WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
I invested in Intel over a span from 2021 to 2024 with the thesis that Pat Gelsinger would turn them around, and also that some powers that be would realize we shouldn't keep all our chip fabricating eggs in one basket off the coast of China. I ate shit on that thesis for 5 long years of continuously losing money.
I'm up 300% of of today.
And this is why I go long and don't fuck with contracts.
Also, I doubt it's going to stick, so now I'm considering my exits.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
7d ago
Objectively, humans are next token predictors. Watch a child trying to negotiate another cookie, or a man trying to get laid. Watch any politician, or their media mouthpieces. Go back and read what Scott Adams said about master persuaders and hallucinations.
I know we like to think we're rational beings with the scientific method. But that might account for like, 0.00001% of human cognition or less. And I'm curious how often LLMs might stumble on a deep scientific truth with pure dumb luck and token matching.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
I finished my protracted play through of StarCraft 2. Took me a few months of on again off again play.
The Terran campaign I played on normal, and it was easy to the point of being tedious and boring. I definitely feel like some pussification happened in the difficulty, and "hard" became normal, normal became easy, and easy became "This is mathematically impossible to lose unless you are a game journalist".
The Zerg campaign I played entirely on hard, and that felt about right.
The Protoss campaign I started on hard, but towards the end I caved and had to switch to normal. They just throw too many high level units at you when all you start off with are zealots and stalkers. Also too many obnoxious defense missions where it feels like Protoss are just too squishy on defense. I forget which mission it was that finally broke me and caused me to switch to normal, but it was some defense mission where your allies start off covering your east, west and south entrances, and you get repeatedly hammered from all three directions.
Then I played the epilogue on normal, because I'd already switched, and also the Nova mini campaign. They felt alright on normal. At least not tediously boring like the Terran campaign on normal.
All in all, it was alright I guess. I had to obsessively watch every dialog because I can't help myself. Which really slowed things down because the game feels like 50% dialog and 50% gameplay. The story beats of "Cure Kerrigan of her Zerg infestation, then re-Zerg her, then she saves the universe" was as dumb as it always was. Especially with that being the penultimate climax of the Terran campaign, and then completely undone halfway through the Zerg campaign. It reminds me of all those show runners that end season 1 on this show altering cliff hanger/climax, and then completely chicken out and backtrack in the first episode of season 2. Like in Santa Clarita Diet when the first season builds up towards Drew Barrymore turning into a feral zombie, and then in the first 30 minutes of the next season they cure her and go a completely different direction with the story.
It also got pretty tedious how every campaign is some weird neoliberal fanfiction about all these different peoples coming together in a melting pot where all their differences actually make them strong enough to defeat the big bad. In every single campaign. I don't remember StarCraft 1 being remotely that obnoxious and one note. Oh well.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
Nobody can agree on all cause excess mortality statistics, and whether its a signal, noise, or potential causes. We already lived this.
Thanos snap people turn to dust or everyone pretends nothing happened.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
I also enjoyed season 4. Season 5 was lazy slop. But it was at least better than the last season of Game of Thrones and didn't entirely and retroactively ruin the show for me. Its a low bar to clear, but many shows fail it.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
How do you even know the button did anything then? That's just the normal end we all get.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8d ago
On the one hand, I agree with the consensus that this is almost certainly false.
On the other hand, there are so few checks on female behavior, it often gets outlandishly and cartoonishly out of control by the time there are any consequences. It's often only during the murder trial that the decades of their psychotic behavior are given the moral consideration it was due. A shame it took someone dying before they couldn't "teehee, I'm just a girl" their way out of their shameless malice anymore.
But yeah, all that said, 99% chance it's bullshit. 1% chance it was an open secret, and all his coworkers are just going "Niiiiiice".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9d ago
Basically this. If you don't immediately perceive that a vote for blue is a vote to be killed, perhaps you deserve that outcome.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
14d ago
Its mildly amusing how the reddit left doesn't want to claim this particular guy, but they do want to praise the idea of killing Trump, so they can't reject him either.
I remember back during the war on terror, one right wing blog or another, maybe Little Green Footballs (whatever happened to that guy?) or Jihad Watch. There was some interview with a veteran who had served in the middle east, talking about how these people simply cannot be allies. Their brains are completely broken, and they simply lack the intelligence to realize how broken they are. As an example, he cited a common conversation you may have with an Arab would contain both praise for the 9/11 attacks as a great victory for Islam over the evil United States, and also insistence that it was all a Jewish plot to provoke the United States into attacking the Middle East.
Turns out there is nothing uniquely Arab, or requiring exceptionally low intelligence, to support double think this overt and retarded. Apparently millions of Democrats, highly educated and otherwise well adjusted, are perfectly capable of simultaneously believing that Donald Trump needs to be assassinated and that it's a shame all these courageous shooters keep missing, and also that they are all hoaxes and staged by the evil Orange Man to raise his political capital and make them look bad.
