Soteriologian
16d ago
I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I’m playing Persona 4 for the first time now, and it’s fantastic. And it can’t be nostalgia, because I never played any Persona games growing up.
People were just less brainwormed back then, and it shows.
Soteriologian
16d ago
I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"
And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.
Soteriologian
22d ago
In some sense I think this is even more damning than it may seem to a naive viewer.
Like, that scratchpad memory a la Memento strategy should absolutely work, assuming you have an intelligent agent in the first place. The fact that it works so poorly is a sign there’s serious problems with the thinking part of SotA LLMs. It’s not merely a memory problem.
Soteriologian
24d ago
I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.
Soteriologian
24d ago
The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?
You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.
What’s happened is the aesthetic of the Empire became less about some non-partisan celebration of Captain America’s thunderbutt and more about evangelising radical social issues of the Democrat party like Pride Parades and trans kids.
The Republicans, thanks to their total lack of representation in organisations of any influence, decided it was simpler to dismantle the Empire entirely rather than try to steer it away from gay pride back to Captain Thunderbutt.
Basically, the Empire-maintaining parts of the government became partisan, and now are being cut off since the other party is in power.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Cut adverbs.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
abandoned Walmart (shoplifting killed it)
That’s impressive. It is difficult to kill a Walmart.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Not if you keep your socks on!
Soteriologian
1mo ago
My personal favorite:
https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs
The comical part is they try to act like this is some minor compiler bug that can be fixed and not a core problem with the type theory (or lack thereof) itself.
Unsoundness of this sort would be fine if Rust portrayed the type checker as a mere tool to assist a well-intentioned author in reasoning; but it’s portrayed as an authority capable of guaranteeing memory safety, and you’re expected to submit yourself to it.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
It’s not probable, but still, President of the United States is by far the most lethal job you can legally have.
Statistically, there’s a nearly 10% chance you’ll be killed (not merely die; be killed!)
Trump would be safer working as a RedBull stuntman than working his current job.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Inbuilt disdain of "computer says no because reasons" not enough?
What exactly are you arguing against here? Error messages at compile time? There’s plenty of interpreted languages that crash at runtime if that floats your boat.
Presumably, such people enjoy removing the annoying "check engine" light and just waiting for their engine to start smoking.
that "shipping product that works well enough" is more important than "mathematically correct, but your competition beat you to market by a month"
I don’t believe this is even a real dichotomy, at least in the Rust vs mainstream language sense. (Obviously if you’re formalising something in Lean4, that’s going to be comically inefficient compared to just building it, but that’s so far from the Rust vs C++ land it’s not even relevant.) The reason companies are fond of mainstream languages has nothing to do with engineering, it has to do with the availability of replacement labor. It doesn’t matter what technical properties the mainstream language has; what matters is that it’s mainstream.
which is why everyone tends to bitch about the borrow checker
I’m going to out myself as much crazier than anyone may have expected, but: the borrow checker is the least-inspired part of Rust and the language would be better without it entirely. The reasons Rust is good are because it actually has sane primitive types, non-ambiguous syntax, algebraic data types, parametric polymorphism, a non-busted standard library, and perhaps most importantly: cargo.
The borrow checker paradigm is basically a half-baked bastardization of linear types, and the way it’s done has some serious theoretical deficiencies that basically mandate leaky abstractions. But I’m not going to babble about that here.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I mean, the person reverse-engineering the Mac M1 GPU and building a Linux driver for it is doing so in Rust. I don’t know how much more bare-metal you can get than that.
Rust isn’t about gaining safety by being far from the hardware, the way memory managed languages with runtimes are; it’s about giving the systems programmer a mental model that actually has some degree of engineering sense behind it. You seem to have the impression that C++’s danger is what makes it an appealing tool, but the danger is to the user not accomplishing their intended goal, not to an enemy: it’s a kitchen knife which is all blade and no handle. Moar blaDe doesn’t make the knife better at cutting food into sizes and shapes you want for your sandwich.
And disdain for C++ long predates Rust. If you need to copy your opinions from someone high-status, I’ll defer to Linus Torvalds on the matter.
