Yeah, the accurate 4th panel would show the guy seizing on the ground.

I wouldn’t say “obviously” because I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to just have some refuse to vote along just to blame their opponents for the fallout, especially when they wanted that fallout in the first place.

Just for clarity, if every single R votes yes and every D voted no, would the budget pass? Of does it require a larger majority that the GOP doesn’t have?

I think it was mainly a design decision about wanting the game to get harder as you progressed instead of easier. Which I have mixed feelings about because divide and conquer where it starts hard but gets eaaier as you clean up can be very satisfying, but factory games can scale in ways that would make it more trivially boring.

Don’t the trees already help by absorbing some amount of pollution? If tree is gone, it stops absorbing, thus pollution rises.

It’s funny if anyone thinks that strategy can compete with China in the long term. Hell, I’m not sure how much longer the west will stay “on top” in the short term (doesn’t really feel like winning lately).

It’s because it was pretty much the Netflix of video games. Pay a subscription and you get access to a collection of games.

When it was 5.99 it was a no brainer. I think I cancelled mine around 13.99, though not because of the price but because I always forgot it existed and it tied me to windows. Switched to Linux and cancelling was a part of that transition.

Well I’m counter suing because when I got served with your lawsuit, it gave me the nastiest papercut!

Things get more violent. Wind tries to find the path of least resistance, though as a fluid, so it’s taking all paths in proportion to how much resistance it has (just like electricity). If you increase the absolute resistance in one area, it reduces the relative resistance everywhere else, so you end up with increased airflow everywhere else and a reduction where you added resistance. Which means more wind outside of the turbine’s path (because it’s going to equalize that pressure differential one way or another). More flow through the same volume means higher speeds and forces (think like turning up the pressure on a tap).

But wind turbines don’t have a constant effect on wind resistance; it depends on how fast it’s spinning or how fast the wind is moving. When the wind slows, the resistance goes down, and when resistance goes down, wind speed increases. So you end up with an oscillating effect where the wind goes through cycles of strengthening, losing more energy to the turbines and weakening, which means the turbines take less energy, and the winds strengthen again. Though you’d need to be taking a significant amount of that energy to see an extreme effect like this.

Apparently taking more than 53.9% of the total wind energy in an area is enough to slow the wind to a stop (again, a violent, turbulent, oscillating stop, not a gentle end of wind).

Nintendo is Japanese.

TPM is more about securing data from PC owners rather than for them. Since it’s there anyways, it is used to support bitlocker, but the reason they are pushing it so much is because it might (depending on whether it actually is secure) be able to allow content providers to allow users to view their content without needing to give them access to copy or edit it.

And there isn’t any guarantee that the uses that do benefit the user’s security don’t have some backdoor for approved crackers to get in. Like doesn’t the MS account store a copy of the recovery key for bitlocker? Which is nice for when the user needs it, but also comes in handy if MS wants to grant access to anyone else.

There’s a lot of space between “just let them carry on with whatever” and “beat them like I expected to be”. Not to mention, “getting my ass beat by my parents” might not mean literally getting beat, but can be a metaphor for any kind of discipline (though I can see how it can fall into the uncanny valley since there were and are parents that would literally beat asses).

Yeah, part of it is to teach that they won’t get their way by annoying you into giving in. Helps in my case that I can be a stubborn fuck, too. It means I have to choose my battles because I don’t want to back myself into a situation where I make a choice, realize it’s not the best one, but feel like I have to stand my ground to combat whining. Luckily we’re past the point of tantrums and she’s old enough that I can explain my reasoning in cases where I say one thing at first but then later change my mind.

But there’s two other parts imo. One is teaching them the right way to express what they want (as well as when stating what they want might be rude or out of line, like if it’s in response to getting a gift that isn’t their top choice). And the other is being open and honest about the why. I only use “because I said so” or some equivalent to deal with the endless chain of "why?"s (though I’ve found deflecting it back at her is also effective, like “why do you think it is?”).

I can’t understand how such an obviously stupid approach to rasing kids even got off the ground to the point of general awareness. Any intelligent adult should be able to see how learning to take a “no” is an essential part of growing up. Same with dealing with negative emotions in general, which I understand the whole “never say no” thing is trying to avoid.

My daughter was taught how to take a no at a young age. It was a bit rough the first few times, but she quickly learned to take them in stride.

Some arcades were actually a bit more manipulative than that in that they’d get harder depending on how long it was since you last put a quarter in.

Mortal Kombat was one. I noticed this pattern on the snes version of MK3 (can’t remember if it was ultimate or not that I had): I’d easily win one fight, then get demolished by the next fighter. Then continue and that same fighter would be easy, only for the next one after that to be much more difficult. I didn’t have to put quarters into my snes but they just used the same tuning from the arcade machines.

Eventually when I played that game, I was spending much more time on the space invaders minigame lol.

Also if the CEO of target decides he really doesn’t like a popular shirt and is able to force everyone to only shop at target, then he can come a lot closer to snuffing out the existence of that shirt.

The water tasted like damp basement! Oddly enough, it was a kinda pleasant flavour.

It’s because they are horrible at problem solving and creativity. They are based on word association from training purely on text. The technical singularity will need to innovate on its own so that it can improve the hardware it runs on and its software.

Even though github copilot has impressed me by implementing a 3 file Python script from scratch to finish such that I barely wrote any code, I had to hold its hand the entire way and give it very specific instructions about every function as we added the pieces one by one to build it up. And even then, it would get parts I failed to specify completely wrong and initially implemented things in a very inefficient way.

There are fundamental things that the technical singularity needs that today’s LLMs lack entirely. I think the changes that would be required to get there will also change them from LLMs into something else. The training is a part of it, but fundamentally, LLMs are massive word association engines. Words (or vectors translated to and from words) are their entire world and they can only describe things with those words because it was trained on other people doing that.

I don’t hate AI or LLMs. As much as it might mess up civilization as we know it, I’d like to see the technological singularity during my lifetime, though I think the fixation on LLMs will do more to delay than realize that.

I just think that there’s a lot of people fooled by their conversational capability into thinking they are more than what they are and using the fact that these models are massive with billions or trillions of weighs that the data is encoded into and no one understands how they work to the point of being able to definitively say “this is why it suggested glue as a pizza topping” to put whether or not it approaches AGI in a grey zone.

I’ll agree though that it was maybe too much to say they don’t have knowledge. “Having knowledge” is a pretty abstract and hard to define thing itself, though I’m also not sure it directly translates to having intelligence (which is also poorly defined tbf). Like one could argue that encyclopedias have knowledge, but they don’t have intelligence. And I’d argue that LLMs are more akin to encyclopedias than how we operate (though maybe more like a chatbot dictionairy that pretends to be an encyclopedia).

Calling the errors “hallucinations” is kinda misleading because it implies there’s regular real knowledge but false stuff gets mixed in. That’s not how LLMs work.

LLMs are purely about word associations to other words. It’s just massive enough that it can add a lot of context to those associations and seem conversational about almost any topic, but it has no depth to any of it. Where it seems like it does is just because the contexts of its training got very specific, which is bound to happen when it’s trained on every online conversation its owners (or rather people hired by people hired by its owners) could get their hands on.

All it does is, given the set of tokens provided and already predicted, plus a bit of randomness, what is the most likely token to come next, then repeat until it predicts an “end” token.

Earlier on when using LLMs, I’d ask it about how it did things or why it would fail at certain things. ChatGPT would answer, but only because it was trained on text that explained what it could and couldn’t do. Its capabilities don’t actually include any self-reflection or self-understanding, or any understanding at all. The text it was trained on doesn’t even have to reflect how it really works.