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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Github copilot can do some impressive things, but it also ignores my instructions to not try to run anything and leave testing to me that I’ve stopped bothering saying it and just block the attempt when it asks permission. Just yesterday, it confidently said it had figured out an issue I was debugging with it and made a bunch of code changes that literally only affected comments. If I leave it in agent mode (which allows it to edit code) when asking a question to clarify something and not intending any code changes but wanting to think about the answer (and telling it that), sometimes it still runs ahead and tries to make changes anyways.

    When it does well, it’s uncanny how effective it can be these days, but it’s not reliable enough to be trusted to be in control of the whole system. Plus I don’t trust Microsoft enough to put my data on onedrive, and believe that access to data is the real reason behind their AI push, no matter how much usefulness and reliability improves.





  • As I understand, chess AIs are more like brute force models that take the current board and generate a tree with all possible moves from that position, then iterating on those new positions up to a certain depth (which is what the depth of the engine refers to). And while I think some might use other algorithms to “score” each position and try to keep the search to the interesting branches, that could introduce bias that would make it miss some moves that look bad but actually set up a better position, though ultimately, they do need some way to compare between different ending positions if the depth doesn’t bring them to checkmate in all paths.

    So it chooses the most intelligent move it can find, but does it by essentially playing out every possible game, kinda like Dr Strange in Infinity War, except chess has a more finite set of states to search through.


  • I had an A5 a while back and samsung didn’t make me hate them so the next phone I got was an s10. On that phone, they decided that they needed to dedicate a physical button to their fucking virtual assistant bixby. It was pretty obvious to me that these virtual assistants were mostly actually data vacuums, wanting to integrate into every aspect of your life so they can access better data on all those aspects.

    Every single time it opened that fucking thing, it was unintentional. It wasn’t as annoying as your TV, since I bet the phone was way faster and had enough memory to not have to discard whatever else you were doing just to open its app, but it exemplifies how I see samsung today. Hardware had great specs but the software made it annoying by trying to lock everything in to their ecosystem without a hard lock like apple. Even MS had ways of disabling the windows button (which used to have a high chance of crashing a game if you accidentally hit it).




  • Have you actually had an issue with buffer underruns with blurays though? I’d figure reliability should be way up, considering we now have multi-core CPUs, plus writers probably support variable speed writing that slows the write if the buffer is running out of data, plus error correction/recovery options for if it happens anyways. I’d guess vibrations, low quality discs, and loss of power would be more likely to cause a write failure than a buffer underrun these days, but maybe I have too much faith in those involved.


  • Same kind of people who lie all the time to look good to others. Some people want to be awesome but know they suck, or even more pathetic don’t suck but can’t stand not being the best, and cheating is their pathway to getting the social results of being awesome without needing to develop the skills.

    The way I’ve seen it for ages now, being a loser isn’t just about losing games, it’s how you handle losing games and how much you internalize that. I see it as short for “sore loser”. Cheaters are losers in that sense.

    Though it makes the idea of them still losing despite cheating even more hilarious, which is why I love the idea of games that detect cheaters but stick them in cheating queues instead of just banning them.


  • There’s another whole category that also doesn’t care about what the game is running on the kernel: seperate device cheats. They act as a man in the middle for the input and output signals, and can auto shoot when you’ll hit or adjust your aim if you’re close but not quite there. Or just play for you entirely if it’s that good at processing the output.

    And blocking that isn’t likely possible without killing streaming for the game or convincing all users to get input devices with encrypted connections or they can’t play your game.

    I’d respond to the original comment that anyone who doesn’t have server side cheat detection isn’t serious about stopping cheaters. In any case, I just removed that game from my wishlist. Not that I needed another survival builder game anyways, though they do tend to catch my eye.