They ported Half-Life to PS2. And the sequel was on everything.

Fundamentally he doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know what happened. He means that he hasn’t received his talking points about this yet.

He knows that there will be some way that the right-wing media ecosystem is going to frame this, and it’s very important that his framing match theirs exactly. Somewhere a think-tank is working on the perfect wording that will turn an innocent victim into, somehow, an evil communist traitor who was a threat to an ICE officer and also somehow to the very concept of America. And if he tried to give his own spin on it before that, it would only make their job more complicated.

So yeah, he may know that an innocent man was shot, again. But he doesn’t yet know the important stuff: how to make him the villain. He just hasn’t had the time to get caught up on that! Give him a break.

Yeah. It shows me Titan Isles, Into Black, Portal 2, The Lab, and Aperture Hand Lab, with the last two being free tech demos. Adding this since it seems like the list may be somewhat location dependent, so those seeing fewer titles can tell what’s missing.

Didn’t they release the first new Half Life title in over a decade in coordination with that headset?

Sounds like it could be really useful for VR displays. The best optics for VR right now use polarizers to fold the optical path repeatedly through the same lens, but a side effect is that only a small portion of the light makes it to the users’ eyes.

Could also extend the battery life of phones; the display is the main power draw for most phones, and the higher brightness make that worse.

I understand why people are reacting badly to these being described as “brighter,” but it does also mean “more energy efficient for the same brightness.”

There was a supreme court decision during the current administration that basically said the president can’t be held accountable. It’s completely insane.

Are they just clueless about how anything works?

That’s certainly how I read it. They seem to think that if you feed the LLM a new prompt that tells it it made a mistake, it’ll update itself to avoid that mistake in the future. Which isn’t how any of this works, but I can understand why they wouldn’t know that given the marketing from the big AI companies.

A couple of years from now everyone will know this was really dumb, but right now only the engineers know that, and management won’t listen to them. I guess they’ll learn the hard way.

And presumably it had never occurred to the kid that one might want to turn off a radio for any reason.

Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y’know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I’m not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y’know, passive index fund investors.

No, my understanding is that they’re bringing in revenue on token generation, but it’s exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they’re afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they’ve reduced the amount they’re subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.

I can’t find a good citation for this, though, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they’re operating at a massive loss either way, and it’s a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.

In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That’s…we’ll have to see what happens on that front.

It’s particularly funny because I’m pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren’t taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.

My family had two volvos that behaved like this. One was an '81 Volvo 240 DL manual, and the other was a '92 Volvo 740 automatic. Both of them could get up to highway speed noticeably faster if you turned off the A/C. (My dad used to say they’d “do 0 to 60 on a leisurely afternoon.”) There’s some chance that A/C was aftermarket on the '81, so maybe that’s a factor? But the '92 did it too, and that was definitely stock.

I guess I didn’t drill down into the exploitation aspect, yeah. The people actually doing the jobs I don’t know how to do–mining, farming, sewing, etc.–are at this point almost entirely disadvantaged people in other countries, who are being woefully underpaid and subjected to terrible conditions. (A lot of farming is also done here, but it’s still by exploited foreign workers, so…) And a bunch of that relies on other systems too, like farming being done by as few workers as it is depends on fertilizers from the petrochemical industries, which are hurting people EVERYWHERE. I wouldn’t be able to afford anything if it weren’t discounted in this way. Even if there was no actual apocalypse, and only the exploitation went away, it’s not at all clear to me that I would have a way to keep myself alive.

If the AMOC shuts down, all bets are off.

I mean I’m about a billion dollars short of being a billionaire, and I don’t know how to live without exploiting labor either. I can’t farm, I can’t hunt, I can’t identify edible berries, roots, and mushrooms, I can’t sew beyond fixing a button. I know a lot about mechanisms, but it’s far from clear to me I could do anything useful in that field once the electricity is out, let alone once source metal starts getting hard to find. Everything would get so much harder so quickly. Hell, I don’t even know how to dig a latrine that’ll prevent the water supply from being contaminated, assuming we can find a water supply. (On the plus side, sources of pollution in water supplies should start to fall apart pretty fast.)

I dunno. I just think everyone thinking about the collapse wildly underestimates how hard everything will be. I can’t really picture my sorry ass lasting long at all.

We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.

I mean, redraw this graph as “happiness” vs “year of birth” and it’ll look way less optimistic!

"Just glue some gears on it and call it steampunk…"🎶

thanks!

So is it being used as slang outside the context of describing people as non-Jewish? I grew up in Skokie, IL, so I was familiar with the yiddish term, but I haven’t heard this new usage. Are non-jewish kids online using “goyim” to refer to outsiders of some other in-group?