While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is, the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
It disagrees with all my sensibilities about "talking computer", and thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that, but it feels like a half measure to me, and no replacement for actual skill.
lol, I'll put this in hardcore WoW terms: many imagine skill as being able to stylishly finesse your way out of thorny situations; anyone who's ever succeeded at this game mode knows the real skill is not getting yourself into bad situations in the first place. For example, Xaryu -- professional WoW streamer and many-time rank-1 PVP gladiator -- died in the harpy cave in an extremely stylish way. In his next run, did he learn how to super-skill the harpy cave even betterer? Well, yes, in the truly high-IQ way: he decided going in there was a terrible decision in the first place and he wouldn't do so this time. He hit 60 on that character.
This is the difference between a C++ developer mindset and a Rust developer mindset. It is the humility to accept that you are, in fact, not skilled enough to get it right all the time, so you should stop playing with fire in the first place.
PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly, although it still doesn’t quite capture my sentiment.
A priestly class actually has the respect of the other classes, and takes its mission in shepherding them seriously. The noisemakers the West has today fit neither of these criteria.
If anything, I’d say the primary characteristic of this class is being annoying in rhetorically-compelling (but not epistemically- or aesthetically-compelling!) ways. Think "Team Building Exercises" or other such nonsense. What are you gonna do, argue that team building and camaraderie is bad, hmm? Yet everyone who’s ever been subjected to this has the same thought in their mind: "this is such bullshit."
Dumbledore vs Umbrage is a good example of the contrast between the actual priestly class and the rhetorically-motivated class that fancies itself priestly.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
I’d like to point out that nobody who doesn’t self-identify as part of this "caste" has ever referred to it as a priestly caste.
I’m sure they view themselves as Napoleon placing the crown on his own head, but to everyone else it looks more like Gavin McInnes putting something else somewhere else.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Hey now, they fund zstd. Is that not worth the rotting cerebral cortices of 30 million boomers?
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Gatsby 1: I’ll have a pop!
Gatsby 2: I’ll have a cola!
Gatsby 3: I’ll have a soda!
Gatsby 4: I’ll have a carbonated beverage!
Gatsby’s nightmare: I’ll have a glass of water.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Did the US even try over there? Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?
Morally, no; de facto, yes.
See, the way to make a great business in #currentyear isn’t to sell a product to consumers. That’s hard, and risky, and requires a lot of work. Instead, make a moral crisis and sell it to the government via social activism! Now, your endeavor is freed from annoying constraints like grounding in economic reality.
Note that it is entirely possible—and perhaps even optimal!—for participants in this myopic charade to not realize they are just engaging in parasitism with extra steps.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
That attempting to really super duper try hard mmf at something ends up looking a lot like gooning.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Even modulo selection effects, this doesn’t really solve anything: it’s just rearranging the pregnancy chairs on the Titanic.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
To be fair, this sort of on-its-face won’t work. It’s just basic high school thermodynamics.
The carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere is increasing precisely because creating that carbon dioxide produced usable energy for us. You can’t un-make that carbon dioxide without spending at least as much energy as you put in (and in fact, substantially more).
So either you’re going to produce even more CO2 than you’re eradicating, or you’re simply pursuing non-fossil-fuel energy sources entirely—which would simply have not produced the CO2 in the first place if you’d just done that from the start.
The only way any of this makes any "sense" is if you get the government to write you a check to perform what ultimately amounts to fake work, in the most fundamental sense. Which probably means that’s exactly what will happen.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
It's complicated because of the perverse incentives created by bad regulations. The people running the insurance companies don't have a choice.
See, this works unless you think the people writing the bad-incentive regulation and the people running the megacorps as the same people.
Same as the subprime mortgage crisis. "The government made me do it 😩," howls the voice with more influence over government policy than your family tree could ever dream of.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
I mean, there was a recent fiasco with a guy shooting his gun with the scope on backwards. And it wasn’t some low-ranking cannon fodder recruited for Operation Human Shield; he was captain of a big ship! And he wasn’t a diversity hire, either—he’s a white male!
Like, just ponder for a moment the level of smoothbrain it takes to do this: looking through the scope backwards would make your target smaller.
I would not trust these people to run a lemonade stand.
I hope so. If I ever try to take over the world, I can’t imagine seeing all these comments steelmanning my endeavor as some bureaucratic trifle.
I am burning the Erdtree, goddammit! I intend to ascend to Elden Lord and reforge the shattered Elden Ring!
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