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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1897 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire: https://www.amazon.com/Theft-Fire-Orbital-Space-1-ebook/dp/B0CJHQ4LZN

Rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension.

Pros:

  1. Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.

  2. Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.

  3. Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.

Cons:

  1. It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.

  2. Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.

  3. Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.

Ooo, looks interesting.

"The no-stealth-in-space" principle isnt totally violated.

Which is a shame, because that "principle" needs to be violated, since it simply isn't true. I love Project Rho as much as any sci-fi nerd, but the entire "no stealth in space" article boils down to a claim that it is trivially easy to deploy and coordinate sufficient numbers of sufficiently sensitive IR sensor platforms around any given system that any incoherent IR emissions from malicious spacecraft can be detected, picked out of all of the other emissions that are around, interpreted as a hostile craft, all in a reasonable timeframe. This to me is a significantly high dose of handwavium critically compromised by such facts as: IR emissions need not be incoherent- IR lasers are very much a thing and can make (admittedly not particularly efficient) closed-loop radiators, and also liquid hydrogen propellent happens to make one heck of a good heat sink which by the way can be expanded in a rocket nozzle to background-cryogenic temperatures whose IR emissions are indistinguishable from all the other hydrogen atoms bouncing around.

I presume you're talking about Hydrogen/Helium steamers that work through keeping hull temperatures below the noise limit for IR detectors, and potentially even at CMB levels?

In my own hard scifi novel, the K3 aliens have those, as well as far faster craft that manage to hide emissions via using neutrinos as their reaction mass in their drives, beaming them tightly and nigh-undetectably away from watching sensors, but that's a tier far above current speculative space craft (well, they're K3!).

Yes, reducing hull temperatures to background levels would be an essential component of minimizing IR signature, but this is something we do today on things like telescopes to avoid thermal distortions, its not even sci-fi tech. And highly expanded exhaust nozzles with cryogenic final exhaust temperatures are again already something that exists for simple efficiency reasons.

I think the "there is no stealth in space" meme comes from the fact that at least to public knowledge, no one has tried to build a stealthy spacecraft so there is no countervailing data to present against detector technology, wheres terrestrial stealth technologies (such as vs radar) has popped up almost as quickly as the detectors did.

Is your novel out? Im always looking for more good reading material.

I was referring to the directed neutrino emissions for heat dissipation and as reaction mass as the outright scifi part, the Steamers are just short of proof of concept!

If you want to take a look, here it is:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with

Maybe in principle it's possible, but in this setting they're using multi-thousand tonne ships with nuclear fusion powerplants that get up to 1% lightspeed (imagine the exhaust), in a region that really ought to be heavily watched since it's a militarized treasure trove, in the rather highly populated Sol system. They use some tricks such as covering one's burn but really...

As of 2013, the Voyager 1 space probe is about 18 billion kilometers away from Terra and its radio signal is a pathetic 20 watts (or about as dim as the light bulb in your refrigerator). But as faint as it is, the Green Bank telescope can pick it out from the background noise in one second flat.

Also, how can you use a laser as a radiator? Isn't the rule that they always make more heat than they release in energy?

IMO stealth in space needs FTL to make sense. When you're moving faster than light, you can be stealthy since they can't see you coming. You could have picket ships, scouts, messenger drones, all moving superluminally.

Ah, yeah that sounds like something not particularly stealthy, unless there is some very fancy nozzle tech going on.

The Voyager example is cited alot as some sort of definitive proof, but misses the obvious point that emissions controls (EMCON) on radio frequency emissions have been a means of avoiding detection since shortly after the first RDF equipment was invented, and the navies and air forces of the world have practiced its use for nearly a century at this point. A 20 watt RF emission is infinitely stonger than a non-existent one after all. The great thing about a vaccum is there are no pesky particles to scatter lasers, which means laser LOS communication is quite easy, and i would imagine become the default for military operations.

RE lasers as radiators- the basic recipe for a laser is to convert an incoherent form of radiation to a coherent form, with some transformation losses of energy. These tranaformation losses are usually waste heat, but if you are beaming a massive amount of IR radiation away, your thermal energy delta is negative. Gas dynamic lasers are a good example- they can arc weld quarter inch steel plate at a hundred miles in a fraction of a second, and the lasing mechanism itself becomes only slightly warm to the touch. There is definitely no free lunch in terms of energy generation, but since the problem you are trying to solve is an energy surplus rather than a defecit, thats not a particularly big deal. The simplest setup would involve a a solid state IR laser enveloped by a cooling mechanism which is in turn coupled to some form of thermionic converter that is the actual power source for the laser. This makes for what is effectively a laser refrigerator of not particularly great efficiency, but still capable of cooling a spacecraft while emitting only coherent radiation.

