I think they want to hire you to write a Sokoban AI, and are offering 800 an hour.

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

Plenty of self-driving trains around, generally metros where frequency and 24/7 operation is a great boon to overall service quality – you don’t want people to look at schedules, you want them to go to the station knowing there’s going to be a train in a couple of minutes, tops.

It’s way different for long-haul service, freight, passenger, doesn’t matter. Longer and less frequent trains with way more passengers in them, and you probably need other staff too, like someone needs to run the bistro. The tracks they’re running on are also way less predictable, with a metro you can have station screen doors everywhere (which btw necessitate automatic driving, humans aren’t accurate enough) try that with an international train: Regions much less countries can’t even agree on uniform platform heights. Much less door locations: Automated long-haul would require dedicated platforms at every station and while those could be served by trains with drivers, trains nowadays are all smart enough that including a button “stop at exactly that location, to the half-centimetre” isn’t an issue, those trains would have to have doors at the right location. Now go ahead and convince Germany and France that they need to replace all TGVs and ICEs to have doors in the same location as your regional trains.

Oh and none of that automation tech used with trains uses machine learning, btw. At least not at the basic level, when it comes to actually driving the train. I do remember watching a documentary about Singapore’s metro, where they have an ML algorithm scheduling track maintenance, minimising not service interruptions as such but impact on people’s commute. First the workers complained that none of the orders made any sense, then the developers made the computer spit out context and motivation alongside with the orders, workers changed their tune to “that’s fucking brilliant”.

…which, actually, brings me to the conclusion: Also with automated systems we’re going to need maintenance which isn’t going to be automated any time soon. If you automate a metro that currently doesn’t run 24/7 you don’t have that many drivers in the first place, and probably have other jobs for them to do. Automating really is about making “a train max. every five minutes, 24/7” possible without breaking the bank.

Very relatedly: If you’re a EU citizen make sure to sign this initiative.

If not a EU citizen do not sign it, that’d be the opposite of helping, but do enjoy numbers go up from afar. Also you can spread the word that’s fair game.

I’m not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there’s a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you’re a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it’s a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren’t strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It’s democracies holding each other accountable.

If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that’s their god-damned right but it’s also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.

You don’t need an ID in Germany to vote just, push comes to shove, a way to make your identity believable. Expired ID, student ID, personalised public transport ticket, perfectly sufficient. Generally you just vote with your election notification, a sheet of paper with your address, ballot location, and number in the voter registry on it. If you try to vote with an ID but without notification workers are going to roll their eyes because they’ll have to manually search for you in their lists, heck, you might’ve turned up at the wrong location.

I don’t need my ID to vote, also it’s valid for 10 years. Municipalities fill the voting registry from their citizens’ registry, then send out notifications to everyone. You literally cannot miss an election. You generally go voting with that notification, it’s sufficient, or use it to request a mail-in ballot.

I’m sure administration is sufficiently different in the US than it is in Germany for the thing to not be able to work like that, but, big picture: The IRS can find everyone. Have them fill the registry, then.

The OSCE reports are usually just shy of scathing. The US reaction to those missions ranges, as far as I’m aware, from being completely oblivious to it or its results to Sheriffs trying to arrest observers.

The only reason I can think of to get that data is to circumvent archive.org’s limitations on renting out stuff so your bots can slurp books without getting throttled.

That is, my best guess is that this was pirates seeing if they can’t add to libgen.

Or it’s a “prove you can do stuff” kind of deal.

This kind of stuff got legalised in Germany: Banks said that e.g. Sofortüberweisung was instigating their customers to break their TOS and should be shut down, anti-trust then said “nuh-uh you can’t just shut down legitimate business” (Sofort is indeed legitimate) and instead put third-party systems under banking regulations, and required ordinary banks to have APIs allowing third parties do do sensible things.

…which theoretically could mean that you’re sent to your actual bank to authorise and thus getting rid of the normalising phishing problem, dunno, haven’t checked I’m boycotting them out of principle for going down that route in the first place. Don’t serve any purpose now that we have real-time transfers, anyway.

The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.

Generated from human compositions, human-mixed, human-edited, there’s plenty of songs which have less human input. Even I can steal beats from a frying steak.

This isn’t the “automated AI slop” that you’re looking to complain about.

As to “intention to mislead”: That has nothing to do with AI. Passing off a new composition as a 1974 track on first sight is peak retro.

ROMs back then got erased by UV light, EPROM. EEPROMs are a bit newer (though still ancient) and can be erased electronically, nowadays it’s a very sane idea to just throw flash storage at the problem. I think you can get modern replacement for pretty much any ancient form factor.

The way those things are used are basically big logic tables: Instead of using a bunch of logic gates, you store the output that’s expected given a certain input. Completely ancient technique, the limiting factor is storage space and sensibility – storing all addition results of two 32 bit numbers uses a lot more transistors than a 32-bit adder, but if what you want to put in there isn’t a thing that can be implemented few standard TTL components throwing storage at the problem makes sense even if you never plan to reprogram it because burning a custom set of transistors onto silicon is expensive.

Some more technical info.

It’s an legit 8-bit CPU implemented with TTL chips, what makes it a different beast than what they did back in the days is that its microcoding isn’t kneecapped. It would absolutely have been possible back in the days to build exactly such a thing, even from precisely those components. At least the TTL part, that is, I bet there’s wibbles around VGA etc. And because I already hear the detractors yes, 8-bit CPUs were microcoded: They decoded single external instructions into a stream of “load from memory, fetch from register so and so, switch on the ALU, put what’s in the ALU output somewhere”. They kept it as simple as possible and it wasn’t reprogrammable but that stuff there, that’s microcode.

Implementing CPUs in TTL chips also isn’t a new idea, that’s how early minicomputers were made (later on they got some specialised chips). And those things also used ROMs for their microcode. So you could say that this is a minicomputer capable of pretending to be different 8-bit microcomputers.

FPGAs are a completely different technology, those allow you to arrange logic in a (more or less) arbitrary topology. That is, looking at that board with all those TTL chips, it’d be the equivalent of being able to re-route all the board traces as you please.

Replacing /usr/bin/firefox doesn’t fix anything if you don’t restart Firefox itself.

On my box updating firefox and then restarting it won’t even launch the new version because NixOS knows I’m logged in and won’t just change things in my environment. But unless there’s a kernel update yes nixos rebuild switch followed by logging out and logging in is equivalent to rebooting as it will automatically shut down and restart all system services, I think even systemd itself. Modulo some wibbles around kernel modules but those fall under kernel updates in my book.

Contrast Ubuntu, which really likes to prompt your for reboots. The difference between a distro primarily for desktop use and one that can also do desktop because also devops want a desktop. Hey I could spin up 1000 cloud instances of my desktop with a couple of keystrokes isn’t that impressively useless :)

He’s accused of tolerating such distribution even after being alerted of the fact so, yes, he’s accused of distributing it. For an online platform “we didn’t know about it because we don’t moderate proactively” is a valid defence, “authorities told us about it but we didn’t feel like doing anything about it because can’t be bothered / frozen peaches” isn’t.

You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.

And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.

Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”

“Type A” and “Type B”, I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for “I don’t want to name it but can’t call it foo and bar either because normies will be seeing it”.

As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided “male” and “female” because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you’re not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn’t consider the alternative.

That is: You’re assuming intent when there’s simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.

Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work

Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.

That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.

Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.

The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.

In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.

I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.

As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.

As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.

Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?

Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.