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Open on mastodon.social mcc
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mcc
I appear to have found either a bug, or a way to improve the game tremendously, in Oquonie/uxn v5
mcc
Looking up the original GIF89a spec, final version issued in 1990. This is in the appendices. "Lawl"
mcc
Have you ever noticed how many canonical "paradoxes" just sort of evaporate if you decline to recognize Bayesian inference as a thing that works
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IoT is the grey goo
@mcc A favorite saying of mine is "Not everything that's logical is reasonable". Bare logic can work on top of any prior assumption. As for "rationality" I think that term has some baggage. Arguments or world views (or people) are sometimes derided as irrational because they are not aggressive or greedy (...and that may itself indicate ideas like game theory have questionable priors).
Michael Busch
@mcc I make a sharp distinction between actual Bayesian inference, which works just fine, and the caricature of it used by the "rationalist" / "effective altrusim" / LessWrong contingent. I had a conversation with one such person where he did not seem to understand what a probability distribution function was; but claimed to be doing Bayesian analysis to justify his personal misconceptions about physics & cosmology. He did not react well to my explaining that that is not how any of this works.
mcc
I just this second drew the line in my head from "Microsoft is one of the companies who is convinced ChatGPT is a good thing and is telling its shareholders it's going to try to shove this brand of 'AI' into everything it can" and "Microsoft owns my phone keyboard, since they bought SwiftKey" and, uh… shit, maybe I should audition AnySoftKeyboard sooner rather than later
mcc
"The Crudites" sounds like the name of the evil aliens from a children's cartoon
mcc
Have you heard of Crossfire? It was this old CNN show that presented news through a spectrum of a left-right debate, except of course "left" meant "centrist" and "right" meant "Pat fucking Buchanan". Timothy Leary called it "the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA". Anyway when you periodically see Jack Dorsey publicly disagreeing with Elon Musk about Twitter I feel like it's like that except instead of the CIA it's people who think there's an Ivermectin coverup
mcc
I wonder what the TikTok teenagers think about the Twitter blowup and this whole Mastodiaspora thing.
mcc
I think Mastodon's low-discovery mindset (no public search, no QRTs) is overall good, but one thing I think I should be able to do is search posts that I personally have seen. Like if something appears in my Home feed, I've already "discovered" it. There's not particularly interactions one would want to avoid that are exposed by letting me search for posts I saw yesterday and lost the link to, except interactions those people were already exposed to.
mcc
Also I suuuuuuper wish I could search ordered by date, because I search my own posts to find previous posts/threads all the time and this is going from convenient to unusable as I my post count increases and posts I made ten minutes ago get buried below ones from months ago. But I assume that's coming.
mcc
There was an actual IRL SCP / machine basilisk in the world and it remained effective for almost a year
mcc
The paradox of Mastodon is no one (not even mastodon.social) likes mastodon.social dominating the network, or Eugen G being the sole arbiter of extensions to the common protocol, but on the other hand, ultimately, the reason we all use Mastodon (IE, the part of the Fediverse people think of as "Mastodon", modeled on the Mastodon extensions to ActivityPub) instead of Secure Scuttlebutt or identi.ca or whatever is because Mastodon was the AP implementation that had one person's singular vision.
mcc
We *need* standard protocols like ActivityPub, but ultimately, users do not want a protocol. People do not want a formless ball of infinite potential. They want "Products". They want a clearly presented thing that they can put into their web browser or phone and it slots them into a legible user flow satisfying a specific user story. This is not because they are brainwashed by capitalism. It is because most people *have other shit to do* and don't want to bother with software that's unfinished.
mcc
A building consisting entirely of the 13th floors that were omitted from other buildings
mcc
A book written in human blood on pages of human flesh, except it's from the universe where humans have ink for blood and paper for skin
mcc
#FediTips (or perhaps #FediWarnings?): Something I discovered the other day on accident is in Mastodon and derivative software, if you are sending someone a DM, and you spontaneously tag someone in the middle of the message, *that person now has read access to the DM in which they're mentioned*. This is a neat feature if you're using it on purpose but could be awkward if you're just trying to link an account and suddenly that account can see you talking about them…!
mcc
Apparently this is a Mastodon-unique behavior and was not part of how messages worked in the original ActivityPub. (I don't know if it works this way on independent Mastodon reimplementations such as Pleroma.)
mcc
(Note: I say "currently being blocked from updating". Specifically, Tusky has two apps on the store, one is the normal release and the other is Nightly. Google has, inconsistently, locked only the Nightly app. We're afraid they'll hit the main app tho next time it updates, and anyhow under its current process Tusky cannot post updates to the main channel or even third party stores without using the established Nightly channel first to gather bug reports.)
mcc
So here's what YouTube, very gradually, did to me: - Announced that because of Google+, they were forcing me to change my YouTube handle to my full name
mcc
Google+ no longer exists. I only needed the "brand account" to work around a no-longer-extant name restriction caused by Google+, but now Google+ is gone, I'm stuck with it. This "handles" thing, which I don't get why it exists if you can pick your own name now, appears to exclusively exist to promote "Shorts". Like Google+ was an attempt to clone Facebook, "Shorts" are an attempt to clone TikTok. What happens when Google cancels Shorts? What weird wrinkles will THAT leave behind?
mcc
Wondering if there's like, a set of five to six words that if spoken are the minimal way to discover if there is an alexa/google home/siri microphone present in the room and listening to you. It would be like a magic spell. Speak these words aloud and any invisible demons present shall be revealed
mcc
I have been running into a situation where I keep using "RTX" to refer to hardware raytracing acceleration, but this is misleading because RTX is actually NVidia's trademark for their specific implementation and sometimes you want to contrast NVidia with AMD. To solve this, I would like to propose we now refer to the underlying technology as "HRT", for "Hardware Raytracing". "Within ten years all gamers will have access to HRT", et cetera
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Amy Dentata
@mcc petition to dub all the AI image generators Online Rendering with Computers of High Intelligence, or ORCHI for short
mcc
Multiverse ideas are common but often ill-formed since they rarely seriously interrogate the question of "which universes exist?" / Max Tegmark formalized a simple idea that any universe is "real" if it has a complete mathematical description / a consequence of this idea is every computer program is a universe / in other words humans create tiny self-contained universes that we can insert avatars into and move around in, extract sounds and sights from / and we treat this as utterly mundane
mcc
Science is inherently incapable of answering the question of first origins / science is an infinite descent of "but why?", a five year old responding to each answer with the same question / if we say the big bang created the universe we are scientifically obligated to ask what caused the big bang / religion solves this problem by simply defining a primal mover and naming it "God" / but really all this means is religion allows itself to respond to "but who created God?" with "shut up"
mcc
Staring at Android logcat and a thing that is always interesting to me is when we have managed to recreate human anxiety conditions in a computer
AutumnMeowMeow🐱🐧
@mcc Is this pressure referring to physical pressure? Like is this about supercritical fluids? |
@mcc Thank you for this article. It was fun to read and contains so many helpful details!
@mcc great blog post -- I remember most of those graphics APIs from when they came out but it was helpful to see them all explained at once together (also I didn't know about WebGPU yet)
@mcc as someone who is still running Mojave on a 2013 MBP with discrete Nvidia card, this whole blogpost hits home.