balooga's recent activity
-
Comment on Is there a reason that we aren't seeing pushback to US President Donald Trump's blitzkreig? in ~society
-
Comment on Is there a reason that we aren't seeing pushback to US President Donald Trump's blitzkreig? in ~society
balooga Yeah it’s another “miracle” he wasn’t held in contempt.Yeah it’s another “miracle” he wasn’t held in contempt.
-
Comment on No Man's Sky: Worlds Part II in ~games
balooga I think the appeal of the game isn’t actually the procgen planets. It’s the vibes. It’s the tiny, lonely feeling of being lost in an infathomably large and meaningless universe. It’s the personal...I think the appeal of the game isn’t actually the procgen planets. It’s the vibes. It’s the tiny, lonely feeling of being lost in an infathomably large and meaningless universe. It’s the personal arc from surviving, to exploring, to thriving. It’s about crafting and base building, not dissimilar to Minecraft actually, making cool stuff no one has ever seen before. And there is a healthy multiplayer component to it too.
I think the story is an interesting one considering the limitations of the gameplay. There are a lot of interesting side directions you can go in, whether you’re into building stuff, upgrading your tech, combat, exploring for secrets and rarities, etc. And there are much more collaborative online “expeditions” which add a lot more structure to the game.
When the game first game out your points were more applicable, but it’s really evolved into something unique and fun since then. The procgen has improved, and the diversity of stuff to find is better now, but that’s still all just window dressing for what the game actually is.
-
Comment on Is there a reason that we aren't seeing pushback to US President Donald Trump's blitzkreig? in ~society
balooga 1, 2, and 3 are all legal. Despicable, but legal. I don’t think they can be considered “cheating” though certainly some reform is needed because the game wasn’t meant to be played like that. 4 is...1, 2, and 3 are all legal. Despicable, but legal. I don’t think they can be considered “cheating” though certainly some reform is needed because the game wasn’t meant to be played like that.
4 is the clincher. I’m stupefied, flabbergasted, and gobsmacked that he did zero prison time for 34 felony convictions. That’s gotta be wholly unprecedented. How is it even remotely possible that situation could ever happen for anyone?
SCOTUS then declaring he can do whatever he wants and that makes it legal was the final insult to injury. An astonishingly bad (and beyond belief) ruling… one that his administration is already using to defend illegal actions like the firing of federal workers without due notice. I guarantee you they’re going to be flexing that muscle often in the coming years. They love having that get out of jail free card. Wouldn’t surprise me if they try to use that as a hail mary in 2028 to justify keeping him in office longer, constitution be damned.
-
Comment on You can change ONE thing about a game. What do you change? in ~games
balooga Skies of Arcadia: Legends, but with the high-quality audio from the Dreamcast version. I generally think the GameCube version improved on the original, but the music is completely butchered. I’ve...Skies of Arcadia: Legends, but with the high-quality audio from the Dreamcast version.
I generally think the GameCube version improved on the original, but the music is completely butchered. I’ve been bemoaning for years that the emulation scene still hasn’t managed to combine the best of both versions into a definitive ROM.
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga Oh that sounds like just what I need! I peeked at DO’s pricing earlier and there’s probably some nuance or optimization I’m missing but this looks like it’s intended for production use with...Oh that sounds like just what I need! I peeked at DO’s pricing earlier and there’s probably some nuance or optimization I’m missing but this looks like it’s intended for production use with minimal downtime. Way out of my budget. Something more a la carte is what I need for my negligible household usage. The main thing is I want some flexibility with models. DO has a handful of 1-click solutions for llama or sonnet. But I’d like to run deepseek and stable diffusion, which aren’t offered pre-configured.
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga LLMs make great rubber ducks. I’ve found that rubber-ducking for a while before asking it to write code can yield better results, since you’re adding valuable considerations and planning details...LLMs make great rubber ducks. I’ve found that rubber-ducking for a while before asking it to write code can yield better results, since you’re adding valuable considerations and planning details to the context window up front.
