During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
> Anything else and more is sectarianism and people bragging about their choices not having verified their true claimed efficacy or benefits.
Everybody's looking for a silver bullet and wants to advocate for their specific one by tearing competing theories down. The reason that IF works is because it's more difficult to eat at a caloric surplus when you can only fill your stomach for 8 hours a day. Full stop. There might be modest ancillary benefits but as far as weight loss it really is as simple as calories in versus calories out. There are tons of variations on this theme dependent on goals and tolerance for discomfort but simple math wins ten times out of ten.
For the layperson IF or keto or something similarly extreme is effective but difficult. It requires strict adherence to a lifestyle that impacts one's social life and makes eating prepared foods difficult. Worst of all it leads to impromptu cheat days in moments of weakness that spiral out of control and negatively affect consistency. For people trying to lead a normal life I personally think eating at 80% TDEE with 1:1:1 macros is the most sustainable - you eat at your leisure, get sufficient protein for lean muscle mass and still eat carbs for energy and fun. It's basically "eat less, have a protein shake." Combine this with some light cardio and body weight/kettlebell stuff while watching TV and you'll see great functional fitness gains in addition to quick and steady weight loss.
Of course it's hard to build an online quasi-religion around moderation so this type of thinking isn't mainstream despite its efficacy.
The Saturn is my favorite Sega system. I remember seeing it on the GameFAQs header in the late 90s when looking up strategy guides for Game Boy games and thinking "wow, that's a cool name for a system!" It wasn't until a few years ago that I finally got one. The next time I'm convalescent or snowed in I plan on finishing Powerslave and Panzer Dragoon Saga - I've only made it about halfway through both and they're fantastic.
The Saturn is also my favorite.
Is it bad that I think depends a dragoon saga kind of overeated?
Zwei is my favorite. The music in one was awesome I thought though
There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches... I could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.
> Hideki Sato was responsible.
I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?
Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.
Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.
Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.
[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.
I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche.
DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.
Let's throw on one more: consumers had lost faith in Sega. The Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn (in the US) were all abandoned by the company (for understandable reasons, but still). Why shell out another $200 for yet another system which was going to be prematurely dropped in a couple of years? Which, of course, was exactly what happened.
Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)
You make it sound like dual shoulders were standard, but PS(2) was the odd one for having that. None of N64, Xbox nor Gamecube had them. It wasn't really until the Xbox 360 that you'd see it outside of Sony.
Now that you mention it, maybe I'm thinking more of the dual analog sticks than the shoulders. But yeah, Gamecube at least had a Z trigger in addition to the shoulders.
Yeah, I think it would have had other issues if it carried on further too. Games were starting to understand using the 2nd analog stick and the DC controller was also missing 5 buttons that the Xbox and PS2 controllers had. Even some GameCube ports felt weird because of the missing buttons and that only had 4 less buttons and a 2nd analog stick.
You may call those a debacle. But I think it was a great time in the world of gaming and electronics in general. Commercial failures aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can still be fun.
> I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole
I dont necessarily agree with the guy you are posting to, but if Hideki Sato is being bestowed the glory of 'Designer of all Segas consoles' then he also needs to hold responsibility for their failings, of which there are many.
You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.
People make these mistakes too. Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so - on at least one occasion I unplugged one from a breadboard before it got too toasty to handle (and I was/am an electronics nublet). Similarly there was also a lot of hand-wringing about the Gemini pizza glue in a world where people do wacky stuff like cook fish in a dishwasher or defrost chicken overnight on the counter or put cooked steak on the same plate it was on when raw just a few minutes prior.
LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill. Most people don't know what they don't know and fail to think about what might happen if they do something (correctly or otherwise) before they do it, let alone what they'd do if it goes wrong.
> Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so
Yes, and that's okay because the classroom is a learning environment. However, LLMs don't learn; a model that releases the magic smoke in this session will be happy to release it all over again next time.
> LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill.
Which makes the problem worse, not better. If risk management is a difficult skill, then that means we can't extrapolate from 'easy' demonstrations of said skill to argue that an LLM is generally safe for more sensitive tasks.
Overall, it seems like LLMs have a long tail of failures. Even while their mean or median performance is good, they seem exponentially more likely than a similarly-competent human to advise something like `rm -rf /`. This is a deeply unintuitive behaviour, precisely because our 'human-like' intuition is engaged with resepct to the average/median skill.
Well said, but I'd add that LLMs are also surfacing the fact that there's a swathe of people out there who will treat the machines as more trustworthy than humans by default, and don't believe they need to do any assessment or risk management in the first place.
People are just lazy. It’s got nothing to do with LLMs having more trust because they’re a machine because most people would happily trust their friend over an expert. They’d trust the first blog post they find online over an expert. Most people are just too lazy and not skilled enough to perform independent review.
And to be fair to those people, coming to topics with a research mindset is genuinely hard and time consuming. So I can’t actually blame people for being lazy.
All LLMs do is provide an even easier way to “research”. But it’s not like people were disbelieving random Facebook posts, online scams, and word-of-mouth before LLMs.
As right as this may be, it elides the crucial difference between asking LLMs and all the other methods of asking questions you enumerated. The difference is not between the quality of information you might get from a friend or a blog versus an LLM. The difference is the centralization and feeding of the same poor quality information to massive numbers of people at scale. At least whatever bonkers theory someone "researches" on their own is going to be a heterodox set of ideas, with a limited blast radius. Even a major search engine up-ranking a site devoted to, like, how horse dewormers can cure covid, doesn't present it as if that link is the answer to how to cure covid, right? LLMs have a pernicious combination of sounding authoritative while speaking gibberish. Their real skill is not in surfacing the truth from a mass of data, it's in presenting a set of assertions as truth in a way that might satisfy the maximum number of people with limited curiosity, and in establishing an artificial sense of trust. That's why LLMs are likely the most demonic thing ever made by man. They are machines built to lie, tell half-truths, obfuscate and flatter at the same time. Doesn't that sound enough like every religion's warning about the devil?
But nothing has changed there. People have been posting intelligent-sounding gibberish on social media and blogs for years before LLMs.
The problem with centralisation isn’t that it gobbles up data. It’s that it allows those weights to be dictated by a small few who might choose to skew the model more favourably to the messaging they’ve want to promote.
And this is a genuine concern. But it’s also not a new problem either. We already have that problem with new broadcasters, newspaper publications, social media ethics teams, and so on and so forth.
The new problem LLMs bring to human interaction isn’t any of the issues described above. It’s with LLMs replacing human contact in situations where you need something with a conscience to step in.
For example, conversations leading to AI promoting negative thoughts from people with mental health problems because the chat history starts to overwhelm the context window, resulting in the system prompt doing a poorer job of weighting the conversation away from dangerous topics like suicide.
This isn’t to say that the points which you’ve addressed aren’t real problems that exist. They definitely do exist. But they’ve also always existed, even before GPT was invented. We’ve just never properly addressed those problems because:
either there’s no incentive to. If you are powerful enough to control the narrative then why would you use that power to turn the narrative against you?
…or there simply isn’t a good way of solving that problem. eg I might hate stupid conspiracy theories, but censoring research is a much worse alternative. So we just have to allow nutters to share their dumb ideas in the hope that enough legitimate research is published, and enough people are sensible enough to read it, that the nutters don’t have any meaningful impact on society.
The AI is being sold as an expert, not a student. These are categorically different things.
The mistake in the post is one that can be avoided by taking a single class at a community college. No PhD required, not even a B.S., not even an electricians certificate.
So I don't get your point. You're comparing a person in a learning environment to the equivalent of a person claiming to have a PhD in electrical engineering. A student letting the magic smoke escape from a basic circuit is a learnable experience (a memorable one that has high impact), especially when done in a learning environment where an expert can ensure more dangerous mistakes are less likely or non existent. But the same action from a PhD educated engineer would make you reasonably question their qualifications. Yes, humans make mistakes but if you follow the AI's instructions and light things on fire you get sued. If you follow the engineer's instructions and set things on fire then that engineer gets fired likely loses their license.
Lawyers are getting in trouble because they use AI and submit fabricated citations about fabricated cases as precedent. A bunch of charges were recently thrown out in Wisconsin because of this, and it's not the first time such behavior has made the news.
The real analog here would be an electronics teacher leading his students to create a circuit that caught fire. If you’re confidently giving faulty information to people that don’t know any better, you’re not teaching them.
