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It’s amazing how many people forgot about the classical “get a rise out of everyone with shitty arguments” troll, or forgot that the way to deal with them was to ignore and ban on sight. Fuck, I was practically in diapers when Usenet and BBSes were a thing and I still remember “don’t feed the troll.”

As others have said, it’s a very snowbally game. The various characters all grow naturally stronger over the course of the game through gold (to buy items) and experience that you earn by killing minions. The problem is that killing an enemy player and destroying enemy towers grants a lot of gold and experience, so if you fuck up and die (or if you get ganged up on by the enemy team) you can end up making your opponent much stronger. Even if you live and are forced to return to base to heal, the opportunity for free farm or destroying your tower (which also makes it riskier for you to push forward) can make your opponent a lot stronger than you, which lets him kill you easier, which makes him stronger. This can also spill over to other lanes, where the opponent you made stronger starts killing your teammates and taking their towers.

There’s ways to overcome this snowball–players on killstreaks are worth more gold when they die, you can gang up on a fed opponent and catch them out to nullify their stat advantage, and you can try and help other lanes to get your team stronger. The champions also have different scaling levels, and some champions get a lot of front-loaded baseline damage while others scale better with items, and a select few champions have theoretically infinite scaling (but are generally much weaker in other areas to compensate). Worst case, this means your team can play super defensive and try to wait out the advantage until they catch up and then win from there. The problem is that all this requires A) communication and the ability to quickly adapt from your teammates, B) the opposing team screws up and doesn’t press their advantage, and C) your team is willing to try (which may require dragging the game out for over an hour). Needless to say, this is not always the case, and this design makes it very easy to blame another player for the loss (warranted or not).

I mean, you don’t have to go full-blown fursuit and conventions if you don’t want to. Most furries never actually bother with fursuiting–speaking from personal experience, it’s hot as shit (especially outdoors or in summer), you can barely see or hear anything, and if you wear glasses they’re prone to getting knocked off your nose or fogging up so badly that you can’t see anything. Many fursonas exist exclusively in artwork or stories–either commissioned or self-drawn–and even that’s optional.

You don’t even have to actively participate in the community if you don’t want to. Many furries are passive members who just follow artists, lurk in streams or group chats, occasionally leave a comment on a submission, and generally exist in furry spaces. Literally the only requirement to be a furry is to say you’re a furry!

Honestly, don’t stress yourself out over it, and keep an open mind. It might not be your cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine–there undoubtedly is a large sexual aspect to furry, and lots of folks (especially folks who are cisgender, heterosexual, have a less relaxed view about sexuality, etc.–not to say that you can’t be a straight male furry, but there are a LOT of gay/bi furries) may find it to be a dealbreaker. Ultimately, furry has its roots in the nerd and geek communities, back when being nerdy or geeky was something to be bullied over, and it still shows it today.

Furry is a community that has a disproportionate number of LGBT+ folks, neurodivergent folks (especially people on the ADHD/autism spectrum), and other marginalized groups. Among many things, this means it revels in being proudly and unabashedly weird, both as a celebration of itself and as a defense mechanism against becoming overwhelmed by the kinds of business interests that would love nothing more than to push out all the sexuality and weirdness to provide a safe space for advertisers to shovel their slop down our throats.

If that sounds like something you’d enjoy being a part of, then I’d suggest checking out some places like the furry_irl subreddit, looking up streamers under the furry tag on Twitch (Skaifox, WhiskeyDing0, etc.), maybe make an account on FurAffinity, and look up furmeets or conventions in your area you can attend. You might not like it, or you might find yourself joining the best community I’ve ever been part of.

Yeah, definitely. Furry encompasses basically anything that’s a non-human anthropomorphic creature. I’ve seen fursonas based on birds, sharks, dolphins, turtles, rhinos, dinos, frogs, hippos, orcas, dragons, reptiles, plant creatures… hell, there are alien species like sergals and avalis, anthro/machine hybrids like protogens, and even entirely robotic characters.

It’s just called furry because furred species are the most common, and the original community that splintered off from sci-fi conventions in the 70s and 80s and grew through fanzines pre-Internet largely used furred species for their characters. (“Fun” fact, the early community had a lot of skunk characters, which is why one of the first derogatory terms for furries was “skunkfucker.”)

Believe it or not this is exactly how most furries make their fursona

Yeah, suuuuure you weren’t.

Note that the proof also generalizes to any form of creating an AI by training it on a dataset, not just LLMs. But sure, we’ll absolutely develop an entirely new approach to cognitive science in a few years, we’re definitely not boiling the planet and funneling enough money to end world poverty several times over into a scientific dead end!

You literally were LMAO

Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.

