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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I recently read a neat little book called “Rethinking Consciousness” by SA Graziano. It has nothing to do with AI, but is an attempt to describe the way our myriad neural systems come together to produce our experience, how that might differ between animals with various types of brains, and how our experience might change if some systems aren’t present. It sounds obvious, but the simpler the brain, the simpler the experience. For example, organisms like frogs probably don’t experience fear. Both frogs and humans have a set of survival instincts that help us detect movement, classify it as either threat or food or whatever, and immediately respond, but the emotional part of your brain that makes your stomach plummet just doesn’t exist in them.

    Humans automatically respond to a perceived threat in the same way a frog does–in fact, according to the book, the structures in our brains that dictate our initial actions in those instinctive moments are remarkably similar. You know how your eyes will automatically shift to follow a movement you see in the corner of your vision? A frog responds in much the same way. It’s not something you have to think about–often your eye will have darted over to the point of interest even before you realize you’ve noticed something. But your experience of that reaction is also much richer than it is possible for a frog’s to be, because we have far more layers of systems that all interact to produce what we call consciousness. We have a much deeper level of thought that goes into deciding whether that movement was actually important to us.

    It’s possible for us to continue to live even if we lose some parts of the brain–our personalities will change, our memory may get worse, or we may even lose things like our internal monologue, but we still manage to persist as conscious beings until our brains lose a large number of the overlying systems, or some very critical systems. Like the one that regulates breathing–though even that single function is somewhat shared between multiple systems, allowing you to breathe manually (have fun with that).

    All that to say the things we’re currently calling AI just don’t have that complexity. At best, these generative models could fill out a fraction of the layers that would be useful for a conscious mind. We have developed very powerful language processing systems, at least in terms of averaging out a vast quantity of data. Very powerful image processing. Audio processing. What we don’t have–what, near as I can tell, we haven’t made any meaningful progress on at all–is a system to coalesce all these processing systems into a whole. These systems always rely on a human to tell them what to process, for how long, and ultimately to check whether the result of a process is reasonable. Being able to process all of those types of input simultaneously, choosing which ones to focus on in the moment, and continuously choosing an appropriate response? Barely even a pipe dream. And even all of that would be distinct from a system to form anything like conscious thought.

    Right now, when marketing departments say “AI,” what they’re describing is like that automatic response to movement. Movement detected, eye focuses. Input goes in, output comes out. It’s one small piece of the whole that’s required when science fiction writers say “AI.”

    TL;DR no, the current generative model race is just tech stock market hype. The absolute best it can hope for is to reproduce a small piece of the conscious mind. It might be able to approximate the processing we’re capable of more quickly, but at a massively inflated energy expenditure, not to mention the research costs. And in the end it still needs a human double checking its work. We will need to develop a vast number of other increasingly complex systems before we even begin to approach a true AI.


  • the current climate for GPUs is terrible with no relief in sight.

    Not only no relief: it’s gonna get so much worse. Between the buying power of the dollar spiraling into the depths of hell and the tariff war heating up, this might be the last opportunity for a lot of people to buy cards for the foreseeable future. It’ll be years at the very least.

    I was online when the 9070 listings first went live and had to fight not to impulse buy, which I was proud of at first. Then they instantly sold out and the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to regret it lol.

    That’s just my perspective, though. Maybe with Americans no longer buying cards they’ll drop the prices internationally to try to boost sales… but the cynic in me knows they’ll boost prices even further to try to make up the difference.










  • I feel that excuse only goes so far. It’s funny; the original Half Life was my first PC shooter experience, and Alyx was my first VR experience, but HL1 manages to be engaging for me even now while Alyx already feels stale. Like, I get the decision to dumb the movement way down for VR first timers who might get motion sick, but it goes way too far and offers vanishingly few options for people who might want more immersive physics. Or, like, a sprint button. Apparently I have naturally strong VR legs, but jeez, it bothered me even on my first time with a headset

    Other things should still have had more room to expand as the game runs on, too. There’s so little weapon variety and even among what it does have, the SMG and pistol fill almost the same niche. Apparently they made the AI painfully bad on purpose, but why couldn’t they have saved a more engaging combat experience for the endgame or higher difficulties? And the constant orb puzzles they used to replace the traditional physics based ones get incredibly repetitive, especially when replaying the game.

    It fails to iterate on the mechanics it introduces in meaningful ways, instead choosing to introduce new things that are entirely self contained (i.e., the Jeff sequence and the final level’s vortigaunt blasts). Like, Jeff was super memorable, but part of the reason for that is he breaks up some seriously repetitive gameplay, and nothing about that level is ever relevant again.

