You’re absolutely right, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

As someone who deployed Windows professionally for years and was a power user at home, let me supply some additional details,

Windows has become business software through and through. It can run fine enough if you go with a basic install and minimal tweaks through only the standard channels (like Group Policy) and this is probably what those people always loudly claiming “well I never have an issue!” are doing and then they’ll accuse you for bringing it on yourself from deviating from this.

But what everyone should understand, especially them, is that this is not how normal people use their computers and it’s utter bullshit that Microsoft continues to restrict people into this box. Most businesses don’t need hardly anything aside from Office and perhaps one or two industry specific applications, an overwhelming number of these being SaaS these days anyways. Normal people on the other hand use a wide variety of software for their businesses and hobbies in a wide array of configurations and what’s more, we enjoy personalizing our experiences on top of it, as we should! This unsurprisingly leads to more instability that Microsoft simply doesn’t want to take responsibility for.

People still complain about not being able to move the taskbar from the bottom of the screen and Microsoft apologists will say, “but it’s such a small thing!” And well, it is and that’s kind of my point; it’s a bellweather. I bet it’s a simple fix, they could do it, they could please people and provide further usability but they just don’t have to. How long has it gone unaddressed now? You want to play Call of Duty, you cretin? Lick our boots! And don’t even get me started on the whole SecureBoot/TPM 2.0 DRM lockdown issue.

I use Arch BTW and here’s my quick pitch for that. It really is a good distro for people of moderate or above skill level. I slowly built it out over time, bolted on each carefully selected piece of software from the repository, reading the wiki and making configurations as I went. In doing so, I gained a better understanding of Linux in general and my system in specific so on the rare occasions something does break, I don’t feel as clueless addressing it. The reason we all start to sound like cult-like zealots after awhile is because we’ve established a personal relationship with our computers; it is my friend again. It’s hard to understate the actual palpable relief that comes from cutting out a bloated, malicious corporation from that chain of trust with a machine we use in our daily lives.

It’s time to end Microsoft. Reach out, be helpful and welcoming in the Linux community. They’re losing balance, they’ve overplayed their hand on 11 and over-invested in AI and while I doubt we’d be lucky enough to be truly rid of them, we can see them suffer some real damage.

Same, for me it’s about perspective and what I’m controlling. In an FPS, I’m controlling the view window and I want it to directly follow my intention: non-inverted.

In a 3rd person game like Dark Souls, I’m controlling an external camera. It’s the angle I’m viewing my character from and not necessarily the frame of the scene I am considering: inverted.

Flying games? Inverted. Rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon, I’m controlling the absolute position of a targeting reticle: non-inverted.

Those are just by preferences and how I perceive things, some people may take the opposite stand than me. But even those aren’t strict rules, if a specific game doesn’t feel right I’ll try mixing it up to see if something works better for whatever reason.

For me a lot of it depends on the perspective.

• For an FPS, I think non-inverted feels more comfortable. I generally just want the view window to move in the indicated direction, but I understand people that like it inverted.
• If it’s third person, I actually prefer completely inverted (including horizontal). Especially with something like Dark Souls where one stick controls the player and the other stick controls the camera. It’s more clear that the camera is an external entity and I’m controlling the angle, not the view window. It feels unpleasant and unnatural to me to push left and then also have the camera bend to the left.
• If it’s a rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon or something, we’re back to non-inverted. I’m controlling the absolute position of a targeting reticle and I just want it to move to where I want it to move.

Alright, chilling out for a second, I understand your point better. Thank you for the additional information.

I do still feel we may fundamentally disagree though.

It’s honestly been a good long while since I read 1984, but I think my interpretation was different. You use the word “collapsing” but Newspeak was a more intentional reinforcing through rigid structure. They purposefully reduced the language to good and ungood as a direct means to smooth out the nuance.

In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them. The fluid nature of language is what allows it to evolve and I think stifling that evolution is both foolish and downright impossible in the long run. The advent of the internet and social media speeds things up.