There is not a whole lot of literature on the subject, mostly because lasers dont make very efficient radiators and the only immediately plausible applications are all military in nature, but there is no thermodynamic prohibition on it. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19660023147 for the genral efficiency calculations.

The FTL interaction with stealth is definitely an interesting one, I find the way its portrayed in the Honor Harrington series to be good, essentially concluding that in a universe with relatavistic ships and weaponry anything moving in classical mechanic terms is stealthy because the light cone of detection is slow relative to the application of deadly force.

I finally did some work on my compiler after a long-ass break. That's a hobby project of mine, to write something that emits a standalone executable. Today I tackled calling conventions. I actually tried to write a patch for QBE to support Win64 calling convention first, but QBE is written in very terse C that I really didn't enjoy deciphering. It's not at atw levels of terseness, of course, but I have an additional excuse to not follow down that path: QBE, in true Unix fashion, doesn't do more than necessary: it reads code written in its own "slightly lower level than C" language and emits sufficiently optimized GAS code for the target architecture. After all, all self-respecting distributions have an assembler and a linker, don't they? Except I want a PE/COFF binary for Windows, which means relying on something like MinGW (and if I have to bring MinGW along, why not just program in C?) or writing the necessary modules myself, like Go.

Now all I need is to write some tests, add SysV and preferably Aarch64 (Win/SysV) calling conventions, factor out common functionality and I'll finally be able to generate some assembly and corrupt the stack.

Have you looked at TCC? It claims to support GAS assembly (as input and intermediate code for C compiling) and compiles for windows (and other platforms). I didn't read all the code but it looks reasonably structured. It's small enough you can incorporate it into a larger project, or use it as a library.

Yes, yes I have. The biggest problem with TCC is that it already exists and is practically feature-complete.

Fuck SysV x64 ABI, seriously. MS calling conventions might be slower, but they are so much easier to implement.

Just watched Society of Snow, a new movie about the Andes plane crash survivors. Thought it was really well done. They made a few changes for pacing but overall it was very accurate based on what I remember from the book. It's one of those stories that hard to think about because it's so gruesome but at the same time it's incredibly inspiring.

Do you normally watch movies in one sitting? I'm not really into cinema overall, but I watched The Northman the other day and it took me several sittings even though I liked it, especially the last third or so. Today I started watching Princess Mononoke and I decided to do something else half-way through and finish it tomorrow, even though it's not like I ran out of free time or anything like that. Can't imagine paying for watching either movie in a theater only to get robbed of my Rewind and Pause buttons. I think I'm fairly normal psychologically. I guess it's just a zoomer thing

No, but that's mostly down to interruptions IRL.

Usually in one sitting, but it's not rare for me to stop watching if it's getting late and finish it another day. I don't feel like it ruins the experience.

If a movie isn't holding my attention enough to finish it in one sitting, that's usually a sign it's not worth finishing at all. Were you enjoying the movies but somehow ran out of attention span or something? Do you mind saying what generation you are?

Were you enjoying the movies but somehow ran out of attention span or something?

How do I put it, watching things does requires attention and it's kind feels like work to do it for so long unless it's something super interesting. And even staying put for 2+ hours is not something I would rather do, so I go stretch my legs, make a cup of tea, etc. and by then I figure I would rather do one of the tasks I planned for the day or check Twitter or something.

Do you mind saying what generation you are?

I as good as admitted it at the end there. I'm in my mid-20s.

Same, I can only binge shows. If the show doesn't drive me to binge it, then it wasn't worth watching the first place.

I like to watch movies all in one sitting, though my family tends to interrupt, so I don't watch all that many movies at all lately.

If it's a movie I haven't seen before, I have to watch it in one sitting or else the experience is ruined. Movies are very subtle. You don't know what information from the first act will be important in the second and third acts. The only way to ensure you don't forget something is to watch it in one continuous screening. That is how they films are designed and edited.

If I'm watching at home by myself, I'll usually watch a movie in 2 or 3 sittings. I don't have a problem watching a whole movie at once in a theater though. I suppose that's more likely to be planned out or going with other people though.