    Plus I have other gripes about sound design, physics (especially for heavy objects), even the way fall damage is handled. And the way it retcons Ep2 feels cheap to me. Idk. The game was ultimately fun, but flawed far beyond what I think can be said of the earlier games. Obviously I’m biased, but I wound up having more fun with HL2VR than Alyx.


  • People say Breen is sympathetic?

    Ohhmygoodness I must have argued about this on the old site at least 5 different times. People really like the idea he was doing the best he could to buy time in a world where he genuinely believed fighting the Combine was impossible. I guess they were really starving for a sympathetic villain? But yeah his actions don’t leave any room for sympathy, let alone his speeches and the dialogue between him and Vance. If anything the evidence points to him working with G-Man to cause the Black Mesa incident on purpose.

    The only part of 2 that hit that high for me was the underside of the bridge

    True, HL2 really deemphasized platforming as something necessary to win. I’ve always figured Valve tries to make games they want to play, and they fell out of love first with platformers, then with shooters. That’s why there’s been no HL3: they’re into MOBAs now. I put together an almost entirely new PC and I’m still out here playing TF2 when I get the itch to shoot stuff; Deadlock really isn’t my jam. Honestly at this point I figure even if we do get a HL3, it will have been taken in a direction I’m not really interested in.


  • Yeah it feels like BM picked 3 because that’s what HL2 did, but to be fair there needed to be fewer than 10 because each individual grenade was way more powerful than in the original. At least HL2 didn’t go as far in reducing weapon variety as HLA!

    Also I edited in some actual hot takes into my original post.

    Yeah okbh was a meme comm and I guess its mods were equally unserious. Not like I got banned for making a non-meme post, mine was the only viewpoint in that thread that got deleted so I guess they just didn’t like what I was saying lol


  • Uhh yes. Oh boy, an invitation to ramble!

    Tap for spoiler

    Personally, while I don’t hate either of the Gearbox games, I don’t think they deserve to be on the same pedestal as the Valve games, either. BS is so short and does so little worldbuilding that it’s like one step up from Lost Coast in terms of replayability. I’ve only felt the need to replay it once, and that was like a decade after my first run (I run through the mainline HL games almost every year). And it’s a huge stretch for OF to be considered canon. While it definitely goes further than BS in trying to impart interesting details, mostly it seems to recycle beats from the original game, and the parts it adds on don’t have a consistent tone. I also strongly dislike how the game tries to whitewash the military. Plus it doesn’t seem like Valve was a fan either; in HL2, the way Mossman describes teleportation working for either the humans or the Combine doesn’t fit with the existence of Race X, the headcrab life cycle is completely retconned, and not one element of that game has ever resurfaced, not a single easter egg among all the Xen fauna throughout HLA. Maybe the Xen grenades could be a reference to the OF alien grenade launcher if you really want to push it? I mean Laidlaw has even said he didn’t consider the Gearbox games when writing HL2.

    As for HL1 vs HL2… I dunno, they’re very different games. HL2 obviously wins in terms of narrative storytelling, but I totally see the argument when people say that HL1’s gameplay is more fun. On the other hand, I also think HL2’s more restrained weapon design came about because Valve was being more careful about crafting enemy encounters. Like in HL1 you get weapons like the Tau cannon which are super cool but Valve don’t seem to have thought the ammo placement through very well. It’s so rare that you get used to not using it unless all your other guns are out of ammo, which is also rare, even on hard mode. The Black Mesa fan project did a much better job of showcasing those lategame weapons (at least, unless you’re a fan of Tau jumping).

    Edit, actual hot takes: HLA was extremely average, even among VR games; the only standout it has is looking pretty. The boat and car in HL2 aren’t bad. More lukewarm but Breen as a character is a fully selfish, evil prick and only uses “saving humanity” to justify himself to others, he doesn’t believe it at all.

    Ah jeez I’m gonna stop. Feel no obligation to read any of that. But yeah I used to post about all kinds of half life stuff. Once I wound up permabanned from okbuddyhalflife when I argued that valve popularized lootboxes and gaben was not a good billionaire






  • … You think it’s embarrassing that I think that advertising works?? You’re hilariously naive to think that it doesn’t.

    Like I said, sure, we have a higher standard of living than most countries, but there are plenty of options when it comes to moving somewhere with a higher-value currency. And any other option will probably come with some form of socialized medicine and better protections for workers. Oh and they won’t have an incoming administration promising to deport everyone en masse and keep them in camps in the meantime.