Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 34 Posts
  • 266 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • We could have used the tilde, which has been used in formal logic & maths for negation in very many contexts for a long time.

    It’s used instead in C and many C-like languages for the far less useful bitwise negation. Of course, we could have had it work in the same way as bitwise vs logical and & or, by dialling up the symbol. Which would have massively improved its visibility compared to the bang.

    But for some reason, no. They chose the bang instead.








  • I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

    And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

    Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.


  • A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

    True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

    But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.




  • I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

    How much of that sounds familiar…?




  • They’ve got options.

    • never build in forced server components to begin with
    • patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
    • give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
    • open source the whole thing

    And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.






  • Tell me, when was the last time you went to a concert?

    Because you should know, it’s very common for someone to talk a little before the concert or before the piece about the piece itself, what inspired it, how it fits into the programme, etc.

    That’s what he did here. He explained what inspired the writing of this piece. No different to a conductor explaining that Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony was dedicated to the city of Leningrad, which at the time it was premiered was being besieged by the Nazis. Or explaining how his 9th Symphony was a deliberate mockery of earlier composers’ grand 9th symphonies, as a way to subvert expectations placed on him by Stalin’s regime. Or how Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony was written at first in honour of Napoleon, and then later changed to “celebrate the memory of a great man” after Napoleon went against Beethoven’s republican idealism and crowned himself emperor.

    Music has always been political, and in modern times no concert is complete without at least some discussion about the context in which the piece was written. That should be as true for a piece written to commemorate victims of a modern-day war as it is for mid-20th century or early 19th century pieces.