Given that prisons are an industry in the States and that inmates are one of their main sources of cheap labor, the high recidivism rate is there to maximize profits.

Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.

I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.

The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.

But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.

Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.

I’m 50/50 on the episodic plots. I think that DS9 hit a good balance there: The plots were mostly episodic but usually connected to an overarching metaplot. That felt pretty good; not too loose and not too tight.

Depends on how much of their money is liquid or in non-tech assets. It doesn’t matter that the tech sector gets hit the hardest if they’re certain that they can get it to bounce back by the time they’ve bought out companies in other sectors.

Crashing the economy lets them buy companies for cheap so they’ll concentrate even more wealth onto themselves when the economy rebounds.

System Shock (the remake) with a cut-down version of the Ironman mod to provide randomization. It’s only slight loot randomization so there’s no major pathing changes but it’s fun nonetheless.

I like randomizers. They add some additional replay value to already good games. I must’ve played through randomized Bloodstained a down times already – and twice that for Super Metroid. (And then there’s the beautiful mess that is randomized Borderlands 2. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish a run but man are they wild.)

Or they’ll do Elden Ring 2 with GoW gameplay as a live service game because surely people just want a new but proven IP.

I can see how furniture designed to be cheap(ly made) is not terribly robust. But what I’d really like to know about is how the quality/price ratio has changed over time.

I can easily find a carpenter who makes me high quality furniture. Or go to a company that sells furniture to cafes and restaurants, a market where longevity is an important selling point. But both of those are going to be very expensive – like “several hundred bucks for a single chair” expensive.

So how has quality per price changed over time? Because if quality was better but any piece of furniture was a significant investment… Well, then it wasn’t much different from today, the low-price segment just didn’t exist.

Good point. If you look at the Yakuza games, they’re typically set in a little entertainment district. The map isn’t huge but it’s not supposed to be. It feels the correct size for a busy little part of town.

Meanwhile, yeah, Fallout 3 gave me the impression that even before the war the DC metropolitan area was home to maybe a thousand people.

If you use a .local domain, your device MUST ask the mDNS address (224.0.0.251 or FF02::FB) and MAY ask another DNS provider. Successful resolution without mDNS is not an intended feature but something that just happens to work sometimes. There’s a reason why the user interfaces of devices like Ubiquiti gateways warn against assigning a name ending in .local to any device.

I personally have all of my locally-assigned names end with .lan, although I’m considering switching to a sub-subdomain of a domain I own (so instead of mycomputer.lan I’d have mycomputer.home.mydomain.tld). That would make the names much longer but would protect me against some asshat buying .lan as a new gTLD.

No, there is no punctuation missing, the headline writing style is just hurting comprehensibility. I’ll expand it a bit.

“A startup, which is set to brick an $800 kids’ robot, is trying to open-source it first”

Every week? Shit, some games expect you to drop by every eight hours!

I’m not really a fan of MMORPGs, both due to the gameplay (MMOs are grindy by nature and the hotkey-driven autocombat of most MMORPGs isn’t interesting enough to sustain that for me) and because of often aggressive monetization.

I do like some MMOs in other genres, though. Path of Exile is an action RPG with drop-in multiplayer and a rudimentary built-in trading system. It’s basically Diablo 3 in good. Plus, its monetization system is one of the fairest I’ve seen so far, with the only MTXes that offer gameplay benefits being on sale literally every other weekend.

Path of Exile 2 (currently in closed beta) is basically the same with a tweaked skill system and a soulslike dodge roll mechanic that you’re expected to use. Pretty decent, a bit slower-paced than the first one.

I should also pick up Warframe again one of these days. The repetitive nature of MMOs isn’t as bad when it’s a mobility-focused third-person shooter. And IIRC, there’s not much you can get with MTX that you can’t also get through gameplay somehow. Plus, it’s also a game that you can just play singleplayer if you want.

But it’s still not a backup strategy. You should always have a second partition on the server that you sync your data over to. For performance reasons this partition should be on the same RAID 0 array.

Yes, I didn’t know about the fraud allegation when I posted. That definitely shouldn’t have happened. Funko should’ve known better than to pull shit like that and it’ll be interesting to see if Itch sues over this.

My point about AI tools remains, though.

Using AI driven software is willful negligence.

Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.

Of course if you skip the review step you’re doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.

There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and we have strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.

Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.

Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.

looks at collection of 10-20 € games with hundreds of hours of play time

Yeah… yeah, that’s totally what games cost these days.

An obsolete 10,000 prefix already exits (“myria-”) but Jesse’s prefix is a bit snappier.

Nah, I’m thinking of sodium-ion batteries. That’s 1990s tech and is currently in use for grid storage. Several manufacturers are currently bringing car-ready Na-ion batteries to market and there seems to be one production car using them in China (a version of the JMEV EV3, which I hav enever heard about before).

Now, Na-ion is still less mature than Li-ion and that Chinese car gets about 17% less range compared do the Li-ion version.