atrahasis

X-Moose, of the cult of Bentham; atomic communitarian

[argumate]

How are you doing?

grabbing life by the balls as usual

[atrahasis]

[argumate]

You should watch the show (Evangelion)

no (politely but firmly)

[atrahasis]

Ok, but if you do, you may skip the last 2 episodes and jump straight to End of Evangelion. Avoid the rebuild films at all costs.

[femmenietzsche]

There’s a chapter in the Quran that’s just one short paragraph condemning Muhammad’s disbelieving uncle and his wife to hell.

[atrahasis]

There's a bit in the Quran that reprimands Muhammad's house guests for lingering too long, following that up with saying that Muhammad was too embarassed to tell them off personally, so God himself had to it. Also Islamic theology holds that the Quran is God's word that exists co-eternally with God, so yeah.

[argumate]

Western media is finally coming around to the idea of cartoons for an adult audience, but so far that usually just entails sitcoms with bleaker humor (see BoJack Horseman) rather than grand drama, so unfortunately I’m gonna concur with everyone else who’s said you’re gonna struggle to find what you’re looking for. Seriously though, plenty of people could give you a “Viewers who liked AtlA also enjoyed...” anime list, if you’d just be less stubborn about the medium

*leaning in close* watch some anime already!

*stubbornly* no.

*summons a giant hammer out of thin air and wallops me with it*

*spitting out blood* b-baka!

[atrahasis]

Man, I haven’t been frequenting Tumblr in the last few years, but I remember Argumate anime hangups from a few years back. Guess some things really don’t change. 

[transhuman-y-deactivated2020092]

developing an advanced type of atheist guy: doesn’t believe in any religions, but like, the actual social existence of religions. like you’ll talk about the catholic church and they’ll say “you know none of that’s real right?”

[argumate]

they keep rebooting the pope with different actors, just like Captain America

[atrahasis]

They cribbed off TimeLord regen from the Dalai Lama series.

[argumate]

actually it was a cool night so even though it’s passed 38C now it’s still cool indoors without even using air conditioning, I’m just drama queening.

[argumate]

ghoulish fascination watching outside pass 39C

[argumate]

Melbourne is holding steady at 41C but it’s already 3pm

[argumate]

42.8C but the cool change is on the way

[atrahasis]

[femmenietzsche]

CONCEPT: A highly naked man politely informing you that Nova Scotia is a peninsula, not an island

[argumate]

every time I type peninsula I’m slightly anxious that I’ll type penisula, but only because I have actually done that several times before without noticing.

[atrahasis]

I once heard someone asking whether "penis" gets musician's cramps. He actually said "pianist".

[transgenderer]

nightcore-nasheed replied to your post “another problem with To The Stars: space warfare doesnt work for math…”

why doesn’t space warfare work?

theres basically no way to defend! and with even fairly-basic technology attacks are absolutely devastating. gwern has a good post about it

[tanadrin]

Mark Rosenfelder in his Invatena setting takes quite the opposite tack as Gwern: he argues that the disadvantage you have in space is that your ships are *too* visible, there’s no terrain or choke points, and the large transit times (and pretty fixed courses you have to take, barring magic engines that don’t need fuel) make it basically impossible to launch a surprise attack; defenders have a massive advantage. Attackers just take too long to deploy reinforcements and, especially in a setting without FTL (but even in many FTL settings), it’s cripplingly expensive to invade another star system; maintaining control is actually impossible. But more importantly, there’s no *point.* The expense of intersystem travel means that bulk goods aren’t being shipped from star to star; you’re not gonna have empires trying to maintain control of colonies so they have access to their cheap raw materials or even finished goods. (What interstellar trade their is is primarily going to take the form of information-based exports). And there are going to be few or no resources found only in one location and not another’s elemental abundances will be similar near any star with human habitable worlds. In the Incatena setting, humans tried interstellar warfare and found it was ruinously expensive and stupidly ineffective. Other forms of warfare do still exist, though.

[tanadrin]

Orbital warfare, or planet to planet warfare, might still have some tactical interest and conceptual viability, especially if you’re deliberately refraining from things like asteroid drops b/c you want there to be something left to conquer, but in a star system like ours I would expect that the expense of colonizing the rest of the solar system and the fragility of artificial environments built there would mean that most other powers would be dependents of Earth, and so long as Earth was disunited, most actual wars would just take place there; and if it was united, there would be no reason for war. What *would* be scarily destructive on a Mars colony is terrorism (but as long as he’s being mentioned I should point out Gwern has a good essay on how maximizing destructiveness doesn’t seem to actually be a goal of terrorist attacks, outside very rare flukes like 9/11).

