• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • While I’m not against an anonymous stand for what’s “right”, that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

    It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things “for the lulz”. It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

    The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn’t care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.





  • Wow.

    They clearly care more about propety damage than people. Here’s an aside on why property damage in America is often damage to people (local business owners). But they totally only care about property.

    My guy, there are significant, demonstrable, and studied long term negative effects on communities (problems that directly effect the people living there) due to property damage from protests. You’re right that it stems from a lack of support structures, but that cause doesn’t change the bad it does to communities and the people in them. It disproportianately effects the poor as well, as those with the means tend to flee areas where propery destruction/rioting/looting occured, which takes money out of the local area, which snowballs until a once thriving community is now a food desert with no businesses or services available for the residents.

    Yeah, fuck the big businesses. Fuck the 1%. But don’t cut off vital services from a community by driving all of them out. Go make an actual statement and go after the owners. Go after the HQs. Go to the executives’ and politicians’ homes and where they actually work and spend time.

    See how quick the police respond to people destroying inner city businesses vs a peaceful crowd in the street in front of Maxine Water’s house, and then tell me which is more important to the rich (and therefore far less damaging to the poor).

    If you’re going to risk getting riot equipment used on you, pick more valuable fucking targets.




  • there was something I could somehow magically fix if I just kept pushing myself through the rock in my way.

    This is one of the worst “thought traps” out there. The biggest change in my life was when I decided to learn to work around/with my flaws rather than through/against them.

    I don’t mean give up and never try to improve, like a post I’ve seen here where someone got mad at their friends because their friends should just expect them to be late because ADHD. I mean stuff like that I set as many alarms and reminders as it takes, rather than deluding myself that “one alarm will be fine if I pay attention”.




  • That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

    My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

    Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.



  • I had one that kind of did. Looking back I think it was a clever way of seeing if I was a good fit based off my reaction.

    It was the end of the interview and he asked if I had any questions, and I pulled the “turn it around on them” play and asked him what he enjoyed most about his job/working there. He was going to be my boss.

    He said “every day I get to work on something new”. With the magic of far more experience now, I understand just how much that’s a blessing and a curse. That idea excited me at the time, and it was the attitude needed for the position.

    Now I prefer to have that opportunity available, but I have to be able to deep dive into a smaller subset of things and ignore the churn sometimes to stay sane long term.

    Working with something new every day in a tech support position just means something new is breaking every day, and there’s not enough time to become well versed in much of it.


  • So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

    It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

    At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

    Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

    The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

    Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

    Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

    So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4n states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

    Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.


    My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

    People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

    Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.


  • Most people don’t want their kids eating slop all the time.

    Beyond that Minecraft is a considerably old game now, especially if you got into it in the very early days. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are older people paying attention to this.

    I was in notch’s old threads on /v/ in the very beginning back as a young teen (yes 4chan, I was totally 18 years old, pinky swear). I’m in my 30s and have a kid now who is too young to play, but I will probably introduce her at an appropriate age if she likes computer games.

    I’m not raging or anything, but I’m definitely paying attention enough to know if this movie is garbage to steer my kid away from in the future.