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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Hate to break it to you but quality of data isn’t the fundamental problem with LLMs. It’s that they are trying to use statistics to encode entire thought processes into hidden variables from conversation snippets. They want to use statistics to go from many individual interactions to a large model, and then use that model to predict individual interactions again. Which you can do with statistics, but it’s predicting the average text that follows the prompt, not the correct text (it has no concept of correctness; whenever it “talks” about it, that’s just the average text that follows, not any particular insight into what’s correct or even how it works).

    That’s not to say that the quality of the training data has no impact; it can have a huge impact. I’m just saying that even if the training data was perfect, the LLM will still get things wrong in its output.





  • I think it’s possible to do that, but just don’t expect the people on the other platforms to get excited about it. Using a phone as a primary gaming device is partially about mobility but mostly about budget (at least going by how I see it). Someone who already has a gaming PC or console doesn’t really want mobile games. Personally, while I used to have more of a variety of games on my phone, currently my only game is chess, despite considering myself a big gamer.

    Blizzard’s mistake wasn’t in making a mobile game, it was thinking they could excite a room full of PC gamers with news about a mobile version of a big PC game, showing just how out of touch their leadership was. Like it should have been obvious that that presentation wasn’t going up be taken well and should have either just been a booth at blizzcon or an announcement that said “mobile game” right from the start. I forget where in the timeline that fell compared to their other blunders like WC3 reforged replacing the still superior WC3, but IMO it made those other ones more predictable because it was a clear sign their leadership was just chasing the money without a good idea of what gave them fans in the first place.

    If xbox handles it better, it could work out better for them. Not for winning me as a customer, but for increasing users who do like to game on mobile environments.

    Diablo Immortal was successful for blizzard on its own, though it’s hard to quantify lost business because of it (especially when it wasn’t the only thing hurting business for blizzard).










  • Yeah, I was briefly disappointed to find that the rock station I listened to like 15 years ago had become a classic station when I forgot my phone at home and decided to just do my errand without it. Until they played mostly the same music as they did before, just without what would have been new releases at the time.

    Didn’t really feel old from it because I’m already used to 90s music being called classics. Since those are both 90s bands, just be aware that “classic rock” has edged into the 00s already and will soon include the new music that would have played back when I was listening to it.

    If the station even lasts that long, who even listens to radio still? Is it just people like me who temporarily found themselves without their usual entertainment device?



  • I’ll push back on the gears are not wheels statement. They serve the exact same function as wheels (as in they spin to allow something else to move or spin relative to them), just with teeth to add friction and make the ratios less dependent in the specific diameters and/or flaws in curvature (give them a large thing to grab onto to prevent small variations from having an impact).

    Though I’ll grant that hinges aren’t wheels (while they do have an axle and involve spinning, the hinged object itself is more like the wheel than the hinge.

    Also drawers, if they have tracks, have 2 or 4 wheels each.


  • Yeah, that also makes sense. My line of thought was more about how returning to old great games might not seem as great after experiencing all the QoL and gameplay improvements that came since, so starting with those ones means they can enjoy them. My daughter is already handling the dual stick controllers well, so I guess is beyond that stage already (though when she was younger I remember her not even understanding that Mario Kart was something she could control and she thought we were picking characters for a movie, especially since the auto-steer and auto-accelerate still give a fighting chance even if you don’t otherwise touch the controller).


  • I’m caught between wanting my daughter to play a bunch of my old favorites but I’m also recognizing that some of them I only really like because of nostalgia. Like I bought the sonic collection for GCN and played it recently and didn’t really have fun with it tbh. Like the original one, while a great game for its time, is really about memorizing the levels so you don’t run into spikes or enemies at full speed which just doesn’t seem fun.

    Or Super Metroid is another favorite that does stand up to the test of time, but I’m playing Hollow Knight and Super Metroid just feels awkward compares to the newer one, even though Hollow Knight only has a melee weapon as the main attack.

    GoldenEye is another one. I spent countless hours playing that back in the day, both single player and multiplayer, but even when Perfect Dark came out, I had trouble going back to it, let alone all the other games that advanced console FPS (Halo where they finally figured out a decent control scheme, or CoD with loadouts instead of the scramble to find guns lying on the ground, though I suspect neither of those games invented those mechanics). While I do treasure the GoldenEye time of my life, I don’t think my daughter would gain anything from having to do that herself.

    She’s making her own memories on games like Minecraft, Pokemon (as much as adult gamers complained about the lack of depth, she loves Arcerus or whatever it’s called), or Smash Bros.

    I do still plan on introducing her to some amazing games, but I’m not sure that list should be essentially my own video game path. Figuring out that list is kinda tricky.

    Not saying your approach was wrong btw, just that I’m not sure how to approach it myself.


  • Some systems are less stable with 4 dimms populated instead of 2. This is the only real valid one I can think of.

    Or if you have an algorithm that tries to use all available ram, it will spend more time filling up more ram. Though that’s the stupid algorithm, not the RAM.

    Or if you add virtual ram and run programs to the point where it needs to constantly page data out and in. Though that’s running more programs than you have ram for and it suffers from a lack of RAM, not the other way around.

    Maybe with bad RAM refresh settings where all RAM access is paused during refresh will slow down the system with a sufficient amount of RAM if it needs to be refreshed in series. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen UEFI settings to do that dynamically over sections of RAM, plus I think that RAM already parallelizes it inside the dimms because it’s an obvious limitation for them.

    Oh, another real one, though I don’t think it has a huge impact, but the amount of available RAM can affect how many bits are used in the data structures used to manage/track memory allocations, and the number of bits could determine the size of the structures, though those could also be dynamic and depend on memory used rather than available, but I’m not familiar enough with memory allocators to say for sure (both whether it would be a factor at all and how well current managers would handle it). Though even if it does make an impact, each bit added means double the RAM handled, so it doesn’t even scale that badly, and could be optimized to that “used” version if it is the “available” version.

    So yeah, without a better mechanism to create bottlenecks, I’d call BS on that statement.