Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

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  • 276 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Let me guess: you were trying to pirate Windows games and software. Right?

    If yes, look at it this way. You’re pirating games for one system, and trying to run them in another system. Of course it’ll involve one or two additional loops to make it work. It’s like baking bread on your stove, you know? It can be done, but it isn’t as streamlined as using your oven.

    That said it isn’t really difficult. I have a bunch of pirated Windows games installed in my Linux. Steam helps by a lot, because of Proton; add the game to Steam as a “non-Steam game”, then force it to use a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. You can do it without Steam but it streamlines everything.

    You’re still better off looking for native software, though, made for Linux. A bunch of good games have Linux versions.


  • The name of his studio, “Kintsugiyama”, is too long. Can I clip the “sugiy”? It sounds better! :^) …okay, disregard the shitty joke.

    Serious now: Kaplan and Ford’s takes are fairly reasonable. Forums online (including Reddit… and Lemmy/Piefed, by the way) seem to trigger on people a natural instinct to fit in, as part of a group. This leads to the adoption of similar values and judgements, and in turn to direct praise and criticism towards the same things — even when you’re in no position to do it, because you didn’t experience it nor plan to. In practice this means yes, it’s harder to speak “I like it” when everyone else dislikes it.

    And people can get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally loud with this shite.

    Also, I like the way they voiced this. It’s really hard to misconstrue it as “don’t criticise things”. Criticism is often healthy, sometimes even really harsh criticism; it’s just that sometimes it needs some experience to be even constructive, and that’s the case here.





  • The article used the word “Microslop” thirteen times. I guess the author really wants search engines and bots to associate “Microslop” with “Microsoft”. Apparently Microslop is a term for Microsoft products, or perhaps even Microslop is an intrinsic property of Microsoft.

    …'kay, I’ll stop it now.

    It’s rather curious how MS babbles so much about “AI”, but its Discord server uses such a simple filter that can be evaded by 0N3 0F 7H3 0LD357 700L5 0F 7H3 1N73RN37 5H17P0573R one of the oldest tools of the internet shitposter: leetspeak. It’s almost like it knows it’s selling a dud.

    Also, I guess this thing run so far they don’t even care about the Streisand effect any more.


  • Yeah, got to borrow some word from discourse analysis :-P

    It fits well what I wanted to say, and it makes the comment itself another example of the phenomenon: that usage of “utterance” as jargon makes the text shorter and more precise but makes it harder to approach = optimises for #2 and #3 at the expense of #1. (I had room to do it in this case because you mentioned your Linguistics major.)

    Although the word is from DA I believe this to be related to Pragmatics; my four points are basically a different “mapping” of the Gricean maxims (#1 falls into the maxim of manner, #2 of manner and relation, #3 of quality, #4 of quantity) to highlight trade-offs.


  • To be clear, by “communication” I’m talking about the information conveyed by a certain utterance, while you’re likely referring to the utterance itself.

    Once you take that into account, your example is optimising for #2 at the expense of #1 — yes, you can get away conveying info in more succinct ways, but at the expense of requiring a shared context; that shared context is also info the receiver knows beforehand. It works fine in this case because spouses accumulate that shared context across the years (so it’s a good trade-off), but if you replace the spouse with some random person it becomes a “how the fuck am I supposed to know what you mean?” matter.


  • I believe that good communication has four attributes.

    1. It’s approachable: it demands from the reader (or hearer, or viewer) the least amount of reasoning and previous knowledge, in order to receive the message.
    2. It’s succinct: it demands from the reader the least amount of time.
    3. It’s accurate: it neither states nor implies (for a reasonable = non-assumptive receiver) anything false.
    4. It’s complete: it provides all relevant information concerning what’s being communicated.

    However no communication is perfect and those four attributes are in odds with each other: if you try to optimise your message for one or more of them, the others are bound to suffer.

    Why this matters here: it shows the problem of ablation is unsolvable. Even if generative models were perfectly competent at rephrasing text (they aren’t), simply by asking them to make the text more approachable, you’re bound to lose info or accuracy. Specially in the current internet, where you got a bunch of skibidi readers who’ll screech “WAAAAH!!! TL;DR!!!” at anything with more than two sentences.

    I’d also argue “semantic ablation” is actually way, way better as a concept than “hallucination”. The later is not quite “additive error”; it’s a misleading metaphor for output that is generated by the model the same way as the rest, but it happens to be incorrect when interpreted by human beings.


  • Link to the archived version of the article in question.

    I actually like the editor’s note. Instead of naming-and-shaming the author (Benj Edwards), it’s blaming “Ars Technica”. It also claims they looked for further issues. It sounds surprisingly sincere for corporate apology.

    Blaming AT as a whole is important because it acknowledges Edwards wasn’t the only one fucking it up. Whatever a journalist submits needs to be reviewed by at least a second person, exactly for this reason: to catch up dumb mistakes. Either this system is not in place or not working properly.

    I do think Edwards is to blame but I wouldn’t go so far as saying he should be fired, unless he has a backstory of doing this sort of dumb shit. (AFAIK he doesn’t.) “People should be responsible for their tool usage” is not the same as “every infraction deserves capital punishment”; sometimes scolding is enough. I think @totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone’s comment was spot on in this regard: he should’ve taken sick time off, but this would have cost him vacation time, and even being forced to make this choice is a systemic problem. So ultimately it falls on his employer (AT) again.