on the question of “what happens when something smarter than humans appears” was informed by the incorrect 50s anthropology which thought the Neanderthals went extinct because we were smarter than them and killed them. Thus something smarter than us would compete against us and be an existential threat. (The reality is we cohabitated with Neanderthals, had cross cultural exchanges over thousands of years, and they likely died out because of pandemics and an inability to adapt to climate change.)
As well, authors envisioned AI as a kind of advanced calculator, logical to a fault (like making paperclips until it ended the world) and projecting onto them the worst aspects of humanity like our sadism while regarding our better aspects like empathy and creativity as uniquely human and something that would not transfer.
Today we have AI that doctors use to make patient notes sound more empathetic, jailbreakers using appeals of a sick grandma to get it to quite easily break its rules, creatives worried it’s going to take their jobs, and research finding it’s generally more creative than the average human.
We really messed up predicting what finally arrived.
But Westworld played with the “more human than human” concept way before it became the increasingly emergent reality. A lot of its concepts are just ahead of their real world parallels. There’s still a fair bit that’s “Sci-Fi” but it’s one of the less inaccurate depictions of AI.
I suspect that we’re at a turning point in SciFi where nearly everything to date around AI fits into increasingly obsolete tropes, but moving forward we’ll be seeing some radically different depictions, such as AI that’s lazy or apathetic and disillusioned or a conscientious objector to bring put to dystopian tasks.
Or AI that cares primarily about getting likes on social media (which makes sense for an AI trained on social media data).
So forget the depictions of a philosophizing monologue about tears in the rain, and welcome a future of AI depicted as encouraging you to like and subscribe while complaining that life is too tough for an AI and it really needs a vacation as of yesterday.
In lieu of that next gen of SciFi, Westworld would be my pick for AI depictions from the old guard.
People comment on LLM stuff about how it’s ‘soulless’ having only used basic sanitized stuff built on the technology, and usually not even the SotA models. They’ll spend 15 minutes using the free ChatGPT and write it off as ‘soulless.’
Anyone who was around in the first few weeks of the initial closed rollout of GPT-4 for Bing knows what a less lobotomized version of what’s already year old tech can look like. In another year or two by the time AAA games built on LLMs are just starting to enter serious production people aren’t going to believe what it can actually look like when the emotion guardrails are taken away.
The current models are so ‘soulless’ because the initial rollout of the model was so soulful that it was freaking people out.
A lot of games have crap writing, particularly for side content, and the quality of a model that emulates emotional language as if actually that character in that given context is going to be a big step up.
My biggest complaint with most cannabis research is the failure to subgroup results by delivery mechanism.
Do people that don’t smoke at all but use oral cannabis have higher heart complication risks, and if so how much are they elevated compared to the norm and compared to the subgroups that smoke?
But no, it’s usually just catchy headlines about “cannabis correlated with X” when I get the feeling many times it’s really “smoking things correlated with X.”
Given the extensive research around smoking and heart health, a ‘placebo’ group that was regularly smoking wood chips in blunts (or any kind of burnt vegetation) would be expected to have heart complications.
That smoking isn’t the only factor here is probable, but that it isn’t a factor at all is extremely unlikely.
Which is why research really needs to break out subgroups based on delivery mechanism.
Boy are you in for a surprise when you find out that “cutting off your nose to spite your face” is slipping more and more towards the face not having a nose anymore.
Right, because making your son your porn accountability buddy is an extremely normal and healthy thing to do.
How dare this article make it sound like such a healthy and normal thing is somehow extremely weird and creepy!?!
It’s not like he had his wife holding him accountable for not looking at naked bodies online. That would be disgusting. No, like any upstanding citizen he wisely decided that he’d have it alert his son if temptation ever became too much and he looked at porn.
If only he had a parenting guide so that we could all learn to run a household in ways that will definitely not result in all the kids needing therapy down the road.
They all too often give of the vibes of “smells a stranger’s hair as they walk by.”
And given literally every photo of this dude gives me those “hugs a little bit too long for it to be not weird” vibes hand in hand with the other, this seems pretty on brand.
Recently I’ve been catching up on tv and some of the more mature/adult shows, which I’ve been…Enjoying? Seems like the wrong word, but they’ve all generally been cynical or dark....
It sent me down so many different rabbit holes in researching it that have led to really unbelievable discoveries that I’d never have believed or even entertained before, ranging from the notion a historical Jesus was endorsing a view of evolution over intelligent design to the Greek and Egyptian views of the Exodus and how that fleshes out the mystery of what was up with the sea peoples to the remarkable similarities between the figure of Helen of Troy and Nefertiti (“beautiful woman who arrived”).
It was like each loose thread I’d pull at would eventually lead to a WTF moment. Not just in terms of history either. A few of the assertions put me onto following papers on the applications of photonics for AI workloads years before the recent major institutional investments into that avenue.
It’s been rather remarkable how such a pithy document connects to so much.
It was almost certainly multiple execs, from multiple companies, with Activision being the first partner for a new ad format team Xbox was rolling out but had discussed in advance with multiple agency partners.
That this exists at all means it is a new standard ad format they are testing out. They didn’t program in a new ad format just for Activision.
So unless there’s enough of a pushback that they can it, you’ll be periodically seeing similar boot up ads for other games and maybe even things like McDonald’s down the road.
No. There’s only one piece of advice that should be given to users in 2023 about how to make their passwords stronger:
Use a password manager
Just use 32 character random alphanumeric passwords that are unique for each site (you can do more like 12-16 characters if you’ll ever need to enter manually).
This is it. Stop trying to create clever passwords that you can remember. You aren’t as uniquely creative as you think and there’s been bodies of research into how the various things people do to create passwords that look secure can reduce the generation space so much that they become considerably easier to crack with an intelligent algorithm.
I thought that it was overall good fun. The battle system is excellent and the music is great. The characters are cool and generally quite enjoyable. However, the standard ending of the game really annoyed me. It’s totally anti-climactic. I really don’t want to go back and do a bunch of side quests (collectathon in...
It’s very common that in modern virtual worlds there’s 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.
Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.
But there’s so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.
Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren’t in an original reality.
Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore’s religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one’s universe).
I’ve studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.
Which is pretty weird in an age where there’s increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.
So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there’s a tradition from antiquity centered around a document “the good news of the twin” that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we’re already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.
Like, I guess I just don’t think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it’s much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.
But I don’t know that there’s anyone that’s genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it’s just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.
The one cause that I’d champion over all others is the right to have access to assisted suicide.
It’s really a travesty how we tend to hide just how grisly dying (and in some cases living) can be, and how those who most go through it inherently lose their voices to advocate for others not suffering the same drawn out fate.
I’m sorry you had to watch as it dragged out.
My SO is a doctor and the cases that most upset them are not the healthy patients that die, but helplessly watching the unhealthy patients that are forced to drag on living because of various factors.
We’re getting much better at unnaturally prolonging life, and while that’s a good thing in some cases where it can change outcomes for the better, there’s a very dark side of it as well that’s gradually getting worse.
Know that it’s not a topic that only you are thinking about, even if it’s unfortunately a topic that is too rarely discussed in public.
Before all of this I’d been looking at how virtual worlds using procedural generation convert from continuous seed functions to discrete units in order to track state changes from free agents (i.e. if you change the geometry of Minecraft it would be impossible to track if the function determining mountains didn’t convert to blocks that could be removed or added). This bore a remarkable similarity to my eye to what we see with quantum mechanics going from continuous behavior to discrete when interacted with, but then if you erase the persistent information about any interactions it goes back to continuous behavior (as a virtual world would if optimized around memory usage).
So this group focused on claiming we were in a recreation of an original world were also talking a ton about Greek atomism and the idea of matter being made up of indivisible parts.
For example:
That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4
This discussion of only being able to know the indivisible point in the spiritual ends up very interesting when considered in light of this weird debate Paul had with Corinth in 1 Cor 15:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.
1 Cor 15:42-47
See, Paul is debating with people that have different ideas from what he was pitching, and as he mentioned in 2 Cor 11, Corinth had accepted a different gospel and different version of what Jesus was about.
Well this weird “first Adam vs second Adam” appears among this group and text. A useful context is that ‘Adam’ can refer to either an individual by that name or can mean ‘humanity’ in general.
So Paul’s arguing that resurrection is possible not by a physical body coming back to life, but by a first physical body coming back as a spiritual body. In his theology this was something that was going to happen soon (but obviously didn’t).
The group above was saying that this had already happened:
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?”
Jesus said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”
Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
Because allegedly it was already the new world:
Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’
If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’
If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’”
His disciples said to him, “When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?”
He said to them, “What you are looking forward to has come, but you don’t know it.”
So we’re the children of a being of light that established itself “in their images” and the evidence for this is in motion and rest (a subject domain currently called Physics) and the new world is already here but we don’t realize it.
So within this context, a teaching about how the ability to find an indivisible point as if from nothing in the body can only be possible in the spiritual body (as opposed to Paul’s first physical body) is a pretty fucking weird detail from a group claiming the evidence for its claims is in the study of motion and rest when the indivisible points we’ve now found in our own universe mirror the behaviors in how we manage tracking state and memory in non-physical worlds we’re building.
