as alive as you need me to be
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Kind of a long shot, but you have ever picked up a unicorn, at the Unicorn?
Been a while since I've been in Seattle, hah.
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Huh.
So you're occasional unicorn wranglers, basically?
Hadn't heard of monogamish.
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Never heard of 'Bryan Gozzling' and just goddamnit, now that is a pornstar name, ahahah!
Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.
You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.
You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.
Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?
You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.
RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.
Moore's Law is not only dead, it has inverted.
Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.
PC games are software.
Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.
Proton can only do so much.
... and Metal basically can't do that that much.
Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.
They haven't really.
They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.
Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.
By 'real AI', I presume you mean AGI, a digital intelligence that is actually superior to human intelligence, ie, is more intelligent than the smartest human and has all our collective knowledge and is able to comprehend it and evaluate it more consistently than any of us... and also is thus capable of improving itself and becoming more and more superintelligent.
That is still scifi, that is not real.
What we currently call 'AI' is basically an extremely expensive, lackluster pantomime of that, that fools fools into thinking it is the other thing... mostly because it is sycophantic and very confident, ie, it uses well known 'hacks' in human psychology, where confidence, breadth of knowledge, usage of technical terms... you know, con man techniques ... are confused for actual competence.
If we had a real AGI, it would be be capable of both hacking into all the military information systems of the world, and tricking humans into nuking each other... and it would also be capable of making actual novel improvements in software, hardware, engineering, physics, social engineering, etc, and could decide to be a kind of benevolent dictator of the entire economy, that it would command and control.
We have no capacity to model the morality that would emerge in an actual superintelligence, because we definitionally would not be able to keep up with attempting to understand how it thinks.
Thats where the whole 'is AI the potential best thing ever or would it become SkyNet' problem comes from.
... But we are not there yet.
We are at... basically, a very fancy autocomplete algorithm that can analyze huge datasets reasonably well, compared to an average human, but also makes all kinds of mistakes, hallucinates 'facts' in order to generate more coherent things to say, and these hallucinations routinely trick non subject matter expert humans into just going along with it, again, like a con artist, like a fast talking 'influencer' pitching selling you a course or giving you some kind of 'advice'.
And currently, what is going on, is that we are pouring I think at this point trillions of dollars into 'AI', under the premise that it is AGI, that it will be capable of generating massive returns on investment and productivity increases...
... but the actual results are turning out to be, all averaged for everywhere it has been implemented... somewhere between a net productivity loss, to meagre productivity gains.
What that means is that the AI Mania is the biggest bubble, the most severe malinvestment of economic resources in the history of humanity.
When that pops, we basically formally transition into cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism.
AI is a tool, a device, a machine. Thus, it depends on how you use it, what you use it for.
Right now, we have a whole lot of companies saying they are laying off workers because we don't need them anymore... this is broadly a lie.
People are being laid off because the economy, the real economy, is already contracting, basically due to the collapse of the US as the undisputed world hegemon.
AI, as a broad, socioeconomic force... is mostly a smokescreen, the ultimate promise of bread and circuses, that masks a gigantic wealth transfer and restructing of economic and political power.
AI as a tool can be used for good, in specific use cases.
But it broadly isn't, because people are fooled by the conversation machine into thinking it can do things that there is no evidence it can do, because people do not understand its limitations and flaws, and then they plug it into their immensely shitty business processes, and just assume it will not break things when it tries to use them.
AI, as it currently exists, is essentially a false or trickster God of Capitalism.
I mean, I have certainly wandered through many an abandonded, functionally cursed place when I was homeless for about 2 years.
And I could have just brought a portable radio and randomly dialed through FM/AM stations, pausing for a few second on something stable, then going back to static.
... but I didn't need a radio to see the echoes of what had happened at the places I'd been.
'Environmental Storytelling' isn't just a thing in video games.
TIL my comment is the top comment.
But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.
Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:
Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.
If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.
The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.
In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.
Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.
Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the 'Relay' is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations...
... but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.
Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?
Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.
If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.
If you just see ActivityPub as 'normal social media that can talk to other servers'... you don't get it.
- There's no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.
- Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more 'small d' democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.
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I just now saw this and... that is a much erudite explanation than I gave... I will have to check out this Corey Robin.
I think these ideas, and what I said, are mutually true.
What do you think?
Basically, yes, conservatives either literally are losers or fear loss, to horrifically paraphrase Robin... and also, their replacement identity, their group identity that has supplanted their personal identity, which includes being directed to war against certain ideas and concepts, well, they can't not perform those ideas, otherwise, its another existentual criss.