But, while I can no longer endorse the bent of that random blog I read in the 90's that this behavior is uniquely Arab, I can endorse his conclusion. You cannot engage with those people. They belong in asylums, not voting, running for office, or dictating policies. Unfortunately the inmates run the asylums now.
Knowing where we are is the first step in formulating a plan to protect yourself and your families from them.
You say that. But without Trump to campaign for Vance, where are we? I take nothing for granted after Kirk's assassination and how much it felt like some core to the MAGA movement that was load bearing in a way I hadn't appreciated was ripped away. After he was buried, suddenly Republicans were looking at getting slaughtered in the midterms. Turns out political murders work.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
14d ago
But why? Within 30 minutes of finding the code, I found my answer. Within 10 minutes of dicking around in a sample project, I had my proof of concept. How would an LLM have improved on that? I don't need the LLMs validation or approval.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
15d ago
So, I had an interesting problem at work, that revealed something fascinating I think.
I have to beat around the bush some, so bear with me. We're using a popular framework for our database layer. We went to do things to this database that theoretically the database is capable of, but the framework doesn't support. Sad face. All the web searches, and associated AI formulated answers confirm, it's not possible do said thing in said framework.
Except it is. The Framework is open source. You can just read the source code. Turns out you can ask for the handle to the underlying interop pointer, and it'll just give it to you. You don't even have to do weird fucky things like dig around in private data space. It's a public API call to just get the interop pointer. The driver it's calling is open source too, and you can just call the function you want on the interop pointer it gives you, and it just works. It's fine. If it's confusing, the test cases for the driver in it's github even shows you exactly how to do it, multiple ways. Reading unit tests are awesome for stuff like that. This is the furthest thing from impossible. It's practically spelled out for you with examples if you just read the fucking code.
So, why does AI all think it's impossible? Because as of 3 years ago, this functionality wasn't exposed by the driver. So all the stack exchange questions about this correctly stated that as of 3+ years ago, this was impossible. LLMs got trained on stack exchange (supposedly), and now stack exchange is a dead site. The LLMs (supposedly) killed off the source of knowledge they were being trained on, and now they can't learn that a few years later this task is not just possible, but trivially easy in like, 6 lines of code. Totally within the remit of the typical "how do I do thing" programming question.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
16d ago
I hated having upstairs neighbors but that is not inherent to apartments,
Correct, it's inherent to neighbors.
Well.
Certain neighbors. The ones I pay handsomely not to have anymore.
Hey, you know something else interesting about Tokyo? It's virtually entirely ethnically homogeneous. At least compared to your average European city where Europeans are the defacto minority.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
17d ago
I had a similar experience back in November when the company I worked for went out of business. Applied to everything that looked even remotely in my ballpark, and crickets. Updated my profile, and got scouted by two different headhunters almost immediately, both with offers better than my old job. My total compensation for one of them was nearly twice what I was making before.
It's kind of fucked though, when the job market is entirely "Don't call us, we'll call you. No, don't even apply until we've told you to." But the stories I've heard of people scamming the interview process are horrendous. They aren't even all Indians! Though most are... Internationalization and AI have really fucked things. The signal to noise ratio interfering between qualified candidates and open job positions is through the roof.
Turns out the bar is in hell, and the primary challenge is convincing a recruiter you are a real person and not an Indian or an LLM. Or an LLM behind a brain rotted meat proxy.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
20d ago
’m far more interested in discussing the larger pattern that Clav is symptomatic of. Young men don’t see any viable paths to success, or have good role models for how they should live their lives. They look around and see the traditional paths (like college) are uncertain at best. They notice young women’s expectations have increased and they often don’t meet them. If they see a successful person (like a retired boomer) they don’t think that path is still available to them. If everything is uncertain the best thing to do is look around for successful people and imitate them. So, they find an influencer like Clav and realize they can play the social media influencer lottery by trying to become viral like him. If society tells them to figure out everything on their own and won’t provide a clear path that is likely to succeed then becoming viral on social media, giving up, or gambling suddenly seem like much more attractive options.
A start would be to bring back men's clubs and groups. Make Boy Scouts for boys and their dads again. Bring back men's only sports and dining clubs. Give men some capacity to network among themselves, and even give candid advice about out of earshot of the breasted commissar's that dominate every other public space.
Men need their own culture again. Not in the way gonzo youtuber stars are "culture", but in the way a small towns local chapter of a men and boys club is culture. Sure, the advice and guidance young men might get from both of those might be directionally aligned. But the gonzo youtube version takes it to a place that's unhealthy, but unfortunately, it's all that is allowed to exist.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22d ago
Assimilation typically doesn't happen as much with the first generation immigrants, it's a second generation, and even more so a third generation thing.