Literally a direct quote. In what world is this not talking about LLMs?

Did you read the article, or the actual research paper? They present a mathematical proof that any hypothetical method of training an AI that produces an algorithm that performs better than random chance could also be used to solve a known intractible problem, which is impossible with all known current methods. This means that any algorithm we can produce that works by training an AI would run in exponential time or worse.

The paper authors point out that this also has severe implications for current AI, too–since the current AI-by-learning method that underpins all LLMs is fundamentally NP-hard and can’t run in polynomial time, “the sample-and-time requirements grow non-polynomially (e.g. exponentially or worse) in n.” They present a thought experiment of an AI that handles a 15-minute conversation, assuming 60 words are spoken per minute (keep in mind the average is roughly 160). The resources this AI would require to process this would be 60*15 = 900. The authors then conclude:

“Now the AI needs to learn to respond appropriately to conversations of this size (and not just to short prompts). Since resource requirements for AI-by-Learning grow exponentially or worse, let us take a simple exponential function O(2n ) as our proxy of the order of magnitude of resources needed as a function of n. 2^900 ∼ 10^270 is already unimaginably larger than the number of atoms in the universe (∼10^81 ). Imagine us sampling this super-astronomical space of possible situations using so-called ‘Big Data’. Even if we grant that billions of trillions (10 21 ) of relevant data samples could be generated (or scraped) and stored, then this is still but a miniscule proportion of the order of magnitude of samples needed to solve the learning problem for even moderate size n.”

That’s why LLMs are a dead end.

Or they’ll do shit like put Harris on full blast for not providing “detailed policies,” and then moving the goalposts to “but how do you pay for it” when she does, and nitpicking every word of every sentence she says. Meanwhile, Trump will cancel interviews, go up on stage at rally, spew a word salad response, and the NYT will bend over backwards to reword the salad to make him look better, while casting his decision to dodge a second debate as “smart” and avoiding any form of scrutiny as “efficient use of campaign funds.” At best, they’ll halfheartedly throw in a fact check like “his plan to fix inflation by levying tariffs will increase inflation” but they don’t dare portray him as the senile, hate-filled lunatic he is because they’re terrified of angering their right wing audience (who are already shifting away from legacy media anyway to reinforce their bubble). They also do this because virtually all forms of legacy media have been coopted by the billionaire sociopaths that would very much like a second Trump term to give them another tax cut and the “freedom” to pollute our world and grind the heel of their boot into the face of the working class so that they can race to become the first trillionaire.

When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”

Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.

There was a period of blissful ignorance circa 2006 where the only thing I knew about him was that he was rich and starred in the apprentice. Then a black man became president and the world hasn’t been free of his stench ever since.

And now we’re in full mask-off accelerationist theory “it’s okay to let Trump win as long as Democrats are punished” bullshit. You’re unhappy with Democrats, so you’re okay with letting throwing literally everyone on the left in the US under the bus, along with the entire country of Ukraine, and throwing even more bombs at Gaza.

What an entitled, smug, self-righteous, holier-than-thou position, utterly divorced from real life consequences. Thanks for admitting that you’re a thoroughly unserious poster, though!

A McDonald’s burger from the 80s when they still used tallow for their fries and higher quality ingredients? No contest, it was better than the TrumpDonalds that got served in 2017-2020

Shit, there’s roughly even odds that the records of her employment no longer exist because the franchise she worked at shut down, or destroyed them because they were 40 years old.

I used to work at a Sprint call center in the early '10s, but if you asked me to prove it I literally couldn’t, because the staffing agency I was hired through, the call center, and Sprint itself no longer exist. Doesn’t change that I worked there.

Yeah, do NOT watch end of Evangelion if you’re in a bad mental headspace. The original series ending might be better for you despite the “ran out of money and cobbled together a clip show” values, since it at least has a relatively upbeat tone. EoE starts with “all the main characters are comatose or going through a mental breakdown” and it gets worse from there.

They’re both extremely excellent. The original series is a fair bit darker and more depressing, and End of Evangelion is definitely a lot more WTF than anything that happens in the rebuild movies (which isn’t a bad thing necessarily). The rebuild movies,meanwhile, have much higher production values, and the fights are generally much better–most of the gifs of Ramiel you see are from the rebuild. The characters are also a lot more mentally stable–they’re all still depressed and dealing with heavy shit, but it’s “I’m taking my meds” depression instead of “untreated spiral” depression.

Watch up to the last episode, then watch End of Evangelion for the canon ending. And/or watch the rebuild movies for a condensed retelling that goes in its own direction.

The fuck is wrong with you? Why do you give a shit about what people enjoy? That’s pretty weird, bro