self

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[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago

you’re right, I’m giving them way too much credit — the full thought is almost definitely “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes and replace them with their own repressive regimes, but this time with heroin and sex tourism”

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 4 hours ago

what if we made the large language model larger? it’s weird nobody has attempted this

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

also this is all horseshit so I know they haven’t thought this far ahead, but pushing a bit on the oracle problem, how do they think they solved these fundamental issues in their proposed design?

  • if verifying answers are correct is up to the miners, how do they prevent the miners from just generating any old bullshit using a much less expensive method than an LLM (a Markov chain say, or even just random characters or an empty string if nobody’s checking) and pocketing the tokens?
  • if verification is up to the requester, why would you ever mark an answer as correct? if you’re forced to pick one correct answer that gets your tokens, what’s stopping you from spinning up an adversarial miner that produces random answers and marking those as correct, ensuring you keep both your tokens and the other miners’ answers?
  • if answers are verified centrally… there’s no need for the miners or their models, just use whatever that central source of truth is.

and of course this is avoiding the elephant in the room: LLMs have no concept of truth, they just extrude plausible bullshit into a statistically likely shape. there’s no source of truth that can reliably distinguish bad LLM responses from good ones, and if you had one you’d probably be better off just using it instead of an LLM.

edit cause for some reason my brain can’t stop it with this fractally wrong shit: finally, if their plan is to just evenly distribute tokens across miners and return all answers: congrats on the “decentralized” network of /dev/urandom to string converters you weird fucks

another edit: I read the fucking spec and somehow it’s even stupider than any of the above. you can trivially just spend tokens to buy a majority of the validator slots for a subnet (which I guess in normal cultist lingo would be a subchain) and use that to kick out everyone else’s miners:

Only the top 64 validators, when ranked by their stake amount in any particular subnet, are considered to have a validator permit. Only these top 64 subnet validators with permits are considered active in the subnet.

a third edit, please help, my brain is melting: what does a non-adversarial validator even look like in this architecture? we can’t fucking verify LLM outputs like I said so… is this just multiple computers doing RAG and pretending that’s a good idea? is the idea that you run some kind of unbounded training algorithm and we also live in a universe where model overfitting doesn’t exist? help I am melting

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (5 children)

If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it’s money, some people would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain … The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.

it’s really rude of you to find and quote a paragraph designed to force me to take four shots in rapid succession in my ongoing crypto/AI drinking game!

How does Bittensor work? “When you have a question, you send it out to the network. Miners whose models are suited to answer your question will process it and send back a proposed answer.” The “miners” are rewarded with TAO tokens.

“what do you mean oracle problem? our new thing’s nothing but oracles, we just have to figure out a way to know they’re telling the truth!”

Bittensor is enormously proud to be decentralized, because that’s a concept that totally makes sense with AI models, right? “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes,” starts Bittensor’s introduction page.

meme stock cults and crypto scams both should maybe consider keeping pseudo-leftist jargon out of their fucking mouths

e: also, Bittensor? really?

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

(Currently writing some book-like text on the AI bubble, with minimal crypto. I also have some book-like text on smart city scams, which has rather more bitcoin in it.)

fuck yes

AWS’ suggested upgrade path is Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — which also does audit logs. So as usual, the answer to which database is: just use Postgres.

it’s amazing how often Postgres is the sane implementation for a database-shaped problem, including a search engine just waiting for a competent ranking algorithm and a crawler (yes I’ve considered doing this)

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

Never change (meaning this sincerely, thanks for the good mod work).

anytime!

Investigating a user for a sus body shaming post, banning them for a programming drama post.

see, I don’t know Lena’s work well enough to know if maybe “she has ballooned” is a multi-layered reference that only looks like shallow, shitty body shaming if you don’t get the in-joke

but I’m online enough to know exactly where they got that Godot dogwhistle from, and it’s not even close to being an innocent mistake

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I opened your post history to see if this was the lazy unfunny fatphobia I thought it was and found an additional awful fucking take right away:

That seems like a better system than say, Godot, who picks and chooses who is allowed to contribute.

so off you fuck

[–] self@awful.systems 18 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

having stealth-launched a full-blown web3 game last week called Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles on PC.