I am sure this is true. On the flip side, as someone who is addicted to learning, I've been finding LLMs to be amazing at feeding my addiction. :)
Some recent examples:
* foreign languages ("explain the difference between these two words that have the same English translation", "here's a photo of a mock German exam paper and here is my written answer - mark it & show how I could have done better")
* domains that I'm familiar with but might not know the exact commands off the top of my head (troubleshooting some ARP weirdness across a bunch of OSX/Linux/Windows boxes on an Omada network)
* learning basic skills in a new domain ("I'm building this thing out of 4mm mild steel - how do I go about choosing the right type of threading tap?", "what's the difference between Type B and Type F RCCB?")
Many of these can be easily answered with a web search, but the ability to ask follow-up questions has been a game changer.
I'd love to hear from other addicts - are there areas where LLMs have really accelerated your learning?
I agree, I always ask to know more if I don’t get it or it’s a new subject. But I think we’re in the minority, it’s easier to just accept the answer and move on, it requires very little effort compared to trying to understand and retain.
Hah, yesterday I was discussing solar panels and moving shadows. I would have wasted money buying a commercial solar panel if I didn’t have this chat.
Learned a lot on how it works, to the point I’m confident that I can go the DIY route and spend my money in AliExpress buying components instead.
Why not ask a pro solar panel installer instead? I live in an apartment, of course they would say it’s not possible to place a solar panel on my terrace. I don’t believe in things not being possible.
But I had two semesters of electronics/robotics in my CS undergrad and I know to not to trust the LLM blindly and verify.
I'm of a similar mind but I think you also need to be careful. I find that people are more willing to believe a chatbot than a search result simply due to the way the information is presented. But if you're thinking "but search results can be wrong too!" then that's exactly my point. The problem is quite similar to people "doing their own research". I'm sure conspiracy theorists do a lot of reading, a lot of searching, and all that cargo cult research stuff. But I say cargo cult because it has all the form of research but none of the substance. That doesn't mean using LLMs is exclusive cargo cult learning but it is also easy to fall into a trap of that, and I'd argue easier than it is to fall into cargo cult learning by searching, which is easier to fall into cargo cult learning than by reading books, which is easier than being in a university lecture. Doesn't mean the tools are bad, but that it's easy to fool ourselves.
Basically if you can't differentiate how your typical conspiracy theorist isn't researching then you're at greater risk. It's worth thinking about that question, as they do do a lot of reading, thinking, and looking things up. It's more subtle, right?
FWIW, a thing I find LLMs really useful for is learning the vernacular of fields I'm unfamiliar or less familiar with. It is especially helpful when searches fail due to overloaded words (and let's be honest, Google's self elected lobotomy), but it is more a launching point. Though this still has the conspiracy problem as it is easy to self-reinforce a belief and not considering the alternatives. Follow-up questions are nice and can really help sifting through large amounts of information, but they certainly have a preference to narrow the view. I think this makes learning feel faster and more direct but have also taught (at the university level) I think it is important to learn all the boring stuff too. That stuff may not be important "now" but a well organized course means that that stuff is going to be important "soon" and "now" is the best time to learn it. No different than how musicians need to practice boring scales and patterns, athletes need to do drills and not just learn by competing (or "simulated" computations), or how children learn to write by boringly writing shapes over and over. I find the LLMs like to avoid the boring parts.
Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population to type 80085 and giggle, doesn't mean it can't also be used for complex calculations.
AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.
> Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population
I'm not sure what your argument is here. I think everyone knows this but also recognizes that the vast majority of people are not using calculators in that way. The vast majority of people are using calculators to replace calculation.
I'll give an example. I tell people I tip by: round the decimal, divide by 10, multiply by 2. Nearly every time I say that people tell me it is too difficult. This includes people with PhD STEM educations...
Hearing these stories (and I hear them more than I would like) is mind boggling to me. As someone who’s quite bad at math, doing what you describe is insanely basic stuff, anyone in a developed country with access to school should be able to do that.
It will be hard to convince me those people are using a LLM to learn.
That's a very strong claim. I don't think people expect their circuits to ignite, LLM instruction or not. But I'd expect learning from a book or dedicated website would be less likely for that to occur. (Even accounting for bad manufacturing)
You're biased because you're not considering that by definition the student is inexperienced. Unknown unknowns. Tons of people don't know very basic things (why would they?) like circuits with capacitors bring dangerous when the power is off.
