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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

    As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.


  • I don’t necessarily disagree that we may figure out AGI, and even that LLM research may help us get there, but frankly, I don’t think an LLM will actually be any part of an AGI system.

    Because fundamentally it doesn’t understand the words it’s writing. The more I play with and learn about it, the more it feels like a glorified autocomplete/autocorrect. I suspect issues like hallucination and “Waluigis” or “jailbreaks” are fundamental issues for a language model trying to complete a story, compared to an actual intelligence with a purpose.










  • A lot of assuming that this project was dead serious in here… he’s a college student, presumably working on a senior project or something. Hooking up a glasses display, to his phone with a mic and the ChatGPT API isn’t a massive endeavour, either, and this is funny as all hell if you assume he’s mocking the industry and being tongue-in-cheek. RizzGPT? Charisma As A Service?

    Point being, don’t despair for this guy, he’s hilarious!


  • Ah yeah, there is some of that? Not totally unfounded, although my understanding is more that Angels know God is there, and always have, so they don’t have to have faith, and they don’t have the “sin nature” we do as a result of Adam and Eve eating that apple. Basically they don’t seem to have that natural selfishness we do, so their relationship with God isn’t as personal, and obedience to him comes much more easily. We are more “like God” (“made in his image”, in Genesis terms). As such, those who do follow God will “rank higher” than angels, whatever that actually looks like.

    That said… it’s a bit ridiculous to assert that they don’t have any free will, because a bunch of them rebelled against God. It wouldn’t surprise me if Catholic ideology disagrees with me here though, although I don’t think there’s much of that in the actual text of the Bible.


  • Happy to help! I like studying this stuff, and it’s fun to share it when I get the chance.

    Honestly, I suspect the “demons torture humans in hell” probably originates from their seeming to want to torture the possessed.

    Because in the biblical conception of hell, it’s very much not “demons torture humans” it’s more like a lake of fire to torture the demons, which unfortunate humans are also thrown into. There’s no organization or structure whatsoever. Also, nobody is currently there, humans are just… dead, or in purgatory/Gehenna, a sort of neutral waiting place, waiting to be raised back to life at the end, and sorted then.

    Their role biblically seems to be just… acting against God, out of spite for being kicked out, perhaps? They seem to act to tempt humans not to find/love/follow God. Not much is given as to their motivations though, the Biblical authors truly aren’t that interested in them, besides as a warning about temptation. A shame, as they’re obviously just… fascinating to learn about, but it’s not a priority for them to write about.

    They also aren’t given much credit, either. Rather than the “epic struggle of God vs Satan” we like to characterize, it’s more like… Satan and demons are permitted to roam about, but are absolutely beneath God, and can/will eventually be rounded up and thrown out very quickly. They’re characterized as accidentally playing a role in Gods plan, and given tentative leash for that reason. Satan apparently is even still allowed to visit heaven, and argues with God? See Job. Him getting locked out of heaven permanently is one of the kickoff moments of Revelation/the biblical apocalypse. Again, not much detail on this relationship, and honestly some of even this much detail is speculation.

    The modern conception of “hell” is quite interesting, as it’s mostly just imaginative fiction, likely heavily inspired by pagan cultures that merged with Christianity as it spread across the world.


  • Surprisingly, a lot of the creepy media is fairly accurate, though extreme. Demons aren’t prominent, we know they are angels who rebelled with Lucifer, and were cast out, so that would be their appearance, but in reference to possession, we basically have those that Jesus encountered and a few his apostles drove out in his name later on.

    And what we see are people behaving almost like animals, screaming, shouting, with an inhuman strength to break chains or whatever locals have tried to contain them with, and inflicting a lot of self harm. There’s a woman who would throw herself into fires, a man who had 100 demons in him (where “I am legion” comes from") who would throw himself onto rocks and off cliffs and cut himself, etc.

    The more manufactured elements are the head twisting, anything to do with pentagrams, and honestly a lot of the hostility to others. People usually steered clear, but demon possessed individuals generally did more self harm than harming others, with cases where Jesus would meet them within cities, and they weren’t surrounded by dead people or a panicking mob or anything. They also don’t “haunt” or hunt people like they do in movies, but are usually extremely obvious.

    Anyway, that’s my experience purely from biblical account, off the top of my head, I’m sure others can add more detail or examples.



  • Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

    • Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
    • Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
    • Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

    Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they’ve already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn’t insanely hostile. Guess we’ll see how this plays out from here.


  • Having used tailwind a little bit, I have nothing but praise for it. Effortless copy/pasting of components with confidence, really nice look by default, easy tweaking, absolutely no management or planning required to organize your CSS, and it’s all right there, directly on your html, never anywhere you have to hunt for it. Feels very freeing to just… not think about CSS at all.

    And the “clutter” really is fine, modern IDEs with good syntax highlighting, plus a tailwind extension to help complete the class names and clean up accidental duplicates or conflicting properties, and you’re good.



  • I also feel like a lot of the value of chronological is lost if I think it’s algorithmic recommendations. If I don’t know I’m browsing the latest? I’ll likely just think the algorithm is serving up some garbage. Especially somewhere like Facebook, where people haven’t really been curating their feed for years, just… following whoever to be polite and letting the algorithm take care of it.


  • Eh, I’d assume the comparison isn’t flattering. I think the point of this article is to argue you don’t need ElasticSearch to implement a competent Full Text Search for most applications. Splitting hairs over a few milliseconds would just distract from that point, when most applications should be prioritizing simplicity and maintainability over such tiny gains in a reasonable dataset.

    Might be interesting to try to analyze at exactly what point elasticsearch becomes significantly useful, however. Maybe at the point where it saves a full tenth of a second? Or where it’s returning in half the time? Could be an interesting follow up article.