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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • You can’t prevent client-side cheating with a server-side implementation. For instance, making enemies on the other side of a wall visible uses data that the server has to supply to the client in order for the game to work, just in an unintended way. The server also has no way to verify whether the client is accurately conveying the results of user inputs or gently correcting them to move the aim to an enemy’s head instead of a gazebo.

    It would still be nice if all game companies supported Linux, but it requires active effort and isn’t something they can get for free by being better programmers.


  • Well, I guess you’ve chosen the path of not knowing what a pronoun is, since all of the examples you’ve given use chat as a noun. Good luck with that; I don’t think we can have a productive conversation without shared meanings of words, so I’ll bow out.

    No one’s getting particularly heated, we’re just saying that someone who spews obvious nonsense in an area of supposed expertise probably shouldn’t be trusted about other things.



  • No, don’t be silly. “Chat, is this true?” does not start with a pronoun. Here “chat” is a noun, just like the nouns in “Peter, is this true?” or “Dude, is this true?” or “Friends, Romans, countrymen; is this true?” or “Ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd.”

    Addressing someone does not require them to be present or real, so the presence or absence of a literal chat does not somehow transmogrify this noun into a pronoun.


  • I’ve rewatched the video in case I was being uncharitable. Nope. He accepts the premise (direct quote: “that’s kind of true”). He then does the exact thing I said, which is argue that it’s not acting like a normal pronoun: “the ‘fourth person’ can also refer to a generic pronoun […] it doesn’t refer to a specific referent, like ‘he’ or ‘she’. […] if ‘chat’ is being used to refer to nobody in particular, then arguably it is a new fourth person pronoun.” This is complete and utter nonsense packaged as exciting linguistic concepts, which is not at all “cool and good.”

    (As a bonus bit of wrongness that I didn’t catch on the first watch: he says that chat used like “y’all” is third person plural, which is another thing that maybe you shouldn’t get wrong in a supposedly educational video.)





  • McDonald’s has the worst kiosks of the three that I have experienced (the other two being Taco Bell and Burger King.)

    They feel slightly laggy, while cramming in as many upsell interstitials (and “log in with your personal data accumulation rewards account” nags) as possible. This makes ordering feel like wading through molasses. The other two could also be slightly streamlined, but the number of clicks to order doesn’t feel as egregious. (I’m now tempted to go count and see if my perceptions are accurate…)












  • I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and … it’s actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better?

    It’s still very good at autocompleting an answer to look like its training data (because that’s what it’s doing) and very bad at logic (which it is not doing.)

    “I have two chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?”

    This is a classic river-crossing puzzle. Let’s think through it step-by-step:

    • First, note that if left alone, a chicken will eat the corn, and one chicken might eat the other.
    • Start by taking a chicken across the river.

    …and we’ll stop there, since it came up with the wrong constraints, failed to realize that these constraints are impossible to fulfill, and also violated the actual constraints in its first step.

    Will more detail help? No. “I have two vegetarian chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?”

    First, we need to consider the constraints:

    • You can only take one item (chicken or corn) across at a time.
    • You can’t leave a chicken alone with the corn, as the chicken would eat it.
    • The chickens are vegetarian, so they won’t eat each other.

    Here’s a solution:

    • Step 1: Take one chicken across the river.
    • Step 2: Return alone.
    • Step 3: Take the second chicken across.
    • Step 4: Bring the first chicken back.
    • Step 5: Take the corn across.
    • Step 6: Return alone.
    • Step 7: Take the remaining chicken across.

    Explanation:

    • By never leaving a chicken alone with the corn, we prevent the corn from being eaten.
    • We use one chicken as a “guard” for the corn on the original shore while transporting the other items.

    Because it’s not actually doing logic it got the first step wrong, violated the constraints multiple times, and also included an irrelevant idea (the guard) from a variant that it was trained on. I only got a correct, efficient answer one time out of ten trials of trivial variations on this classic puzzle.