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

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  • Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

    I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

    The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.


  • Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

    That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

    This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.


  • The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

    This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.







  • Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

    That isn’t the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

    The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

    When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: “First I will draw a diagram out in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem”, and so on.

    Neural nets don’t appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such ‘black boxes’ and researchers ‘don’t understand’ how they work.


  • 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.





  • Once game pass starts being more expensive than buying the games I want, I’ll just go back to doing that

    You may not have that option. The business model here is to burn cash, get consumers used to gamepass, then get games onto gamepass exclusively (likely in exchange for higher payouts from the service). Once we are at that point, which may be years away, prices will rise and there won’t be another avenue to play most games.

    This is the model right now for shows, and some movies, they are produced for streaming services and are only available on those services.

    Most games already don’t get physical releases. All that needs to happen to eliminate choice is that gamepass makes publishers a better offer than Steam - then there isn’t a digital release either.