I grew up as a PC gamer (if you can call 8-bit computers PCs too) and never had a console as a kid. I got an Xbox One when it came out, just because of the Kinect, and never played anything on it other than Just Dance. Playing on my PC is more convenient. I got a Switch and played some Pokémon, but couldn’t get in the habit of playing on a device instead of a PC. When I got a Switch emulator on my PC, I played more on that than I did on the actual Switch in all the time I owned it.

Not sure what that’s supposed to help with. I’d be even more uncomfortable if my steak had eyes and made eye contact than when a person does it.

Make a large enough model, and it will seem like an intelligent being.

That was already true in previous paradigms. A non-fuzzy non-neural-network algorithm large and complex enough will seem like an intelligent being. But “large enough” is beyond our resources and processing time for each response would be too long.

And then you get into the Chinese room problem. Is there a difference between seems intelligent and is intelligent?

But the main difference between an actual intelligence and various algorithms, LLMs included, is that intelligence works on its own, it’s always thinking, it doesn’t only react to external prompts. You ask a question, you get an answer, but the question remains at the back of its mind, and it might come back to you 10min later and say you know, I’ve given it some more thought and I think it’s actually like this.

Exactly. As the mandatory sexual harassment and money laundering trainings have taught me repeatedly, if the company knows about it and doesn’t do anything, they’re equally liable (and in many cases even if they don’t know about it). So stopping inappropriate behavior is in their interest.

Remember to look into his eyes

I don’t know if it’s some neurodivergence or if other introverts feel the same way, but that is something I personally find very difficult and uncomfortable and I can’t hold eye contact for more than a second or two at a time. What feels natural to me is to look at a person’s mouth when they talk.

Pear and gorgonzola is a typical combination.

They are effective, but in the other direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re funded by fossil fuel companies.

Somewhere on the vertical axis. 0 on the horizontal. The AGI angle is just to attract more funding. We are nowhere close to figuring out the first steps towards strong AI. LLMs can do impressive things and have their uses, but they have nothing to do with AGI

How about a voting license that needs to be renewed every 30 years? You have to pass a test that checks if you are capable of thinking objectively or something like that.

Any type of criteria that is not absolute (like age), can and will be used to exclude certain groups of people from voting.

With the introduction of AJAX, web pages became apps. It was the advent of SPAs and SASS. Which enabled the things you saw as a consumer.

Yeah, I remember when I first got ZSNES and suddenly I had access hundreds of games I wasn’t able to play before. Played through Super Mario RPG, spent so much time in Harvest Moon, and finally played the first Final Fantasy games and Legend of Zelda.

I didn’t have any consoles, so couldn’t play a lot of those games. But on PC (and on 8-bit computer before that), I played hundreds of games. There were no copyright laws in my country when I was a kid and my dad got everything he could get his hands on. In the 8-bit era he collected over 40 cassette tapes (8-10 games on each). Then when we got the PC there were boxes and boxes of floppy disks (I remember Need for Speed was on over 30 disks). Then CDs came out and I remember one CD that had 200 games on it. And as my dad collected, I tried every single one of them.

That just goes to show the sheer amount of quality gaming that there was.

I made that top 10 list years ago from some silly Facebook game that was going around at the time. The hardest part was picking just 10. My initial list had about 70 games on it.

Add one more here. Some of the greatest games came out in that period.

I made before a list of the top 10 games that impacted me the most and a large part are from that period. In no particular order:

• Worms (particularly Worms World Party)
• The Settlers II
• Master of Orion II
• Heroes of Might and Magic (particularly the first 3)
• Phantasmagoria
• WWF WrestleMania
• Little Big Adventure
• Monkey Island (especially 1-3)
• Dizzy (all games in the series)
• Jet Set Willy

How is Monkey Island missing from the list? Those games were the peak of SCUMM.

since they mostly use band 66 for large cells which has pretty crap penetration into buildings.

Huh, good to know there’s an explanation for why I was getting no signal inside my home when I was on T-Mobile. It’s the reason I switched.

My first email address was @k.ro (a free email provider many many years ago) and many websites thought a valid second-level domain name cannot be just one letter

Back in high-school there was a street I had to cross on my way to school and there were no traffic lights at that crosswalk. It was a high speed street and there were lights at major intersections before and after that crosswalk, so cars tended to just blow through it regardless of anyone waiting to cross.

The biggest problem was not waiting for a car to stop, it was a car stopping on the first lane, forcing me to start crossing, only for a car to come shooting through the second lane without wondering why the other is stopped. That’s why I learned to avoid using the crosswalk, it was the most dangerous place to cross the street. I chose a place without a crosswalk where I could cross when I saw that both lanes are safe.

Changing the setting from a grocery isle to an electronics department makes for a completely different story. Goes from “yeah, sure, that happened” to “perfectly credible encounter.”

It does make sense to increase all menu prices in order to pay higher wages, but it’s a sleazy dishonest practice to hide that increase from the customers until it’s too late.

are often brought over as cheap labor, undercutting local labor

I came to the US on a work visa and my company had to pay thousands of dollars for the visa fee, prove that my salary is in line with local averages, publicly post a job opening for the position I was going to fill, and in general show proof that there are no equally or better qualified local candidates for the job. I don’t see how they could have gotten my visa approved if they tried to pay me less.