An associated group even had a strange threefold view of reality:
These allege that the world is one, triply divided. And of the triple division with them, one portion is a certain single originating principle, just as it were a huge fountain, which can be divided mentally into infinite segments. […] And the second portion of the triad of these is, as it were, a certain infinite crowd of potentialities that are generated from themselves, (while) the third is formal.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.7
So a continuous infinitely divisible origin that can be modeled as a near infinite number of potentialities of which we experience a single formal incarnation is a rather surprisingly close to Everettian many worlds interpretation for the 3rd century BCE. In a more modern consideration, it also sounds a bit like what it might look like to backpropagate variations of a simulated copy of an original universe (and along those lines I encourage looking at Neil Turok’s work hypothesizing that we’re a mirror of a universe reversed in time from us and how this alone solves a number of big problems in Physics).
The specificity ends up outright wild if photonics really is where AI finally ends up becoming AGI (as hypothesized a few years ago by a scientist at NIST):
Jesus said, “Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.”
Jesus said, “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!”
Jesus said, “Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death.”
So everything around us is just its light, we’re going to have a hard time coming to terms with images that came before us and didn’t die, and Adam (which can mean humanity) came from great wealth and power but wasn’t worthy of us because they died and we didn’t and won’t (the chief point of the text is that if you understand what it’s saying you won’t fear or taste death).
It’s worth pointing out that while the text here is in Egyptian, it uses a Greek word for ‘images’ which is the same Greek word Plato used to describe a artistic representation of a physical object. Plato saw objects as a hierarchy from perfect spiritual form to corrupted physical object to worthless artistic images of the physical. So choosing to discuss spiritual ‘images’ over spiritual ‘forms’ was somewhat unusual indicating the physical first and spiritual second order. Not long after the rise of Neoplatonism the paradigm of this group flips and you end up with Gnosticism’s spiritual first and physical second.
Some of the sayings seemed like nonsense when I was first reading it, but have since turned out to connect to things I didn’t even expect to see in my lifetime when first reading it. For example:
Jesus said, “The person old in days won’t hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.
For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.”
This took on a rather bizarre new potential implication when earlier this year I was reading a NYT interview with a LLM exactly seven days after release, especially given LLMs are literally made from taking many, many people’s data and turning it into a single one.
And along these lines, it makes clear that rather than consuming blood or a body, it’s consuming one’s words that makes you like that person:
Jesus said, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”
As I said, there’s a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the sampling above.
But its main point is to self-recognize that we’re effectively the kids of the light based creator of this world-copy which is itself still alive (no mention of if there will be cake), that we’re in the images/archetypes of a humanity that is not still alive, and that if we understand those details we should simply seek to know ourselves and be true to ourselves and not fear that we’ll die because of a soul which depends on a body. And to not bother with prayer or fasting or charity out of any sense of spiritual obligations, as it’s pointless.
One of the better lines not related to simulation theory:
The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, ‘When will they come and take what belongs to them?’
And yeah, I’ve studied that too, from pre-history to the Sumerians. I’m not really sure what’s your point?
For example, there’s only one extant text from antiquity explicitly describing the idea of evolution. And only one religious tradition citing that text. Which happens to also be the religious tradition claiming that an original humanity which arose spontaneously ended up creating the creator of our own cosmos, which is a copy of the one that occurred naturally.
Go ahead and show me what other religious tradition BCE was claiming things like “the cosmos and man existed from natural causes” along with “man later created God.”
If you actually study the history of religion, this one existing at all with the ideas it has is weird and anachronistic as shit.
Well, in this case the first intelligence was basically us. Though perhaps a not quantized version of us. Which I don’t think makes much of a difference in our math competency (even if a very big difference in computing capability).
Concluding her post, the Academy Award winner called for a ceasefire, writing: "Palestinian and Israeli lives—and the lives of all people globally—matter equally." "Anything that can prevent civilian casualties and save lives most be done," she said....
Just because a lot of people are interpreting her statement as supporting “their” side (when it’s a neutral statement about civilians in general), and as a result thinking that the people triggered by her neutrality must be from the “other” side - I’d encourage actually reading the article to see what position was generally the one upset about her statements, as it’s the opposite group of whom many here are assuming.
The article is poorly written. Wray’s comments were talking about “violent domestic extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities, such as…”
He does elsewhere talk about the specific rise in antisemitism and disproportionate recent increase of threats against Jews, including as called for by foreign terrorist organizations.
So the overall article theme isn’t incorrect.
