Kalbear

Sam Bankman Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison. I thought a comment by Robert Reich was pretty accurate - the rich get punished only when they steal from other rich people.

Still has to be Requiem for a Dream.

It was done almost entirely offscreen.

Pretty much. I believe there's like a 3-page part where she has this weird-ass set of dreams and then is all 'fuck y'all'. That said, Madeline Pryor is 100% justified in going full villain, and not just because she has a fucking sexy costume

The scientist in me prefers agnostic to atheist.

I tend to agree, but that's pretty much a big part of his story. You need to show him be tempted by things and turn them down, and the drama is his heart wanting to go against his duties and morals. The morals always win, but it should always be hard as hell for us to see that. Conversely there's also value in Superman having to deal with threats he can't actually punch through. That makes the power level a lot more like Goku and whatnot, but Superman being clever is also kind of cool at times. I mean, Batman doesn't really have any arcs or changes either. He is unyielding and unchanging. I don't see why he's particularly more interesting other than he has better villains.

Superman doesn't need an arc. As stated elsewhere, Superman is a crazy fantasy about a person who has virtually unlimited power and is not corrupted by it.

Oh no, Joe Lieberman died. Anyway https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/politics/joe-lieberman/index.html

I'll try and explain a bit better.

Interesting that the Kate bullshit was Yet Another likely Russian disinfo campaign. It's remarkable how cheap and effective this has continued to be: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68637136

its not so exciting. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/politics/kari-lake-defamation-lawsuit-richer/index.html

No, he's one of the most powerful people on the planet. He has a very good chance of being president of the US again, has millions of followers who are nearly fanatically loyal to him and him alone, has been able to drive a domestic terrorist organization without any real repercussions in the US, is covered repeatedly in every major news organization on the planet, has his own social media system and a lot of connections to other world leaders. As an example, he is able to simply tell congress not to pass a bill and they're doing just that, when previously they were going to go ahead with it. Being able to basically personally control that level of dysfunction in the US government is a lot of power. Ask Ukraine if that's 'wannabe' power. Ask Russia.

Just to be clear, that's on a rack that has 18 of them. It's not quite the absurd leap from a single chip that implies. Again, we don't need to challenge state of the art to cause major problems. AI modeling is already at a stage where the current paradigms of models can be used on training data to be massively problematic. And because it already is built to do scaling and fan-out processing all controlling chips does is increase either the price or time you have to spend. I think thinking about controlling these as a security concern is a category error. We typically think about that in terms of either making sure that people don't have access to the underlying technological underpinnings, or they don't have access to the actual hardware because it's so hard to duplicate. The former is not particularly special because NVidia has been so open about how their chips are made and done; the secrets that they have are in manufacturing, not in the technology. And getting hands on the chips matters a hell of a lot less when you don't have to worry about it taking up space; when you're trying to pilot a missile having 30 chips and processing slower isn't going to be a useful workaround, but that isn't at all the case when you're just putting stuff in a datacenter. Eh. I'm pretty sure that either that's already there in sufficient abilities or has nothing to do with the actual models in question. Throwing a lot of power at video/audio training isn't the primary solution, any more than it is with LLMs, because more power does not mean more contextual understanding.

It is a popular stock associated with one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is also something of a loyalty check.

You can either tax them significantly past that point in terms of consumption or require them to purchase power allowances (similar to water rights or other things) and have them have civil or criminal penalties for going over. As to how it would affect other companies - there is only so much power and resources to go around; this would mean that the biggest fish would not be able to simply take all the resources for computation that exist and not let anyone else work on them.

Ah, okay. It would potentially regulate the industry in terms of making them actually pick and choose interesting problems instead of just throwing AI at everything, but it certainly isn't going to make it not abusive or dangerous by itself.

So I"m not sure about them specifically, but there is an incredibly annoying thing where you basically have to both do a long rest and talk to those people in one specific place - after you've left Act 2, but before you get invaded by the Gith. Where you're overlooking Baldur's Gate at night. If you don't do a long rest there and talk with some of the companions there you'll be forever locked out of any future relationship stuff with some of them. I know that's true for Karlach, for instance. Might be true for them, too. WOO HALSIN YAY

Yeah, I think that kind of massively misses out what made it such a winner for @Ser Lany. The combat is the least special part of BG3, though it is fun in some horribly abusive ways. The relationships and the consequences are a big draw.

AI chips and systems are very power hungry - very similar to bitcoin, which makes sense given that they, too, are doing massive amounts of math calculations as fast as they can. That said it ain't gonna stop China or anything like that.

Zorral was claiming exactly that, which is why I responded. Furthermore there is very little study that indicates any kind of causal linkage, and in fact it seems entirely the opposite - those who are more inclined to violence like violent media. In any case, as I'm sure you'd agree, there are no easy fixes. The problems are humans.

Another example of how limiting access to specific chips probably isn't going to matter very much: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/phisons-new-software-uses-ssds-and-dram-to-boost-effective-memory-for-ai-training-demos-a-single-workstation-running-a-massive-70-billion-parameter-model-at-gtc-2024 In this case software is allowing for extra use of SSDs and memory to run a model that normally requires supercomputers on a single workstation using off the shelf parts.

Note also that if you decide for no good reason to take off your clothes during the Loviatar part both Shadowheart and Astarion have special dialogue, because OF COURSE they do. Weirdly I have found myself not wanting to play because I'm at the very end and it was kind of a mental slog to do all the fights. The fights are basically trivial at this point, mind you, they're just not very fun or enriching. I did finish up the Steel Foundry, then did House of Hope and finally did Gortash. Holy crap is House of Hope's song amazing. The Raphael fight was kind of disappointingly easy; I ended up stunning him every turn with Astarion as a monk and he never even changed form. Anyway, I think I'm now done other than the end battle. Despite thinking sacrificing Gale is the better choice I think I'll end up making Orpheus a squid so I can do the final fight.

Eh, unlikely. All sorts of late game companion stuff is glitchy. Wyll and his dad is super messed up still, jaheira and her kids and Minsc have oddness, shadowheart has issues with her parents and a bunch of the npcs. Gale, for a while, would show up and ask about the crown of Karsus after blowing himself and the crown up. For a while you could have a headless karlach in your party. The late game just doesn't have the polish, period. Also, on having the time to play being married - my wife actively encourages me to play and finish the game. #winning

To be really clear I wasn't actually intending to be taking a victory lap here - when I said "who could have predicted this" I was trying to say that this was a really predictable part of dealing with rich people, and this sort of thing happens every single time with Trump (and, well, basically anyone else rich). Same sort of thing happened with the sacklers, who at this point are the largest drug dealers in the last 20 years and are responsible for literally millions of deaths. Or how no one of note got charged for anything after the great recession. It just doesn't work the way people want it to.

Yeah, it's not that surprising or anything and doesn't mean it is actually true, but for markets what people believe to be true usually makes it so. And gas prices have risen about 5% since the attacks majorly stepped up, well over what seasonality would explain.