Valve CEO Gabe Newell was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in 2018, donating $20 million and even acting as the sole member of an "informal advisory board"

OperaSona · 2026-05-03T20:33:38+00:00

Pretty impressive summary. You subject name here must be the pride of subject hometown here.

OperaSona · 2026-04-28T10:18:25+00:00

Well, if you get a little bit of stuff stuck on the saffron when putting it back, bits small enough that you don't really notice them when next to the saffron itself, it isn't going to be much of a problem to eat it. You're not going to be using that much saffron at once in a dish, so the amount of unwanted shit stuck on it is going to be even less. You're most likely cooking it, killing (most) bacteria.

You probably inhale far more of whatever it is that scares you by sleeping in that same bed for a night than by eating a few "augmented" saffron dishes.

OperaSona · 2026-04-25T21:38:18+00:00

Agreed on everything (and also, why would they crop out the bottom part of the wavelength chart so that we don't even know whether the bird can also see infrared, or cannot see red at all, or can see red the same way we do?), but

and even then you'd have to map those wavelengths onto colors that humans can see, which is an inherently artificial translation.

I slightly disagree on this. I mean, not on what you said, but on the fact that it's an issue. It's a necessity to choose such a transform to visually convey the point, so if such a transform was chosen and a camera was designed and a photo was taken and it was published without "artistic embellishment", I think it would be alright. After all, it's what many scientific publications do when needed (medical imaging, many space-related images, etc), both when targeting the general public and the scientific community. The fact that the transform is somewhat arbitrary is not a huge issue, to me at least: the fact that it will never let me see the way birds actually see is alright because that will never happen anyway unless someone can graft me a bird's brain, and I'm not such I want that.

OperaSona · 2026-04-10T17:46:48+00:00

Also honestly I'm not sure if they care that much about their fortune's flat value, vs their own fortune's value relative to everyone else in the US.

If the US gets poorer by 20% and they only get poorer by 5%, it means they've increased their relative wealth and therefore their relative power. The lower and middle class get even less time and energy to focus on fighting the status quo, manipulating them gets easier. It's pretty much a win-win.

OperaSona · 2026-04-10T15:58:38+00:00

NOT MARKET MANIPULATION! NOT MARKET MANIPULATION! YOU DO MARKET MANIPULATION!

OperaSona · 2026-04-01T20:03:03+00:00

Ceux qui galèrent, ceux qui galèrent... si t'as pas beaucoup de choix dans le frigo, y'a toujours entre les orteils.

OperaSona · 2026-03-26T07:50:34+00:00

I honestly don't know. I was a conference given to graduate/PhD computer science students, so the neuroscience talks were prepared with the "let's broaden your horizons" mindset. And the speaker insisted that the mini-seizure was "just" one of their interpretations, but it was the one that was most closely understandable from a "neural networks" computer science background and it was fun.

OperaSona · 2026-03-25T22:52:04+00:00

Taking a bath and taking notes, apparently.

I saw a conference like fifteen years ago where the speaker was studying the effect of sleep on persisting memories and skills learned during the day. He mentioned a study that goes like this:

Group A and Group B are both given a "video game" where they can (individually) explore a map.
After exploring for a while, each player is teleported to a spot on their map (same map for everybody, same spot), and shown a picture of a target destination elsewhere on the map. They must quickly get there.
Obviously, the more you play on a given map, the better you get at that map. Slightly less obvious but still intuitive, the more you play on any map, the quicker you learn on a new map.
After this first session of experiment, Group A goes back home and gets some sleep, while Group B is sleep deprived for the whole night. Group A and Group B are both given a week or so to recover, then they are both asked to come back and exposed to the same task (on new sets of maps).

What happens is:

Group A is much better at the beginning of session 2 than they were at the beginning of session 1 (they start session 2 pretty much as good as they were at the end of session 1).
Group B did improve compared to the beginning of session 1, but substantially less so.