Why are you defending there LLM? Would you be as nice to a person? I'd expect not because these threads tend to point out a person's idiocy. I'm not sure why we give greater leeway to the machine. I'm not sure why we forgive them as if they are a student learning but someone posting similar instructions on a blog gets (rightfully) thrashed. That blog writer is almost never claiming PhD expertise
I agree that LLMs can greatly aid in learning. But I also think they can greatly hinder learning. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's any different than when people got access to the internet. We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more). Instead we've ended up with lots of conspiratorial thinking. Now a sycophantic search engine is going to fix that? I'm unconvinced. Mostly because we can observe the result.
> We gave people access to all the information in the world and people "do their own research" and end up making egregious errors because they don't know how to research (naively think it's "searching for information"), what questions to ask, or how to interrogate data (and much more).
You pin pointed a major problem with education, indeed. Personally, I think 3 crucial courses should be taught in school to mitigate that: 1) rational thinking 2) learning how to learn 3) learning how to do a research.
I think so too, but I also think this is part of the failure of math and science education. That is exactly what those topics are. But many courses will focus on the facts and not the substance. Instead of linking Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, which also broaches this I'll link this one instead[0] as I think it better illustrates what I'm saying.
The difference is that LLMs pretend to be experts on all things. The high school shop kids aren’t under the impression they can build a smart toaster or whatever.
In Norway we eat plenty of salmon which is quite raw or even raw (in sushi). It has to be frozen and thawed first, to kill parasites.
A friend that studied fish production did recommend not eating salmon though and eating trout instead (ørret in Norwegian). Based on scientific evidence difference is pretty small (15% fish not surviving for salmon vs 12% for trout). But rainbow trout does have more DHA per kg.
Some cultures believe that blood type has a bearing on personality [1]. I always thought "Type A" personalities were called so because A is the first letter in the alphabet. No idea whether I'm correct though the Wikipedia article says that BTPT is "not to be confused with" this so I'd imagine the overlap is coincidental.
On a separate but vaguely related note: if somebody comps all or part of your bill at a restaurant or bar then you should split the difference on the tip.
As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100 (I'll use round-ish numbers for this example). The bartender comps you 30% because you all are cool and discuss your shared experience bartending or jetskiing or whatever. Ordinarily your tip would have been 20% for a total of $120. In this case your bill is now $70 plus your newly selected gratuity. Take the difference between the original bill with tip and your current bill without tip and divide it in two. This is the floor for your new tip, in this case (120-70)/2 = $25. This is indeed something like a 35% gratuity but they hooked you upand made that custom drink for your charming new beau. As a matter of fact you should round up from this number because they have side work to do and you make pretty decent money as a software engineer/LLM tickler/product sorcerer. Just make it $30 for a nice round hundo.
If you're friends with the manager and they comp your dinner to do you a solid and impress your date then you should tip 50% of what the bill would have been minimum. This is why you should keep cash in your pocket - shake the waiter's hand on your way out and palm it to them. If that's not possible then go to use the restroom and talk to them on your way back so they can run your card through the POS on a blank check to give them said tip.
This is how you do things with class. This is what I wish somebody had explained to me when I was 20 and kinda broke (i.e. eager to save money that I would have spent anyway) before I embarrassed myself by failing to do such. If you are similarly unaware then now you know too :-)
As an addendum this also applies to coffee and pizza places but the numbers become coarser. Buying them the equivalent of a beer at your local dive ($3ish) is customary.
I'm really not trying to hate, I think you method is great and I love that you have rationalized it, but as someone whose mostly find this kind of social interactions natural, there's something "funny" about finding the algorithm for it. I never did the math and always naturally landed more or less there.
The way to do it with class would be the manager asks the price of the service, and pays the servers and tenders their due fair wage. The moment you bring money to a bunch of "ifs" surrounding a social interaction, you lost all class. Thinking of tips at all is actively detrimental to what you're trying to accomplish.
I've only been given 1 free meal (by the manager). I just gave the entire difference as my tip. I was already going to spend the money, so why not make a random waiter happy.
I always thought that was a casino thing (to keep you drinking so that you gamble more) but I've never been to a casino. I live in Canada though, so we might have laws against that sort of thing.
like, a good looking person will get the occasional comp on the basis of that, but you'll never be friends with the staff on the basis of that. whereas anyone can be friends with the staff, if they are friendly and earnest about it.
