15,266 karma · joined November 13, 2013
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
The review of the book isn't so good, though I'd still own it as a charming period artifact: https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/write-your-own-fant...
Dungeon Crawlers for the C64 always make me think of the Sword of Fargoal! https://www.lemon64.com/game/sword-of-fargoal
I get the sense that the OP of this particular thread was asking about Ubuntu in general, not just the server. If it was the server, I'd understand it, but Ubuntu on the desktop still makes sense. And yes, Ubuntu is in my gaming laptop.
I use desktop Ubuntu because it's up to date and it just works for me, and I can play the latest games in it with Steam + Proton. I don't have to tweak it or do any additional downloading of stuff besides the Nvidia drivers (I actually don't remember how I installed them).
Can I do this with Debian, in a no fuss way? (I know this can be done in any distro, that's why I'm stressing "no fuss").
> It is given sets of paramaters/data and infers a response based on it's acceptable confidence level. The bottleneck for this is compute power and model/prompt/rails/integrations.
or whatever the LLM claims its confidence is on any given output?
The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.
Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.
I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.
> The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera.
Good luck finding any written publication of any kind that everyone will agree is unbiased and reliable on this topic, and that won't upset a significant number of readers.
Re: specifically Middle East Eye, Wikipedia's own article on it is critical and highlights controversies. As for using it on articles about the Middle East, it would only be a problem if it was the only reference, but this doesn't seem to be the case in a cursory search I did. So aren't you effectively asking they ban some sources but left others, which ironically would introduce bias? Same with Al-jazeera or any other news outlets you dislike.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
Edit: wow, downvoted for asking this. Really, it's very simple: one should be able to make it explicit what bias they mean. If they don't, maybe they fear to show their own biases and be called out? Downvoting is the coward's way out.
Edit 2: I'm rate-limited, but I find this answer very puzzling:
> Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim.
That goes directly against HN guidelines. Assume the best version of a comment, not the worst. My question should be fairly straightforward to answer.
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
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Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited:
> Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited.
Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited.
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
Yes, but if you read this "semantic" info directly from a site, you can judge the site and its potential biases, and decide for yourself "this sells Louis Vuitton, of course they will praise their handbags". Or to pick a more extreme example that nobody would ignore, if you somehow land on an extremist website spewing racist crap, your alarms will surely trigger by anything they say.
But through an LLM this gets whitewashed and presented as authoritative and "neutral", when it isn't. You might know not to trust the LLM either (if you're paying attention; we all have our unconscious biases) but I bet you most people will be caught off guard.
As an example, nothing George Lucas did compares to what I wondered about the mysterious clone wars back when I watched (and rewatched) Star Wars. Lucas effectively "filled in the gaps", leaving nothing to my imagination. That what he did envision turned out to be pedestrian only added insult to injury, but now I cannot unwatch his prequels.
There's a similar phenomenon to when you read a book and imagine the characters and even situations mentioned off hand in the text, and then someone makes a movie out of it and makes it explicit and locks in specific actors and CGI-filled situations for whatever you imagined in your mind. You may or may not like it, but your own imagination gets stifled.
For things like "The Hunt of Gollum" it becomes downright bizarre. Whatever became of Gollum as he crawled towards Mordor, tracked by Aragorn and later mentioned by Gandalf, is such a minor footnote; definitely something for your imagination. Tolkien definitely didn't think it warranted even a short story. But no, they must make a movie out of it, because why not; the fans will lap it up even if it garners bad reviews.
As I mentioned in another comment, and there's no polite way of saying this, the nerdy need to know "what really happened" in excruciating detail (not to speculate, but to know) is a sign of immaturity. Art, even pop art, thrives as much in the known as in the unknown. To want to cast light into every single detail and "make it official" is a mistake. Though of course publishers and studios salivate at the chance of milking the proverbial cash cow.
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe belong in the Silmarillion, but do note the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
Agreed. But would our AI entrepreneurs, so busy building the Torment Nexus, pay heed?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
The author didn't qualify every word he wrote with "of the time" and "typically", possibly because he didn't expect their article to be nitpicked on HN, but a cursory reading shows that's what he meant.
So when you say "this is incorrect", and also:
> Software renderers can do bilinear filtering.
What do you mean? Nobody is disputing they can. The author is talking, in my opinion, about how software and hardware renderers of that time behaved in practice in games you could buy at the time. It's just that peppering the text with "at the time", "typical" and "in practice" makes for very cumbersome reading.
I'm also an old fart, by the way :) I don't remember Flipcode, but I wrote software renderers for fun and also for my CS coursework. I read my Abrash and my Foley & van Dam, etc. I then lost track of that, time was finite and I had to choose my hobbies more carefully!
Yes, of course. That's what I meant. I didn't mean "simulate" as in fake, I meant it more as in "replicate the same effect". Ultimately, hardware and software are equivalent, give or take matters of costs, debugging and performance.
> In the time of fixed pipelines (3Dfx to GeForce 3), you couldn't do arbitrary operations on pixels, so some effects, like the kind that are common in the demoscene were software only. So games that used these effects, like Comanche voxels can indeed be thought as representative of software rendering, and they can, of course, be simulated on modern GPUs as everything that was done on software before can.
Yes, I think that's the spirit in which TFA's term "software rendering" must be taken. The context is old games and their pipelines as they were used at the time, not more recent GPUs or practices.
> The tricks used by the Quake engine are awesome, but they don't beat raw power.
I really don't think the article is contesting this.
E.g.
> Software renderers generally sample textures pixel by pixel, so every texel stays a crisp square. Early 3D cards smoothed textures with bilinear filtering, which looked impressive in 1997 but turns everything soft and blurry to my eye now.
The author is a hobbyist discussing things in context. Early 3D cards, bilinear filtering as done in '97, etc. You cannot take random words and criticize the article. This seems to be a retrogaming hobbyist blog about doing stuff with old hardware and games.
Nitpicking is pointless.
That's unfair, especially if you read his other articles.
> Someone unfamiliar with graphics
... is probably not the intended audience of a hobbyist, specialized blog such as the one we're discussing.
Incorrect how? It's correct in that software renderers of the time TFA describes mostly looked like this, and GPU renderers didn't (of course, they weren't called GPUs back then), and there's a reason for this. Even you admit it later in your comment.
So saying "it has nothing to do" with software renderers (of the time) is wrong. It has something to do with how software renderers vs GPUs were used during that era in practice. It's also true you can simulate one with the other, but that doesn't make it incorrect or unrelated.
> So to show off, every 3D game back then turned it on (an OpenGL/Glide/D3D configuration option) and everything got smoothed out, often with no option to turn it off. That's why it ends up looking different
So it had something to do after all! So TFA has a point. He means software renderers in the sense you're describing here, and it's clear from the text. He's not implying you cannot use a GPU to achieve the same result.
Can it be simulated on GPUs? Sure. But it was typical of software renderers of that era, and NOT typical of GPUs, and it has to do with how they were used.
This would have more merit if the owners and investors of major AI companies suddenly adopted a philosophy of rejecting private property and capitalism. That way I could believe we can let go of this "dominance strategy of hieratic pissing territory".
But if they don't, and they merely try to convince us that we should let go of the obsession with owning things and getting paid, I'll be suspicious. People who own a lot telling others they shouldn't worry that much about money and owning things.
If you don't, nothing special happens either: you just wait 7-10 seconds, hardly an eternity, and there's really no rush to firing up a videogame either. We're not talking in-game responsiveness, the only thing that truly matters.