vitehozonage (u/vitehozonage)

vitehozonage commented on Why old games never die, but new ones do pleromanonx86.wordpress.c... · Posted by u/airhangerf15

mattnewton · 10 months ago

The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.

Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...

vitehozonage · 10 months ago

Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point.

It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.

Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.

Just today there was a new article that shows this:

>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...

vitehozonage commented on The Dead Planet Theory arealsociety.substack.com... · Posted by u/sebg

vitehozonage · a year ago

I think I disagree with the article. I think it is true that if you choose to expend time and energy on something that few people spend effort on, then you can become better than most people at that one thing. However, it seems that the article is trying to say that is true for everything and for everyone, and i disagree with that.

The missing key factor is that you have to find something unpopular and easy which will actually have a payoff if you become an expert. Risky and easier said than done.

If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.

vitehozonage commented on An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox blog.mozilla.org/en/produ... · Posted by u/ReadCarlBarks

vitehozonage · a year ago

>there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar

Mozilla should commit to stop doing anything like that. Then we can have a nice clear Terms of Use that promises to not sell data. I think that would alleviate community concerns.

vitehozonage commented on Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

ncallaway · a year ago

> then LLMs in their current form are not going to lead to AGI.

It always seemed to me a wild leap to assume that LLMs in their current form would lead to AGI. I never understood the argument.

vitehozonage · a year ago

Likewise. It is fascinating to me that people seem to assume this.

I suspect it is an intentional result of deceptive marketing. I can easily imagine an alternative universe where different terminology was used instead of "AI" without sci-fi comparisons and barely anyone would care about the tech or bother to fund it.

vitehozonage commented on CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' pcgamer.com/gaming-indust... · Posted by u/ghuroo1

theamk · a year ago

Will RandomX work on the old cell phones, via Javascript interface only?

The website says: "Fast mode - requires 2080 MiB of shared memory. Light mode - requires only 256 MiB of shared memory, but runs significantly slower"

If you want your website challenge to work on the cheap phone - slow CPU, with little memory, and when implemented in Javascript, you'd have to tune complexity way down. And when a modern PC with fast CPU and tons of memory tries to solve it.. it probably will take only a few milliseconds, basically being useless.

vitehozonage · a year ago

I don't know, I dont understand the details and your reasoning is confusing for me. My understanding is that the effectiveness of particular hardware is complex to predict; it depends on the sizes of the CPU caches and effectiveness at certain instructions, and the algorithm can of course be tuned in all sorts of ways. The Tor project is already using it so presumably it is working for them to some extent. More info here: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...

vitehozonage commented on A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11B Nightmare bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/impish9208

jazzyjackson · a year ago

I was let down by the article, there's very little narrative that I would describe as "nightmarish" (unless you consider longevity/crypto bros hosting a beach party outside their coworking space a nightmare). More just legal and political posturing and dunking on the feasibility of network states. I did enjoy the irony of a libertarian sect going straight to Washington DC to try and push around their host country. Like, yes, there is a reason it's nice to be a citizen of a global hegemon, why are you trying to do your own thing again?

vitehozonage · a year ago

I found the article to be very long and uninteresting and also never found the "nightmare" part, maybe i missed it

vitehozonage commented on CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' pcgamer.com/gaming-indust... · Posted by u/ghuroo1

jszymborski · a year ago

While I get the draw, I never understood how PoW is ever supposed to work practically.

PoW tasks are meant to work on a wide range of mobile phones, desktops, single-board computers, etc... you have vastly different compute budgets in every environment. For a PoW task that is usable on a five year old mobile phone, an adversary with a consumer RTX 50 series card (or potentially even an ASIC) can easily perform it many, many, many orders of magnitude faster.

Am I missing something?

vitehozonage · a year ago

Perhaps you think all PoW algorithms are still crackable by ASICs? A few years ago that was the case, but some years ago Monero developers made a breakthrough with RandomX. Now it is no longer true that a GPU or ASIC can outperform a typical consumer device to the extent that you seem to imagine. The Tor project uses a similar algorithm, i think with the same developer contributing to it as RandomX. It is nothing like bitcoin's SHA256 PoW - with that, the performance of an ASIC does indeed mean a consumer PC becomes completely useless at the algorithm

vitehozonage commented on CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' pcgamer.com/gaming-indust... · Posted by u/ghuroo1

kevin_thibedeau · a year ago

As of two weeks ago my locked down Firefox profile gets hit with captchas on every visit to Google search. DDG has also gone to shit with captchas and stupid low cache lifetime because I use their non-javascript site. I'm giving Bing a test run before making the leap to Kagi.

vitehozonage · a year ago

You might want to try Mullvad Leta, it's what i use for this issue. I would try Kagi if it could be used privately but i suppose it still requires an account and has no way to pay privately

vitehozonage commented on AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU techcrunch.com/2025/02/02... · Posted by u/geox

_heimdall · a year ago

What I don't see here is how the EU is actually defining what is and is not considered AI.

> AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.

That can be a hugely broad category that covers any algorithmic feed or advertising platform.

Or is this limited specifically to LLMs, as OpenAI has so successfully convinced us that LLMs really are Aai and previous ML tools weren't?

vitehozonage · a year ago

Exactly what i thought too.

Right now, for 10 years at least, with targeted advertising, it has been completely normalised and typical to use machine learning to intentionally subliminally manipulate people. I was taught less than 10 years at a top university that machine learning was classified as AI.

It raises many questions. Is it covered by this legislation? Other comments make it sound like they created an exception, so it is not. But then I have to ask, why make such an exception? What is the spirit and intention of the law? How does it make sense to create such an exception? Isn't the truth that the current behaviour of the advertising industry is unacceptable but it's too inconvenient to try to deal with that problem?

Placing the line between acceptable tech and "AI" is going to be completely arbitrary and industry will intentionally make their tech tread on that line.