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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • seeing what can be done with the tech to make each person’s experience unique, with bespoke quests and dialogue.

    That being possible would be fundamentally a level up from what they are now. I’ve read a paper on this someone linked in a Lemmy thread a year or so ago.

    Maybe one day playing a game like Skyrim for 10 years doesn’t have to mean playing the same quests over and over.

    I think a more manual approach would work, of a world model like Crusader Kings has, with traits and ties and opinions and random events of NPCs between each other and towards the player, and that AI being used simply to rephrase and slightly adjust descriptions and sequences of events - then maybe.

    But consider how many NPCs that means and how many others they meet in their simulated lives, and how hard it would be to debug a story line to ensure that it’s always playable.

    An LLM is not, strictly speaking, necessary here, and if used, doesn’t make it easier.




  • I just took a short look at the JXTA specification ; JXTA is abandoned and this is the progress people are pursuing. So sad really.

    I mean, yes, comfort is good, yes, this is like a device from Asimov’s Foundation, but the problem is kinda solved by headphones already. And yes, it’s cool.

    (If someone doesn’t know what JXTA is - it’s Sun’s standard for p2p applications, of the “progress of the past that was left unfinished and forgotten” kind, and looking at ZFS, which is a similarly comprehensive thing for filesystems, I have no doubts the world would be better were it finished.)


  • Finland technically doesn’t have complete separation of religion from state and has a really proto-fascist set of state symbols, though, part from the Russian Empire, part from the White Guard.

    Just since it’s a functioning nation, these things don’t affect it much.

    Also unlike, say, Sweden, Finland never fully jumped on the multiculturalism train and such.

    One can say honesty and true moderation make you happy.

    I’ve never been in Finland, though, what I can say of why being in Estonia (not living there though) makes you feel happy - it’s like Russia in my childhood (hard to explain), but clean and fixed and without tasteless expensive things everywhere (ugly malls, ugly decoration, ugly everything, people deciding on how things look nice in Russia have taste worse than average ; maybe in Moscow this is simply because people with money who moved there from outside think this is how things are done in Moscow, people don’t just live here, it’s a matter of prestige that a fscking barbershop should look like a mafia meeting place or Gringotts bank entrance, btw bank offices are actually kinda normal in appearance ; and places you need to actually visit are behind some unnumbered door under a leaking pipe). Still many bad things feel similar to Russia too, but that’s likely just autistic experience.


  • Baltics and Finland just chose differently, Finns to fight and Baltics to give in.

    Different situations, Finland had lots of sympathies from both future western Allies and the fascist nations, and a better military.

    About Czechoslovakia - I meant the Nazi approach to negotiations, like calling bombardment of a city in the middle of a diplomatic meeting. Compared to that USSR was almost civilized. Nazis were much like ISIS (similar ideology to Salafism too).

    So if you gain anything depends on whether you believe USSR had further ambitions in Finland or not.

    It definitely had, but Stalin with his “socialism in one particular country” already lowered the bar on that a bit. Still till his death USSR would be preparing for global thermonuclear war for world dominance and such.

    OK, I think we agree on this. My initial post was about the stereotype which ignores the first and the third of the wars between USSR and Finland, leaving only the second, which was, yes, an aggression against Finland.


  • Building a few more bunkers is easier than moving a city, especially in the 30s.

    But to help your argument, there were plenty of propaganda pieces and Finnish communist organizations supported by the USSR before the war. So probably there were intentions of biting off more than expressed.

    And to help mine (sort of, it’s an appellation to authority), I think I’ve read many notable figures, even Mannerheim himself, considered the proposed deal reasonable.

    Comparing this to Czechoslovakia, USSR still took exactly what it initially demanded, and I don’t remember Nazis offering anyone anything in exchange. And comparing this to Baltics - there it was a different scheme, where IIRC their governments (small cozy authoritarian ones, which is very funny) asked USSR for protection (because Nazis were scarier), Soviet troops entered those countries and suddenly there were Soviet state institutions in place and plebiscites.



  • That’s true, except people from Baltic countries, all of the Eastern Block, and notably Finns love the narrative of bad bad barbaric Russia that always oppressed them, and bad bad totalitarian USSR that was “worse than Nazis”.

    Just recently certain Linus Torvalds expressed a interesting sentiment about being a Finn and knowing something about “Russian aggression”, well, Soviet-Finnish conflicts didn’t start with the Winter war, and the Winter war was preceded by a few suggestions ending in an ultimatum. By those suggestions Finland would receive far greater amounts of territory (in the areas it claimed before at that) than the stripe of land and a few small islands in artillery range of Leningrad it would be giving away. That’s rather soft if you consider the character of the preceding Soviet-Finnish war. And Finland’s participation in the blockade of Leningrad while allied with, well, Nazis makes the “worse than Nazis” argument more easily understandable and still wrong.



  • I can’t believe you worked a B5 ref into a discussion, much less operational differences between Vorlon and Shadow.

    I’m technically not interested in any other kinds of discussions, but even explaining what this particular kind is takes work even from the closest people to me, so - compromises are to be made, weird posts are to be typed and sent.

    Major difference even in the analogy is that Shadows actively and destructively sought control and withheld info whereas Vorlons manipulated by parceling out cryptic messages.

    That’s the “planted gods for the lesser races”, “taught Minbari hyperspace travel”, “sent that Inquisitor guy with nice former hobbies” kind of Vorlons, right? Very cryptic.

    Removing filters from LLMs and training them on shitholes will have the expected result.

    I’m glad we don’t disagree.







  • Not necessarily, they train models on real world data, often of what people believe to be true, not what works, and those models are not yet able to perform experiments, register results and learn from them (what even a child does, even a dumb one), and real world is cruel, bigotry is not even the worst part of it, neither are anti-scientific beliefs. But unlike these models, the real world has more entropy.

    If you’ve seen Babylon V, the philosophy difference between Vorlons and Shadows was somewhere near this.

    One can say in philosophy blockchain is a Vorlon technology and LLMs are a Shadow technology (it’s funny, because technically it would be the other way around, one is kinda grassroots and the other is done by few groups with humongous amounts of data and computing resources), but ultimately they are both attempts to compensate what they see as wrong in the real world. Introducing new wrongs in their blind zones.

    (In some sense the reversal of alignment of Vorlons and Shadows, between philosophy and implementation, is right - you hide in technical traits of your tooling that which you can’t keep in your philosophy ; so “you’ll think what we tell you to think” works for Vorlons (or Democrats), but Republicans have to hide that inside tooling and mechanisms they prefer, while “power makes power” is something Democrats can’t just say, but can hide inside tooling they prefer or at least don’t fight too much. That’s why cryptocurrencies’ popularity came in one side’s ideological dominance time, and “AIs” in the others’. Maybe this is a word salad.)

    So, what I meant, - the degeneracy of such tools is the bias in his favor, there’s no need for anything else.