By doing less things and forcing myself to worry less. I'd wager that a lot of what you're fretting over is not absolutely vital to survival. If it was you wouldn't have time to fret about it like this.

Attempting to optimize your entire life in some vain attempt to maximize certain outcomes is a fools errand that reveals a significant lack of maturity and life experience.

There are plenty of people in the world who put far less effort in and will be more successful than you, and plenty of people putting in more effort who will be less successful than you. One of the most unfair parts of reality is that level of expended effort is not a reliable determinator of quality of outcome, except that putting no effort in guarantees failure.

There will be plenty of times in life where all the effort in the world is undone be factors outside of your control. There will be plenty of times in life where despite everything aligning against you, you will still succeed.

All of this is not to say that you should just give up on your plans and dreams, because you're nearly guaranteed to not achieve them if you aren't trying. What I'm trying to say is that you need to be open to opportunities outside your plans. You need to understand that personal plans you make for yourself are not some sort of contract with the universe guaranteeing certain outcomes if you follow certain actions. Don't steal joy from the present for some hypothetical future that may or may not come to pass.

The reality is that most people don't end up where they planned to be when they were younger, or even working in a field they studied for. Most people don't end up doing great amazing things or leaving a mark on the world outside the immediate lives they interact with on the way to the grave.

There's a very common saying, with permutations of the concept the world over: Man plans, god laughs.

If I had pinned the concept of my self worth to the idea of where I thought my life was going or where I thought it needed to go when I was 16, 18, 21, or even 25... if that was some true determinant of success or happiness... I would have killed myself ages ago.

I'm nowhere close to where I thought I would be, but I am proud of where I am, what I do for income, what I do for fun, what I have accomplished over the years, etc. While it may be cope, I honestly feel like I have a better relationship with myself for my circuitous path.

Another saying with concepts echoed in different forms: "It's about the journey, not the destination".

Open platforms

Care to share any of those? That would be quite helpful.

Is bugmenot still a good source for shared creds, or are companies getting savvy to it yet?

Can't help but hear the "ay yo" of that song as "egg roll". We call it the egg roll song in our household.

~~You ok CustardFist? You're stuff's always been weird but it seems to have taken a decidedly sexual slant in the ones I've seen lately.

Also, there are impossibly few women turned on by having a doctor rooting around in their privates. That last facial expression overwhelmingly pushes the whole comic into the territory where I'm questioning if these aren't some way of not so subtly sharing your personal kinks with the world.~~

Edit: Nevermind, just checked your profile. For some reason a ton of your recent stuff hasn't shown up during my doomscrolling. Guess it's time to try a new sorting algorithm!

I am happy to see that the project was not abandoned, but I'm afraid that the autocomplete is going to spell the end of this. The dev has been working on autocomplete since the last release two years ago. At this point I'm not sure it's coming.

Yes, lets give Google even more arbitrary and non-auditable control over information!

Google, don't be evil global arbiters of truthiness!

A good chunk of the internet in general as well. I don't see how this is in any way enforcable. So fucking many things do this.

Oh man, can't wait for all the physics engine abuse videos.

Saved you a click.

It's called Emerald Resprited. Has a Vanilla version with just the sprite changes, and a different version where all 386 are catchable and trainer rosters are adjusted to match up with each artist's contributions.

Incredibly inconsistent quality of the sprites. Just take a quick scroll through their google doc. Actual artist work right next to obvious child scribbles.

Turning the freakin hogs gay

I have an Aunt who ruined her life with drug usage, so that pretty much ensured I had no interest. She had gone sober long before I was born, but her life was and is still a mess, unfortunately.

Sex talk didn't happen until I had already bought my first pack of condoms and had used most of them. My parents seemed relieved to be able to avoid talking about it.

Yeah, RetroArch is something best used/enjoyed in spite of the lead devs. There's a lot of really cool and unique stuff it does, but the main devs have pulled some real bullshit over time.

Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.

He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.

As far as I understood things, he's always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.

Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I've got them blocked and I'm not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.

Sigma Star Saga is an odd RPG game where the random encounters are short side scrolling shmup segments. I really enjoyed the amount of it that I played, but you can get screwed in some encounters as it gives you a random ship each time, and some are worse than others.

While I'm not against an anonymous stand for what's "right", that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things "for the lulz". It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn't care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.

Thank you for providing me all new ways to pronounce things in horribly cursed ways, magic internet man.

How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?

