I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
The irony about getting treatment for ADHD is that medical providers make it very hard to get the proper medication and treatment. People with ADHD are horrible at following through and handle rejection poorly. So the worse the ADHD is, the less likely somebody will be able to actually get treatment for it. A lot of people suffer because doctors fear losing their license like so many did during the pain pill debacle. It's a risk for them to prescribe a stimulant, but zero risk to tell you to eff off.
As many have said in this thread, most doctors will tell you to go away or give you Welbutrin (which works poorly, if at all). I feel for your struggle.
The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions. Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
Piracy also offers:
0. Ability to watch offline!
1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.
1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)
2. Ability to normalize audio.
3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.
4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish
5. Arbitrary number of user accounts
6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)
7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder
There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.
Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.
Piracy offers:
1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.
4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.
I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.
Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative manner but he had just enough naivete to get through life happy. He talked about all the chips he redesigned as a teen and it did not sound like bragging at all. We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world.
To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
Hi all, I built these models with a great team. They're available for download across the open model ecosystem so give them a try! I built these models with a great team and am thrilled to get them out to you.
From our side we designed these models to be strong for their size out of the box, and with the goal you'll all finetune it for your use case. With the small size it'll fit on a wide range of hardware and cost much less to finetune. You can try finetuning them yourself in a free colab in under 5 minutes
For picking a Gemma size this is a video I recorded for the 1b to 27b sizes earlier this year, 270m being the newest addition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcjrduz_YS8
Hacker News Disclaimer I really like working at Google so with that; All my opinions here are my own, I'm a researcher so I'll largely focus on technical questions, and I'll share what I can.
Software patents are a scourge.
The Arch wiki is one of the best things the Linux community has produced. It's like a modern, improved and more complete version of TLDP.
I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.
Well I started with pip because it's what I was told to use. But it was slow and had footguns. And then I started using virtualenv, but that only solved part of the problem. So I switched to conda, which sometimes worked but wrecked my shell profile and often leads to things mysteriously using the wrong version of a package. So someone told me to use pipenv, which was great until it was abandoned and picked up by someone who routinely broke the latest published version. So someone told me to use poetry, but it became unusably slow. So I switched back to pip with the built-in venv, but now I have the and problems I had before, with fewer features. So I switched to uv, because it actually worked. But the dependency I need is built and packaged differently for different operating systems and flavor of GPU, and now my coworkers can't get the project to install on their laptops.
I'm so glad all the Python packaging challenges are "solved"
Here is what Illinois says:
https://idfpr.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idfpr/news...
I get the impression that it is now illegal in Illinois to claim that an AI chatbot can take the place of a licensed therapist or counselor. That doesn't mean people can't do what they want with AI. It only means that counseling services can't offer AI as a cheaper replacement for a real person.
Am I wrong? This sounds good to me.
Probably the more useful blog post: https://astral.sh/blog/introducing-pyx
This is such a useful feature.
I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't have to spend any more time wondering if it could be just me who is too obtuse to understand what is going on.
The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
https://www.deepki.com/about/#certifications-awards
>Deepki holds the label BCorp certification, thereby strengthening its commitment towards its communities and stakeholders.
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/standards/complaints/
>B Lab will investigate material, credible, and specific claims against a current B Corp in one of the two following categories:
> 2. Breaches of the B Corp Community's core values as expressed in our Declaration of Interdependence.
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
>B CORP DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE
>As Certified B Corporations and leaders of this emerging economy, we believe:
> That we must be the change we seek in the world.
> That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
> That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
> To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.