Champions Tactics is billed as a "PVP tactical RPG game on PC", and is both developed and published by Ubisoft. It involves collectible figurines of various warriors from the in-game fantasy world of Grimoria, which players assemble into squads of three and then battle in turn-based combat that looks oddly reminscent of Darkest Dungeon, of all things.

dear fuck this is incredibly generic. the game series is… Champions? of which this is a tactical installment and also the chronicles of Grimoria, a fantasy name so bland I can’t believe it’s not copyright infringement? this shit — name, concept, and all — definitely came from an LLM

But fundamentally, Ubisoft's perspective on the tech seems surprisingly bullish; the vice president of its Strategic Innovation Lab seems to think gamers just "don't get it."

yeah! your target audience just refuses to get what you’re going for! I wonder what that’s called again? oh yeah, failure

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

…fucking hell I’ve got Netrunner on the brain. the card game about socialist hackers doing the best they can with what they can scrap together, organizing an economic war against extremely well-financed and terrifyingly powerful but inefficient corporations that almost own the entire world and will if you don’t single-handedly stop them

and as if that wasn’t cyberpunk enough, modern Netrunner is completely free and built on a game system and concept appropriated from Fantasy Flight after they let the game go out of print (though you can pay a reasonable price for good-quality printed cards, and they adopted roughly Fantasy Flight’s seasonal model that lets you do a MtG style deckbuilder without the greed elements, which is very nice)

e: and Musk is quoted in the other thread like “huh huh huh we all want cyberpunk right but just the duster not the other parts” and it’s like motherfucker a used duster’s normal hazard protection for a dying earth, ask me how I know, and all the other parts of any cyberpunk that’s worth a damn are about how much you fucking suck

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

this is only part of why Netrunner is the superior deckbuilder

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago

unfortunately, the US election season is the time for tedious motherfuckers to try some shit

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)

see I’m slowly shifting my vocabulary to tap unless I’m DIYing an NFC sticker into a project, but sometimes my cursed engineering brain takes over

maybe both should be tap. maybe it’s all tap. REST calls are now taps.

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

 

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

 

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

 

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

 

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

 

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

  • its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
  • the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
  • the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
  • the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.

because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:

  • any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
  • you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
  • or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet

the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.

Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

 

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.

above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow:

Hypnospace Outlaw ending spoilersit goes without saying that sleeptime computing in Hypnospace is a limited and janky but still revolutionary brain-computer interface, and in effect what you’re doing during the whole game is a precursor to netrunning. in fact, Hypnospace in general is a perfect prelude to a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia.

as demonstrated in the last chapter of the game, sleeptime computing tech is fatal when pushed beyond its limits, as Merchantsoft demonstrated like only a short-sighted and greedy startup in 1999 could. Dylan even spends 20 solid years blaming a hacker for the lives he took fucking with tech he barely understood. the tech behind sleeptime computing is most likely outlawed after 1999, or its use is at least heavily stigmatized.

at the same time, the promise behind Hypnospace remains alluring as fuck. in the last chapter of the game, you join up with a nostalgic effort to archive all of Hypnospace from the cache memory in your repaired moderator headband. the allure goes beyond nostalgia though: with the 90s ideas stripped away, even a janky BCI is incredibly useful. you can imagine high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and similar assholes being particularly interested in the illegal tech that replaces sleep with the ability to very efficiently do their jobs 24/7. cyberdeck tech being strictly regulated and only available to high-level corpos and obsessed hackers is a key component of classic cyberpunk.

and hey, while we’re on the topic of the worst people in the world adopting illegal tech, did you finish the (excellent) M1NX and Leaky Piping side plots? cause if you did, you’ll know that sleeptime computing doesn’t actually let you sleep — it severely limits the amount of time you spend in REM sleep, but users don’t realize that because they’re still physically resting. so those high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and other assholes who’ve adopted habitual sleeptime computing use are also slowly going insane from a lack of REM sleep, and chances are they don’t know it because all the evidence was released right before the Mindcrash

in short, these are all the precursor chemicals you need for a cyberpunk future.

the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

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