I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

Nah. Verbotten opinions.

I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.

When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.

Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

Nooooo!

No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.

Yeah thats the main problem, significant development is likely to be crushed.

It has apparently been rehosted as ‘Nuzu’ on github… but I wouldn’t be surprised if that or any similar instance just gets taken down once it gets reasonably popular.

MSFT sure as shit doesnt want to get sued by Nintendo.

I appreciate the straightforward answer, thanks!

But uh… fuck. This fucking sucks, Yuzu is basically dead now, they have to disband and take down their code.

If Yuzu lives it will only be pirate copies floating around, further development will… basically have to go underground more like game crackers, as this very settlement establishes that Nintendo will sue you into oblivion if you publicly work on this.

Honest question: Where the hell are they gonna come up with 2.4 mil?

I have no clue how Yuzu as an organization is funded.

As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

Its insane when you compare the things they hold dear and are most concerned about to themselves personally and the people they support.

They will tell you they are highly worried about secret sex trafficking and millions of missing children, but extremely often they and the people they support are sexually abusing children, or have a history of it.

Its the cognitive dissonance thats the insane part, the extreme hypocrisy.

Gaetz is almost certainly a person who knowingly paid an underage girl for sex. The person who facilitated it basically already plead guilty and may be cooperating with investigators, though the proceedings of this seem to be going quite slowly.

This is even more insane given that Gaetz is one of the most Q-Anony of the lunatic Republicans in Congress. Kind of their whole thing is largely based around saving children from being sex trafficked.

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

Bleck.

Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.

Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.

Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).

Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.

The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.

Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.

These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.

Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.

Other than SWGEmu, which … literally emulates it.

Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.

If you need to be able to do unions and you are doing it in javascript, you are being absurdly inefficient compared to setting up a postgres db, but i wont be able to convince you of this because of basically nonsense brainwashing from your corporate conditioning.

EDIT: Note to self, do not use lemmy while hangry.

Yep Im wayyyy off base here.

Ah yes, javascript, the database language.

Jesus fucking christ I am so glad I don’t work in the corporate tech sector anymore.

Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.