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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • There will be more options, sure, but the fundamental limits on the performance of a handheld PC haven’t really changed since the steam deck launched 2 years ago.

    We need either a big battery breakthrough or a big architecture breakthrough to actually push the space forward.

    There are plenty of interesting games to play that don’t need super-powerful hardware, but the Deck doesn’t even handle all of those flawlessly. Case in point the Persona 3 remake that had very noticeable frame rate drops on the Deck.





  • it’s not spontaneous

    Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

    So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

    The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

    There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

    Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

    Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

    Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.




  • They aren’t the good guys. A lot (too much if you ask the community) of the fiction is told from the perspective of the imperium/space Marines, but that doesn’t make them the good guys.

    They go around saying things like “The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal.” They clearly are not meant to be the good guys, even in their own stories.

    The problem is media literacy is so poor that far too many people look at quotes like that and think “that’s a good point”. Even the creators have put out press releases about how all the fascists are missing the point.







  • In the language of classical probability theory: the models learn the probability distribution of words in language from their training data, and then approximate this distribution using their parameters and network structure.

    When given a prompt, they then calculate the conditional probabilities of the next word, given the words they have already seen, and sample from that space.

    It is a rather simple idea, all of the complexity comes from trying to give the high-dimensional vector operations (that it is doing to calculate conditional probabilities) a human meaning.


  • No, it isn’t. The key conceit is they are removing water from the river and evaporating it.

    The water isn’t ‘lost’ it is still part of the hydrosphere, but it is made non-local. That water goes into the air and will go on to be rain in some place far away from the community where it was sourced. This will absolutely contrubute to local droughts and water insecurity.