I suppose I'm more likely to watch in 1 sitting or make the breaks short if the movie is actually really good, which not that many are. Or, another way to look at things could be that I watch more movies than otherwise because it's acceptable to watch in multiple sittings rather than having to wait until I am ready to devote a solid 2h+ block to it. Which also means that I'm more willing to take a chance on something that I don't know much about and might not be that good, rather than only watching things I have high confidence that I'll enjoy. If it's really awesome and would actually benefit from watching the whole way through in one sitting, I can always watch it again when I am prepared to do that.

I'll usually get up and move around if the movie is over 2 hours. It's just nice to stretch a bit, gives a chance to get more snacks or use the restroom.

Mostly I just don't watch movies though, they are somehow both too long and too short at the same time. When it comes to entertaining devoting nearly 3 hours to watching a movie feels like it takes up all the time I have to visit with people. TV shows work better since you can still grab a bite to eat, cook something, watch an episode, then socialize more after or just watch another.

At the same time with a book series or a tv series you can get far more into the characters and world because they last a lot longer than a movie. So when it comes to my own solo entertainment I prefer books > video games > tv shows > movies.

OK, I'm going to be a boomer about this one - needing a break, needing captions, needing to pause and rewind, these are all signs that your attention span is broken. Rather than avoiding the discomfort of having to pay attention for two consecutive hours without getting to roll something back, you should lean into it, embrace the discomfort, and see the ability to just be present as a new power to develop.

Totally agree that people should work on their attention span and ability to be present - but using captions is not really part of this problem. They're often necessary for ESL people and even for native speakers when watching the many movies with bad sound design, unless you want to miss details.

What’s wrong with captions?

They take the viewer's eyes off of the actual visual content of a scene and diminish the need to listen closely to dialogue that is intended to be listened to closely. Try it out with a scene where the actors are speaking in hushed tones - if you turn on captions, do you tend to just read them without changing the way you're listening? If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life? Different types of immersion impact the experience of content in a meaningful way.

I'm not saying everything needs to be engaged with this way. If I'm flying, the audio quality is going to suck anyway, the visual content is on an iPad, and I just want some entertainment to kill a couple hours, so I'm going to turn captions on. Nonetheless, I think it's a bad habit to get into more generally and feeds into the inclination to divert attention to multiple things instead of just paying attention to one thing.

If you turn off captions, do you tend to tune your listening to the sort of secretive tones that you would in real life?

No, I just end up not understanding what they’re saying and missing key plot points, replacing my immersion with confusion.

Sorry, it's not my problem that modern movie-makers increasingly have a skill issue about making their movies intelligible. There's also a problem with viewing foreign media - I mentioned Princess Mononoke and I surely ain't watching that with original voice track alone, and dubs are generally bad idea or simply low quality.

Though I acknowledge the problems you raise and will say: let the movie prove itself that it deserves a second viewing so I could appreciate it from a new angle using my memory instead of subtitles.

Sorry, it's not my problem that modern movie-makers increasingly have a skill issue about making their movies intelligible.

Love this video, thanks for linking it.

I don't think this is inconsistent with what I wrote though - if you're somewhere that the audio is literally unintelligible (for any reason), captions are the obvious solution. Personally, I would rather try it out as intended by the creator rather than immediately going to the written form. Perhaps Nolan's choices are so extreme that this pretty much means you need to be in a top-end theater - sure, fair enough.

Yeah I'm with you on this - I pretty much have to have subtitles these days because my hearing is shot, but I think it's undeniable that I am missing part of the experience. That said, I don't know if it's just growing up watching a lot of stuff with subtitles (when I first moved to Australia as a kid we lived in a semi-rural area and the only channels we could get were the ABC and SBS, and SBS primarily played foreign language content) but they don't take me out of the film or show at all. I know they are intellectually, they must be, but I don't feel any detraction.

Actually, thinking about it, it's probably more accurate to say that they are less detrimental to my experience than the feeling of frustration and confusion I get when I can't hear half the script.

I don't know. I don't feel more immersed in Swedish or English language content that I consume effortlessly without subtitles than content in other languages where I have to use subtitles. Maybe it's just a skill issue on the part of people unused to subtitles? Perhaps it depends on how fast one reads? If you can read a sentence at a glance then you're not really "looking away" for any appreciable amount of time.

I'm annoyed if my viewing experience is interrupted unless there's a built-in intermission. Thus, the longer the movie length, the more critical I am of it. Anything beyond two and a half hours better be movie of the year.

