l'empathie mécanique @dpwiz@qoto.org

I've almost procrastinated writing this episode down because the most expected outcome of it would be "the post is flushed down the social stream with only a few eyes to see it ever". And it was kinda pre-disappointing.

But I couldn't stop thinking it through and it still kinda writes itself in my head.

Meanwhile I recall that I had quite a reach for one of my works this year, so this isn't just a numbers game. And the problem of doing *anything at all* is actually one of the challenges in that post-human adventures (thankfully explored in Permutation City, Diaspora, 31 laws of fun, etc).

So, challenge... not accepted. Not yet. Something is missing still. So I just browsing idly on the viability FP32 precision for modelling orbital maneuvers and...

...

Unfortunately I can't remember how I managed to actually start typing, sorry.

Perhaps having a Fediverse client on a muscle memory and the learned anticipation of randomized reward from reading it (keep up the good work, all y'all!) made me open it. And then a typing box helpfully focused in a client was presented in a prominent position. I'm not sure, but whomever designed that - I'm grateful to them.

This IMO brings some evidence against efficacy of using Skinner boxes to alleviate low-energy mood swings.

🙈 See no idler 🙉 Play no idler 🙊 Make no idler

I've found I would make a bad Jedi. A game character I've been playing was involved with some mystery amulet and been stuck in a time loop for a while. After refusing to just die and pass away for long enough I've been contacted by an Evil and asked to embrace it. In a split-second it took to consider I managed to lodge a justification and accepted the contract like an EULA (EoLA?). So, yeah, apparently I'm a sucker for the dark side.

That made me consider my life choices and whether I would do something like that to avoid death and go on with my post-human adventure.

Beyond that spicy moment of flavor, the game is actually quite barebones. Just a few skills to level and jobs to take. Yeah, that and getting a "Holy" job title despite clearly turning into an abomination. An ironic non-turn of events. Anyway, the flavor text clearly describes the position as being extremely violent - while getting a shitty pay raise, but allowing about 3 OOM increase in constant happiness level (mediated by a rental agreement and a skill of not giving a flying fuck AKA meditation).

So yeah, it's a "number go up" Skinner box, a never-ending crescendo of a Shepard Tone. Like many other games like that out there. And this one too is "out to get you".

But, just like the virtual light bulbs run on real electricity, that virtual character sacrificed my real soul to perpetuate their existence. How truly evil of them!

TBH I'm prone to be sniped by those dophamine pumps^W drains and especially vulnerable while being down. Maybe it is the other way around and they help me do get out, get some quick wins, and get back on track - with the alternative being "laying down lethargic". I don't know, I didn't measure. But I'd be very surprised if the recovery time is actually smaller.

After a few "prestiges" the stream of winning started to dry up ("a game design error, the progression balance is out of tune" - lamented my inner game designer) and the real sacrifice started to become apparent. "I'm failing my family, right now, I should be doing something else instead of this" I thought. "Just one more loop" the character thought back, claiming one more sleepless night for themselves.

In general, I need some pacemaker to glue me to a screen and be productive. Music works. But shit like this apparently works too. But unlike music it has a way more frequent failure mode of gluing me to itself instead.

Then the next night comes. And I'm once again getting hijacked deep into the night. "I have to fight this, this is unhealthy" I think and a helpful associative memory immediately jumps the rest of the DSM-5 "substance abuse" criteria on me. Thanks, mem!

Finally, the urge to know what's up next, beyond those level requirements starts to lose an uphill battle with the Levels of Outcome Strategically Expected by Ratiocination (LOSER) mentality. It's my chance to claw my soul back! So I say "sorry dude", dump the simulation string to the Cloud Storage and close the damn tab.

Taste thyme, compute

If a process crashes, but there's no one on pager duty, is there an accident?

NAnd
The way it's meant to be played

Open the pod bay door, HAL

Counting days to my new Linux battlestation to arrive.

M1 is fine for a laptop I guess, but I miss having a GPU what isn't a joke.

And I miss the lived-in comfort of an Ubuntu (gnome actually, but whatever) desktop. MacOS feels incredibly inept and patronizing at the same time.

Same energy

> fish: Unsupported use of '='. In fish, please use 'set ....

You know that I used.
You know what that means.
When why the hell you're pestering me with suggestions to use something else instead of just fucking doing it?

#UX

- We ought to understand the world through erotic and reason.
- Did you mean logic and reason?
- No.

Indeed...

Now if only Apple would stop fucking up perfectly^W reasonably good standards - that'd be nice!

Holy fuck 4K display SLAPS.

@nikitonsky was right all along!

https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors

That was Suno v3. Unfortunately v4 got better at musicifying prose, but arguably worse for working with verse. Also the sound got more bland, so v4 "remasters" are at best different arrangements.

I hope the upcoming models would pareto-improve and perhaps the 3rd album would be spectacular.

This is how you do 1 Apr pranks right: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMo5PuXnZDwRjhHhE/lesswrong-s-first-album-i-have-been-a-good-bing

> Honestly, despite it starting out as an April fools joke, it's a really good album. We made probably 3,000-4,000 song generations to get the 15 we felt happy about, which I think works out to about 5-10 hours of work per song we used (including all the dead ends and things that never worked out)

Am I doing this right?..

I'm done with looking at the bullshit evals that give high scores to the toddler-level systems or woo the audience with cookie-cutting skills.

Who wants to join forces and make a new #Haskell / #Rust / #Prolog (?) benchmark so we can cyberbully the new models and "AI coders" as they come out?

New Google model. Even better than everything. Completely failed at simple Haskell task by hallucinating a ton of crap