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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’m comparing gender identity to other forms of protected identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.

    I’m not making any judgements about any group being superior or inferior to another. You’re the one doing that. Being “physically imposing” is subjective and variable. There is significant overlap between the largest women and smallest men, and that’s just staying withing the confines of binary cis people. Not to mention… Guns exist. Cars themselves are weapons far more dangerous than any human regardless of gender.

    Building a just society means we need to leave behind our biases and fears. To judge individuals not on the circumstances of their birth but the content of their character. That means discarding the luxury of pre-judging people, not just when it is easy, but also when it is hard.



  • It’s shocking to me how so many people I know who are woke as fuck and quick to shout down any bigotry are so quick to drop all of their principles to hate men.

    Segregation never works, and only serves to foster fear, hatred, and division within society You cannot define what a “woman” is in a way that excluded trans-women without also excluding some cis-women with them Your gender identity is what you say it is. Others should do their best to remember any pronouns or name changes Crime is too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to statistics, which are often used by racists and bigots to justify racist and bigoted policies It’s racist to cross to the other side of the street when a person of color comes walking towards you on the side you currently are on. It’s up to you to “Men” are evil monsters who cannot be trusted and need to be locked away

    It baffles me how so many people can have all of these ideas, including the last one, and not see the cognitive dissonance there. It’s succumbing to fear and hatred, the same methods of divisive propaganda that has harmed every other group.







  • For those who don’t want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

    The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

    Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it’s planning to buy

    So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren’t buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They’re buying it so that no one else can.


  • For me, those subtle forms of communication were things I learned when I was young. For a long time I didn’t think I was autistic because I was so good at picking up on it and using it myself. I just thought it was draining and unnatural for everyone. I was always good at poker and other social deception games like that. I learned how to sort through when other people gave conflicting messages. I would often pick up on social cues that my wife, who is definitely not autistic, missed. In times of hardship, my wife would sometimes be unnerved at how calm and neutral I would stay. Perhaps most importantly, I learned what things I need to communicate to people around me, how to do so, and how to verify that we have reached a mutual understanding.

    A bit ago we formed a polycule with another couple. My girlfriend recently discovered they were autistic too. They are usually good at picking up on social cues from other people, but do not communicate much about what they are thinking or feeling themselves. It’s been really strange for me to see someone who is in a lot of ways very similar to myself while I also struggle to understand what they are thinking and feeling. It’s giving me a weird mixture of frustration and comraderie? Like I’m personally wondering whether them being distant and quiet is because they are upset with me because that’s how my wife and boyfriend would work. Then I remember that quiet and distant is my own natural state: I’ve just learned the habit of engaging with people around me to re-assure them I’m not upset. They are working on gettter better about communicating, and I started just asking them how they are feeling more.

    It’s just kind of crazy to find myself on the other side.




  • For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?

    Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.

    Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.


  • This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

    Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

    An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

    I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.



  • They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

    Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

    I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.



  • BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

    On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

    The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

    Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

    Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

    There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

    The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.