-
Comment on Can you recommend tv shows with themes of grit, endurance, survival under hostile circumstances? in ~tv
balooga I’ve been meaning to check it out since I saw Alyssa Grenfell’s recent video about it. I discovered her channel a month or two ago and it’s sparked an interest in Mormon history and the North...I’ve been meaning to check it out since I saw Alyssa Grenfell’s recent video about it. I discovered her channel a month or two ago and it’s sparked an interest in Mormon history and the North American westward expansion. (This is what directly led to the question I asked here the other day, looking for a good visualization of how the maps changed over time; I’m still on the hunt for that, btw…)
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga That’s a great point. Renting cloud hardware would certainly be cheaper than buying my own rig. I’ve been paying for a personal DigitalOcean VPS for years but I’m not sure what their current GPU...That’s a great point. Renting cloud hardware would certainly be cheaper than buying my own rig. I’ve been paying for a personal DigitalOcean VPS for years but I’m not sure what their current GPU offerings are. Might be worth a look. Hopefully there’s something there, I’d rather not switch to AWS, Google, or Azure.
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga I'm starting to wonder if it would be realistic to host my own private AI server on my home network. It's not practical to have these beefy models running on my primary machine but a dedicated box...I'm starting to wonder if it would be realistic to host my own private AI server on my home network. It's not practical to have these beefy models running on my primary machine but a dedicated box running in the closet might not be awful.
Of course, once I cross that rubicon I'll inevitably be tinkering with it 24/7.
-
Comment on Can you recommend tv shows with themes of grit, endurance, survival under hostile circumstances? in ~tv
balooga Battlestar Galactica Breaking Bad MacGyver Fargo- Battlestar Galactica
- Breaking Bad
- MacGyver
- Fargo
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga No, that's true, I've done a lot of poking and prodding to figure out where the edges of its knowledge are but nothing rigorous. Anecdotally, I can choose two wildly random and disparate concepts...I'm curious how you know this? I wasn't aware of any company making their training data public?
No, that's true, I've done a lot of poking and prodding to figure out where the edges of its knowledge are but nothing rigorous. Anecdotally, I can choose two wildly random and disparate concepts that are (presumably) not explicitly connected anywhere on the web, and prompt it to find commonalities, and an LLM will find relationships that (again, presumably) have never been written about before.
Bit of a tangent in here, but I explain my understanding of how LLMs work and how that ties into my "meaning synthesis" thought... feel free to skip if you're already on the same page, or share any notes of your own if you think I'm off-base.
It's not a perfect analogy but I think of LLMs like a mind map or graphical thesaurus: a complex tangle of concepts and their relationships to one another. I imagine a 3D cloud rather than a 2D diagram because it helps me visualize the complexity better, but actual LLMs have not two or three, but billions of dimensions. No way to wrap my feeble mind around that, so the 3D cloud is the best shorthand I've got. Anyway, I picture my prompt being used to determine the starting position and direction of the response within that cloud, then nodes start lighting up rapidly as the chain of thought bounces around from one concept to another. Untouched concept nodes in proximity to the activated ones still affect the trajectory of that chain as if they have their own gravitational pull.
Many different nodes from completely distant parts of the cloud will light up in the course of the response generation, but the vast majority of nodes in the model won't be touched all. If you could map only the active, lit-up ones you'd get a picture of what the prompt+response are "about."
So I think a trick is to prompt with a couple unrelated concepts that are not "about" each other at all, whose nodes occupy disparate corners of the cloud. And the LLM will find a mathematical midpoint between them, adjusted in various ways by the gravitational pulls of the nodes it passes in its thought process. And that's how you end up in new places that were never explicitly spelled out in the training data. By drawing new connections between ideas, LLM inference allows for the synthesis of new meaning.
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga Well that's more job security for me and my legacy skillset! I kid, I kid. I imagine there will always be devs talking to each other in various ways. Colleagues chatting at work, influencers...Well that's more job security for me and my legacy skillset! I kid, I kid.
I imagine there will always be devs talking to each other in various ways. Colleagues chatting at work, influencers hyping up the new hotness on their streams, etc. And the LLMs themselves may be able to recommend even a brand new language for relevant projects, assuming they have some understanding of it.
-
Comment on TimeGuessr in ~games
balooga (edited )LinkDoes the spirit of this game assume players are researching their guess in another tab, trying to find matching buildings on Street View, searching for roads and business names, that sort of...Does the spirit of this game assume players are researching their guess in another tab, trying to find matching buildings on Street View, searching for roads and business names, that sort of thing? Or is the intent more that you put in a good-faith guess based on your existing knowledge and assumptions, and using external sources is considered cheating?
I'm enjoying it either way but not really sure how it's meant to be played.
Edit: LOL, I thought I had a pretty good guess of Seoul in 1989 for this pic. Turns out that's Pyongyang in 2010, oof. Including DPRK pics in the set is unfair!
