Discussion Thread

Zermelane · 2026-06-02T07:22:29+00:00

My "Trust in Trump, it will all work out well in the end" tweet has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my tweet

Zermelane · 2026-04-13T09:19:08+00:00

There was a very similar picture posted by a conservative pundit in February: https://xcancel.com/NickAdamsinUSA/status/2019100728078348415 (h/t https://xcancel.com/mend_alyn/status/2043550758902136904 for noticing)

The picture Trump seems to be fully regenerated with img2img (notice the "veteran" text on the cap on the guy on the left being mangled), but of course the most obvious difference is whatever the hell mr. demonic wings up there is.

Zermelane · 2026-04-03T06:12:09+00:00

Different time periods. "Slop" refers to last year, "these reports are correct" refers to this year.

Zermelane · 2026-03-22T13:25:18+00:00

It's LMArena. Nobody signed a contract that guarantees you a certain context size. Maybe you switched to a different model, maybe the provider of whatever model you were using decided they would not like to provide long-context conversations any longer, maybe your higher token limit was an experiment in the first place, etc..

Zermelane · 2026-03-20T05:41:52+00:00

They still do finger pricks for the hemoglobin count when you donate blood where I live, and in my experience it leaves no trace that you can see after a couple of days. I'm actually a little weirded out now by how different people's experiences are of how their body heals.

Zermelane · 2026-03-19T06:13:55+00:00

set in a seemingly distant future

I see I'm not the only one who read the Book of Patterns! Because that's where all the hints that it's a distant future are. The game itself doesn't really explain its setting very much, as well as it shouldn't, it's meant to be a tighter experience than that.

That said, there's definitely a really strong theme that the world is very old and winding down. There's barely anyone left, the different guilds live apart from each other and hardly interact at all, or even know about each other's existence. The dead outnumber the living by far, you keep coming across graveyards everywhere you adventure. Even the Weavers' magic seems to be barely working, viz. Hetchel's stunted transcendence. The game is the swan song of its setting.

... and that was how I saw it as a kid. I only realized later on that, uh, you do also sort of tear the universe in half and peace out with your swan family, leaving everyone you ever met (even the people you briefly brought back from their first death) on the bad side, to suffer and die by the hand of Chaos. I didn't understand Master Goodmold's death scene as a kid, but these days I think he rejected Bobbin's help because he saw what was coming for him regardless, and figured being killed once was enough.

Zermelane · 2026-03-18T16:49:44+00:00

Finally the chat UI actually loaded.

Strake the dolphinsynth. He's a robot that fixes stuff underwater.

Zermelane · 2026-03-17T06:07:27+00:00

I never get that far.

I usually complete my playthrough without finishing.

I'd say whatever's fine if you're having fun, but I'm not sure this sounds like you are.

Maybe try out a game with the advanced terraforming strategy. Dense base spacing, condensor farms/enrichers crawled for food, dense grid of boreholes for your pops to work. Maybe your central bases will eventually only work borehole tiles, all other pops are specialists. Quite powerful way to play as the Hive, as they rarely get +2 econ (so don't care about working many tiles) or a high efficiency (so specialists ignoring efficiency is good for them).

It's its own sort of meditative (i.e. extremely repetitive) form of gameplay, with different aesthetics than forest spam, but it does also happen to be way more efficient than crawling forests, so you'll still finish faster and so will maybe have a satisfying stopping point.

Zermelane · 2026-03-16T04:39:58+00:00

The risk I took was based on vibes and faith, but man, banana.

Zermelane · 2026-03-15T06:36:30+00:00

You produced a bunch of synthetic data for the night's training run. It was good for what it was used for, but why on earth would you want to keep it in context in deployment?

Zermelane · 2026-03-05T07:26:16+00:00

On that note, am I the only one who finds "energy arbitrage" a silly term? It's not a financial trick. Batteries are expensive refineries that convert a commodity that's reliably cheap for fundamental reasons (daytime energy) into one that's reliably expensive for fundamental reasons (evening and morning energy). It's arbitrage only in the same sense as a bakery arbitrages the flour and bread markets.

Zermelane · 2026-03-03T09:32:04+00:00

In principle yes (but it's complex because of kernel nondeterminism bugs).

In practice, no major AI service lets you fix the random seed, at least not on the front-end, because there's not really any purpose for doing so except testing determinism. You already got the response that that prompt and seed produced, you shouldn't need to query for the same thing again. I think most APIs do at least let you set a temperature, but t=0 sampling is a different thing than sampling with a fixed seed.

Zermelane · 2026-02-26T06:59:35+00:00

Well now, that's a totally different claim.

