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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.

    The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.







  • The output for a given input cannot be independently calculated as far as I know, particularly when random seeds are part of the input.

    The system gives a probability distribution for the next word based on the prompt, which will always be the same for a given input. That meets the definition of deterministic. You might choose to add non-deterministic rng to the input or output, but that would be a choice and not something inherent to how LLMs work. Random ‘seeds’ are normally used as part of deterministically repeatable rng. I’m not sure what you mean by “independently” calculated, you can calculate the output if you have the model weights, you likely can’t if you don’t, but that doesn’t affect how deterministic it is.

    The so what means trying to prevent certain outputs based on moral judgements isn’t possible. It wouldn’t really be possible if you could get in there with code and change things unless you could write code for morality, but it’s doubly impossible given you can’t.

    The impossibility of defining morality in precise terms, or even coming to an agreement on what correct moral judgment even is, obviously doesn’t preclude all potentially useful efforts to apply it. For instance since there is a general consensus that people being electrocuted is bad, electrical cables normally are made with their conductive parts encased in non-conductive material, a practice that is successful in reducing how often people get electrocuted. Why would that sort of thing be uniquely impossible for LLMs? Just because they are logic processing systems that are more grown than engineered? Because they are sort of anthropomorphic but aren’t really people? The reasoning doesn’t follow. What people are complaining about here is that AI companies are not making these efforts a priority, and it’s a valid complaint because it isn’t the case that these systems are going to be the same amount of dangerous no matter how they are made or used.





  • Before, players could use Apex Coins to grab each new pass, earning enough from previous passes to fund their next purchase. The new system for the battle royale game would require real money transactions in addition to doubling how many battle passes would be released per season.

    I don’t play this kind of game and don’t understand what the controversy is. What does a “battle pass” buy you? I guess they made it so people can’t obtain it by just playing where before they could? Why is that something to be outraged about?





  • The person who predicted 70% chance of AI doom is Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI because of it not taking this seriously enough. The quote you have there is a statement by OpenAI, not by Kokotajlo, this is all explicit in the article. The idea that this guy is motivated by trying to do marketing for OpenAI is just wrong, the article links to some of his extensive commentary where he is advocating for more government oversight specifically of OpenAI and other big companies instead of the favorable regulations that company is pushing for. The idea that his belief in existential risk is disingenuous also doesn’t make sense, it’s clear that he and other people concerned about this take it very seriously.




  • I think a lot of people on hearing this sort of thing once or twice will shut off the game and never play again. To me it seems like a similar kind of situation to a website like a Lemmy instance that removes all the csam spam that gets posted, but not fast enough that most people never see it. In that situation you can’t tell users “just report and block”, there is still a big problem and there is no one that can take responsibility for it other than the people operating the service.

    I played thousands of games of Dota 2, and in that time I heard a woman speak probably like 5 times total, which honestly is very understandable on their part, but still unfortunate. Would be nice to play online games that are not de-facto filtering out everyone who isn’t willing to tolerate being periodically subjected to verbal abuse, especially when it’s extreme forms of verbal abuse.



  • I feel like reading statutes is unreliable because a lot of how the law works is how courts interpret the law, which can be very different from the commonsense interpretation of the letter of the law. Lacking broader context, I can’t know from just this exactly what the consequences might be. Here’s some parts that are possibly concerning though:

    The Commission may, in its discretion, prescribe the forms of any and all accounts, records, and memoranda to be kept by carriers subject to this chapter, including the accounts, records, and memoranda of the movement of traffic

    Not sure if this increases the ability of the government to spy on people through their ISPs or if that remains the same.

    (a) Requirement to restrict access (1) Prohibited conduct Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.

    Some states have been experimenting with broad bans on online porn sites and requiring those sites and also social media sites to demand id from all users, maybe this provision could give a future FCC the power to apply this sort of thing to the internet nationally? Although this section already explicitly mentions the internet which is confusing if this whole thing is only recently being made relevant to the internet.

    There are provisions about the FCC being able to come up with rules for the prevention of robocalls, maybe this could be generalized to prohibit some forms of automated network traffic?