I’m confused, is this a serious take? How they make their money leads to how the game is designed and who for. If it’s advertising it’s shit. If it’s microtransactions it becomes about min-maxing annoyance for most gamers while attracting whales, gambling and is shit. Monthly subscriptions is a model that needs loyalty and should attract people who want to “live” in an permanent virtual game world.

Ideally I’d want a global “entertainment subscription” non-profit that is funding projects for the players benefits and is somewhat crowd-controlled like a socialist bank.

There is also a recent academic book (by an Ukrainian academic) about the maidan massacre: The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: The Mass Killing that Changed the World | SpringerLink

Evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt the far right / oligarchs were behind the mass killing of over 100 people and blame it on the government in a false flag operation. But people in the west will never hear of this. And if they hear they will dismiss it as conspiracy theory or propaganda. So it’s really no wonder people like linus react like this.

This was shit graphics even back in 1996 because it only uses primary or fully saturated colors. It’s “dev art”, made by someone with no artistic talent. Or maybe made for 4 year old kids. I missed out on a lot of games with good gameplay because I just can’t stand on this abomination of a color palette.

The worst thing? When games actually went with a more pastel or naturalistic color palette, moronic games journalists would say the colors look “drab” or some shit.

There are people who cheer for this stuff to fail, it’s absurd

There is money in it, just a grift.

I guess any used android smartphone should have plenty of apps. Then you can even have video com

What is “media freeze”?

The USA was designed for minority rule since forever.

Peaceful contact with aliens would tell us something fundamental about the nature of ethics and the universe.

Advanced aliens do not need any material resources or real estate from humanity. We can already interpolate that from existing science. So that is not the reason why there are here. And we know they haven’t exterminated us already centuries ago.

Instead it would tell that we share some fundamental values like curiosity and diversity with alien species - as long as they evolved through natural selection and had to raise and teach and love their children. As long as they had to find productive ways to work together as a people.

We would realize that we are not alone and that we are being judged. That we can’t just endlessly bulldoze the galaxy and that there are limits to acceptable behavior. Because there is always someone more powerful that could smash us, but they already didn’t. That certain ethical ideals are fundamental properties emerging from the universe itself.

It would be a powerful counter to the current nihilistic materialism, that we need to start working to improve our culture.

Yeah the book has an amazing depiction of a truly alien mind that is fundamentally different because of how it functions.

The way I would classify it is if you could somehow extract the “creative writing center” from a human brain, you’d have something comparable to to a LLM. But they lack all the other bits, and reason and learning and memory, or badly imitate them.

If you were to combine multiple AI algorithms similar in power to LLM but designed to do math, logic and reason, and then add some kind of memory, you probably get much further towards AGI. I do not believe we’re as far from this as people want to believe, and think that sentience is on a scale.

But it would still not be anchored to reality without some control over a camera and the ability to see and experience reality for itself. Even then it wouldn’t understand empathy as anything but an abstract concept.

My guess is that eventually we’ll create a kind of “AGI compiler” with a prompt to describe what kind of mind you want to create, and the AI compiler generates it. A kind of “nursing AI”. Hopefully it’s not about profit, but a prompt about it learning to be friends with humans and genuinely enjoy their company and love us.

Still interesting. zstandard using pretrained dictionaries (zstd --train). Previously they used zlib.

Does anybody know if you can pretrain dictionaries for 7zip for large ebook libraries? Or any better compression library for text?

Thanks. I imagine most unicode characters and emojis are just copied over from some default font?

Maybe they’ll patch it into a https://www.nerdfonts.com

Can I use a seedbox to host videos for peertube?

True. I think about it now as a kind of physics problem. You have political energy measured in dollars on each side. Volunteers to help bring the political message across for free can be converted into dollars too. There are a lot of people concerned or outright scared out of their minds about environmental concerns like climate change. One sight has multiple orders of magnitude more political energy to spend. For example on counter measures, or boosting extreme vegan voices to cause disruption, advertising or media stories or think tanks or lobbyists. And the “technology” to manage this political energy is rapidly advancing too. So no amount of “this is the right / wrong choice” argument is going to change anything. There is only power.

You’d need to grow the third party / greens by having them become a viable party in local elections and state elections first. The greens have failed to do that. Which means they have no chance except to spoil the election.

Fascism.

People have been lied to for decades and we all know it’s going to get worse in the future. The democrats are neoliberals who will continue to exploit people. The news media and social media are all owned by oligarchs. Wealth inequality is getting worse. Climate change won’t be solved and will make all things worse. Why should people vote for the status quo? Work hard, get fucked? No solidarity, no rational action, no plan. And nuclear war when?

Fascism and nationalism is not just something to break this but also has the better story. Something the stupid masses can believe in again. Trump is telling them everything they want to hear.

I think you need to compress the air and cool it and you get condensation. I think the advantage of baking the soil would be that the concentration of water vapor would be higher so less energy.

Hmm… maybe the smartest way would be to just build greenhouses and pump compressed air into it. Plants grow, absorb CO2, release oxygen and water. At night you lower insulation and condense excess water out of the air. What is left is a surplus of oxygen. Of course that requires a ton of glass.

I dabble a little (3D printers, composites). I’m thinking more about 30-100 years for actually living on moon or mars like a real self sufficient colony instead of missions.

I do believe mechanical engineering can be represented in a way that is accessible to AI. It doesn’t need general knowledge or sentience. Not just the generative stuff we have now in CAD, but more like the AI that can generate images. Ways to generate infinitely complex “nonsense” machines isn’t hard, but AI can then learn of how to work more intuitive.

At some point we’ll have an AI that can design, supervise manufacture / CNC and robots to assemble and then control all the machines we need for this. Of course the design would have lots of human input at start. But robotics are improving and deep AI is able to do remarkable things already. Eventually we would feed all the existing CAD designs and function and physical laws and material science into an AI as a lot of data and then suddenly you can bootstrap an entire industrial society fully automated. But every step and progress towards that goal would make it that much cheaper and easier to do.

Of course that’s sci-fi but so is the idea of living on mars :)

True, and you have more gravity. On the other hand you have perchlorides. Obviously you need water but I thought they did find some already near the south pole on the moon? (EDIT: Yes but apparently little and not very concentrated). I didn’t know there was so little carbon though.

Well yeah, then underground in lava tubes. But then the moon would be much easier for building habitats to live in.

There is a sort of paradox. To do any of this in any scale would be much more likely with automation. And automation, like robots being able to build robots and then factories and anything else is coming especially with the recent advances in AI and computer vision etc. And then such megaprojects won’t be unthinkeable any more. But then it would probably also be easier to build a mega space habitats mining the moon. Without automation, it might never be worth it to actually colonize there so it’s better to wait a few more decades.