somehnrdr14726

I can't think of one, but I also can't tell the difference between the tenderloin and SOMA anymore.

Everyone's comments makes sense to me if you swap SOMA in for tenderloin

I started using Impossible in any beef recipe which highly seasons or sauces the meat, and can't tell the difference. Or don't care enough about the difference. Talking hamburger helpers, manwhiches, casseroles, that sort of thing.

The price of Impossible and Beyond per pound is still higher than real beef, probably due to government subsidies artificially reducing the cost of beef. Once the equation flips I expect just about every fast food menu item, freezer food, and quick prep box to switch to these new vegetable meats.

There is a snowball effect happening. More and more places and products are offering a meat alternative because Impossible and Beyond are 1:1 recipe substitutes. This brings the cost down as manufacturing processes can scale up. Confidence is growing and taste isn't suffering. Toward a vegetarian future, economics will succeed where ethics and wellness have failed.

Sticking to the consumer-side of the discussion, the BigCos aren't going to break the cycle. In fact, it's a capitalist crime to do so. Their flywheel requires a steady cattle population to surveil in the fields. When we choose as individuals to remain in their ecosystem, we choose the hidden fees of surveillance capitalism over more straightforward payment models. This is what gives BigCos the muscle to wield against smaller capitalists.

We in our consumer role, by not participating in these business models, are the only truly free actors in the system at this time. The only other way out is for government to get bigger and step in, as it's doing in Australia now.

One difference is that Twitter, Facebook, Google, are not governments and have no real authority over you. They only have the power you give them by choosing to stay in their ecosystem. Therefore it's a strain to refer to them as officials.

If you're worried about them _becoming_ officials, then act now. Leave these platforms and convince others to do the same.

My intuition is that consciousness, as an a priori concept, is not useful. Like the four humours in the medical world, it's a metaphor that captures just enough truth to be a blunt instrument. However it's a local maxima. And a honeypot in the neuroscience domain.

So much effort is spent trying to pin down a definition of consciousness. Ask five people and you'll get five definitions. And yet everyone is so sure they know who has it and who doesn't. Slugs don't have it, dogs don't have it, maybe elephants do? Apparently they can talk to each other and mourn the dead.

One possible motive behind humanity's fascination with consciousness, and our speed at assigning or withholding it, is that it gatekeeps the belief in an anthropocentric universe. The human experience is the one we understand, and if you don't have it you are not conscious. Consciousness then, is a Turing test for how passibly human you are. Slugs could get some of the consciousness table scraps if they'd only mourn their dead.

As we learn more about other species; and coming from the other end too as computers (big data really) reveal new sightlines on human determinism; consciousness as a metaphor is strained and loses adherence.

At some point nvidia would be better off mining with these gpus than selling them.

The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics cards at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-hours. With a big enough operation they could force all the other miners into becoming resellers. It's free, distributed electricity and it gets the gamers off their backs.

(While I have your attention, I'm pretty sure proof of work is the paperclip maximizer sci fi warned us about.)

F2P regulations have advanced rapidly in Asian countries and since the games have global audiences, everyone worldwide is now "benefitting" from the regulation. Boot up a gacha game and it will have guaranteed reward schedules, clearly explained drop rates, and caps on spend.

Retail games have had a ratings body and seller restrictions by age for decades now.

Considering video games have such stringent regulations on their design, in ways that make the design cost-prohibitive to tailor for different geographies; and content-based sales restrictions around the globe - it's safe to say that games are heavily regulated as well.

Fortnite sells skins directly without blind boxes, which is as tame as virtual goods come. As it happens, none of their virtual goods come anywhere close to F2P regulations. You could have an equivalent moral panic about Twitch chat emojis.

I guess my point is, how much regulation will it take before Fortnite isn't preying on children anymore? Is uncapped spend the problem? Should we limit the other kid hobbies as well? There's really nothing forcing them to stop buying pokemon cards, or comic books, or TV episodes, or toys they see in commercials.