Oh Geremy, it's time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.

The NSA tries incredibly hard to not make public which of the many many options in their toolbox are in active use at any given time. Not sure anyone outside the org can say for sure what they are and aren't using.

Wow.

They clearly care more about propety damage than people. Here's an aside on why property damage in America is often damage to people (local business owners). But they totally only care about property.

My guy, there are significant, demonstrable, and studied long term negative effects on communities (problems that directly effect the people living there) due to property damage from protests. You're right that it stems from a lack of support structures, but that cause doesn't change the bad it does to communities and the people in them. It disproportianately effects the poor as well, as those with the means tend to flee areas where propery destruction/rioting/looting occured, which takes money out of the local area, which snowballs until a once thriving community is now a food desert with no businesses or services available for the residents.

Yeah, fuck the big businesses. Fuck the 1%. But don't cut off vital services from a community by driving all of them out. Go make an actual statement and go after the owners. Go after the HQs. Go to the executives' and politicians' homes and where they actually work and spend time.

See how quick the police respond to people destroying inner city businesses vs a peaceful crowd in the street in front of Maxine Water's house, and then tell me which is more important to the rich (and therefore far less damaging to the poor).

If you're going to risk getting riot equipment used on you, pick more valuable fucking targets.

Mobile Haro plus SD kit parts is such a cool idea that I'm shocked I haven't seen it done before.

Does homeboy not know about crabcakes? All the taste, none of the pain in the ass and paying for the privilege of preparing your own food. Just get them somewhere that doesn't use filler.

there was something I could somehow magically fix if I just kept pushing myself through the rock in my way.

This is one of the worst "thought traps" out there. The biggest change in my life was when I decided to learn to work around/with my flaws rather than through/against them.

I don't mean give up and never try to improve, like a post I've seen here where someone got mad at their friends because their friends should just expect them to be late because ADHD. I mean stuff like that I set as many alarms and reminders as it takes, rather than deluding myself that "one alarm will be fine if I pay attention".

Oh fuck off with this shit Capcom. I hope no one has forgotten where all the fan support for Megaman Legends 3 got us.

Bastards couldn't even be assed to release the already finished 3DS demo (which we know was in a decently playable state from videos they released).

Beyond my Megaman saltiness, I have a very hard time believing that fucking Marvel needs fan support to prove profitability. You just need to not make some bullshit microtransaction filled live service game like the ones that are repeatedly failing.

Solarwinds Orion

We don't curse in this household.

Anyway, guessing it's the classic "sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do" situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.

That's a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It's dumb as hell that people don't know stuff like what a server is, but if they don't you have to abstract it more.

My go to is some form of: I'm in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone's stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone's email work.

Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I'm mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.

I had one that kind of did. Looking back I think it was a clever way of seeing if I was a good fit based off my reaction.

It was the end of the interview and he asked if I had any questions, and I pulled the "turn it around on them" play and asked him what he enjoyed most about his job/working there. He was going to be my boss.

He said "every day I get to work on something new". With the magic of far more experience now, I understand just how much that's a blessing and a curse. That idea excited me at the time, and it was the attitude needed for the position.

Now I prefer to have that opportunity available, but I have to be able to deep dive into a smaller subset of things and ignore the churn sometimes to stay sane long term.

Working with something new every day in a tech support position just means something new is breaking every day, and there's not enough time to become well versed in much of it.

Thank you. I'm getting quite tired of people posting the most fucking obvious takes about problems in the US, then going "why haven't americans fixed this? are they stupid?", when we have exceedingly small control over the actions of our shitass policy makers.

It's some real "everyone is dumb except for me" energy.

So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for "AI" before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

It's how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each "step". Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of "frame 2s" and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it's driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4^n^ states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can't even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their "reward" function. God only knows what edge cases they've overlooked.

My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the "randomness", have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those "pre-responses" against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the "pre-responses". They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further "positive/negative points" reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.

I'd love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.

Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go "full tinfoil hat" over.

Most people don't want their kids eating slop all the time.

Beyond that Minecraft is a considerably old game now, especially if you got into it in the very early days. It shouldn't be surprising that there are older people paying attention to this.

I was in notch's old threads on /v/ in the very beginning back as a young teen (yes 4chan, I was totally 18 years old, pinky swear). I'm in my 30s and have a kid now who is too young to play, but I will probably introduce her at an appropriate age if she likes computer games.