[atrahasis]

Ok, this is my jam.

[atrahasis]

PhD reviews climate change in Civ VI: Gathering Storm

[ultimaromanorum-deactivated2019]

Chinese company leaves Muslim-tracking facial recognition database exposed online | ZDNet

Researcher finds one of the databases used to track Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang.

@argumate

[argumate]

Gevers told ZDNet that the database contained information on 2,565724 users, along with a stream of GPS coordinates that came in at a rapid pace.

The user data wasn’t just benign usernames, but highly detailed and highly sensitive information that someone would usually find on an ID card, Gevers said. The researcher saw user profiles with information such as names, ID card numbers, ID card issue date, ID card expiration date, sex, nationality, home addresses, dates of birth, photos, and employer.

For each user, there was also a list of GPS coordinates, locations where that user had been seen.

[atrahasis]

How humanly tragic that almost one fifth of people live under such a regime.

[voxette-vk]

StarCraft is a deep, complicated war strategy game. Google’s AlphaStar AI crushed it.

DeepMind has conquered chess and Go and moved on to complex real-time games. Now it’s beating pro gamers 10-1.

Can we get them to make a decent 4x AI?

[atrahasis]

Unfortunately, Deepmind kind of flubbed this one. Apparently they’ve failed to limit the Alphastar’s actions-per-minute, so we can’t quite say that it got ahead through superior strategy. I’d have preferred that they did test it in a 4X game, just so that we’d avoid this whole actions-per-minute nonsense.

[voxette-vk]

The article says they limited its APM to significantly less than that of human pros. What they didn’t limit in the first test was its “vision” of all the areas within scouting range of its units. That is, it didn’t have to scroll the camera. (It still has fog of war, of course.) So that lets it move units more efficiently with a limited APM.

But they have a version that does have to scroll the camera.

[serinemolecule]

This is a misinterpretation of what the APM stat means, and also what DeepMind did with the APM.

DeepMind didn’t limit APM at all; they noticed that AlphaStar’s average APM was lower than TLO’s, and decided it didn’t need to be limited.

But there’s a mistake here: A human can type a ridiculous number of words per minute if they just mash their keyboard. They’re limited to a much lower number when typing sentences. If a computer typing actual sentences is nearly as fast as a human keyboard mashing, the computer has a huge advantage here.

You might ask why a human would do the equivalent of keyboard mashing. The answer is that it’s called “APM spamming”, and it’s essentially exercise. It’s used to keep your body’s adrenaline high, which helps keep your reaction time fast for when you do need it.

The game that drew the most “unfair APM” criticism was the moment in MaNa game 4 (Blink Stalkers flanking from three different angles), where AlphaStar steadily held an APM of 1000 – in comparison, I’ve heard from pros that human effective APM has never been higher than around 300 (all higher numbers tend to be APM spam).

[atrahasis]

Link I gave above is broken, so here is the article again explaining this detail: An Analysis On How Deepmind’s Starcraft 2 AI’s Superhuman Speed is Probably a Band-Aid Fix For The Limitations of Imitation Learning

[voxette-vk]

StarCraft is a deep, complicated war strategy game. Google’s AlphaStar AI crushed it.

DeepMind has conquered chess and Go and moved on to complex real-time games. Now it’s beating pro gamers 10-1.

Can we get them to make a decent 4x AI?

[atrahasis]

Unfortunately, Deepmind kind of flubbed this one. Apparently they’ve failed to limit the Alphastar’s actions-per-minute, so we can’t quite say that it got ahead through superior strategy. I’d have preferred that they did test it in a 4X game, just so that we’d avoid this whole actions-per-minute nonsense.

[femmenietzsche]

Hmm, more like, Marie, ah… Kondom?… Mmm. Marie Kondom. Marie Kondom.

[atrahasis]

Marie Kondo, in a brand new series, Merry Condo.

[atrahasis]

So let me get this straight, there are still pornbots, just with strategically-hidden .. oh good lord!

[atrahasis]

I alternate between sad angst and prideful Ubermensch angst.

[atrahasis]

Well my workplace finally unblocked Tumblr, so there’s that I guess.