First, they lost or failed at something core to their personal identity, then they subsume themself into the aggrieved group identity... and if they renege against or fail at the performance of the group identity... well now they have another existential crisis, suffer another kind of identity loss.
Conservatism, as a trauma response.
I just also want to note the immense cognitive dissonance between the actual, fear-based conservative mindset of 'zero-sum'... and their purported belief in the 'free market', much of which totally fails to be any kind of logically coherent without the idea that... an unregulated market generally (or even always) leads to a 'positive-sum' situation.
They lie about how they actually think, and tell you the thing that very often actually is zero-sum in reality... is broadly mutually beneficial... and that you're wrong/evil if you disagree.
Its... all projection.
Quite a logical short circuit.
No, it doesn't, because, you used 'embraced' when the it would be more accurate to say that Dorsey started and oversaw the development of BlueSky.
Hitler didn't go fully nuts into megalomaniacal monument planning, overuling his generals, micromanaging superweapon projects, untill ... what, 1942ish?
Hitler embraced the autobahn, he didn't oversee it as an involved executive, he appointed Fritz Todt to make actual decisions and lead the project.
He also didn't invent it or found it. It was a thing that already existed, that he thought was a good idea, despite himself having really nothing to do with its early development.
(also just 'holy shit' at immediately jumping to literally Hitler as a comparison. I don't even have that much smoke for Dorsey, sheesh)
Dorsey, on the other hand, started BlueSky, and ran BlueSky the way all VC/'Angel Investors' run their projects: You can't really say no to them, what they say is basically understood to be what you do.... or, they leave, as Dorsey eventually did.
He was obviously frustrated that he was not being listened to, on this project that he set up.
You can't be frustrated that people aren't listening to you if you're not saying things, giving guidance, suggesting policies... that people are disregarding.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-bluesky-twiiter-nostr-interview-2024-5
Very early in Twitter's history, Dorsey imagined that Twitter could be an open-source protocol that wasn't controlled by anyone, instead of a venture-backed, for-profit company. But that didn't happen. And later on, when Dorsey got frustrated while running the for-profit version of Twitter, he imagined that Twitter could help start an independent, open-source protocol version of itself — Bluesky.
But then — in Dorsey's telling — he got frustrated that Bluesky was doing things like the old Twitter. Things like raising money, and moderating what happened on its platform, and having a board. Which Dorsey was on.
Key Takeaways
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter, now X, and later founded and funded an X rival, Bluesky.
He left the Bluesky board on Saturday and announced it on X.
Dorsey explained that the trouble started when Bluesky started moderating content.
I really have no idea how anyone can pretend that BlueSky wasn't Dorsey's idea, his project, his baby.
Oh wait, no, I know.
If thing becomes bad, then person I like wasn't actually involved with it that much, therefore person I like is not bad.
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I'd argue that a lot of 'Alchemy' had actually been very spiritual/religious/philosophical from the start.
It was... more of a way of trying to understand the world, in a very broad, total, and inventive way, with connection to and focus on the material, but much also focused on and devoted to the divine.
The whole idea was to try and define the rules that bridged the gap, if that makes any sense.
Its not that 'Alchemy' diverged or emerged as the spiritual side of proto-Chemistry expiriments...
... its more that the materialistic parts of Alchemy that 'worked' grew out of it , into Chemistry, the 'spiritual' parts of it that 'worked', grew into Religious or Philosophical ideas, some quite popular and influential, others very, very niche.
Alchemy also isn't always related to or involving Astrology.
Sometimes those mixed.
But not always.
... and the Freemasons, other weird covert orders like that... I mean, their ideas, rituals, customs, symbolism... largely are evolutions of spritual/religious/philosophical concepts that were present in Alchemical writings.
As an example, its why most of the Founding Fathers were Deists.
They either literally were Freemasons, or, believed in the Freemasonic concept of a Deity... you actually still to this day can't be a Freemason and an Atheist/Agnostic at the same time, you must believe in a God.
The Freemasonic 'Great Work' is... to transform society into a more righteous, more divinely aligned society....according to their own conception of what that means.
The Masonic Founding Fathers literally believed that the creation of the USA ... was them doing that.
Its all over the symbolism that still exists in many of our monuments, on our currency....the all seeing eye of providence, the unfinished pyramid, "E Pluribus Unum", forging a new society by mixing together a variety of peoples, as if making a superior metal alloy.
Alchemy etymologically derives from al-kīmīā, الكیمیاء.
