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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • 2 things:

    • Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

    • People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

    Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

    So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.


  • darthelmet@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzanswer = sum(n) / len(n)
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    2 months ago

    Idk. There’s something going on in how humans learn which is probably fundamentally different from current ML models.

    Sure, humans learn from observing their environments, but they generally don’t need millions of examples to figure something out. They’ve got some kind of heuristics or other ways of learning things that lets them understand many things after seeing them just a few times or even once.

    Most of the progress in ML models in recent years has been the discovery that you can get massive improvements with current models by just feeding them more and data. Essentially brute force. But there’s a limit to that, either because there might be a theoretical point where the gains stop, or the more practical issue of only having so much data and compute resources.

    There’s almost certainly going to need to be some kind of breakthrough before we’re able to get meaningful further than we are now, let alone matching up to human cognition.

    At least, that’s how I understand it from the classes I took in grad school. I’m not an expert by any means.




  • Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

    But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.


  • Yeah. It’s more like:

    Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

    CEOs: Give that baby a job!

    AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.



  • Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

    That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.


  • Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

    • In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

    • In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

    • In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

    • Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

    Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

    It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.




  • I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.

    It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.

    It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.