If it's a good movie, I would imagine I'm compelled to. If I start fidgeting or feel like doing something else, well, it's either because I have to watch >0 romcoms a year to keep the girl happy, or I feel like my time is being wasted.

It depends. I think modern movies are often too long and I occasionally take a break and watch it over multiple sittings.

I wouldn't split up a 90 minute movie though, those are usually pretty tight and if it loses my attention i won't go back to it.

I don't see the point in watching a movie in more than one sitting, although that being said I do get put off when I hear about a movie with an unusually long runtime. Looking at you, Scorsese.

I thought The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon were an hour too long.

Some films are too long due to laziness or self-indulgence, and others are too long because the story doesn't fit the medium.

I feel like a lot of Scorsese films are a little long, but his best films remain engaging through their entire runtime. Those films were both 3 hours, which is a lot.

Yes. A good film is like a good song. Part of the experience is the tempo - how it flows and how it carries a feeling throughout. If you drop it and come back later, the continuity is lost the same way your favourite song is ruined if you keep pausing it every 30 seconds.

Example: Uncut Gems is a tense movie! It's stressful! It doesn't let up for two hours straight, and then when you finally get to the end, the last scene very much cashes in on it having taken you for that exhausting ride.

Uncut Gems is a miracle of writing, directing, and acting.

Even in films that are well written, it's pretty common for me to sort of detach and think, "Oh, this is the redemptive scene. This is the contemplation scene. This is the remorse scene." And I'm not a very talented cinephile. I think it's just incredibly difficult for a director to utterly absorb the audience for 2+ hrs straight.

But Uncut Gems! I can't imagine how much attention had to be paid to every line of the script both in writing it and then acting it out on screen. It's like a swiss watch in terms of complex integration yet almost no extraneous material.

People look at me funny when I claim that Adam Sandler is one of the most talented actors/filmmakers of our generation, but his "dumb comedies" are pretty much the platonic ideal of "dumb comedy" and that one time he does do a "serious" movie we get movies like Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems.

Adam Sandler is the Steven King of movies. Follow me here...

Sure, there's the obvious "high brow" vs "low brow" argument for each. For Sandler, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore dick jokes aren't en vogue for the thinking man. He laughs at the laconic wit of Fargo and thinks everything by Wes Anderson is what the children (der kinder!) ought to be watching. Same thing with King - paperback horror? Oh, goodness! Why not spend your time reading the claaaaaaasics Stoker, Shelley, perhaps some Lovecraft?

Pure cultural classism, to be sure. But there's a deeper element - doing the basic things right.

Sandler makes you laugh with a good joke that's straightforward with an easy, but well delivered, punchline. Steve King writes a good story. Plot. Characters. Scenes crafted with a mood that's spooky.

I think that so many of their detractors are envious that they can't do the damn basics right, but think they have the "higher level" stuff mastered. This should be expected from a society (the PMCs) that values a sort of personal branding and individuation highly, and often is involved in careers where objective measurements of common factors of performance are rare or impossible. Sandler and King are basic and non-esoteric, so they have to deliver on the meat and potatoes level. Sandler; you laughed. King; you got spooked. There is no avenue for them to appeal to some sort of abstract rubric of "inventive, thoughtful insight." They're playing an old game with defined rules that's been done a lot before. They're not standing on the shoulders of giants, they're being compared to them.

Sandler is good (and King) because they've been in the arena on purpose for a long time. Anybody who's putting a straightforward product out like that again and again over decades has my respect.

I think you might be legitimately on to something here and would encourage you to expand upon it.

I'm surprised that throughout the past few weeks I've seen no discussion on handheld computing a la the Steam deck, so here it is.

I've fairly recently gotten my hands on a Steam deck OLED, and it's everything that I've wanted a modded PSP to be (maybe a touch too large). A higher quality brighter screen is a significant improvement from the old LCD I had from yesteryear. Having Arch OS behind the scenes comes at a significant benefit as well, as full software support means you can literally run common applications, Emulators, etc. with actual software support! Oh, and it can run steam games too, I guess.

Anyways, I think it goes to say I enjoyed messing around with it a lot and have actually started tackling a non-0 amount of my steam backlog. My hope is that the success of these handheld compute units will create incentives for Microsoft to actually take a look at a lightweight version of their OS for ease of use without the endless need for internet connection to send telemetry and personal information and maybe implement some battery-optimizing techniques. I'm not holding my breath but one can hope!

