Aerolfos

Seems like the latter - except that not only describes how people perceive gambling, but the entire economy considering startups, silicon valley, the current crop of tech billionaires and how they made their fortunes, etc.

So, why not gamble on crypto, NFTs, or prediction markets? Might as well go for the longshots since everything is a longshot anyway

As far as I know, nope.

Some games also get really confused if you have Xinput and DirectInput devices plugged in at the same time - for me, Silksong (and unity games in general) don't work if I have a throttle+stick plugged in.

And it's worse than just taking input from the wrong thing, the game can't recognize input from any of throttle, stick, or controller. Only controller by itself works.

Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).

And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.

I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase

Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json

Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs

I believe it references that article, too

I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).

Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.

In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

We know perfectly well who they are.

Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.

But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.

However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

Which obviously works, it's not like there aren't tons of multi-million startups ultimately doing the exact same thing, and yet. It feels a bit... trite?

Is it?

It seems to me like the model has been poisoned by being trained on user chats, such that when it sees a pattern (model talking to user) it infers what it normally sees in the training data (user input) and then outputs that, simulating the whole conversation. Including what it thinks is likely user input at certain stages of the process, such as "ignore typos".

So basically, it hallucinates user input just like how LLMs will "hallucinate" links or sources that do not exist, as part of the process of generating output that's supposed to be sourced.

You're fighting an uphill battle against the inherent tendency to produce more and longer text. There's also the regression to the mean problem, so you get less information (and more generic) even though the text is shorter.

Basically, it doesn't work

Fun fact: despite having absolutely no menu entry for it, and I believe not even a command available with Ctrl+Shift+P, Vscode supports Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a closed tab. Discovered out of pure muscle memory.

OpenAI shows exactly how well that works and what that kind of governance does to a company and to its support of science and the commons.

TL;DR, it's fucked.

Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them

Other reporting says this is very much the case. Stargate barely has some of the land cleared, but the buildings were supposed to be finished and have GPUs installed over the course of 2026.

There's also the indicator of Nvidia giving out billion-dollar deals to other companies such that they could commit to buying even more Blackwells to keep production going. The chips from those new deals don't have anywhere to go, everyone already spent their cash on getting shipped chips that they're still installing today (apparently some are even in warehouses)

A 16th-century formal book like this would be the gold standard to replicate if you want to make "serious" texts. And yes, in scientific literature, the "serious" text is a narrow target and far narrower than you might expect from the possible variation in a handmade artisanal work. Mostly because when everything is "custom", standardization and regular structure is exceptional

>The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?

Well, for a time greek city states did fight pretty much like this. Small armies of hoplites were raised outside harvest season, went out, fought almost show-battles with very few casualties, and tribute changed hands based on the results. Everyone went home for the harvest.

I believe there's even instances where a battle wasn't fought at all in favour of two appointed champions dueling (origin of the popular fiction trope)

It didn't last, but for a time the greek city states had a kind of equilibrium with relatively few resources (or people) spent on war.

Imagine you have multiple contributors with multiple new features, and you want to do a big release with all of them. You sit down a weekend and merge in your own feature branch, and then tell everyone else to do so too - but it's a hobby project, the other guys aren't consistently available, maybe they need two weekends to integrate and test when they're merging their work with everyone else's, and they don't have time during the weekdays.

So, the dev branch sits there for 2-3 weeks gradually acquiring features (and people testing integration too, hopefully, with any fixes that emerge from that). But then you discover a bug in the currently live version, either from people using it or even from the integration work, and you want that fix live during the week (specific example: there's a rare but consistent CTD in a game mod, you do not want to leave that in for several weeks). Well, if you have a branch reflecting the live status you can put your hotfix there, do a release, and merge the hotfix into dev right away.

Speaking of game mods, that also gives you a situation where you have a hard dependency on another project - if they do a release in between your mods releases, you might need to drop a compat hotfix ASAP, and you want a reflection of the live code where you can do that, knowing you will always have a branch that works with the latest version of the game. If your main branch has multiple people's work on it, in progress, that differs from what's actually released, you're going to get a mess.

And sure you could do just feature branches and merge feature branches one by one into each other, and then into main so you never have code-under-integration in a centralized place but... why not just designate a branch to be the place to do integration work?

You could also merge features one by one into main branch but again, imagine the mod case, if the main code needs X update for compatibility with a game update, why do that update for every feature branch, and expect every contributor to do that work? Much better to merge a feature in when the feature is done, and if you're waiting on other features centralize the work to keep in step with main (and the dependency) in one place. Especially relevant if your feature contributors are volunteers who probably wouldn't have the time to keep up with changes if it takes a few weeks before they can merge in their code.

Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

And yes, good leadership is very hard, and many managers aren't any good at it

Very common pattern you see in literature about military strategy, actually. The answer is delegation, heavy use of NCOs, and in general explaining the plan all the way down to the individual soldier. Under the western school it all falls under "initiative".

Notably, a lot of non-western militaries are terrible at it, and a number of military failings in africa, the middle east, and the soviet union (*cough*russia*cough*) are viewed as failures in flexibility with very low initiative, as well as lacking/unskilled NCO corps.

Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.

The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing