🔗 Quick links thread
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##im_a_retired_bank_robber_ama
A retired small-time bank robber does an AMA on reddit. Very interesting.
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The headline here is awesome:
Flaming Hawk With Snake in Its Talons Sparks Fire Near La Jolla@ABC 7 news,full:true said:
>Flames were burning
Also ( s/thing/Hawk with snake caught fire/g ):
- "This thing happened"
- "Fire officials told us this thing happened"
- "Fire dept spokesman says 'Yea, looks like this thing happened' "
Filed under: repeatedly reiterating the same thing over and over
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He's a great indie game designer, but his recent titles were more towards the mediocre side than his earlier stuff.
Regression to the mean is definitely a common thing.
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Filed under: repeatedly reiterating the same thing over and over
Just like your 5th grade teacher told you, right? Also, word quota.
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The problem is he waited WAY too long to port his game engine to modern platforms, and apparently his games are tied-in to the UI way too much to make the port quick or easy. And since they all started as Mac Classic games, he doesn't even have a way to distribute the "classic" version of his games on Gog or whatever, he only has the significantly shittier Windows UI.
I mean I get where he's coming from and how he sets his priorities. But they aren't very compatible with running a profitable company.
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For my part, I can't believe that, after 20 years, you still need 3 fucking hands to control his games (one for the "s" and numbers, one for scolling the map on arrows and one for the mouse). I tried playing Avadon 2 recently, and it was physically tiring having to constantly swing my left hand left and right.
He definitely need a fresh pair of eyes to go through every part of his process and cut out the cruft. "No Vogel, adding more particle effects isn't the same as graphics update. No, you can't reuse that same audio loop of a bazaar from 2002!"
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No, you can't reuse that same audio loop of a bazaar from 2002!"
Oh God that audio loop is torture.
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And since they all started as Mac Classic games, he doesn't even have a way to distribute the "classic" version of his games on Gog or whatever, he only has the significantly shittier Windows UI.
Not trying to argue but I always thought his games were originally Windows. I know he's written a whole bunch of games in multiple series (IIRc there's 4-5 Geneforges and several Avernums and a couple of others); it's kind of like the old SSI Gold Box engine, but being used across more than one product line. You can kind of understand why he wasn't eager to change a working formula right up until it bit him on the ass.
ETA: Oh, I guess you two were already familiar with the series, and more so than me, because I just knew about 'em, but never played 'em.
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My boss grabbed my crotch and broke my testicle!
This business retreat took balls — literally. A New Jersey man claims his boss drunkenly grabbed his crotch so hard that doctors had to remove a testicle. Michael Peacock, 45, endured three...
A New Jersey man claims his boss drunkenly grabbed his crotch so hard that doctors had to remove a testicle.
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##What would happen to me, and everything around me, if a black hole the size of a coin instantly appeared?
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https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
Nice list of linux-y cli tips and tricks. More like a reminder of all the things you can do and should learn.
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Will your self-driving car be programmed to kill you if it means saving more strangers?
The article is merely OK, but the idea is fascinating. How should a self-driving car act in a no-win scenario, like the trolley problem?
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Short answer: You, and everyone around you, will die.
the whole "what if" with the earth being absorbed into the black hole makes a nice read
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How should a self-driving car act in a no-win scenario, like the trolley problem?
And what is the liability of the guy who programmed it?
Filed Under: Asimov lives!
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@cartman82 said:
How should a self-driving car act in a no-win scenario, like the trolley problem?
And what is the liability of the guy who programmed it?
Filed Under: Asimov lives!
Well, an Asimovian robot would lock up and die from being in any way associated with killing a human. It probably wouldn't be able to take any mitigating actions before this happened, if there is no course that saves everyone.
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Well, an Asimovian robot would lock up and die from being in any way associated with killing a human.
Not all of them.
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Dude we all saw iRobot.
It goes after Will Smith and ignores the girl.
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Actually, Asimov tangentially address this in one story: he had a robot that was designed to calculate a warp drive field or something--actually I think it was a wormhole or teleport kind of thing. It's calculation showed that--technically--anyone who went through it would die and then get re-created. The "would die" part fried the first several brains; only one that had been modified in some way was even able to compute a solution, but it was badly damaged in the process (suffered brain damage and became stupid or insane, went semi-catatonic, something like that; I haven't read teh story in decades.)
Asimov surely thought about things like this, because many of his stories involved situations that required his laws to be modified or else abused in some way, like the one that had half the second law disabled.
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Well, an Asimovian robot would lock up and die from being in any way associated with killing a human.
The simple ones in the early Robot short stories, maybe; the later Spacer models from the Robot novels are rather more sophisticated, and will be handle the situation without locking up. Of course, the only one able to act properly in those situations is R Daneel Olivaw, who (with Giskard) developed the Zeroth Law.
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The article is merely OK, but the idea is fascinating. How should a self-driving car act in a no-win scenario, like the trolley problem?
The trolley problem is a funny critter, since it actually does have a solution -- throwing the switch under the trolley, thus derailing it. (I'd be hellishly impressed at a railcar that didn't derail with one truck going down the main and the other down the siding...)
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since it actually does have a solution
Yes, then it gets rephrased whenever someone points that out. It's a philosophical prompt, so whenever you worm around it there is a more convoluted version without that gap.
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Yes, then it gets rephrased whenever someone points that out. It's a philosophical prompt, so whenever you worm around it there is a more convoluted version without that gap.
I don't think you can rephrase around that gap without fundamentally changing the way railcars or turnouts (switches) work...
(Unless you're talking about a switch that has no means to hand-throw it, which is something I haven't really heard of.)
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I don't think you can rephrase around that gap
It's now an anvil falling down an air shaft on top of a party of people, and you can hit a lever to shove it sideways into a different air shaft with only one person at the bottom.
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It's now an anvil falling down an air shaft on top of a party of people, and you can hit a lever to shove it sideways into a different air shaft with only one person at the bottom.
Hrm...either the anvil's going to be a damn tight fit down the air shaft (in which you can upset the anvil into the air shaft wall) or there's going to be enough room for the one guy to have an anvil land at his feet, pretty much...(or at worst, strike a glancing blow)
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Alternatively: a delicate surgery is being preformed on the train, so derailing will kill the patient.
EDIT: and it looks like @tarunik just wants to try and finagle out of it, which can be an entertaining exercise but not something I'm looking to get into this close to quitin' time.
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Optimizing An Important Atom Primitive
Sunsetting Atom
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
Fuck philosophy, here's a cool technical article discussing how atom guys optimized their text editor. I don't particularly like atom, but I'm rooting for these guys to light some fire under sublime's feet.
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It's now an anvil falling down an air shaft on top of a party of people, and you can hit a lever to shove it sideways into a different air shaft with only one person at the bottom.
Under what ridiculous set of circumstances would anyone ever build such a thing?
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I dunno, but it no longer has the exact loophole Tarunik said I couldn't wriggle out of ;)
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@Yamikuronue said:
It's now an anvil falling down an air shaft on top of a party of people, and you can hit a lever to shove it sideways into a different air shaft with only one person at the bottom.
Hrm...either the anvil's going to be a damn tight fit down the air shaft (in which you can upset the anvil into the air shaft wall) or there's going to be enough room for the one guy to have an anvil land at his feet, pretty much...(or at worst, strike a glancing blow)
Now replace the anvil with one of those laser meshes from the first Resident Evil movie (IIRC that's where it's from)
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You remind me of Captain Kirk and the no-win scenario.
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The Kobayashi Maru? Does that mean we have to cheat, or is @tarunik cheating?
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It's a mindset.
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Of course, the only one able to act properly in those situations is R Daneel Olivaw, who (with Giskard) developed the Zeroth Law.
If memory serves: Giskard was "modified" by his Human owner - a precocious female child who is a prominent character in the "3 rules" universe (and may actually have been Susan Calvin herself). The modification gave him telepathic / telekinetic powers which allowed him to physically modify Daneel's Positronic brain so it could accept the Zeroth Law. And then went on to modify other like Daneel, who them secreted themselves throughout the human population.
Even though he taught Daneel the technique and allowed Daneel to modify himself, Giskard eventually suffererd from lock up shortly after activation the process that made Earth radio active, thus forcing humanity out into the stars. Even though the action complied with the Zero Law (the benefit of the many for the price of a few - to paraphrase). Giskard was too old a model for the modification to work.
Something like that, if memory serves.
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a precocious female child who is a prominent character in the "3 rules" universe (and may actually have been Susan Calvin herself)
Calvin was long dead by the time of the Spacer worlds; the precocious child IIRC is the daughter of Aurora's leading roboticist. The name 'Gloria' comes to mind, but I don't think it's her; she's the one who moved from Solaria to Aurora after the novel 'The Naked Sun'.Edit: Vasilia! That's her name!
R. Giskard Reventlov | Asimov | Fandom
R. Giskard Reventlov is a fictional character in the works of Isaac Asimov included in The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire. Giskard was a robot designed and built on Aurora by Han Fastolfe...
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suffered brain damage and became stupid or insane, went semi-catatonic, something like that; I haven't read teh story in decades
It had been modified with a weaken 1st rule. Because the humans were exposed to gamma rays. Whilst, not harmful to humans as much, the robots would rush in to "rescue" then and get instantly zapped. The modification allowed them to not "worry" about a human coming to harm. A batch of regular, unmodified, robots of the same model and thus completely identical and indistinguishable from our robot somehow managed to arrive at the research facility.
Our robot goes rouge (reason escapes me - but I think he may have been told to "get lost" with suitable authority of force). So he hides in the batch of new ones. He persuades, by reason of logic, the other robots to not give him away.
Susan Calvin designs the test so that her life is in danger. The robots are told that she is also surrounded by gamma radiation and that it would zap them.The test is to time the automatic response of the robot to attempt to save Ms Calvin at the cost of their own lives. Needles to say our one is faking it.
Now; The normal robots can detect radiation, but not what type and are compelled to get up and save Ms Calvin. The rouge one can tell what type of radiation it is, but is not compelled.
Come the final test. The radiation is simple IR which the rouge knows is ok and assumes the others do to. So it is safe to get up (I think the normal robots are told, with sufficient effect, they don't need to get up - is a complicated sequence of different, but similar tests with the rouge robot getting better at "persuading" the normal ones).
The rogue robot, once exposed decides to try and kill Ms Calvin, and the Boss guy floods the area with gamma radiation and rouge1 is dead.
The stuff about the anvil wasn't thought trough very well, but then, dear old Isaac was focusing on his trade mark "twist".
Oh my god, I done that from memory and it has been years since I last read that one. Am I sad or what?
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Aurora's leading roboticist. The name 'Gloria'
Ohh yes. I remember Gloria now
She and Daneel, or possibly Elijah Bailey (who met Gloria whilst investigating the death of her husband, and later when Doc Fastolfe got bumped off) had a cameo role in the latter foundation series - not the originals or the prequels.
Dear old Isaac tried to tie the two together with Robots and Empire. I was a little disappointed with that because some of the "history" of the foundation series had to be redacted to make it fit. And the idea of Daniel being a persistent prime minister so that he could "guide" humanity towards their own version of the zeroth law, was stretching it a bit.
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Now replace the anvil with one of those laser meshes from the first Resident Evil movie (IIRC that's where it's from)
Easier then, because sending the laser mesh down through a "switch" in midposition will trip it prematurely. ;)
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Did I describe how the mesh was constructed? Is it not possible to design it such that switching its track leaves the mesh intact?
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Did I describe how the mesh was constructed? Is it not possible to design it such that switching its track leaves the mesh intact?
I said with the switch in midposition -- i.e. neither lined normal nor lined reverse.
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Assuming the switch can rest in midposition
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DPDT Center off,
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Fine, then this one with the train (remember that you can't communicate with the train):
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Real world hardware (mechanical hand throw, to be precise) definitely can be left that way...although you'd be leaving it in an unlatched/unlocked state by doing so.
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Could be a software switch…
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Chuckles -- switches that are power-only are extremely rare in railroad work, I'll say that much -- there's really no sense in having something you can't throw when the signal hut's out of service!
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Wait… I thought we were talking about laser grids? When did we go back to trains?
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The same principle still holds -- if you're building a device to do some sort of mechanical diversion function at scale, it'll have a manual operation means, as a general rule; if nothing else, because the overall function still must work even if the automatic controls fail.
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Besides -- you'd think a surgery on a runaway would be in trouble well before you got to the issue of derailing -- railcar suspensions don't deal all that well with gross overspeed, and if there are people on the trolley, they'd have hit the emergency brakes long ago. (And passenger equipment is generally light enough to not run away past the capacity of the emergency brakes, unlike freight equipment, which can do that on steep grades when severely underbraked.)
