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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah I’ve done a tiny bit of AI stuff for what I do (biology) and I think it’s very sus they can build such a strong model out of data which costs lots of money. The reason the algos in my field of biology are so strong is because the NCBI has the genomes of everything that’s be sequenced FOR FREE, because obviously you don’t want people patenting genomes and it should all be free for science, etc.

    Which begs the question how the a start up that started out as a non-profit get that much user data and keep costs low? I know you can buy user data and I’m not sure how much it is to buy a bunch of google docs from a data broker, but if you buy from hackers who just data breached or used some illegal crawler you can probably cut that to prices a nonprofit could afford.






  • There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
    https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
    I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a “”“lolicon”“” issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
    And when I say “”“lolicon”“, I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it’s disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but “”“lolicon””" hasn’t been one of them.
    TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was “by otakus, for otakus” they aren’t hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator



  • In biology we’ve been using machine learning for a long time now so the AI super hype out there is pretty funny to me. It’s for sure useful with stuff like predicting protein folding and analyzing genes and stuff, but it’s all hyper-specific stuff just like it has its always been. Good for removing tedium for sure as its the reason we can even know the human genome because it would take literally forever to sequence it without modern tech, which we did in the in the 90s and finished in 2003.
    My big hope is that all this hype will get people to invest in proteonomic technology which is 100% a great use case for AI and also the future.






  • “Starship Troopers” the book is blatantly fascist, Heinlein became a fascist in his later years.
    “Starship Troopers” the movie IS a parody of fascism, Verhoeven literally based the Starship Trooper’s symbols on Nazi iconography.
    "Although some contemporary critics and audiences considered Starship Troopers to be an endorsement of fascism, Verhoeven said, “whenever you see something that you think is fascist, you should know that the filmmakers agree with your opinion.”

    Also Sargon is just a fascist puppet.



  • I’ve been an MMO gamer for a VERY long time and I would say the whaling thing is a perfect analogy. I often pre-order expansions to MMOs like WoW and FFXIV but I have never bought cosmetics other than two race changes for FF, which would make me a “dolphin”.

    I noticed in WoW and FFXIV that if someone has one mount you can only get from the cash shop, they are VERY likely to have bought TONS of other cosmetics from the cash shop. If they don’t have any cash shop mounts, they won’t have any cosmetics from it either. It seems like most people are either “all in” or nothing, people like me are very rare.