Let’s set aside the stupid TikTok censorship stuff for the moment because that has it’s its (ah fuck, don’t crucify me) own unique motivation. Slop as a noun has existed for a long while with its set definition. The modern use of it has evolved this new connotation to specifically imply something is rushed, derivative, or overabundant. As people start to apply it in more situations, it shows an understanding of those new connotations even when they haven’t been directly communicated. I think that’s cool. I think that shows a deeper understanding of how language moves and is shaped than strict adherence to definitions. True, eventually its overuse may dull the meaning a bit, but by allowing language to be continually fluid we leave the door open for other new wordly innovations.

But again, I aim’t not linguist.

Lol, wut?

Burying the lede here.

I don’t think this is the expression you intended to use, or if it was, you used it poorly.

In my post I:

1. Open by indicating that I think it is foolish to enforce strict language standards
2. Affirm this point by saying that the primary purpose is to simply be understood
3. Expand on this point by saying I think it’s cool that language evolves

Where did you even pull that “good” and “ungood” dichotomy from?! Don’t be smarmy and quote high school literature reading lists at me. But if that’s the extent of your repertoire, perhaps I have some recommendations for you 🫤

I do not understand people who get uptight about English. French? Sure (I’m still gonna laugh at them, but I get it).

English has always been a joke of a language and I have nothing but respect and sympathy for people who pick it up as a second+. So long as you’re understood, it’s fine. Brutalizing it is half the fun. See how far you can bend it and still get your point across.

The speed at which it mutates is also interesting just to watch, and I say that as someone who isn’t even a linguist. How quickly a term catches on, gets overused, and migrates to ironic is culturally fascinating. I type like this and use proper spelling because it’s a stylistic choice for how I represent myself on the internet, but I couldn’t give a damn if you use the wrong you’re/your when half of you buffoons are spelling it “ur” anyways. I’m not ur English teacher, do what you want.

No, look at this, it’s fundamentally awful! It’s a stylistic decision to omit the mouths of the characters that leads to more expression through the eyes and overall design. The AI is incapable of understanding that and FORCES mouths onto them because things need mouths. Especially the one on the right where like, ugh, what the fuck is going on there. It’s gross, I hate it.

It’s like those high-res texture packs that just upscale everything for the sake of upscaling it and loses all artistic merit or cohesive aesthetic in the process. Fuck this.

At OpenAI, we can’t eliminate that disruption.

… oh yes you can …

Please, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus was written in the 70’s. The author only had a vague idea of the concept. We can make it better. Tormentier.

Some sites have started sending them to you before you’ve even done anything!

Never been to this site before? Don’t worry, chat bubble in the upper corner already displaying a little red dot with a 5 in it. There’s already an AI chatbot trying to offer help and discounts off on things and … AUGH!

This is a good point. I’ve been trying to make it clear in a lot of my predictions that Microsoft doesn’t want or even need full control, just enough. They don’t even need to do anything particular here other than continue to manage github with their current level of incompetence.

Was trying to source an article here, wasn’t there just an outage or some other major issue a few days ago? Anyways …

not only is Windows not very profitable anymore, the real money is at businesses.

Hear me out, this is exactly why they care. Windows as a product isn’t profitable anymore, but as a market share it is. Apple has always enjoyed their locked down ecosystem and Google is trying to completely block side loading on devices we already largely don’t have control over the bootloader. It’s no secret Microsoft has been seething with jealousy for years.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

You’re a soulless corporate ghoul, how do you make those numbers work for you? Why do you think they have the absolute gall to tell you to throw your computer out and get one that supports TPM 2.0? Why do you think there are still so many people willing or not that will swallow that bitter pill that’s Windows 11?

