To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

funny, this seems similar to how Gordon Ramsey demonstrates “perfect scrambled eggs” in a youtube video I once saw. He basically just pulls the eggs off of the fire every 15 seconds or so.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

I watched a few playthroughs earlier this year, and was struck by the games’ vibes. Maybe I’ve become jaded, maybe 2013 was just a different time, but the over-the-top-bombastic, gratuitous-yet-totally-sincere meditation on power, violence, and humanity feels incredibly relevant, not to mention a breath of fresh air compared to the games I see coming out today.

It’s also very similar to the type of video game I’d like to make someday, so it counts as homework as well!

Not to mention it feels like half of the media/art that I love from the past 10 years has been heavily influenced by this game, so playing it could give me a fuller appreciation for them.

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.

Ooooh, that’s a good first test / “sanity check” !

May I ask what you are using as a summarizer? I’ve played around with locally running models from huggingface, but never did any tuning nor straight-up training “from scratch”. My (paltry) experience with the HF models is that they’re incapable of staying confined to the given context.

I’m not sure if this is how @[email protected] is using it, but I could totally see myself using an LLM to check my own understanding like the following:

1. Read a chapter
2. Read the LLM’s summary of the chapter
3. Make sure I can understand and agree or disagree with each part of the LLM’s summary.

Ironically, this exercise works better if the LLM “hallucinates”; noticing a hallucination in its summary is a decent metric for my own understanding of the chapter.

Good luck and don’t forget to bring heat pipes!

(More realistically, given you posted this 11 hours ago; hope y’all weren’t stranded!)

I don’t think I was making it out to be easy at all. I expect it to be nigh-impossible. I also expect it to be worth it.

But the question was what opinion on the industry do I have that I don’t feel comfortable voicing at work, not what do I think is the most feasible way forwards.

… That’s why I ended my comment with “we should be teaching others and helping them make their own”.

We should stop making software for others.

A prerequisite for reasonable tech use is understanding the amount of energy and materials you need to “burn through” for any given piece of tech to 1) exist and 2) do its useful work. Call me naive, but I really doubt that we’d be accelerating climate change this much if every person contributing to the “X thousand hours of videos uploaded to YouTube each day” was required to write their own video hosting software first. I doubt our social networks would become so captured by propagandists of every user of one had to write their own. (Obviously as an absolute this is a bit too restrictive - it’s more the tone and direction that I’m trying to convey).

Instead, we should be teaching and helping others reach our knowledge /skill level.

Maybe the execs would stop pushing shitty UI dark patterns if they had to code the service themselves (and then use it afterwards!).

One^can^dream…

It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.

As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.

Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.

The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.

Also, just with Mario alone Nintendo has long had a heavy jazz influence.

Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.

Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.

Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.

Not at all. I don’t even know if the devs have already considered it and decided against releasing it with such functionality.

Not from the platform, but you can control what the landing bay on the surface requests with circuit connections.

I would try to dump the asteroid chunks instead of excess ore - you’re paying electricity to crush chunks and then potentially throwing away the output. Of course, if you’re avoiding circuit conditions then there’s not much better way than to throw the excess ore, plate, etc off the back.

In case you haven’t found out yet, it’s the landing pad. Better quality ones have a greater radar range/radius.

cacher does, but cache as in “cache-toi !” (go hide!) and “je me cache” (I’m hiding) are pronounced “cash”.

Besides, “correct” pronunciation in a different language is pretty meaningless. The word may have come from French but we’re speaking English, not French.

Also, it might not be a loan word so much as a legacy-of-foreigners-taking-over word (c.f. the Normand invasion of Britain), which doesn’t tend to help the language’s users care about respecting the “original” pronunciation. I’m not certain when exactly cachet entered English.