• 0 Posts
  • 1.3K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • And the fundamental weaknesses, like the disconnect between the game world you’re playing in and the physical world your body needs to play from. You can still run into things in the physical world and pass through things in the virtual world. No physical touch interaction at all from the VR world back to ours, other than vibrations. Still limited by gravity as well as the input devices being used. Can’t really experience non-human shaped things. Hell, even driving around in a vehicle, something VR is relatively good at, isn’t the same because you don’t feel the acceleration and g-forces.

    Games like beat saber are the only ones it’s strong at, though I’m sure I’ve done many cuts that would have taken my arm or fatally wounded my legs.






  • They don’t really understand how they work and get misled by how AI can get to a correct solution (or correct looking one).

    Like I was in a meeting where people were presenting their Claude skills (which are just text files describing processes that it can add to the context) and one manager mentioned doing regression testing on added skills to make sure they don’t break the functionality of existing ones. From my pov, he was both on the right track but also missing the point entirely because they won’t be able to consistently pass regression tests even without new skills. Because something being in the context window only has a chance of affecting the output. If the code being modified has comments that look like instructions, they might override the actual instructions.

    Or it might try solving non-existent problems for you. Like a skill I was “developing” for making a particular modification to tests basically just outright said “make a test that inherits from the target test and add these parameters”. Dead simple step. First test I use to test it on, I see it’s missing one of the arguments. I mention it and the AI says that because of the start of the name being “<name of section>” and the test didn’t target that section, it decided that the argument wasn’t necessary, so I had to add instructions to not just add that argument but to not decdide to just leave it out for arbitrary reasons.

    I can’t say for sure any of the AI tasks I’ve done saved any time by being AI. But the mental load is lower and they really want us using AI, so I’ll keep doing it, but the unreliability is going to cause more problems than it solves in the long run IMO.



  • I guess the joke is that it wasn’t an ambiguous expression in the first place and that pedmas/bedmas wasn’t the issue, or rather using just it here is the problem?

    When you have multiplication expressed as numbers joined without a symbol, that takes precedence at the current layer, where layers are created using brackets, fraction symbols, superscript exponents and concatenated multiplies.

    I’m not sure this resolves all ambiguity, but it simplifies the rule to just doing multiplication/division before addition/subtraction. It seems simple enough in my mind, so I’d need to see a counter example if it does break down.

    Though I hate how mainstream math problems/puzzles always end up being an order of operations problem, which I’d argue isn’t even math but more of a metamath thing. If you’re using math to solve a real problem, the correct order of operations will be determined by logic, not any conventions.

    Like if it takes you 5 seconds to get in your car and 12 seconds per km traveled, and 5 seconds to get out of your car, if you multiply the 10 seconds to get in or out by the distance, you’ll have a wrong answer. It’ll always be distance traveled in km times 12 seconds/km plus the 10 seconds, and the math works on the units as well as the numbers to show you did it in a way that makes sense.




  • Yeah, I’ll check that out… I was thinking that primitive builder guy would do well going to the past but I wasn’t sure how much he could teach people, so it’s cool to hear about a someone doing higher tech from scratch.

    Also, that ancient puzzle box/lunar calendar/whatever it was is a counter example showing that some artisans were capable of precision work. The industrial revolution might have been more about scaling precision work to mass production levels. Like adopting standard units of measurement was a big part of it, which isn’t really technology but just getting everyone on the same page. Before that, a foot could have a different length depending on where you were, if that region even had a reliable and reproducible definition for what a foot was exactly.


  • Not fine metal, precision metal. Those ornaments didn’t have to fit something perfectly and if one person’s was slightly bigger than another’s, it didn’t really matter other than maybe for their pride.

    I’m talking about making 50 barrels with the exact same measurements (within some small error range) so that they will all fit the same receiver perfectly and can handle a standard sized bullet.

    Or, in the case of motors and machines, bearings that spin smoothly, gears that fit together without slipping, the ability to align things well enough that spinning wheels on an axle won’t add a force that wants to rip the axle apart.

    Not that electric motors are completely useless without that precision, but there’s only so far you can take them with more maintenance required without that precision.


  • Just be aware that precision metalworking wasn’t invented until the renaissance, so you might need to invent that first or your motors will wobble badly.

    Edit: that might have even been the industrial age instead of the renaissance. It might have been what really kicked off the industrial age, though the invention itself was for more reliable guns iirc.




  • One thing I’ve noticed lurking on AITA is that there’s suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you’d see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.

    It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It’s still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.


  • Not to mention the richer video the sega CD was capable of showing encouraged most games for it to pretty much just be choose your own adventure movies (from what I’ve heard, since I grew up on the Nintendo side of that deadly console war). Those “games” IMO are the poster child of games that focus all on graphics at the expense of gameplay, though they can be really rich in story. If younger me had gotten one of those, my disappointment would have been severe.

    Also don’t forget that they released the Dreamcast in the midst of all that, too.