What I love most about these baseless self serving assertions is that you won't be proven disastrously wrong for almost 100 years.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
28d ago
Yeah, that was another thing that annoyed me about Halo, is the enemy AI went the wrong direction.
Since it keeps getting compared to Half-Life, I'll keep going. Half-Life introduces fairly dumb enemies, and then introduces smarter ones. You get to warm up on relatively dumb xeno-fauna, and then they throw marines at you, which talk, coordinate, dodge grenades, flush you out, flank you, etc. Now I know people have dissected how that worked and a lot of it was scripted to create the illusion of intelligent enemies. But it was still a really good illusion.
By contrast, Halo starts you off with really good enemy AI in the form of elites, and then halfway through the game swaps them out for retards that bum rush right at you. A sin doubly compounded by the fact that the game checkpoint saves, and you are consistently stuck in really annoying locked arenas fighting off boring hoards of flood. I positively loathed it.
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood. Maybe the encounters were designed smarter, or at least less annoyingly. Maybe they changed the game mechanics to make it less annoying somehow. I think I remember Halo's health mechanic got dropped between games replaced almost entirely by shields? Whatever the reasons, after the flood appear in Halo 1, it's a far worse game for it.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
29d ago
I had to explain to a programmer coworker recently who John Carmack is. Made me feel so fucking old.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
29d ago
On its face value Halo is remarkably bleak and yet it also has something that I feel is sorely lacking in a lot of modern media. Sincerity.
As I've gotten older, and especially since having kids, I have found that I have less and less patience for deconstructionist takes, and subversion for subversion's sake. I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want from my fiction is something to inspire and/or aspire to. Yes Halo is bleak, but it is also hopeful. And yes, I recognize that this sounds like a contradiction but it's not because what Halo's story is ultimately about is what do you do when faced with frightful odds or a seemingly hopeless situation? It's about what do you when your faith is shattered, and you find out that much of what you thought you knew about how the universe worked is revealed to have been a carefully crafted lie? It's about duty and loyalty. It's about the relationship between created and creator. It's that meme about "the masculine desire to perish in a heroic last stand" in video game form. It is all of these things, and I think that is why fans keep coming back to it.
At some point "sincerity" was rebranded "cringe" and caring about anything became a shameful public display. Or at least, certain demographics are condemned for caring about anything. Others get to have public meltdowns over trivial matters and are lauded.
But you and I, when we care about things it's "cringe". Even existential things like "Will my children inherit my nation, or be dispossessed?"
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
29d ago
Eh. In many ways I think Halo is overrated, and The LIbrary might be one of the worst FPS levels I have ever played in my entire life. That said, I think JeSuisCharlie accurately characterizes it's strengths. I actually haven't played a Halo game since I couch cooped Halo 3 when it came out. I meant to replay them recently, and then my XBox 360 died as soon as I took it out of storage. Alas.
I could probably spring for the Master Chief Collection on Steam whenever it's on one of it's frequent sales.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
I haven't posted much on account of working 9-10 hour days and commuting 2-3 hours on top of it.
However I finally have an excuse to learn OpenGL for work. Every other time I've tried to learn OpenGL the last 20 years, work has reared it's ugly head and taken up too much of my headspace to make much progress. But not this time, oh no, this time work has me utterly immersed in it.
It's actually a funny story, but I probably shouldn't divulge it on a public forum. Alas.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Yes, you do understand this goes both ways? You understand democrats come off as Halloween villains to much of the country?
I'd go with actual living demons over Halloween villains, but to each their own.
In light of the over the top evil of the opposition, I'm fine with my chosen champion acting like a Crusader King.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
And here I am making real children the traditional way, like a chump.
The great project of the "online right" is to identify this evil, to name it, and to then fight it. Yet this evil remains amorphous and elusive.
I don't think this is remotely true. I'd argue evil is so pervasive, it's a target rich environment. Just because people identify different evils doesn't mean they are all wrong. They can all be right!
Sorry for the late reply. Been busy, but circling back to this has been on my todo list.
I mentioned Scott Adams because before LLMs were even a thing, his world view was basically that people don't think at all. They are hypnotized by language. They think in words, and those words can be used to completely hijack their consciousness, hypnotizing them. In his world view, people were only barely capable of a defense against this at best. And even at people's best, because our entire world model is often built on language, it ends up with all sorts of terrible pathways being laid down that are horribly wrong because of words and how lossy an abstraction they can be. Choose the right name for something, and even with firsthand experience telling them otherwise, people will walk away believing the opposite of reality.
All the shortcomings of human cognition that Scott Adams pioneered broad public awareness of pre-LLMs sound a whole awful lot like all the ways LLMs are shit these days. I never really followed up much with Scott Adams the last few years of his life. I don't know if he ever chased down this avenue too, but I hope he did.
I'll be deeply curious if LLMs can be trained to be better next token predictors than the humans that deny they are in the first place.
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