Although censorship is obviously bad, I’m kinda intrigued by the way it’s yapping against itself. Trying to weigh the very important goal of providing useful information against its “programming” telling it not to upset Winnie the Pooh. It’s like a person mumbling “oh god oh fuck what do I do” to themselves when faced with a complex situation.

I don’t do it, because I usually get confused by them, but it makes sense to me. I don’t know what will taste good, and by following a recipe you can leverage someone’s experience to get something that tastes good. Personally I just accept that I often eat something mid in the pursuit of good cooking skills

Are people really this dramatic? There are plenty of conventions at work that we don’t like but just accept. We’ll moan about it every now and then (looking at you “only one return statement per method”), but in the end we’ll just accept that any standard is better than total mayhem and anarchy. Usually I write the code in a way that makes sense to me and then just tidy it up to satisfy the angry rule machine. Having moet of the code in the same format makes it easier to follow, and the code that was written before these rules has me convinced that this whole thing is am improvement.

Damn the trailer looked pretty cool. I love the modern retro vibe it has. They have space tech, but also CD decks etc. But the comments on Youtube are an absolute dumpster fire… “How dare they have a female with short hair REEEEEEEEEEEEE”

We played this game called Icarus last weekend because of a free weekend. It was okay for me, but I also have a pretty high-end PC for the 1080p monitor connected to it. Even for me the game was quite janky, but for my friends with older hardware the game wasn’t a good time. One friend’s microphone randomly turned into a max-volume noise generator while playing on multiple occasions, something that has never happened before. Another (who plays on Linux) experienced constant crashes and weird behaviour.

After that disappointment we went back in time to The Showdown Effect for the first time in years, which was still as hilarious as ever. Apparently there’s an updated free to play version now (called reloaded or something?) so we’d have to check that out. Would recommend it if you’re looking to have some mayhem with friends .

Edit: oh yeah and I also bought Grid Legends because it has a big sale and I like racing games. The driving physics don’t annoy me like the ones in The Crew or Forza so I’m having a good time with it till now

Yeah this. Nowadays I can usually stop it or at least make it way lighter by just moving my foot in the right position again. It has almost become a reflex at this point

I may or may not have done this haha. I’m a threat to any working piece of software, just enough knowledge to be able to break shit and too little knowledge to avoid breaking shit. I think after all these years I’ve mostly learnt my lesson though. The package manager is the boss, and if I don’t like it I have to work around it without upsetting the package manager

Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.

Yeah I don’t really feel the difference either. Intriguing. Whether I’m wet from the shower or from sweat, it feels about the same to me. It’s only after it’s drying that there’s an obvious difference to me

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.

Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest

Even better

Because sometimes people get violent with guns/fireworks and it’s quite useful to have some protection?

My first experience with the Sims was jumping behind a random computer at some kind of event that was running the Sims 1. Most of the family had just died because the previous person behind the PC had let the house burn down. Needless to say, I was a bit confused. I’ve played the Sims quite a bit after that, and I honestly like messing around with it.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game without cheating a lot of money. I don’t like that the Sims that I made have to go off to work or school, so usually I just build a big fence around the property to keep them all there. From there on it used to devolve into chaos when I was younger. Building huge mazes to access basic necessities, launching fireworks indoors, etc. Nowadays im a bit more behaved though.

Imo the Sims 4 is the best nowadays. The older ones are showing their age. That being said, the Sims 4 is definitely in need of some competition. It’s inexcusably buggy sometimes, and I personally think there’s a lot more that can be done with a game like this. Hopefully the upcoming competitors can spark some fire into this genre.

I got randomly recommend “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” recently by Steam and decided to go for it. I just finished the story and it was definitely a good recommendation. Hard enough to make me work for it, which I always like. It is kinda short though, finished it in like 12 hours. It’s a bit janky at times with the camera and jumping, but overall a great experience.

I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses WhatsApp here. Friends, family, work, doctors, landlords, etc. Not using WhatsApp will make you miss get togethers with friends, make it way harder to communicate with colleagues, take away a lot of convenience when talking to your doctor or landlord or something.

I have Signal groups with friends, but you’re never going to be able to fully lose WhatsApp here unless you’re prepared to be “that person” everywhere and miss a lot of convenience.

I’m not a hundred percent sure, but afaik it has to do with how random the output of the GPT model will be. At 0 it will always pick the most probable next continuation of a piece of text according to its own prediction. The higher the temperature, the more chance there is for less probable outputs to get picked. So it’s most likely to pick 42, but as the temperature increases you see the chance of (according to the model) less likely numbers increase.

This is how temperature works in the softmax function, which is often used in deep learning.

How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it’s still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.

Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat

I like how specifically this relates to my experience with the discount factor gamma in Reinforcement Learning. Like, pretty close to the exact numbers (though missing 0.99 and 0.999)

I kinda suck at Tetris. We had a “LAN” last year where we played some battle royale Tetris game, and there was one girl who absolutely demolished everyone. After that I feel like a kid playing (and failing) with one of those block shape matching toys whenever I play Tetris. It’s a cool game though. Nice simple gameplay, but high skill ceiling. I respect people who absolutely destroy me at a game due to pure skill