Schadrach

I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.

Of course not. That requires being infected by a trans first - they work under vampire rules which is why we need to keep trans and children away from each other! /s

Haha, Leviathan was certainly the “big bad” in Job.

To quote a work of fiction I particularly enjoyed, during a discussion between the characters on the Book of Job:

“You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”

“Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a plesiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”

“And you don’t think if he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.

“It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.

“So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”

https://unsongbook.com/

And if you have the opportunity to question Him directly, you’ll say the same thing Job said.

That would be what, “Why are you so weirdly obsessed with Leviathan?” after Job 41?

As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.

I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?

I mean, it would suck for any mod using F4SE. The answer for what to do is the same as every other update - recommend people not update until F4SE is updated.

Did they have their own plugin DLL or were they just using F4SE as is? If the former that would make it suck for them even worse since they’d potentially need to find some new hook addresses of their own and wait for the new F4SE and then reconcile their DLL.against that and then test it all again to make sure nothing broke.

So basically what happened with the AE release for Skyrim SE where Bethesda switched to a new compiler version and the tool the script extender team was using to find the correct offsets couldn’t handle it so they had to track down the offsets manually like before they’d written the tool, leading to a longer than usual time for the script extender to update than usual?

Which if it’s anything like SSE means that mods that didn’t use F4SE were basically unaffected, mods that use F4SE had to wait for it to update which took longer than usual after which they would mostly work unmodified, and mods that involved a plugin DLL for F4SE had to at the very least be recompiled against the new versions of the game and F4SE. Nothing about that specifically targets Fallout: London though from what it sounds like.

The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.

Fucking Thalmor denying the power of Talos of Atmora.

Seriously though, the canon explanation for Cyrodiil being the way it is now as opposed to original lore is that when Talos achieved CHIM he changed it, because that’s a thing you can do with the secret syllable of royalty. All part of the path to mantling Shor/Lorkhan via one of the Walking Ways and forging an empire.

I’ve joked in other places in the past that CHIM stands for “Character Has Installed Mods” because what it allows is roughly on par with the character opening the modding tools and changing what they want to change.

Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.

I’m now curious about this from a technical perspective - how did the update specifically break their mod in particular? Were they doing a bunch of custom DLL hooks or something?

I know with Skyrim SE modding it’s usually that any update breaks SKSE and a tiny handful of other mods that directly hook DLLs or the executable (these mods are usually scripting engine extensions and are a dependency for a variety of other mods), and depending on the update sometimes it takes longer than average to get a new version of those running (the AE update was one of those because they switched compiler version and that broke the method SKSE was using to find hooks). But in general that only breaks 1) mods using those (think SkyUI) until a new version comes out, after which most of those mods start working again without the individual mods needing an update and 2) mods that include their own plugin DLL, (think SkyClimb) which have to wait on an update and then compile a new version of the DLL for the new version of both the game and the other mod, because addresses and functions they are hooking may have changed. Mods not using SKSE or similar generally run just fine between versions of SSE (including AE).

Sorry, got my racist propaganda films that still show up in film school because they used revolutionary techniques in film making and are thus important pieces of cinematic history mixed up. The Birth of a Nation is the US one, Triumph of the Will is the Nazi one I was thinking of.

(and no I am not glorifying those monsters)

You don’t have to glorify their beliefs to admit they were fantastic at propaganda and aesthetics. Birth of a Nation was used in film schools for decades afterward for a reason and that reason wasn’t that film schools were all secretly run by Nazis.

You support the message that attacking a group people are born into and a group people choose to identify with are equally bad?

Q: Are Not All Proud Boys Like That? Or does it only extend to groups you support?

They are bad because their website is literally godhatesfags.com.

Always found it weird that there are people who believe that the immortal and all powerful creator of the universe is for some reason deeply, deeply concerned with what ~10% of a particular branch of weird hairless apes decides to do with their genitals enough to do things like call down plagues and natural disasters over it. Like that’s just…such an extreme level of being a gooner that it’s even more absurd than the whole monotheistic God of everything idea to begin with.

Clearly the universe was created by committee - that’s how you end up with things like the platypus when the bird team and the mammal team are forced to compromise on a design to get the product shipped on time.

and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit

The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.

SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you’re from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there’s more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn’t either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.

Not even that complicated - SSN are not unique, by design. The combination of SSN and name is supposed to be, but for most of the history of the program no one was actually checking for that so it really isn’t either. Until something like 2014 the first 5 digits of your SSN were basically a code for where you were born and the last 4 were just assigned in order.

In parallel to what Hawk wrote, AI image generation is similar. The idea is that through training you essentially produce an equation (really a bunch of weighted nodes, but functionally they boil down to a complicated equation) that can recognize a thing (say dogs), and can measure the likelihood any given image contains dogs.

If you run this equation backwards, it can take any image and show you how to make it look more like dogs. Do this for other categories of things. Now you ask for a dog lying in front of a doghouse chewing on a bone, it generates some white noise (think “snow” on an old TV) and ask the math to make it look maximally like a dog, doghouse, bone and chewing at the same time, possibly repeating a few times until the results don’t get much more dog, doghouse, bone or chewing on another pass, and that’s your generated image.

The reason they have trouble with things like hands is because we have pictures of all kinds of hands at all kinds of scales in all kinds of positions and the model doesn’t have actual hands to compare to, just thousands upon thousands of pictures that say they contain hands to try figure out what a hand even is from statistical analysis of examples.

LLMs do something similar, but with words. They have a huge number of examples of writing, many of them tagged with descriptors, and are essentially piecing together an equation for what language looks like from statistical analysis of examples. The technique used for LLMs will never be anything more than a sufficiently advanced Chinese Room, not without serious alterations. That however doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.

For example, one could hypothetically amass a bunch of anonymized medical imaging including confirmed diagnoses and a bunch of healthy imaging and train a machine learning model to identify signs of disease and put priority flags and notes about detected potential diseases on the images to help expedite treatment when needed. After it’s seen a few thousand times as many images as a real medical professional will see in their entire career it would even likely be more accurate than humans.

So like nearly every commemorative coin then. I have half a dozen tied to various years I went to PAX because I thought they were a cool piece of memorabilia.

I feel like this is exactly the sort of thing that makes the guy on the right in the comic feel the way he does. Call enough random people Nazis as hyperbole and you can boy-who-cried-wolf your way into being ignored when they’re genuinely at it in full view (aka Musk the other day).

This is the fundamental issue with people arguing against free speech: I can never tell if they know they behave fascisticaly or not. Are they ignorant, or do they know?

People who support censorship always believe the censors will always side with their preferences. They never consider what happens when people they oppose control the censors, and for them merely not having allied censors in place feels like they are being silenced (see conservative Christian types who inevitably get angry any time Christian-focused language isn’t enforced [aka War on Christmas or anyone else requesting a display when there’s a public religious display on government property]).

And, since it’s a subliminal process, it’s extremely difficult to make a concious decision to not buy products you’ve seen or heard ads of.

Instead, I make a conscious decision to not buy products I remember seeing or hearing ads of. If you’re using subtle product placement to subliminally manipulate me in a way I don’t notice, good for you. If it’s obvious enough I remember you doing it then I will not buy your product unless it is already the best deal available (aka the cheapest per unit or best quality per price, excepting products I have had a bad experience with).