• Street Brawl: Removed item slot limit (don’t need to sell items in the final round sometimes)

no, now you can stack past the limit in normal gameplay

Valve made the game your looking for, its called Team Fortress 2.

Well, actually, now its the fan-made Team Fortress 2 Classified, but the point remains.

I don’t think any these companies would stomach a cut in sales. They’d definitely try and fight any change in the courts.

If anything, I expect the EU to try and keep anti-circumvention laws to benefit its own tech industry.

The neat thing about Doctorow’s proposal, though, is that at this point anyone could do it. Canada, India, Brazil… with tariffs already in play, there’s not really much to lose.

The logistics of the Holocaust was enabled by IBM tabulation machines; this comparison isn’t that much of a stretch.

algorithm that’s been modelled after the real world structure and behaviour of neurons and how they process signals

Except the Neural Net model doesn’t actually reproduce everything real, living neurons do. A mathematician in the 70s said, “hey what if this is how brains work?” He didn’t actually study brains, he just put forward a model. It’s a useful model. But it’s also an extreme misrepresentation to say it approximates actual neurons.

Please tell me you don’t actually think “AGI” is possible.

The term AGI had to be coined because the things they called AI weren’t actually AI. Artificial Intelligence originates from science fiction. It has no strict definition in computer science!

Maybe you learn up a little. Go read Isaac Asimov

I think what people are struggling to articulate is that, the way AI gets thrown around now, it’s basically being used as a replacement for the word “algorithm”.

It’s obfuscating the truth that this is all (relatively) comprehensible mathematics. Even the black box stuff. Just because the programmer doesn’t know each step the end program takes, doesn’t mean they don’t know the principals behind how it was made, or didn’t make deliberate choices to shape the outcome.

There’s some very neat mathematics, yes, and an utterly staggering amount of data and hardware. But at the end of the day its still just an (large) algorithm. Calling it AI is dubious at best, and con-artistry at worst.

Literally, LLMs are extensions of the techniques developed for autocomplete in phones. There’s a direct lineage. Same fundamental mathematics under the hood, but given a humongous scope.

Langton’s ant can procedurally generate things, if you set it up right. Would you call that AI?

As for enemies in gaming, it got called that because game makers wanted to give the appearance of intelligence in enemy encounters. Aspirationally cribbing a word from sci-fi. It could just as accurately have been called “puppet behavior”… more accurately, really.

The point is “AI” is not a useful word. A bunch of different disciplines across computing all use it to describe different things, each trying to cash in on the cultural associations of a term that comes from fiction.

the other day I heard someone make the point that Amazon is just a more successful Palinteer

Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock. Here is its prompt: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

are you using the same prompt?

Ok, but R&D on a given product eventually stops. Over the lifetime of a good, it becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of overall costs.

wow, yeah. At least pennies have the excuse of being actually useful when they were first introduced.

The article mentions that pennies almost never get pulled from circulation because they almost never get spent. New rolls of pennies get distributed, the coins are handed out as change and then… nothing. The vast majority of them never get used after that. Cant pull an old coin from circulation if it never makes its way back to a bank.

Yeesh, talk about purple prose

no, it’s $30,000,000 worth of pennies.

that did actually happen to a guy, over the password to his bitcoin account

https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-crypto-kidnapping-torture-case/story?id=122280419

Part of the reason the show works is that we never really see Federation life outside of Starfleet. Mostly this is for practical budget reasons; what does a post-scarcity egalitarian society actually look like? That’s difficult to depict in a show designed to recycle the same set every episode and only very occasionally go outside to film.

So what little we see of the civilian federation looks… a lot like the US. There’s a president. Member states planets. Constant references to US history. A military that operates how Americans like to think their military works, rather than what it actually historically has done.

Newer shows take this even further. Section 31, as it was first introduced, was supposed to be a highly illegal, unsanctioned conspiracy acting in the shadow of the proper Federation. Now they’re presented as the ultra official, coolest badasses who are the only reason any of the egalitarian principals are able to survive.