I’m not trying to call you out in particular here or anything, but I think it’s foolish to assume they don’t

Some others have already said the “embrace, extend, extinguish” but here’s my take on it. Pair it with Secure Boot and TPM 2.0

• Embrace: Secure Boot can already work with Linux, how lucky! This gives them not exactly control, but authoritative denial over your boot process and hardware.
• Extend: This is the part that remains to be seen. If they feel threatened enough by the shift in the gaming landscape, mind you not over losing out on sales or the hearts of gamers or anything, but again control, they may begin to make Linux offerings. A concession to allow an honest to god, thick Office client on Linux would certainly appeal to some. Adobe gets in on that action to back them up with Photoshop and Activision with Call of Duty, etc.
• Extinguish: TPM 2.0. One of the less talked about features of this is remote attestation (“Remote attestation allows changes to the user’s computer to be detected by authorized parties. For example, software companies can identify unauthorized changes to software, including users modifying their software to circumvent commercial digital rights restrictions.” - DRM). We’re already seeing this with CoD on Windows. They’ll allow you to run much requested Windows software on Linux, even provide direct support possibly, but at the cost of not precisely control but authoritative denial. Which still works out to be control in most ways since if you want to use the software and they are to remotely attest, they can also insist that part of that attestation is you running some sort of telemetry or not running software they disagree with.

The reason I think this route is highly likely is because it plays well with uninformed consumers. To the untrained eye it looks like they’re giving ground and actually allowing for broader support of their software while effectively gaining control over the environment once again and removing the biggest benefits of running FOSS on your system.

I see your point but there is one major difference between adults and children: adults are by default fully responsible for themselves z children are not.

I think you miss my point. I’m saying that adults, who should be capable of more mature thought and analysis, still fall victim to the manipulative thinking and dark patterns of AI. Meaning that children and teens obviously stand less of a chance.

Independent of technology, what a parent can do is learn behavior and communication patterns that can be signs of mental illness.

This is of course true for all parents in all situations. What I’m saying is that it is woefully inadequate to deal with the type and pervasiveness of the threat presented by AI in this situation.

I definitely do not agree.

While they may not be entirely blameless, we have adults falling into this AI psychosis like the prominent OpenAI investor.

What regulations are in place to help with this? What tools for parents? Isn’t this being shoved into literally every product in everything everwhere? Actually pushed on them in schools?

How does a parent monitor this? What exactly does a parent do? There could have been signs they could have seen in his behavior, but could they have STOPPED this situation from happening as it was?

This technology is still not well understood. I hope lawsuits like this shine some light on things and kick some asses. Get some regulation in place.

This is not the parent’s fault and seeing so many people declare it just feels like apoligist AI hype.

Shadow Tower Abyss (PS2 - FromSoftware 2003)

EDIT: Forgot to say, this game never released in English but there is a fan translation patch available that should be easy enough to find if you’re interested.

There’s a growing trend in indie games for the King’s Field-likes; Lunacid, Dread Delusion, etc. I’m a huge fan and if anyone has any other good ones to recommend, please let me know! EDIT: Just found Caput Mortem which looks like it might fit the bill near enough and also features music by Ockeroid of Crow Country notably …

But for this I thought I’d return to the roots. I’ve picked at King’s Field I (JP) and II a bit before and while I enjoy them, they’re overall still very clunky and I usually get distracted. I wasn’t sure how long I’d stick with Shadow Tower Abyss, but I feel like this one I may very well see through, I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far. That’s not to say it’s not still a clunky slog, and it’s certainly not for everyone, but there is real charm there.

(Scoring system: 1-5 being bad, OK, good, great, excellent with decimals being vibe based to push it closer to one rather than the other. For example 3.2 is meant to indicate a bit better than just good, but still not great. 3.8 might indicate close to great, but missing a few aspects that prevent it)

Sound: 3.2/5, Good. Like a lot of FromSoft games, there’s not really much music aside from the occasional musical sting which provides effective ambience. The sound design is minimal as well, but there are some very good moments of creepy thrumming, droning, and distant screeching that make it an intense environment to inhabit.

Graphics: 3.5/5, Good. What’s on display is generally competent and atmospheric, each new area has its own theme which is interesting to explore, but still, I feel like they could’ve done a lot more with the PS2 graphics. It’s certainly an improvement over King’s Field '94, but exactly how much is debatable …

The monster design is pretty good, everything has this kind of alien/abyssal feel to it. The overall theming is on point. Areas of the game have simple descriptions (i.e. Blue Light Area) that give the impression the player character is a foreign explorer rather than anyone with innate knowledge of this weird world. It’s a small aspect of world-building I appreciate.

Gameplay: 3.8/5, Good. Overall control still feels dated, but much less clunky than previous entries. The player moves at a brisk enough pace, but still slowly enough that you soak in the environment and progress feels meaningful. Being an older game you can’t really rebind the controls, but there are a variety of schemes including Type 4 which allow for the expected, modern dual analog stick looking/movement.

Combat can still be a little boxy and clunky but each weapon offers a left and right slash as well as an overhead bashing and frontal thrusting attack. Each weapon also has related stats for these types of attacks and enemies will have weaknesses or possible points of dismemberment making them vulnerable to particular attacks. Unlike some of the earlier King’s Field games, connecting attacks always feels good and has satisfying feedback.

The stats system is definitely very obtuse, even if you are familiar with From’s games and I recommend consulting a guide quickly before your first time playing. Again, as is very typical in From’s fashion, there isn’t an abundance of items but what exists is very deliberate. Money consists of these single large coins which you usually only find 1 or occasionally 2 at a time. Most things will only cost a handful of coins with healing potions being 2, boxes of ammo (for your gun!) being 1(?), and weapons and armor ranging anywhere from ~4-15. You’ll also find a plethora of items scattered throughout the game so there’s no shortage.

There is a unique balancing though as in order to heal yourself from the rare healing stations you have to sacrifice items for their value, although I’m early enough in the game that a basic Hat still seems to fully heal me from low health. In order to repair durability on your items from the rare purple repairing stations, you must sacrifice health with items like magic rings requiring sometimes more health than you currently have! This creates a tense and balanced management situation that feels like you might possibly softlock yourself by eating through too many resources, but so far hasn’t proved an issue for me. As a personal aside, I’m a big fan of playing games as they were designed so I’m doing my best to only save at the rare save points and not save state my way through the game, although this is of course up to your own tastes and discretion.

But is there a poison area with forced damage, I hear you ask? Yes, you fool, YES! Why would you even doubt it? Don’t let this discourage you though as understanding the stats system and equipping proper armor allows you to minimize the damage per poison tick such that it creates urgency as a pressure point more than a pain point. Definitely sacrificed a few lives just scouting the area out, though. Game Over means reload a save.

Summary/TL;DR Shadow Tower Abyss is a very competent dungeon crawler with a unique theme and atmosphere that’s worth exploring if you’d like to see historic FromSoft (it’s 20+ years old, as an ancient gamer I can use “historic” if I want). Miyazaki gets a lot of credit for modern From games and while a lot of that is certainly due, it’s fascinating to see how many of these deliberate design concepts have always been in their DNA.

As an aside, one day I’m going to write an entire essay on what makes a Soulslike a Soulsike. I missed the boat on the original hype and only got into them during COVID lockdown in 2020. I didn’t think I’d be a fan of the grueling, “git gud” experience but I’ve come to realize that’s not what makes those games interesting. It’s one concept and some people may find it unsatisfyingly vague, but it’s not the bonfires, or the losing souls on death, or the dodge rolling. It’s the stone-cold deliberateness. A lot of the difficulty from these games arises out of that deliberateness; what items you choose to equip and how you observe and approach unique situations. The games aren’t good because they’re hard, the specific design elements that make them hard are also the things that make them good.

3. What is the main focus of the One UI 8 update?

Based on current rumors and industry trends, the main focus of One UI 8 appears to be a significant leap in on-device AI capabilities (“Galaxy AI 2.0”) and a major overhaul of home and lock screen customization options.

Cool. Let’s shoehorn some AI in there and just fuck up my home screen again. I hate stability. I love it when my phone constantly shifts in my hands and never settles. I love waking up one morning to find that my device has updated itself and now nothings behaves as it did before.

I haven’t felt a significant advancement in years. It’s just shuffling UI elements for the sake of claiming you’re improving things.

I am less than enthused for this update. I dread it.

I don’t know why I expected a Zitron-esque lambsating from fortune.com, but reading the article is disappointing,

But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained.

Sure. Let’s blame anything but the AI 🙄

Hope you enjoy! It’s getting referenced so much these days, I think I’m due for a reread myself.

YOU exist. In this universe. Your brain exists. The mechanisms for sentience exist. They are extremely complicated, and complex. Magic and mystic Unknowables do not exist.

I’ll grant you that the possibility exists. But like the idea that all your atoms could perfectly align such that you could run through a solid brick wall, the improbability makes it a moot point.

Therefore, at some point in time, it is a physical possibility for a person (or team of people) to replicate these exact mechanisms.

This is the part I take umbrage with. I agree, LLMs take up too much oxygen in the room, so let’s set them aside and talk about neural networks. They are a connectionist approach which believes that adding enough connections will eventually form a proper model, waking sentience and AI from the machine.

Hinton and Sutskever continued [after their seminal 2012 article on deep learning] to staunchly champion deep learning. Its flaws, they argued, are not inherent to the approach itself. Rather they are the artifacts of imperfect neural-network design as well as limited training data and compute. Some day with enough of both, fed into even better neural networks, deep learning models should be able to completely shed the aforementioned problems. “The human brain has about 100 trillion parameters, or synapses,” Hinton told me in 2020.

"What we now call a really big model, like GPT-3, has 175 billion. It’s a thousand times smaller than the brain.

“Deep learning is going to be able to do everything,” he said.

(Quoting Karen Hao’s Empire of AI from the Gary Marcus article)

I keep citing Gary Marcus is because he is “an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI)” [wiki]

The reason all this is so important is because it refutes the idea that you can simply scale, or brute-force power, your way to a robust, generalized model.

If we could have only three knowledge frameworks, we would lean heavily on topics that were central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which argued, on philosophical grounds, that time, space, and causality are fundamental.

Putting these on computationally solid ground is vital for moving forward.

So ultimately talking about any of this is putting the cart before the horse. Before we even discuss the idea that any possible approach could achieve sentience I think we first need to actually understand what sentience is in ourselves and how it was formed. There currently are just too many variables to solve the equation. I am outright refuting the idea that an imperfect understanding, using imperfect tools, with imperfect methods with any amount of computer power, no matter how massive, could chance upon sentience. Unless you’re ready to go the infinite monkeys route.

We may get things that look like it, or emulate it to some degree, but even then we are incapable of judging sentience,

(From “Computer Power and Human Reason, From Judgement To Calculation” (1976))

This phenomenon is comparable to the conviction many people have that fortune-tellers really do have some deep insight, that they do “know things,” and so on. This belief is not a conclusion reached after a careful weighing of evidence. It is, rather a hypothesis which, in the minds of those who hold it, is confirmed by the fortune-teller’s pronouncements. As such, it serves the function of the drunkard’s lamppost we discussed earlier: no light is permitted to be shed on any evidence that might disconfirming and, indeed, anything that might be seen as such evidence by a disinterested observer is interpreted in a way that elaborates and fortifies the hypothesis.

It is then easy to understand why people are conversing with ELIZA believe, and cling to the belief, that they are being understood. The “sense” and the continuity the person conversing with ELIZA perceives is supplied largely by the person himself. He assigns meanings and interpretations to what ELIZA “says” that confirm his initial hypothesis that the system does understand, just as he might do with what a fortune teller says to him.

We been doing this since the first chatbot ELIZA in 1966. EDIT: we are also still trying to determine sentience in other animals. Like, we have a very tough time with this.

It’s modern day alchemy. It’s such an easy thing to imagine, why couldn’t it be done? Surely there’s some scientific formula or breakthrough just out of reach that eventually that could crack the code. I dunno, I find myself thinking about Fermi’s paradox and the Great Filter more …