throwsbooks

Ah, so Seagate still sucks!

I accidentally cheesed the spider mama fight because all the baby spiders mobbed the spiritual weapon. Good times....

His description on the character creation screen outright says he's a vampire. Easy enough to miss if you jump for the custom creator right away, but he's the first origin character in the list.

Not sure how diablo works but the big difference is you move with the stick rather than clicking where you want to go, and you get a set of action rings instead of bars.

Imo it's not bad, lets me play away from my desk after sitting at a computer all day for work.

The only thing that really annoys me is picking up small things directly from the overworld... You can scroll selectable items with the d-pad but you have to be within a certain distance and the order of things changes when your character moves to pick something up.

Eh, I don't think it's fair to erase all nuance between spirituality and religion.

Heaven/Hell are these ordered places where some sentient divine being is supposed to judge you at death and sort you into. Whether it's Anubis or God or whatever. It places a sort of human sense of control over the natural world.

Thinking there might be some sort of spiritual something or other, at least on my end, is thinking that well, we've got energy in our bodies that dissipates as we die. That energy ends up recycled in some way, first law of thermodynamics and all that. I don't know if that energy can linger around as ghosts, or act as some new "soul" in some reincarnation cycle, or if it just gets dispersed or what, but you don't need to believe in religion to consider it.

Though there's definitely some overlap.

I would suggest the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig. It's a good overview of the field and has been in circulation since 1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach

Here's a photo, as an example of how this book approaches the topic, in that there's an entire chapter on it with sections on four approaches, and that essentially even the researchers have been arguing about what intelligence is since the beginning.

But all of this has been under the umbrella of AI. Just because corporations have picked up on it, doesn't invalidate the decades of work done by scientists in the name of AI.

My favourite way to think of it is this: people have forever argued whether or not animals are intelligent or even conscious. Is a cat intelligent? Mine can manipulate me, even if he can't do math. Are ants intelligent? They use the same biomechanical constructs as humans, but at a simpler scale. What about bacteria? Are viruses alive?

If we can create an AI that fully simulates a cockroach, down to every firing neuron, does it mean it's not AI just because it's not simulating something more complex, like a mouse? Does it need to exceed a human to be considered AI?

Honestly, I think part of it is that having an entire community of people suffering depressive symptoms becomes a depressing environment.

I'm sure I heard this in a Brene Brown video, but in order to be able to help someone else, you need to be in the right place yourself. Two empty glasses can't help fill each other. And most people can't help an entire community of struggling people, one glass can't help fill fifty, it's futile and self damaging to try. It's why we have professionals that do one on one therapy.

And, this might be unpopular, but I think historically this is why we have priests too. I'm not religious, but I think that community offers that to some people.

Sometimes people need to vent, and some people aren't lucky enough to be in a position where they can vent to anybody, but I don't know if diving into a community where you expose yourself to everyone else's problems too is the solution. Things like addictions counseling are controlled, with professionals at the helm, and often in small spaces, with a prescribed meeting time and an end.

I think you're conflating "intelligence" with "being smart".

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are "intelligent" because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and "decide" when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it "reads" a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it's making is much more complex than "stop or go".

I don't know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I'm talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they're talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don't. That's essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it's got context for a bunch of things. It doesn't care if it's right and it doesn't look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That's incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it's been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it's impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

In a game that takes dozens of hours to get through? Of course I'm save scumming to get the result I want. If I don't care about some consequence maybe I'll let a failure slide but for the big stuff, I'm not starting again and doubling my playtime, I'm usually burnt out on the title by the end of the first run.

That's odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn't really use it for anything more than that, so I could've just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.

IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn't necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you're pretty much set. At least, from a programmer's standpoint.

I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you're managing disks it's good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.

I suggest trying Windows Subsystem for Linux. You'll get a simpler way to get familiar with the command line, which is the important part if you're interested in development.

That or dual boot, you don't need to set aside a large partition for messing around.

I think the thing about the word "retard" is that it's not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it's said. It's effective, and it's really uncomfortable to hear. It's the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.

And we've got this reality where there's variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of "not smart". And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that's medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.

And it's not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It's just we've also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone's brain, they'll go for anything that hurts.