Valve still don't sell the deck directly in my country. I'd have to pay a very inflated price to an importer. I can't justify that given how I can often go 2 weeks without playing any games, and how much I enjoy my PC/TV setup for most gaming purposes. Don't see myself using a handheld all that often. Might get tempted by the Deck 2 though, if it has good specs and they sell it directly to consumers in my country.

I certainly think it had limited use case is somewhat limited if you don't choose to tinker with it. It definitely leans towards the 'portable' end of the current offerings of handheld computers in that it emphasizes battery life over performance which is why it's my preferred device. If you don't game a lot or have an extensive steam library it's probably not worth the money imo. I have both and tend to travel and split time between multiple places so having a to-go device like the steam deck is beneficial for my lifestyle.

If I were more of a traveling man I'd get one for sure. Would eliminate the need for a gaming capable laptop.

I don't travel anymore but I've found much use for my steamdeck anyway.

I can now lie in bed or on the sofa and game more easily. I wasn't sure I would use it enough but I game on it more than my computer and TV nowadays.

I might get into handheld devices about the time you can control them with a headset reading nerve impulses, and you 3d glasses with them.

Between hating bending my neck using phones and small devices not having keyboards or large screens, what kind of games can you even play on them ?

Platformers, card games, metroidvanias, Rogue likes, third person action games, driving games, etc.

What you don't want to play is high paced precision games like FPSs, MOBAs and RTSs.

I play either FPS's, quasi-simulators where memorizing the keybinds is quite a feat or strategy games, so nothing suitable for phones..

Some games (eg Terraria) are intentionally 'game-boy esque', and work as well or better on handhelds as on desktop keyboards. That said, I've seen some people play casual levels of more complex games like MineCraft or even FFXIV on Steam Decks without too many problems -- they're not an ideal form factor, but they're still quite usable.

I definitely hear you on the neck bending! Avoiding the dreaded back hump is something I've always fought against due to how phones and laptops tend to leave you in bad posture positions.

The steam deck can have a (less refined) switch output where you can hook it up to a monitor or TV with a dock, so I frequently use it as a more open source switch which can run all my emulators easily. It has pretty stellar bluetooth as well so you can connect any controller you'd like to it.

Genuine portable computing's long been an underserved and overfragmented market. My gaming uses tend to revolve around keyboards, but this design space has a lot of utility for things like (giant-)pocket-sized tablets for note-taking and light management devices that are otherwise not very well-served -- either PalmPilot- or Pi-level devices that can do too little, or GPD Win-knockoffs that are way too high-end for most users.

I am a little worried about how much they're willing to explore. Valve's had enough success to at least drive imitators (Asus Ally), but there's a lot of design decisions in both the original and OLED variant that point towards a lot of caution in design scaling (both devices use MIPI displays, and the original IPS one was a weird left-over from a generic tablet display with a funky aspect ratio). Valve has historically been careful in general, but if it's more than just their normal engineering-by-the-shelf, either indicates that they don't want to put down the capital, or don't think they can get the manufacturing interest in it.

To date, Valve has never meaningfully iterated on their hardware.

First the Steam Link and Steam Machines, until they lost interest in that.
Then the Index, until they (mostly) lost interest in that.
Now the Steam Deck. It's only been out for a year and a bit and they replaced the screen- sure, faster than Nintendo did, but that's a really low bar.

Sure, the Switch 2 has absolutely sold a lot of units- far more than any other Valve hardware product has- but I can understand why a manufacturer wouldn't be interested in seriously developing the Gabe Gear with a track record of no repeat business- especially if they're now saying "there won't be a new one for a while", and when Valve says "a while"...

At least never releasing a second version of a thing prevents people from asking them when the third one's coming.

At least never releasing a second version of a thing prevents people from asking them when the third one's coming.

The most wounding comment I've ever read on the Motte.

Yeah, especially given Valve's competence in the designs it does create, it's weird how much they don't like building new stuff. Even places that look like past iterations aren't, officially: the Lighthouse V1s were HTC builds and V2s were the first genuine Valve production design, and the Knuckles controllers were 'updated' a few different times but never had an official release.

Optimistically, maybe that's just Valve Being Valve, and when they get bored other people can go into the market that they've formalized (and done a lot of the annoying software work for). Pessimistically, if you only expected to have one shot at this design and picked those joysticks, it doesn't say a lot about what you're planning around. Worse, other companies seem equally cautious about the field: Asus looks like it's using off-the-shelf panel-controller combos on their display as well, even if a little higher-quality, and hasn't committed to long-term support or replacement parts.

((And Asus isn't as competent when it comes to software.))