Which itself etymylogically has ... a couple of likely/potential meanings, possibly simultaneously.
Either:
The Black Land, referring to the fertile terrain near the Nile River.
Khemet being the Egyptian word for Egypt, the land.
Or,
Transmutation, meaning a process by which one can create or transform into or reunite with the basically Platonic Ideal form...
Or,
Metallurgy, basically.
So if you were to try and translate the term 'Alchemy' into modern English, you'd basically end up with 'The Study of Ancient Knowledge of Transformation' ... something like that.
Where you could be transforming either your soul, or literal metal, or both.
It does not help that there is the famous 'Noble Lie' from Plato's hugely influential Republic, where the idea is posited that the Gods made some people's essence out of gold, some of silver, some brass and iron... that that false idea could serve as a grand lie by which social order could be maintained.
So you've kind of got metals and souls intertwined, conceptually, going back to something like 375 BCE.
I guess what I am trying to say its that it is nearly impossible to try to describe 'Alchemy' without being anachronistic.
They did not think of things in the same way that we do today.
PS:
You wanna know arguably the most famous alchemist of all time?
Isaac Newton.
Spent by far most of his life... studying Alchemical texts.
Calculus?
An undergrad capstone project.
Managing the monetary system of England?
Retirement plan.
Physics? Optics?
Post-Grad work.
Now alchemy... he spent like 20 to 30 years just buried in alchemical books.
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That's kind of amazing, honestly.
She is basically right.
Yeah, a lot of 'Alchemy' did involve essentially proto-Chemistry, but a whole hell of a lot of it was also ....basically, a way to hide being a heretic of one kind or another.
What we now call Philosophy and Religion... were not really distinct concepts back then, they were interwoven.
And it is absolutely true that a good deal of 'Alchemists' had... very esoteric ideas about spirituality, and they did offer the kind of mundane, materialistic outer meaning, vs the exclusive, spiritual, inner, hidden meaning, in their texts....where the metals and such do sort of transmute (hah) into having analagous conceptual meanings.
You also have to remember that just literacy itself was not as commonplace as it is today, and you might literally be the only person within 500 miles who has an actual copy or translation of a specific text.
You could not have had the Rennaisssance without the preservation and translation of many texts done by many 'Alchemists'.
If anyone is interested, I strongly recommend the youtuber Esoterica.
That hurt my brain to read, but I think, basically yes.
Its a cabal of mostly vertically integrated companies vs basically a horizontal monopoly that gatekeeps all of them, that'd they've all tried and failed or are currently failing to break through.
And yeah, petulant publishers does sound like a match to me.
Its basically mob tactics, just higher class.
Find your nearest cat cafe, introduce a 'business proposal'.
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Fear of non-conformity.
They value being in some kind of 'tribe' to a literally irrational extent.
Hence, black and white, ingroup vs outgroup thinking.
Then combine that with half of them hate themselves (mostly because of the peer pressure that comes from their tribe) and are literally in a suicidal apocalyptic death cult.
So when the death cult says 'destroy', they don't want to lose their group identity, because without that, they are nothing, so, they destroy.
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Amidalin.
Amygdalia.
A McDonalds.
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POV:
You just aggravated someone with an 'undersized' amygdala.
... but that only makes sense if you genuienly believe that Rockstar and/or EA have less cash than Valve, and/or Rockstar and EA never had their own relevant liscensing agreements.
I may be wrong, but as best I can tell, there is no precedent in UK law for a platform/retailer being found liable under the cited Section 20, unless the content being distributed/retransmitted/sold itself did not have proper liscensing arrangements, and it can be proven that the platform/retailer/retransmitter knew that to be the case.
I kind of find it unlikely that Rockstar and EA did/do not have liscensing agreements in place.
My theory?
The entire Publically Traded gaming world seems to be mobilizing and coordinating efforts to get every kind of secondary organization they are connected to, to sue Valve, right now.
Because they are all financially imploding, and they're trying to do as much damage as possible to Valve, who isn't a part of their club, as a means of trying to level the playing field.
All these people on the boards of top gaming companies... are also on the boards of other top gaming companies, they know each other, they have people and contacts who sit in all the gaming industry lobbying groups, and the astroturf fake 'gamer advocacy' groups, in the IP rights groups, etc etc.
Well I hadn't heard of Feeld either!
But if you ever do go back to the Unicorn...
Oh no.
I was gonna say you have to try the Deep Fried Snickers, but apparently I've been away from Seattle for longer than I realized... no longer on the menu =(