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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • Imagine creating one of the best, most important pieces of media of your generation. Being a rock star of a new medium, defining genres, shaping history and the world.

    Then imagine struggling to keep a job, find work, and create more works in your medium. And now imagine that you were barely in your 20s when you broke out, so that the rest of your life is always in the shadow of your first masterpieces.

    Romero seems like way too nice a person, too good of a being, to be treated with such indignity. In a lot of ways Bill Gates and his company have been fucking over Romero for like 30 years now.



  • My impressions from this comic are that I would hate the creator if I ever met them.

    I think the joke is a typical take on ADHDers having “eyes bigger than their stomachs” for large tasks. Swimming in a lake is very fun, and can help one feel connected to nature. Swimming across a lake is a huge task, possibly requiring training, could take a long time, and is dangerous.

    Why they decided to sit on the beach instead of swimming at all, I have no idea. Maybe it’s a “lakes are deep and scary because lake monsters” thing?







  • Alas! I fear we cannot stay here longer,’ said Aragorn. He looked towards the mountains and held up his sword. ‘Farewell, Gandalf!’ he cried. ‘Did I not say to you: if you pass the doors of Moria, beware? Alas that I spoke true! What hope have we without you?’

    He turned to the Company. ‘We must do without hope,’ he said. ‘At least we may yet be avenged. Let us gird ourselves and weep no more! Come! We have a long road, and much to do.’


  • Preservation, while perhaps idealistic, is about keeping every version that we can. Doom is a great example. Because Carmac released the source code, source ports have proliferated. That means anyone can play the original Doom on just about any machine. Varying degrees of accuracy to the original DOS release exist thanks to ports like Chocolate Doom, GZDoom, Eternity Engine, et al. As do varying degrees of accuracy to Doom 95, the Windows 95 rerelease. Or to the version running on Xbox packed in with Doom 3.

    Ports cover the engine, but we also have an archive of all the doom.wad files, the contents. We have demo and prototype versions. The dos release. Officially patched versions. The win95 release. The Xbox release.

    But a preservationist also wants the original Bethesda Unity release, wad and engine. The Kex release with the new engine and new episodes. Neither of those Bethesda engines needs to exist but why not keep them too? They’re a part of the Doom legacy, an ongoing chapter in the endless story of Doom.

    Its good that in this community we’ve gotten to preserve so much. It keeps the history of one of the most important video games alive and relevant. It keeps the game itself relevant. Without the original source release, there’s no GZDoom and there’s probably no Bethesda rereleases. The impact that source release had on the gaming community, gaming as an industry, modding and indie gaming, is incalculable.

    That Crysis–also a landmark game in its own time–deserves any less is laughable. The original release of the game should always be present and available: as an artifact of its time, as a fine game in its own right, and as a piece of living history that can be stood up against its remakes, sequels, and the games it inspired.


  • So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn’t (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire’s reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?









  • One of the big AI companies (Anthropic with claude? Yep!) wrote a long paper that details some common LLM issues, and they get into why they do math wrong and lie about it in “reasoning” mode.

    It’s actually pretty interesting, because you can’t say they “don’t know how to do math” exactly. The stochastic mechanisms that allow it to fool people with written prose also allow it to do approximate math. That’s why some digits are correct, or it gets the order of magnitude right but still does the math wrong. It’s actually layering together several levels of approximation.

    The “reasoning” is just entirely made up. We barely understsnd how LLMs actually work, so none of them have been trained on research about that, which means LLMs don’t understand their own functioning (not that they “understand” anything strictly speaking).