I'm not raging or anything, but I'm definitely paying attention enough to know if this movie is garbage to steer my kid away from in the future.

The moment you look at even the "best" ones for more than a few seconds you start seeing lots of fun body horror.

That's the way most discussion trends right now. Blame the tech bros and investors chasing a buck for killing the term AI.

The world is a wildly different place now, and the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.

This is not nearly as comparable.

Beyond that, very few people had an issue with AI as fuzzy logic and machine learning. Those techniques were already in wide use all over the place to great success.

The term has been co-opted by the generative, largely LLM folks to oversell the product they are offering as having some form of intelligence. They then pivot to marketing it as a solution to the problem of having to pay people to talk, write, or create visual or audio media.

Generally, people aren't against using AI to simulate countless permutations of motorcycle frame designs to help discover the most optimal one. They're against wholesale reduction in soft skill and art/content creation jobs by replacing people with tools that are definitively not fit to task.

Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.

You've missed my point entirely.

Blame absolutely is fair, but people can't vote on just the best options for SS alone, ignoring everything else. Also, as seen in recent presidential races (cough cough 2016), you can have a massive contigent of voter will just effectively erased by very thin margins or technicalities. On top of all that, voters can't directly effect what the policy makers actually do in office.

My point is, it's not useful to blame such a wide and diverse swath of people. Painting with such wide brush strokes only serves to create an us vs them situation that distracts from the actual policy makers, lobbyists, and news media complex with far more direct influence over all of this. Most of those people are boomers, but all boomers are not part of those groups.

The shortsightedness is thinking that new generations are the first people to go "Hey, maybe we need to pay into SS for enough money to be there. Maybe we shouldn't waste money on proxy wars on false pretenses." plenty of Boomers were shouting this from the rooftops as this shit was happening. Your objections and concerns are not new.

Basically, please stop talking about boomers as some singular homogenous entity. Please stop thinking that the situation we now find ourselves in is caused by some sort of lack of sense from older generations instead of politicians doing what is best for them at the expense of the general populace. Please stop blaming the average populace from before your time for the choices made by politicians.

Trump should be a burning hot example that politicians actions and the peoples' will are often very disconnected.

We do have to find a way to fix this. Taking time to dunk on people just as downtrodden as us is wasted effort that could be put towards trying to fix things.

Calling it now. Next Borderlands game is going to have some referential jokes about this train wreck that are meant to be funny self-deprecation but will actually be transparent attempts as covering up how much Randy Pritchford is malding about this.

I'm honestly surprised we aren't seeing more public meltdown from him. Can only imagine what's happening behind closed doors.

What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?

If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.

I love that they worded it as the age old ban appeal reason. Always someone's brother on their account breaking the rules.

Rough going, but it's better than having cheaters just make a rotation of child accounts they can hide behind.

That assumes that anyone can reliably be a single issue voter their whole life, and that people somehow only have to live in the reality they voted for instead of the reality of whichever politicians actually won.

It's a very beguiling idea to simply blame the current problems of the world on negligence or a lack of effort by those who came before you. On strictly personal failings. It's also incredibly short sighted to do so, and often leads to repeated mistakes.

Inb4 "then they should have tried harder to convince their friends/family! They should have protested! They should have stormed the capital in violent revolution!" Keep moving the goalposts so long as you can keep blaming the previous generations.

It's a classic trap in business for newly hired managers: Come into a new to you situation, pick out the obvious as hell problems, insist upon the most logically simple solution. Ignore the history, company politics, confounding variables, and end up making the situation worse because you never understood how things got so bad to begin with.

In complicated situations, it is a trap to think that the obvious solution just hasn't been tried or investigated because no one as smart as you has been involved yet.

Now blame where blame is absolutely due. There's plenty to go around.

That said, very little of what the powers that be do is truly new. Blaming the older generations eliminates an opportunity for us all to learn from the past, identify patterns in history, and just makes it that much easier to keep us all oppressed.

A big takeaway I've found from elderly family members is that you absolutely cannot rely on inflation increasing at a standard pace. A fortune saved up 25+ years ago does not go anywhere as far as it used to.

Anyway, to try and cut my ramble short: We can sit around feeling smug about some perverted idea of "what goes around comes around", or we can try to learn from the knowledge aand mistakes of previous generations.

We'll all be old one day.

I would hope, but I've been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

And someone in your family at some point will take a picture of your kid and put it up on whatever the social media of choice is.