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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Any computer made in the last 10 years will probably work. It has a really low power demand, and I would recommend you use a fabric server. I’ve used a more optimised server called Paper but it comes at the cost of fidelity, meaning certain technical designs within the world will break because the server behaviour isn’t guaranteed. Fabric has complete fidelity and pretty good performance.

    If you want to host it over the internet then you’re going to need more technical knowledge than I can reasonably teach you here. You’d really need to be able to research that yourself, I’m afraid. I tend not to do that as I only run a server for my family.


  • They’re the same. Basically you can’t connect to a server unless it allows you to, and most online servers prefer to use the central authentication server so they can enforce bans and whitelists. Apparently there are cracked servers, but honestly the best part of multiplayer is building a shared world with your friends, and it’s super easy to make a server on your home network. You just have to toggle offline mode.

    It is super easy to get java working singleplayer too, because there are so many third party launchers and none of them care if you have an account or not.



  • Basically the server needs to allow you to connect even though you’re not authenticated with microsoft’s online account server. You would do this for instance if the entire multiplayer session was on a LAN with no internet connection. You probably won’t find servers that allow it over the open internet unless they have some other way of vetting who is connecting. So you’ll probably only be able to do it with servers you or your friends personally host.


  • It’s definitely a qualitative shift. I suspect most of the fundamental maths of neural network matrices won’t need to change, because they are enough to emulate the lower level functions of our brains. We have dedicated parts of our brain for image recognition, face recognition, language interpretation, and so on, very analogous to the way individual NNs do those same functions. We got this far with biomimicry, and it’s fascinating to me that biomimicry on the micro level is naturally turning into biomimicry on a larger scale. It seems reasonable to believe that process will continue.

    Perhaps some subtle tuning of those matrices is needed to really replicate a mind, but I suspect the actual leap will require first of all a massive increase in raw computation, as well as some new insight into how to arrange all of those subsystems within a larger structure.

    What I find interesting is the question of whether AI can actually fully replace a person in a job without crossing that threshold and becoming AGI, and I genuinely don’t think it can. Sure it’ll be able to automate some very limited tasks, but without the capacity to understand meaning it can’t ever do real problem solving. I think past that point it has to be considered a person with all of the ethical implications that has, and I think tech bros intentionally avoid acknowledging that, because that would scare investors.


  • You’re describing an arms race, which makes me wonder if that’s part of the path to AGI. Ultimately the only way to truly detect a fake is to compare it to reality, and the only way to train a model to understand whether it is looking at reality or a generated image is to teach it to understand context and meaning, and that’s basically the ballgame at that point. That’s a qualitative shift, and in that scenario we get there with opposing groups each pursuing their own ends, not with a single group intentionally making AGI.



  • It is honestly impossible to imagine copy-pasting code and getting it to work without knowing what you’re doing.

    I had an acquaintance at uni who got a job at a software company by taking credit for a friend’s work and basically being the hack & fraud that the person in this post thinks they are - although I didn’t realise this at the time. He asked me to help him write some code that was needed for a presentation the next day. I decided to try to help, and I took a look.

    It was a bug that required a little epsilon value to be tolerant of small changes in input in order to not constantly fire. I wrote that tiny bit of code and gave it back to him. Then he told me it wasn’t working and could I look at it again. I did, and there were two epsilon values with different names in it. I asked him about that and he said he had gotten help from another friend.

    He had literally attempted to merge our two functions that did the same thing into one grotesque chimeric piece of code that would only have worked if he had accidentally made one or the other of our snippets inoperative. This was like a 20 line function. It was basic, easy shit. The guy didn’t know anything.

    I didn’t explain this. I told him I couldn’t keep troubleshooting this for him and left him to it. To my understanding he was fired and cost that company a lot of money. But really if they couldn’t figure out that the programmer they hired couldn’t actually program then it’s really hard to feel that sorry for them. It seemed like everyone was flying by the seat of their pants.



  • That right is something they should not have. Streaming services greenlight shows, get them made, then cancel them after two seasons to prevent artists getting residuals.

    Then if they lose popularity they pull them off the site and even the people who worked on them can’t see them anymore. Animators have to rely on piracy just to show people their own portfolio. That’s where respecting copyright leads.

    The copyright owner is just whoever fronted the money, and the only reason we’ve decided they “own” anything is because people with money have decided money should be the most important thing in our society.