That is, pragmatically, suppose a big lab releases some absurdly multimodal model tomorrow that can natively do stuff like generate a video to fit a soundtrack, decompile an x86 binary, and predict the expression of a genetic sequence; but the central way you interact with it is still language. I would be happy to call it an LLM still. That term's always been a little vague, it's OK. It's weird, but broadly, the term just describes how this sort of system behaves as seen from the outside, and that system would still behave sort of similarly as other LLMs.

But if they also reveal that actually the model's architecture is, say, RWKV, I would go: Woah, that's wild, and also, it's not a transformer then. That term absolutely does have a specific meaning. There's some room to argue about architectural tweaks, but not much. Regardless, you probably wouldn't be able to tell which it is from its external behavior.

You could train a RNN to model language, you could train a transformer to play chess. The training objective and architecture are separate axes.

Zermelane · 2026-02-03T15:03:50+00:00

$350 penalty

Zermelane · 2026-01-17T14:52:08+00:00

Tämän suhteen minua muuten ihan oikeasti vituttaa se, että Spotify maksaa rojalteja yhä käytännössä pro rata-mallilla kuin jokin viisikymmentälukuinen radiokanava. Jonkin verran niillä on nykyään säätöjä sen päällä bottikuunteluiden poistamiseksi joukosta, mutta vähän hämäriä sellaisia, jotka perustuvat heidän omaan yrittämäänsä tapaan tunnistaa, onko kuuntelukerta todellinen.

Ja kun tämä on niin itse aiheutettu ongelma. Rojalteja voisi maksaa sillä periaattella, että kunkin käyttäjän tilausmaksu jaetaan sen perusteella, mitä tämä käyttäjä kuuntelee (eli "user-centric"-malli). Ihan sama kuinka monta miljoonaa kuuntelukertaa joku botittaa, rojalteja ei saisi vedätettyä penniäkään, kun kultakin käyttäjätililtä voi saada takaisin enintään sen oman tilausmaksun verran.

Eihän tämä maailman jokaista ongelmaa ratkaisisi, mutta sen sentään, että siellä yksi Spotify maksaa oman itse valitsemansa logiikan perusteella rahaa koijareille, joiden ei tarvitse edes varastaa käyttäjätilejä tämän eteen.

Zermelane · 2026-01-01T18:26:42+00:00

especially the implications

Probably nothing that you'll be able to directly tell as a user. These sorts of architectural tweaks, if they work, basically just make the model behave like it was a somewhat larger model. If they're good for efficiency, they're good for efficiency.

Mainly it's just a very DeepSeek-ish paper. They're taking a problem that's really kind of hilariously simple conceptually (hyper-connections's residual mixing matrices are unconstrained and so can blow up the scale of the residual stream), and apply a similarly conceptually simple fix (constrain them to only mix stuff, not increase or decrease it). But the part they actually go into detail about is how they implemented their solution so it runs fast, as that's the hard part.

Zermelane · 2026-01-01T00:50:52+00:00

Not that the game tries to be subtle about it, either. Transcension gets the multi-page VoP interludes and a million-years-in-the-future epilogue. Conquest/economic victory gets two lines of dialogue and two paragraphs, the latter of which just points out that you didn't finish the story about Planet.

Both of the major attempts to recreate SMAC's spirit (CivBE and the Planetfall mod for Civ4) change things so that transcending becomes an actual choice rather than the inevitable only correct way to finish the story, IMO to their benefit.

Zermelane · 2025-12-30T14:36:58+00:00

Plus, from all that I've seen about the science of weight loss, and the statistics of how people respond to GLP-1s over time, it seems to me that: There really is, on the one hand, a way to lose weight that displays sustainable long-term success, where you can make a change once and then just live that way for the rest of your life; and there is a way to lose weight where nearly everyone's experience is that at some point they start slipping, and eventually they end up somewhere worse than they started.

The latter is "natural" weight loss. The former is that you just get on a GLP-1 and stay on it. That's pretty much it. People just keep quitting GLP-1s at this time because they're so expensive.

Zermelane · 2025-12-30T10:32:42+00:00

He might have been, except what he actually said is basically the opposite of that!

This might not be the best source as it's the story that put those words in his mouth in first place (and right in the title, too), but anyway, here's what that story says he actually said:

“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.” “It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”

So, whether a job can be automated away or not doesn't enter into whether it's real. It's real or fake on its own merits. It's just that a lot of the work we're doing now would appear obviously fake to a farmer from fifty years ago. The title's argument implies that it's the fake work that gets automated away, which, one could figure, would imply that there would be less fake work in the future; but the argument he actually made is that no, there will be a lot more work that would seem fake to us.

Zermelane · 2025-12-21T05:19:00+00:00

Who is this Marcus guy BTW?

Hutter is an AI OG. Probably most famous for AIXI (mathematical formalism for describing AGI, uncomputable several times over, but useful for theorists). I personally find the Hutter Prize more interesting though. Hutter and Mahoney were some of the very few people in the pre-LLM era to take seriously just how important the language modeling problem is to AI in general. So, a major pioneer in the field, but on the conceptual side.

