audaxdreik

Last book: The West Passage by Jared Pechaček. Delightfully surreal fantasy; highest recommendation. Almost purposefully confusing at times, it wants you to infer the bizarre structure of its world through the mysteries it presents rather than ever try to over-explain itself.

Current book: Everything Must Go, The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey. Also strong recommend. I've been feeling rather apocalyptic lately due to the everything and some dramatic life changes I'm going through and this is having the intended effect. By taking an unflinching, academic (yet sometimes humrous) look at various eschatological stories they become demystified and help reduce the anxiety. Do we really believe we'll be the lucky generation to witness the closure of all things? Probably not. But also ... maybe?

This is the biggest factor for me now, too. Not to go all old man Millennial, but humor me for a second:

I've been playing games since the NES era. The scene used to be a lot slower and while I never played every single game that came out or even owned every console, I was enough of a hobbyist that I could still follow all the major developments. These days, there's simply TOO MUCH. And I don't mean to imply that an abundance of choices is bad, just that it's an absolute firehose that no one person can follow. You have to dedicate yourself to your specific interests, your specific niches. These can well be served by indies and the whole back library of games.

Because that's the other thing, we're starting to more thoroughly recognize games as art, as a library rather than as pure content. Unless you are absolutely committed to sucking on the end of that firehose to catch all the new content at its zenith, what's really the point?

Fuck man, it's time to go back to the NES for me, pick up all those games I never beat as a kid and sink 10,000 hours into learning how to speedrun some of my favorites. There's simply no need to spend $70-80 fucking dollars on subpar, rushed, exploitative content. Fuck 'em.

If you've ever seen Thank You for Smoking and appreciated the dark political satire, check out Boomsday from Christopher Buckley by the same author, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomsday_(novel)

Cassandra Devine, "a morally superior twenty-nine-year-old PR chick" and moonlit angry blogger, incites generational warfare when she proposes that the financially nonviable Baby Boomers be given incentives (free Botox, no estate tax) to kill themselves at 70. The proposal, meant only as a catalyst for debate on the issue, catches the approval of millions of citizens, chief among them an ambitious presidential candidate, Senator Randolph Jepperson.

It's been a decade or more since I last read it, but I remember it being pretty funny and insightful.

Dude handled it like an absolute champ, but the sad thing is, he knows being black it's his only option. You saw how they treated him for absolutely nothing, now imagine how much they would've escalated had he done a single damn thing more ...

The thing I remember most about the early internet was staking out your own weird little corners. There wasn't much of any "everything" site yet, so you'd find the things that appealed to you and settle there.

A lot of my early tastes in indie and experimental music were formed by the Music message board on GameFAQs. I was already going there for the walkthroughs and found my way to some of the under-populated, miscellaneous boards.

You experienced meeting people with names (even if just pseudonyms) and ideas that weren't just blended into an algorithmic slurry.

It's why I like Lemmy, I can feel a bit of that here. Still, I have a hard time surrendering things like Twitter and moved instantly to Bluesky where I continue the trend ...

You're describing neurosymbolic AI, a combination of machine learning and neural network (LLM) models. Gary Marcus wrote an excellent article on it recently that I recommend giving a read, How o3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI.

The primary issue I see here is that you're still relying on the LLM to reasonably understand and invoke the ML models. It needs to parse the data and understand what's important in order to feed it into the ML models and as has been stated many times, LLMs do not truly "understand" anything, they are inferring things statistically. I still do not trust them to be statistically accurate and perform without error.

This got me through so many shifts working in a call center. Could download PuTTY and run it from my user folder without admin permissions and then connect to one of the servers.

Been awhile since I played, but I remember my first ascension was Draconian Skald. I think the rules have changed quite a bit, but I used to love Troll Monk of Cheibriados, too. Stoneskin + Stoneform and a shield of reflection absolutely WRECKED the Elven Halls. For every step I'd take the elves would get like 4-5 turns and fire off a volley of arrows. I'd take practically no damage and a large portion of them would get reflected back and kill the elves themselves. Literally just waltzing through the place. Slow is life.

Transmuter used to be a lot of fun, too, but they changed it significantly over the years. I remember playing as a Felid one time and I died while in spider form. Because Felids get several lives, I reincarnated on the same level, ran back to my corpse and condensed it into a poison potion to chuck back at enemies.

I find it to be one of the simpler roguelikes to learn, but it takes awhile to master and there are some very cool interactions once you get the vibe.

sigh

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-billion-internet-program-that-has-connected-0-people

Oh yes, I think Peter Watts is a great author. He's very good at tackling high concept ideas while also keeping it fun and interesting. Blindsight has a vampire in it in case there wasn't already enough going on for you 😁

Unrelated to the topic at hand, I also highly recommend Starfish by him. It was the first novel of his I read. A dark, psychological thriller about a bunch of misfits working a deep sea geothermal power plant and how they cope (or don't) with the situation at hand.

Blindsight mentioned!

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

This has been my biggest problem with it. It places a cognitive load on me that wasn't there before, having to cut through the noise.

bystander already replied, but yeah, you can see it a bit in Pudutr0n's response as well. I can't source it any better than that, other than I've seen general mumblings about the trustworthiness of Ground's own bias calculations.

I don't think it's anything that would cause great concern, other than just to say we live in tough times right now. I'll always question everything and never fully trust anything. So it goes.

Dropped Reddit cold turkey when they closed the API.

It was an adjustment at first, but I do feel like the ecosystem has continued to grow and evolve, as well as me just adapting to what was on offer better.

I still never purposefully visit Reddit, but sometimes I just end up there from search results or links and it gives me the ick.