-
Comment on AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers in ~tech
balooga I’ve been wondering about this lately. Imagine if SO disappears tomorrow and then next week some amazing new language that the LLMs have never heard of is released. My kneejerk reaction is that...I’ve been wondering about this lately. Imagine if SO disappears tomorrow and then next week some amazing new language that the LLMs have never heard of is released. My kneejerk reaction is that LLMs will remain useless for anything in that language, in the absence of such a large volume of training data.
But I’m not so sure if that’s the case. Assuming the language is released with comprehensive docs, maybe that would be enough? If it’s OSS, could the source code also be used for training? I wonder if we have enough foundation laid already, for general comp-sci and programming principles, that a reasoning model could connect the dots itself. I think we’re past the point of needing to feed them a firehouse of code samples.
I could be totally wrong about that, but I’m generally impressed with the new models’ ability to synthesize contextual, semantic meaning that wasn’t explicitly pre-baked into the training corpus.
-
Comment on Ten ideas to oppose the Donald Trump US administration in ~society
balooga For those not in the know, that’s the thesis of this article (archive) from 2018. This one assertion has stuck with me since then, it’s one of the most useful frameworks for trying to find meaning...the cruelty is the point
For those not in the know, that’s the thesis of this article (archive) from 2018. This one assertion has stuck with me since then, it’s one of the most useful frameworks for trying to find meaning in Trump’s chaos vortex. The specific headlines mentioned have changed but I think the article is even more salient today than it was back then.
Trump and the MAGA movement are fundamentally defined and motivated by an ethos of cruelty. It’s a worldview and moral framework that directly informs every action taken by his administration. It permeates the culture of the right. It’s a deliberate dismissal of anyone who opposes them. By “dismissal” I mean an unflinching refusal to ever consider their perspective, a denial of their basic human dignity, a public vilification of their character, and a continuous reflexive mockery of their personhood, values, and worth.
I hear a lot of attempts to summarize what Trumpism and its associated factions are “about,” but nothing rings as true to me as its full-throated embrace of cruelty as a virtue.
-
Comment on Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport closed after a military helicopter collides with a landing regional jet in ~transport
balooga Thanks for this, X links consistently fail to load for me since the takeover. Even if I wanted to give them clicks (I don’t) the content’s never accessible to me anyway. Sometimes I get an...Thanks for this, X links consistently fail to load for me since the takeover. Even if I wanted to give them clicks (I don’t) the content’s never accessible to me anyway. Sometimes I get an authwall, usually it’s just a “something went wrong” page, maybe because of my privacy stack but I don’t care enough to turn anything off to make it work.
As for the video, if anyone else is curious but hesitating to click, it doesn’t show much. The camera is far away from the collision and it’s dark. Two distant lights in the sky meet and fall down. I don’t think there’s any detail about what happened to be gleaned by watching.
-
Comment on No Man's Sky: Worlds Part II in ~games
balooga It's been a while since I lost myself in NMS. Can't believe they're still updating it. This looks phenomenal! Can't wait to dive back in.It's been a while since I lost myself in NMS. Can't believe they're still updating it. This looks phenomenal! Can't wait to dive back in.
-
Comment on We tried out DeepSeek. It worked well, until we asked it about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan. in ~tech
balooga The more I read about the holes in DeepSeek’s censorship implementation (and the more attention is cast on those by the press) the more I’m starting to worry about the safety of the team that made...The more I read about the holes in DeepSeek’s censorship implementation (and the more attention is cast on those by the press) the more I’m starting to worry about the safety of the team that made it. Seems like the sort of thing that could land them on the CCP’s naughty list.
-
Comment on 1,156 questions censored by DeepSeek in ~tech
balooga What I’m most interested in is the open-source model, not the hosted platform. I won’t be signing up as a customer and I don’t have nearly the kind of hardware to run it locally so I guess I won’t...What I’m most interested in is the open-source model, not the hosted platform. I won’t be signing up as a customer and I don’t have nearly the kind of hardware to run it locally so I guess I won’t be playing with DeepSeek. For now.
But what I want to know is, can the base model they’ve published be fined-tuned by the OSS community to reverse the Chinese censorship? This is way outside my field of expertise but I suspect it would be (somewhat) trivial to assemble a list of known off-limits subjects and train them back in.
In a decade or less I expect to be able to run the models that will be built on top of foundations like this, on my own hardware. That’s gonna be a game-changer.
When Karoline Leavitt speaks I get the exact same vibes: