The point is that clouds aren't inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they've become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it's not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
I can't comment on Into The Odd, but I would consider either The Sprawl or Runners In The Shadows. The former is a general purpose cyberpunk system built on Apocalypse World and the latter is a Shadowrun hack of Blades in the Dark.
And I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention that I've built my own system for my Shadowrun campaigns, called Straylight. I'm in private playtesting right now, and I plan to have the first public playtest draft up very shortly (weeks or days, depending on how things go).
I have to support a remote client that uses Starlink. It's a nightmare. We can deal with slow connections, we can deal with bad ping, but with Starlink what we get is the entire connection dropping every minute or so, and coming back up a short while later. It's unbelievably bad.
Pardoning Maxwell would be an insanely bad idea. The MAGA world love two things more than anything else; conspiracy theories, and imagining themselves in an endless war against a cabal of powerful pedophiles.
Maxwell directly aided and abetted one of those powerful pedophiles. To MAGA, there is no possible justification for pardoning her. It would be tantamount to a full admission from Trump, and it would send their conspiracy addled minds into overdrive. At best (for him), they'd wonder what kind of leverage she has over Trump in order to buy herself a pardon. If not evidence of pedophilia, then surely something else, right?
Is Maxwell angling for a pardon? Almost certainly. But giving her one would be a suicidal move for the administration right now.
Not gonna lie, if someone actually arranged that, it would be the raddest thing that had happened in the history of the universe, and I would immediately question their sanity for picking my book to indelibly ink on a bunch of human bodies, instead of many far better options.
I see ebooks and paper in much the same way I see streaming music and vinyl.
I love my vinyl collection. I love the feeling of putting on a record, the old school analogue nature of it. There's a kind of ritual in dropping the needle.
But I can't bring vinyl in the car or on a plane.
I love paper books, but they're not always the most practical thing. So ebooks are often a better solution. Which is better is really situational.
Personally, as someone who has published, a couldn't care less what medium someone uses to enjoy my novel. Ebook, paper, audiobook; the words are the same, and the words are what matter. How those words are delivered is not important.
It's very strange to see people repeatedly make this assertion that, having yelled "Fire" one single time with no response, the moral and practical choice is now to sit down and quietly burn to death with everyone else.
This is, in fact, exactly the reaction fascists want. One of the most effective strategies of fascism is exhaustion. They want people to give up and choose silence over repeating the assertion that "This is wrong" for the hundredth time, and thus "Wrong" becomes "the new normal." We must never let them redefine what is acceptable. The first time or the thousandth time, we need people to continue to shout that this not acceptable.
There really is nothing else like it. It's a bewildering game, but one that is constantly willing to take big swings in a way that no one else would dare. It's one of the most unique scifi settings out there, and one of the most unique scifi stories. And by and large the community is actually pretty great.
OK, definitely a very cool looking game, but god damn, that is some, uh… very blatant ripping off of studio Ghibli. I’m not just talking art style, there are actual costume designs and whole scenes lifted in their entirety from Nausicaa. It’s hard to even complain because if you’re going to rip anything off, Nausicaa is a damn good choice; it’s probably Miyazaki’s most underrated movie. But it’s definitely a tad egregious. Feels like they wanted to make a Nausicaa game and then couldn’t get the rights.
Basically everything can be set through server / game rules. How do zombies work (speed, strength, toughness, hearing, vision, nocturnal or not, memory, intelligence, etc), how does the virus work, loot availability, XP gain, how long its been since the outbreak, whether power and water should shut off at some point, and so many other things. And that's all without even touching a single mod. It's incredibly versatile.
For the record (mostly saying this for the benefit of people who don't play but might) Zomboid is one of the most customizable games ever. Rules like "How zombie virus transmits" are completely up to you. My wife and I play together and we decided that all survivors are immune to the virus in our world, so we turned off transmission entirely. It just made more sense to us if it was something like an airborne pathogen.
I often describe Project Zomboid as a toolkit for creating your own personal zombie apocalypse.
The Nvidia Shield is still the best option for this. I've tried all kinds of homebrew solutions and always had headaches. In the two years I've had my Shield, I've never had a problem. Smart Tube Next lets me cast YouTube without ads, Kodi/Jellyfin gives me all my media library, plus I've got official apps for Nebula, Dropout and Spotify. Custom launcher removes what little amount of ads there were (and that was unobtrusive background banner stuff even at its worst). Plus the pro version can handle some pretty powerful emulators.
1 hour old account with 1 post, submitting a very, very anti-Semitic blog post with zero sources.
Can y'all maybe read the stuff you're upvoting before you upvote it? Hard agree that Trump is covering shit up, but this ain't it.
(And to be clear, for those who can't be bothered to just go look for themselves, this is the "Jews secretly run the world" anti-Semitism, not the the "How dare you correctly point out that Isreal is committing genocide" anti-Semitism).
I assume by "thinking engine" you mean "Reasoning AI".
Reasoning AI is just more bullshit. What happens is that they produce the output the way they always do - by guessing at a sequence of words that is statistically adjacent to the input they're given - but then what they do is produce a randomly generated "Chain of thought" which is invented in the same way as the result; just pure statistical word association. Essentially they create the output the same way that a non-reasoning LLM does, then they give r themselves the prompt "Write a chain of thought for this output." There's a little extra stuff going on where they sort of check their own output, but in essence that's just done by running the model multiple times and picking the output they converge on. So, just weighting the randomness, basically.
I'm simplifying a lot here obviously, but that's pretty much what's going on.
Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?
Here's where the misunderstanding comes in, I think. And it's not the high quality data or the multiple sources. It's the "processing" part.
It's a natural human assumption to imagine that a thinking machine with access to a huge repository of data would have little trouble providing useful and correct answers. But the mistake here is in treating these things as thinking machines.
That's understandable. A multi-billion dollar propaganda machine has been set up to sell you that lie.
In reality, LLMs are word prediction machines. They try to predict the words that would likely follow other words. They're really quite good at it. The underlying technology is extremely impressive, allowing them to approximate human conversation in a way that is quite uncanny.
But what you have to grasp is that you're not interacting with something that thinks. There isn't even an attempt to approximate a mind. Rather, what you have is a confabulation engine; a machine for producing plausible fictions. It does this by creating unbelievably huge matrices of words - literally operating in billions of dimensions at once, graphs with many times more axes than we have letters - and probabilistically associating them with each other. It's all very clever, but what it produces is 100% fake, made up, totally invented.
Now, because of the training data they've been fed, those made up answers will, depending on the question, sometimes ends up being right. For certain types of question they can actually be right quite a lot of the time. For other types of question, almost never. But the point is, they're only ever right by accident. The "AI" is always, always constructing a fiction. That fiction just sometimes aligns with reality.
He's not accepting donations for the fines, but he is raising money to create an advert that will spread positive messages for trans youth. This guy fucking rules.
The point is that clouds aren't inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they've become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it's not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.