Libra00

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

I played the original when it came out on PC in like 1987. A friend of my dad gave me a copy, but I didn’t have the manuals or map or anything that came in the box, so in order to figure out how to get around the Caribbean I had to crack an encyclopedia to a map, and that got me both interested in maps and also in reading the history of all these places I’d been to in the game.

I still play the 2004 remake of that game a few times a year.

Yes, for two reasons:

1. The racism of the 1800s was built on that of the 1700s and the 1600s. The Atlantic slave trade as an institution was almost 250 years old when the civil war happened, so that kind worldview doesn’t get built overnight and it doesn’t evaporate overnight.
2. The south resisted industrialization because slave labor was cheaper, already represented a significant investment, and didn’t require scrapping and investing a bunch more money to build factories and such. Plus the south doesn’t benefit from things like the Great Lakes as a transport network so industrialization was never going to take off there anyway until the transport barrier could be overcome with trains and later trucks. But even with those things, the South is considerably less industrialized than the Midwest. Looking at this map you can see that even today the ‘industrial regions’ in the South are still almost all along major rivers and near good natural harbors.

So even if robots had been ready for widespread commercial adoption in 1800 they would still have represented a significant investment to transition from a slave-economy, probably wouldn’t have achieved widespread adoption, and thus probably wouldn’t have displaced many slaves. But even if that wasn’t the case the racism that came alongside slavery was already well-established, and as the Jim Crow era showed, once slaves were no longer the backbone of the economy they were relegated to second-class-citizen status and much, much worse. Another 60 years wouldn’t have made that big a difference (and don’t point to the last 60 years as evidence of what can change in that time, the way racism has changed in the US in that period has largely been a product of technological advancement in TV, internet, etc exposing folks to different people and ideas.)

Depends on the cat. Strays fight on the regular so they’re probably pretty good at it. On the other hand one of my entirely-indoor-from-birth cat routinely wrestles with a 100lb dog for fun and takes no shit, so I’d give him fair odds. The other is a big lazy puddle who doesn’t stand a chance.

That looks like a list of words to use instead of ‘very <something>’, not instead of ‘very’. I think people are going to be confused by statements like ‘the bill is exact accurate’.

Oh yeah I didn’t think about the fact that it’s porous, shit. Yeah I’ve had my ceramic skillet set for like 15 years and never done anything special with them, but also no salt water and stuff growing on every available surface. Fair point.

Depends: for how long? 1 finger = 10% of humanity has all of their basic survival needs met forever? Done and done, take all 10. Seems like an extremely tiny price to pay to alleviate a colossal amount of suffering in the world forever, and without all those people being distracted by meeting their basic needs odds are technology is going to advance even more rapidly, along with the quality of things like medical prosthetics and neural interfaces and shit. So, yes please bring on the cyberpunk without the dystopia.

Having my feet up helps with back pain because it changes the natural angle that my lower back sits at, which affects the level of strain of the surrounding muscles. I sat with my feet up on my desk for a long time before I finally realized why I was doing it and just bought a recliner and a desk that could accommodate it.

And the people who don’t know that you should check LLMs for hallucinations/errors (despite the fact that the press has been screaming that for a year) are definitely self-hosting their own, right? I’ve done it, it’s not hard, but it’s certainly not trivial either, and most of these folks would just go ‘lol what’s a docker?’ and stop there. So we’re advocating guard-rails for people in a use-case they would never find themselves in.

You’re saying this like they’re equal.

Not as if they’re equal, but as if they’re both unreliable and should be checked against multiple sources, which is what I’ve been advocating for since the beginning of this conversation.

The problem is consistency. A con man will always be a con man. With an LLM you have no way to know if it’s bullshitting this time or not

But you don’t know a con man is a con man until you’ve read his book and put some of his ideas in practice and discovered that they’re bullshit, same as with an LLM. See also: check against multiple sources.

Huh, I haven’t treated my ceramic skillets special at all, just rinse 'em out when I’m done and throw 'em in the dishwasher, or if I have to hand-wash I can just scrub them real quick since they’re not nasty with food gunk all over them. To the best of my knowledge they don’t require special treatment, I only suggest not letting them sit with food on them because that’ll make anything harder to clean up.

Alright, thar cute little guy will forever be known as Chocolate Chip.

I have bad eyes and a love of computers/gaming, so I spent 30 years hunched over a keyboard squinting at the monitor. It fucked my back all the way up, I’ve had chronic back pain every day for ~20 years now. Fortunately nowadays I have a recliner and monitors/keyboard on arms so I can see while in a comfortable position. Take care of your back, kids.

I don’t actively seek out media from both sides of political issues because in the US we don’t really have ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ media, we have media all owned by billionaires that mostly stay center-right on most subjects, and let the occasional center-left viewpoint slip through so they can seem to be unbiased. Unless I’m reading Jacobin or other actually-leftist (read:socialist) papers/magazines, all I get is right-wing perspectives.

So that seems like more of a lack-of-understanding problem, not an ‘LLMs are bad’ problem as it’s being portrayed in the larger thread.

I’m also not expecting people to be able to understand complex technical troubleshooting or anything either.

No, you’re just calling them stupid for not having spent the time to learn things you with your technical expertise and high comfort level with technical subjects think ought to be pretty simple. I agree that everyone could benefit from increasing their computer literacy, but I also understand that people prioritize the things they care about and that they’re not stupid for not caring to learn the stuff you think they ought to.

You should check your sources when you’re googling or using chatGPT too (most models I’ve seen now cite sources you can check when they’re reporting factual stuff), that’s not unique to those those things. Yeah LLMs might be more likely to give bad info, but people are unreliable too, they’re biased and flawed and often have an agenda, and they are frequently, confidently wrong. Guess who writes books? Mostly people. So until we’re ready to apply that standard to all sources of information it seems unreasonable to arbitrarily hold LLMs to some higher standard just because they’re new.

“Listen, I enjoy hanging out with you, but sometimes people just need some time alone and don’t feel up to hanging out.” is probably a good place to start.

Also for skillets you can just buy ceramic. As long as you don’t let them sit with food on them they stay pretty non-stick for years.

The Bullwinkle Show (1959-1963) is a riot and definitely should not have been around children. It’s as much of a riot as an adult as I remember it being as a kid (though I only ever saw it on re-runs, I’m not quite that old.)

Sure, it happens all the time. Someone shows me a piece of evidence that I trust, or points out that I missed something in what they had originally said, or whatever. What else is there to do in that situation other then go ‘Oh. You’re right, my bad.’?

But I’m kinda weird, I enjoy having my beliefs and ideas challenged and I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong and updating my worldview to reflect the most accurate information I have access to.

How exactly? Bad information is bad information, regardless of the source.