I think that whole "playground" structure they have there (they call it "flat office", but "office" suggests it's a place where work happens) does kind of kneecap them when it's time to do things long-term or that are "uninteresting". I think Valve gets to be Valve because Steam literally prints money, so as long as they're not drawing the budget down too hard they (as a business) can piss high-six-figures-per-employee time into a hole indefinitely.

I think the hardware strategy might have been intended as some internal group's hack around this, because hardware designs have a half shelf life. If they want a game to push the hardware- and as everyone rushing to adopt the Alyx way of grabbing things showed that was the right decision- they need to make harder decisions and actually sit down together and make the thing rather than sit around and Episode 3 it up until Mark Laidlaw leaves an obscene yearly income behind for lack of work (also semi-retirement, but y'know).

I don't think it worked as well with the Steam Deck- yeah, we got Desk Job, but I think the "become really exclusive Nintendo" (one game per franchise per hardware release, and those games are tech demos that encourage full use of the hardware) thing might have a chance if they had a success rate greater than 1 in 2 (only counting post-Index). And the only unique thing with the Deck, other than the form factor, is the gyros (done already with the Switch, but in fairness Nintendo didn't do it right) and the touchpads (which not even Valve gets right on the first time- the ones on the Knuckles are just awful- and the PS4 console ports most people are playing on the Gabe Boy Advance probably don't implement touch controls, good riddance).

That said, however, I think console manufacturers have absolutely been put on notice. Nintendo has it worst because the Deck is literally just a better Switch that they got soundly beat to market releasing and the fact the Deck implements all Switch hardware (and then some) is fantastic for pirates customers who want a better refresh rate or maybe just to do this, and this thing kind of boxes Sony and MS (to a lesser extent, since Microsoft's game pass doesn't really work on Linux to my knowledge) into a place they really do not want to go, since the Gabe Boy Advance is also a better PS4/XBone than those consoles are and GPU improvements in the sub-400-dollar range over what those consoles currently use literally do not exist.

Also, doesn't ASUS clone-and-one-better a computer in basically every form factor anyway?

Also, doesn't ASUS clone-and-one-better a computer in basically every form factor anyway?

Weirdly, no. For the bigger markets, they're willing to make weird one- and two-offs (though not always well, contrast FriendlyElec).

But there is no Asus GPD-clone, for example, probably because it's just too small of a market. While the 5-inch tablets in general have just dissolved since around 2010 for everybody but the weird Aliexpress vendors, for 7-inch tablets you're looking at the MeMoPads running android 4.4 on an atom processor from 2014 (wut), despite a lot of sales at the high and low ends. They don't do nano itx as a form factor, period, even as they've become a major player for NUCs.

Which isn't an awful decision as a business -- spread too far and you lose yourself -- but it's a weird one.

Don't forget the steam controller.

Valve has explicitly said that the og Steam Deck was largely commodity hardware, as they couldn't find manufacturers confident enough in them to make more bespoke hardware. The OLED one is a midcycle refresh from when they had more confidence and could order more bespoke parts.

At this point, I think they could justify entirely custom hardware, but Valve prefers a more console-like approach of establishing baseline performance and sticking with it for a bit until a truly meaningful upgrade is possible instead of annual releases. They've said it'll be a while till the next one, which at least lets devs optimize for the current performance targets.

Edit:

Valve hardware is also milspec: https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1743340445294264373?s=20

I just spent half an hour doing research and napkin math about WWII naval vs. aerial bombardment. This was related to suggestion for a Hearts of Iron mod. Partway through the ensuing discussion, one of the devs steps in with his own estimates. They are based on some flawed math, but more importantly, they are a screenshot from Google Bard.

Observation one: it is absolutely insane that you can give a computer word problems and have it spit out formatted, plausible answers, complete with hypotheticals. There were caveats about how the guns were never designed for the proposed use and a table of how the answer would change with lower rates.

Observation two: it is completely insane that you can do this and have the computer lie to you. Not with any malice! But it will give you a wrong, even incoherent answer with the exact same confidence as a correct one. Those symbols get strung together all the time in its training data, after all.

Observation three: well, the third type of insanity ought to go unremarked. I’m not upset that the dev leaned on this AI. I got the impression he was just tossing in his two cents, not defending the position. It does raise the question—

Is it possible to raise the general level of skepticism about AI answers, rather than AI technology?

I am always surprised that people are not more impressed with LLMs. I went out for dinner with a smart friend and he has not used gpt4 and didn't seem to care. We didn't understand part of the menu, so I took a picture and had chatgpt explain. Every time I do this it blows my mind a little. He seemed to take it for granted.

We now literally have intelligent computers that can see and talk, a la Jarvis or HAL 9000, and so many people are surprised I pay $20/month for access.

Observation two: it is completely insane that you can do this and have the computer lie to you. Not with any malice! But it will give you a wrong, even incoherent answer with the exact same confidence as a correct one.

People do that all the time.

Is it possible to raise the general level of skepticism about AI answers, rather than AI technology?

Given how hard it is to get people to have serious skepticism of human answers? Not hugely optimistic. I like to toy around with the idea of intentionally seeding hilariously obvious lies into LLM outputs, but... uh... there's two ways that could go.

We already have the Steele Dossier endlessly reported by serious news organizations as serious information. Who even needs LLM lies when regular people concoct ridiculous fabrications all the time?

Let's poison the LLMs to give them the ability for deception that humans get for free.

What Bard currently says about the Steele Dossier (prompt was about which parts of it were verifiably true and which parts were not verifiably true):

The Steele Dossier's claims have a complex truth landscape, with no definitive conclusion about how much is verifiable or not. Here's a breakdown:

Claims Verifiably True:

-Some contacts between Trump associates and Russian figures: Investigations confirmed some connections, like Paul Manafort's ties to Oleg Deripaska. However, the extent and context of these contacts remain unclear.

-Russia's interference in the 2016 election: Multiple independent investigations, including the Mueller Report, confirmed Russia's campaign of disinformation and hacking.

Claims Verifiably False:

-Specific allegations: Several specific claims, like Michael Cohen's Prague trip, have been demonstrably false.

Claims Uncertain:

-Central allegations of collaboration: The core claims of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia haven't been definitively proven or disproven. Investigations found evidence of contacts but couldn't establish coordinated activities. -Unverifiable details: Many details in the dossier lack corroborating evidence and remain unverified.

Key Points:

-The dossier was never intended as a proven account, but rather an unverified report requiring further investigation. -Investigations confirmed some aspects, but central claims about collaboration remain unproven. -Several specific claims were debunked, raising questions about the dossier's reliability. -The dossier's legacy remains politically charged, with ongoing debate about its accuracy and significance.

Recommendation:

To form your own informed opinion, consider diverse sources:

-Media summaries: Read summaries from reputable outlets across the political spectrum. -Mueller Report and other investigations: Review official reports to understand confirmed facts and unresolved questions. -Expert commentary: Listen to analyses from experts in intelligence and investigations.

By engaging with various perspectives, you can form a more nuanced understanding of the dossier's complexities and its ongoing impact.

Remember, the truth about the Steele Dossier is still evolving, and new information may emerge in the future.

Is it possible to raise the general level of skepticism about AI answers, rather than AI technology?

It takes time for the novelty to wear off. I think the businesslike HR tone gives it a bit of extra authority too. All people need to do is just refresh and watch as it gives a different answer!

Even AI Evangelists do not take AI answers at face value (at least if they're even mildly informed about the technology). That is a bad idea right now, and will be until the hallucination rate drops further. For anything non-trivial, such as medical advice, I would highly recommend at least generating multiple responses, or following any links and citations the old fashioned way to sniff check them.

Of course, the worst sin this dev committed was to use Bard, it's still noticeably inferior to GPT-4. The latter is free through Microsoft Copilot, why use Google's shitty alternative?

It's always irresponsible and silly, but does anyone have a link to a good counterfactual analysis of the WWII decisions of the Axis powers circa Pearl Harbor?

I'm working my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I was fascinated by the diplomatic dance between Germany and Japan around the entry of America into the war. Germany wanted Japan to attack the Soviets, while the the Japanese wanted the Germans to declare war on the Americans if Japan did. Ultimately, the Japanese got what they wanted and the Germans didn't, and they both got it good and hard from America (while the Soviets and their clients contributed nothing to their putative allies).

I'm curious to read a well reasoned hypothetical of what would have happened in the alternate cases, if Japan had declared war on Russia as well as or instead of declaring war on the United States. What would the balance of forces have looked like? Would Japanese forces have been capable of inflicting significant damage on Russia, or was nothing particularly useful coming out of the Russian far east anyway?

Or if Hitler had refrained from declaring war on the United States, which he was never obligated by treaty to do (and it isn't like Hitler ever cared about treaties anyway), how would the rest of the war have played out? Would FDR and his internationalist clique ultimately have succeeded in pushing the US into open war with the Nazis anyway? Would that have taken long enough, say until 1943, that it would have altered the outcome of important events on the European Continent?

Rising Sun Victorious (edited by Peter Tsouras) is a collection of brief scenarios presented in a nonfiction, history-book style. In the book's first story, Hokushin (written by Tsouras himself):

  • In March 1941, when Japanese diplomat Matsuoka Yousuke visits Germany, Hitler requests (more frankly and formally than in OTL) that Japan attack the USSR. This settles Japan's "hokushin or nanshin" debate in favor of a northern attack in cooperation with Operation Barbarossa.

  • The Soviet spies in Japan and the codebreaking Americans warn Stalin of the impending attack, but he ignores the warnings in the east just as he does in the west. In April 1941 (rather than in October as in OTL), the head Soviet spy in Japan, Richard Sorge, is discovered, and (rather than being exposed and executed as in OTL) is forced to feed to the Soviets false information that Japan is not planning to attack. After Germany attacks in June, this false information leads Stalin to move most of the Soviet troops in Siberia from the east to the west.

  • In August (6.5 weeks after Operation Barbarossa), Yamashita Tomoyuki's 1.3 million Japanese troops invade the USSR. Iosif Apanasenko's skeleton garrison of conscripts and gulag prisoners is beaten without too much trouble. Voroshilov (now Ussuriysk) surrenders in September, after four weeks of battle. With the forces that were transferred from Siberia exhausted in the first battles rather than being kept in reserve, in October Germany takes Moscow and Stalin flees to Kuybyshev (now Samara) along with the rest of the Soviet government. In December, the Soviet government collapses (with Stalin disappearing mysteriously), and Khabarovsk falls, but Apanasenko continues to defend against Japan from Blagoveshchensk.

  • In March 1942, the reconstituted Russian Eurasian Federation signs the Treaty of Manila (mediated by the United States), ceding to Japan "the Maritime Province", over which Genrikh Lyushkov serves as governor (until he is executed for treasonously trying to reunite it with Russia). The Allies agree to let Japan (1) conquer the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina and (2) freely import tin and rubber from British Malaya, as long as Japan refrains from attacking Malaya and the American Philippines. Britain repels Operation Sea Lion in the summer of 1942.

I think you have to consider what was happening in Japan, I don't think what Hitler did or thought affected this much at all. They lost decisively at Khalkhin Dol in '39, which lead to them focusing on going south instead of into Russia. If they had won or drawn there they might have chosen to go north instead of south.

Or maybe what if they just went into Russia rather getting bogged down in China and subsequently getting into a war with the entire west? If that happened it's harder to see the US cutting them off from oil and the USSR would likely have been fucked. The Chinese communists would likely also have lost the civil war and we might have had a second massive war after ww2 between an aggressive nationalist Japan and an aggressive nationalist China.

It would have been a very different world.

Would Japanese forces have been capable of inflicting significant damage on Russia, or was nothing particularly useful coming out of the Russian far east anyway?

Well known the troops that won the battle of Moscow were experienced divisions from Siberia sent west. Japan's largest army was there, 700k men. Due to Richard Sorge's intelligence, Soviets were able to lower the troop strength there because Japan wasn't likely to attack unless Soviet army there was comparatively very weak.

Had Japan decided to attack Soviets there in late '41 or '42 it might have led to serious problems for Soviets, who did not have a comfortable superiority at the time..

Not sure how well Japanese industry would've been able to cope with the strain of supplying both the naval and the land theater though.

Well known the troops that won the battle of Moscow were experienced divisions from Siberia sent west. Japan's largest army was there, 700k men.

Not quite. The German offensive was ground to a halt by European troops and whatever local reserves everyone could scramble, Asian troops were used to reinforce the counteroffensive that pushed the Germans away from Moscow. Without them the battle would still have been won, but the USSR would've spent 1942 in deep defense, mobilizing additional divisions instead of planning any counteroffensives.

Without them the battle would still have been won,

You mean the war. Probably, but there's way more factors. USSR got a lot of supplies through Vladivostok. Japan could've cut that.

Germans weren't a spent force in 1942 yet. Maybe they'd have fared better had they not been forced to retreat in winter.. However, it doesn't seem that many divisions were transferred, only like ~22 or so in total.

https://www.operationbarbarossa.net/the-siberian-divisions-and-the-battle-for-moscow-in-1941-42/#top2

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