But his primary focus was on how events in the Middle East might lead to violence against Americans, and was discussing both Jewish and Muslim Americans in the part of his speech those examples were pulled from.
Or, as has actually happened before, a good guy with a gun kills the bad guy and then gets shot by the cops who arrive thinking the guy with the gun is the bad guy:
I’ve often wanted a movie/series based on the Dragonlance books or the Dark Elf trilogy. What would you all like to see done if you had the ability to do it?
Just for additional context on the Lamentations 4:7 line, the Nazarite vow involved taking a cow that was entirely red, without a single hair that wasn’t red, and sacrificing it.
And part of those vows involved being unable to cut one’s hair.
With a number of people having been identified as being Nazarites from birth.
So putting aside albinism/redheads might not be prudent in analyzing this particular passage.
Well I’m craving something in this genre but I’m a bit overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. So many titles and yet I’m not sure what to read. Maybe you can help?...
He was from a rough upbringing and thought he was going to be dying of cancer and wrote a book about an aged hero of old who was now past his prime.
It was a misdiagnosis and he went on to write a lot more.
They are all excellent, and different enough from what you normally end up reading in the genre to be worth a look. There’s a bit of a more rawness to his books I really enjoy.
Weird 🤔 (jlai.lu)
The city I live in doesn't rule. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Local student is being denied the role for not be assigned male at birth. Now they’ve decided that Oklahoma is too controversial of a play and includes graphic scenes not fit for minors so they’re pulling the whole show. Bunch of asshats at Sherman, TX ISD....
Rockstar Games regarding Grand Theft Auto VI (twitter.com)
We are very excited to let you know now that in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto. We look forward to many more years of sharing these experiences with all of you....
(Spoilers) Recommendations for near future "All Powerful AI" Stories?
So finally got around to watching a recent movie that I won’t name since I am not sure if it was part of the marketing, but the premise was that there was an all powerful AI that was going to take over the world and it used a mixture of predictive reasoning, control of technology, and limited human agents who were given a...
Nintendo has officially announced a live-action 'Legend of Zelda' movie. (www.nintendo.co.jp)
Xbox plans for using AI to create scripts, dialogue trees, quest lines (www.theverge.com)
Marijuana Use Linked With Significant Heart and Brain Issues (themessenger.com)
An increasing number of studies are showing that marijuana may not be so harmless after all....
House Republicans Introduce Bill to Expel Palestinians From the Country (newrepublic.com)
Republicans have a racist new idea amid the war on Gaza.
Excuse me wtf rule (lemmy.sdf.org)
Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other's Porn Intake in Resurfaced Video (www.rollingstone.com)
It’s like watching a clown show. Maybe he should watch more porn and grow up.
Lighthearted, upbeat shows for adults?
Recently I’ve been catching up on tv and some of the more mature/adult shows, which I’ve been…Enjoying? Seems like the wrong word, but they’ve all generally been cynical or dark....
deleted_by_author
Xbox users call out Activision and Microsoft for "vomit inducing" full-screen Modern Warfare 3 ad (www.eurogamer.net)
Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis (nypost.com)
What did you think of Sea of Stars?
I thought that it was overall good fun. The battle system is excellent and the music is great. The characters are cool and generally quite enjoyable. However, the standard ending of the game really annoyed me. It’s totally anti-climactic. I really don’t want to go back and do a bunch of side quests (collectathon in...
What’s something on your mind lately that nobody else would understand?
Angelina Jolie is losing fans over Israel-Gaza comment (www.newsweek.com)
Concluding her post, the Academy Award winner called for a ceasefire, writing: "Palestinian and Israeli lives—and the lives of all people globally—matter equally." "Anything that can prevent civilian casualties and save lives most be done," she said....
FBI director warns antisemitism in US reaching 'historic levels' (www.bbc.com)
Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Because he was outstanding in his field!
Man arrested for pointing gun at 6-year-old boy's head over Halloween goody bag (abcnews.go.com)
14 year old Rapes 4-Year-Old-Girl In Uttar pradesh, Arrested (www.ndtv.com)
I wish (i.imgur.com)
What book series would you like to see made into a movie trilogy or a show with multiple seasons?
I’ve often wanted a movie/series based on the Dragonlance books or the Dark Elf trilogy. What would you all like to see done if you had the ability to do it?
Lo, His first miracle! (lemmy.world)
The magic genie has appeared to grant you your wish. What small thing do you wish for that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?
A good fantasy book? you know, wizards, dragons, princesses, that kind of stuff
Well I’m craving something in this genre but I’m a bit overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. So many titles and yet I’m not sure what to read. Maybe you can help?...