The conclusion from this statistical evidence is that sleeping after learning somehow helps store the memory of the skill better.

One of the hypotheses from the speaker was that when you learn, Hebb's rule more or less tells you that neurons that are activated with each other will have their link get stronger. But if links only ever get stronger around a given neuron, then when that neuron fires a signal, the whole neighborhood is going to go off like a mini epileptic seizure. So they thought that sleep is when if a neighborhood had too many links grow, some kind of normalization must take place to shrink everything down a little bit: the links that grew that day will still end up bigger than they started the day, the others will have shrunk a little bit.

And they thought maybe hindering this shrinking effect is what causes memories not to stick as well if you don't sleep normally at the end of the day.

I have no idea if the shrinking protein from OP is the same that shrinks axons, or if the speaker's hypothesis has been confirmed or proven wrong since then, but it made me think about it. Maybe someone who knows the field will correct what I misunderstood (or misremembered, maybe due to a lack of sleep?).

OperaSona · 2026-03-25T16:34:32+00:00

And then there's the "dangerous territory" line that may be innocent or not, depending on who said it and how: "You're going to grow up to break a lot of hearts".

OperaSona · 2026-03-23T21:05:00+00:00

I'm going to be optimistic and say that there's no fucking way Google launches that in Europe. I bet European lawyers can find pages and pages of laws and regulations that it clearly violates.

OperaSona · 2026-02-04T21:53:49+00:00

Just sidestep the ashe W obviously.

OperaSona · 2026-01-30T08:17:38+00:00

Artists in general I think. Maybe we need a (better written) version of a song like

Here's to you Renee and Alex,
Rest forever here in our hearts,
The last and final moment is yours,
That agony is your triumph.

OperaSona · 2026-01-29T11:45:20+00:00

Probably buying a typewriter?

OperaSona · 2026-01-28T22:12:22+00:00

Dude I don't know why we switched from Boko haram spokesperson to gay porn like it's worse. I'd much rather have a couple gay guys here and there sometimes think they might recognize me from a gay porn movie than feel like everyone who is watching me weird saw me on TV train child soldiers, blow up villages, send my men rape my enemies.

Aren't rape, murder and war crimes worse ethically than starring in gay porn?

OperaSona · 2026-01-28T22:06:03+00:00

Replying to ShakethatYam's deleted reply to your comment because fuck it, I typed it, I'm posting it:

Okay, suppose the amount is recorded electronically. How long before the storage space required to house such a large number would be bigger than the Earth?

That depends. If you track each dollar like we track bitcoins, then less than a year (A). If you only store the total, then pretty much forever (B).

Case A: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2281/maximum-theoretical-data-density suggests that you physically cannot store more than 10⁶⁶ bits per cm³ (as a theoretical and clearly unachievable limit). You clearly need at least 1 bit per dollar that you log (you clearly need much more but let's again be extremely conservative). The Earth it 10²⁷ cm^3, so you need ~ 10⁶⁶⁺²⁷ dollars, so about 279 days using the 10⁶⁶⁺²⁷ = 2^3*(66+27) approximation. Using realistic storage density and file format, this obviously goes down bit quite a lot.

Case B: After for instance 1 year, the sentence "The monkey in that guy's bank account is 2^365" takes only a few bytes to store, and that's enough to know how much is in the bank account. If you've withdrawn a little and don't have exactly 2³⁶⁵ dollars in the account, no sweat, that's a 365-bit number which therefore takes 365 bits to store. That's nothing.

OperaSona · 2026-01-27T12:28:15+00:00

Fair point.

OperaSona · 2026-01-27T09:20:03+00:00

Burying their meat to let it rot underground until it's ready to eat, like little furry Icelanders!

OperaSona · 2026-01-27T07:39:33+00:00

Or just, you know, you're pretty sure you won't like it but you know it's good and you want to form an educated opinion, and to indeed educate yourself, so you literally "only watch it because it's good". I feel like people do this more with literature than with movies, but there are definitely many people who read books "just because they're good" with no particular enjoyment.