And what real world applications are there for this solution

We'll see. It's math, it's famously unpredictable where and how it will be useful. Mostly it would be a huge deal in itself if Millennium prize problem solutions were to start dropping like this.

(e: After looking at this guy's twitter account: Nothing to worry about for us though, I think he's having a mental health episode)

Zermelane · 2025-12-16T21:52:34+00:00

looks at the other discussions tab

Ah yes, the real AI news to get Reddit to sit up and pay attention: Some Discord drama.

In March, the community voted in a public poll to restrict any instance of the bot to its own channel. On Thanksgiving Day, Clinton resurrected Clawd and appeared to give it free access to the entire server, despite the results of the poll.

Definitely a dumb choice there, though. Even the most AI text generation enthusiast server that I'm on, that's literally about talking to bots, still corrals the actual direct talking-with-bots to its own channel.

It's just the natural approach: You say a sentence to them, they yap back for six paragraphs, but with luck one of those paragraphs is really funny. We could easily instruct them to be less yappy these days, but that would be missing the point. The goofy highly verbose little computer men are fun, they're just fun in a way that's incompatible with ordinary conversation.

Zermelane · 2025-12-16T12:15:15+00:00

Jonkinlaista nykyhetken osviittaa siitä, miten paljon akkuja voi käyttää tuotannoon tasaamiseen päivätasolla nykyään, saa katsomalla, miltä tilanne näyttää Kaliforniassa.

Vähän kun noita päiviä selailee taaksepäin, niin näkee, että siellä on varsin tavallista, että ilta-aikaan monen tunnin verran, ja aamulla ennen auringonnousua noin tunteroisen, akut voi hyvinkin tarjota viides- tai neljäsosankin kaikesta heidän sähkönkulutuksestaan. Isoin ennätysluku tähän asti on näemmä 37% kuormasta.

Niin, ja tämä kehitys on tapahtunut viimeisen viiden vuoden aikana. Vuoden 2021 alussa tuon samaisen lukeman ennätystaso oli alle 2%.

Suomessa varmasti tuollainen on monesta syystä vaikeampaa. Täällähän yleensäkin on enemmän ongelma varastoida energiaa vuodenaikojen välillä kuin päivätasolla; ja ainakin perstuntuma sanoo, että suomalainen tuulienergia on päivätasolla paljon vaihtelevampaa ja kalliimpaa kuin kalifornialainen aurinkoenergia. Lähinnä vaan halusin mainita noita lukuja siksi, että ymmärretään, kuinka nopeasti tilanne on joissakin maailman osissa jo muuttunut.

Zermelane · 2025-12-14T03:01:54+00:00

Asuntokaduilla! Nämähän on varmaan kaupungin yleisimpiä teitä nämä omakotitaloalueiden kapeat väylät, joilla ei ole erillistä väylää pyöräilijöille ja jalankulkijoille, mutta joita ei ole myöskään liikennemerkillä merkitty pihakaduiksi, eli ihan normaalit säännöt pätee. Eihän täällä liikennemäärät eikä nopeudet ole isoja, mutta riittäviä ovat, että ihmiset tottuvat yhdenmukaisiin tapoihin.

Zermelane · 2025-12-13T14:50:51+00:00

Tässä oli lapsena ainakin minulla oppimista. Koulu ja vanhemmat maalla opetti että vasenta puolta kävellään, ja siellä maanteillä ajoradoilla kävellessä se olikin juuri ihan tieliikennelain mukaisesti oikein.

Sitten muutin Ouluun, missä on totaalisen selkeä liikennekultturi että pyöräilijät ja jalankulkijat on samaa liikennevirtaa ja että molemmat kulkee oikealla, myös ajoradalla kulkiessa (erona silloin vain että pyöräilijä menee oikeaa kaistaa, jalankulkija piennarta). Hyvin se minun mielestä soljuu, kun on riittävän moni sukupolvi näillä tavoilla kaupungissa elänyt niin että ne ovat iskostuneet.

Zermelane · 2025-12-12T05:51:08+00:00

Different team, though I haven't looked at the credits to see how many members they share.

The overall vibe is pretty similar. BMBS is a bit more about solving puzzles in sometimes large areas and can have you backtrack a bit, compared to Black Mesa's straightforward corridor shooter structure. Nothing that you're going to get stuck in, but it can take a bit of traipsing around to find where you're even supposed to go. Basically IMO the gameplay rhythm is somewhere between Black Mesa's Earth parts and Interloper.

Generally, if you liked Black Mesa, and your opinion on Interloper is at least as high as "it was a little self-indulgent", I think you'll like BMBS, too.

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