I recently had an entire meal at Chili’s comped by the manager, because I waited an hour for food. I guess their system flagged it, or they just noticed, because I didn’t complain. I was hanging with my grandson.
I tipped on the full amount but we had to get the manager again to figure out how. I was going to Venmo her but the manager just sent the $0.00 bill to the table.
> As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100
I guess I’m still similarly unaware, because nothing about palming people money on the way out like a magician or doing the restroom trick feels classy over everyone just being super upfront about the bill and tips.
I think the procedure is being misinterpreted. This isn't a scam, it's just a common social convention. It's not a scam by the waiter because they have a limited amount they can do this for and they have just chosen to do it for you.
Is this how comping actually works? I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but I assumed there was some system for it (if sometimes ill-defined) and not just employees stealing.
The receipt printer in the kitchen is tied to the POS. Anything rung in for prep is saved in the computer. The manager can run reports and see who comped what and if anything has been voided. This has been a thing since the 90s.
Creating a good guest experience is how you get repeat business. Comps are part of that. You are talking about theft and I mentioned nothing of the sort. If you choose to engage in such behavior then that's your business - don't accuse me of it.
As someone who's worked in restaurant kitchens but did one single day as a waiter for training, I'd basically never work as a server, even for tips and the extra money.
Cooking was way easier.
I agree the whole tipping system in the US is a mess, though.
Stomach paralysis is apparently a known side effect [1]. There are also lots of anecdotes about lesser (but still foul) digestive surprises that are too unpleasant for me to bother elaborating on here.
I was on my thiccboi swag for the latter half of last year and am presently working it off by rebuilding my fitness base with kettlebells and cardio. I'd rather do this than GLP-1s not because I'm some sort of iron-willed badass so much as I'm simply distrustful of anything that messes with one's metabolism so severely. While these drugs are useful for the morbidly obese and diabetics I simply can't imagine how or why anybody would go on them for aesthetic or off-label purposes.
>Stomach paralysis is apparently a known side effect [1]. There are also lots of anecdotes about lesser (but still foul) digestive surprises that are too unpleasant for me to bother elaborating on here.
These are real, but they're also not permanent, and are why you start on a low dose to evaluate how your body reacts to the medication. My spouse is a long time GLP-1 user (coming up on four years now) and had mild (or more) bouts of several of these digestive related systems.
However, within six months these had greatly diminished. And by the one year mark, even at the highest dose, they were essentially gone and have remained a non-issue since.
You should certainly be mindful of side effects, and follow the recommended dosage scale up, which should be monitored by your doctor.
>I was on my thiccboi swag for the latter half of last year and am presently working it off by rebuilding my fitness base with kettlebells and cardio. I'd rather do this than GLP-1s not because I'm some sort of iron-willed badass so much as I'm simply distrustful of anything that messes with one's metabolism so severely. While these drugs are useful for the morbidly obese and diabetics I simply can't imagine how or why anybody would go on them for aesthetic or off-label purposes.
I do think folks with obesity fall into one of two camps (or somewhere on a spectrum between): those that are in that place because they don't put in any effort, eat whatever they want, don't workout, and so on.
And then there are folks like my spouse. They were able to lose weight in the past, but only through continued suffering. To be "just" overweight, they needed to be working out constantly and in a state of always feeling hungry. They never reached an equilibrium where it wasn't agony to maintain that weight, and after months/years would always rebound.
For them, a GLP-1 was the only thing that ever quieted the food noise. They workout constantly still and are in the best shape of their life. It wasn't entirely the GLP-1, but that gave them the tool to quiet the noise and get to a state where fitness could be fun/sustainable, and now they're killing it.
So, the TL;DR is that some people need this tool, and it's not necessarily an either/or. It can be one part in a series of positive changes that lead to better health and well-being.
Whoever started this trend has a lot to answer for. It looks tacky as hell and is a technically-inferior solution to just having a dock that would let a customer bring their own tablet. It's truly the worst of both worlds and a seemingly pervasive problem across multiple manufacturers in the automotive design space.
You can’t have a dock for the users tablet because, despite appearances, the system is actually safety rated, and rated to temperature Class H (125degC) as well.
This is in contrast to consumer electronics which are not hard realtime, also they would probably melt and catch fire if left inside the car in direct sunlight.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
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