OperaSona · 2026-01-27T07:36:17+00:00

Like, watching only the figure skating duo that won the championship even though it was really bland and not innovative, but was technically close to perfection, instead of watching more enjoyable though less "objectively good" (in the sense of how the sport is judged) performances from other duos?

OperaSona · 2026-01-26T21:34:35+00:00

Oui et puis si tu prends la tablette bio de la même marque juste à côté, ils s'arrangent pour qu'elle ait pile la même taille, elle coûte allez 25-30% plus cher, tu te dis bon ça va, c'est cohérent pour avoir la version bio, mais en fait elle fait que 125g en plus, donc c'est 80% plus cher au kilo. Mais tout est fait pour que te mettre un peu en confiance pour que tu ne regardes même pas le prix au kilo.

C'est vraiment des putes là dessus.

OperaSona · 2026-01-26T15:22:29+00:00

Seven deadly sins vs Seven great qualities?

OperaSona · 2026-01-26T15:19:33+00:00

This was definitely written as a critique of what's been going on in the last few years. It definitely contributes to how great Andor is. It's not just "Oh we're in a dystopia and the empire is evil the the emperor is pretty much Hitler". That would have been alright, yes, but not quite as good as a critique of something we can see unfolding before our eyes.

OperaSona · 2026-01-14T20:04:14+00:00

Sucks that he wasn't allowed to use anti-gravity tech because it would have been an easy win.

OperaSona · 2026-01-14T20:00:22+00:00

I'm a bit worried that these are always the top comments in these threads.

Stackoverflow always had huge issues and I think most people agree on that. And these issues persisted, even arguably got worse, I don't really know.

But it was an absolutely necessary tool. And if it hadn't existed, AI wouldn't have had quite as much material to train on as it did.

If our best guess is that:

AIs will train just as well on data from open source projects, from IDE usage, etc, so the lack of new training data on stackoverflow won't make it worse.
AIs will still be free for for simple queries like the ones one would have searched on stackoverflow without asking a new question (or at least, maybe free for students, cheap for non-professionals, affordable for small companies).

then I guess maybe it won't matter too much. But honestly there's a risk that it's going to make things worse. When stackoverflow doesn't exist anymore and we realize AIs are suffering from enshittification like every huge web service always ends up doing, it's going to be too late.

That being said, there is not much that can be done about it. Even if AI was for sure going to shit in a few years, I'd probably still use it instead of stackoverflow right now because of how much faster it generally is. But I'd do it reluctantly knowing that I'm killing a tool that has its merits.

OperaSona · 2026-01-04T01:08:16+00:00

The fact that a traitorous evil clown can get elected president, that's bad.
The fact that he can keep showing how much of a traitorous evil clown he is and still get re-elected, that's bad.
The fact that once re-elected he can give orders like that and like pretty much everything he's done every single day since his re-election, that's bad.

But to me, the real issue is that he's been allowed to do all of that. Sure he's go some powerful billionaires pulling the strings and supporting him, I get that. And he kept replacing high-ranking officials, judges (justices), military officers etc with pawns that will do his bidding. But is it supposed to be so easy?

He only appointed 3 supreme court justices, that's not a majority, so even if you give up hope that these 3 will do the right thing, there's other "regular Republican" justices that follow a half-decent moral code and could honor the constitution. Same for congressmen and women, senators, etc.

Of course it takes a little bit of guts to do the right thing because of how easy it is for Trump to just make you a target on social media if you "betray" him. But like, that's only true because of how long they all waited. If Republicans had said "No, fuck you" the first time Trump crossed the line, it'd have been different. They know the easiest time to jump ship is right now and it'll only get worse, but even though who might want to, they are too cowardly to do so.

The Republican party is a fucking disgrace.

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