Marketing anxiety via social proofing has a long history, much older than computers. Beauty products, cleaning supplies, child safety gear, etc.

Why limit the condemnation to virtual goods?

I've worked at lots of employers who ask current employees for positive Glassdoor reviews shortly after a disgruntled former employee writes a bad review.

I wouldn't trust anything on that site. The positive reviews are written under duress and the negative reviews have an axe to grind.

If I were trying to compare technologies I might focus on metrics like release strategy, documentation quality, scale of existing products using it, and maintainer activity.

This survey comes out every year and tells me who is winning the social media popularity contest. Technologies labeled as "Avoid" have over 50% respondents saying they don't even use the technology. Avoid it why? Because I won't be trendy at the javascript meetup? Does anyone actually use this data to drive decisions?

Farmville and Harvest Moon share a theme and maybe even an aesthetic but are in different genres. Harvest Moon is a single player sim game. Farmville is an async multiplayer invest/express. Zynga popularized the genre.

The closest "rip off" to Harvest Moon would be Stardew Valley, but no one ever refers to it that way because rip off is not a useful term for conveying taxonomy. Rip off is only useful for displaying derision towards genres the writer doesn't enjoy.

Oh true, there's a lot of computer assisted tools for level designers and it has definitely made game worlds feel more realistic. The strategy is to let the computer generate a baseline and then hand-tune from there.

Humans aren't really good at making an area feel wild or natural... we stink up the place with hidden order. So algorithms that generate terrain, tree placement, tree shape, etc are already outperforming humans because their form of pseudorandom is more natural-feeling than our own.

I don't know how famiar you are with the industry so apologies if I'm over-explaining, but check out SpeedTree if you want to see one of these products. It's really cool.

During the indie dev renaissance in the 2010's, procedurally generated content received a lot of investment and attention. (Today's marketers would call this AI generated content.)

The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players.

What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore.

Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them.

There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts.

The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.

These business metrics require objective measurement to be useful, so one of the best things engineers can do is make the unseen seen.

You can bootstrap the objectivity by going meta. An objective like, create performance/reliability baseline for application. Key result: N service-level agreements adopted by org.

All the hard work is in avoiding statistical folly. All the busy work is in instrumentation.

When you're done, it should be hard for product or sales types (whoever controls your roadmap) to feature factory the app without tripping an SLA.

A lot of discussion about whether YouTube censorship is valid or not, carries an implicit assumption that the marketplace of ideas is up to the task of sorting fact from fiction.

It isn't, at least not right now, because of technologies like YouTube's recommendation engine. When everyone thinks that virality is a signal of truthiness, an algorithm which amplifies outrage to generate virality undermines the marketplace of ideas.

YouTube isn't going to address the source of the problem because they would go out of business, or at least have a few very bad quarters. What they can do however, is pretend to moderate the marketplace and do it poorly enough that we stay focused on one another; instead of on their algorithm that literally converts outrage into money.

There are no public squares on the internet. Every DNS resolution leads to privately owned 'land'. You can be escorted off the property for nearly any reason.

Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.

You are free to host your video evidence on your own website, following your own internal moderation rules for what is deemed credible or not. No one is taking this right from you.

Honestly confused why Salesforce didn't buy Discord instead.

Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.

They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.

In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.

I wonder if pulling the brakes on what's being called the post-fact era, is futile. Maybe the internet is perfectly capable of maintaining N disjointed realities and there's nothing we can do to resolve them.

It may not be high-resolution virtual reality, but if the only way I interact with other people is through devices, it's virtual reality. We call them bubbles but they're so much more.

I think if we accept this as an invariant we might be able to find solutions by trudging forward. As a thought prompt it certainly gets my thinking cap going.

This is a lovely tool, you can also implement automated builds and deploys using Github Actions to drive web-ext.

Chrome is pushing for manifest v3 and not seeking buy-in from the other web extension standard bearers. Also the new Firefox Mobile has incredibly spotty support for the API. Given these recent events, I worry that the cross-browser nature of this tool will be lost in time. And web extension development in general may be entering a dark age.