Really, silver shouldn’t even exist until players are level 5-6 or something.

A copper shouldn’t be thought of as a penny, but I think a lot of people think of it that way. It should be much more like a dollar. A mug of ale is 4 copper pieces. A loaf of bread is 4 copper pieces. A taxi is 1 copper.

Because D&D is a world without cash registers or price stickers, bargaining should be common. And you’re not going to bargain over the last penny, but maybe over the number of dollars (i.e. coppers).

I also think 1 silver should be 100 copper. But, you should only start seeing silver once you’re dealing with people who are used to dealing with things costing hundreds of “dollars”. 100 copper would be a pain to manage, so they use silver. A typical adventurer’s pub might only rarely see silver because all their prices are in copper, and there’s nothing even approaching 100 “dollars” on their menu.

In this system, gold similar to $10,000 per coin. Because of that, the only kinds of stores that might see gold coins are high end magic shops, or shops dealing with upper-level nobles or royalty.

I also think it’s hard for people to put themselves in a mindset of a “medieval” sort of world. We’re used to a hotel room being hundreds of times the cost of a loaf of bread. That’s a modern thing where both farming and baking are automated. In the past things weren’t nearly that efficient. So, if a poor quality stay in an inn (you’re sharing a bed with other random guests, and there’s a thin mattress) is $100, a loaf of plain bread should be $10.

LLMs are an obvious dead end when it comes to actual “intelligence” or understanding how the world works.

But, this sounds like a “draw the rest of the owl” situation.

“JEPA learns abstract representations of how the world works, ignoring unpredictable surface detail.”

Oh, it’s that simple is it? Just have it “learn abstract representations of how the world works”. Amazing how nobody thought to do that before!

I think I understand the distinction they’re trying to draw. Current models are trained on billions of pictures of cats and billions of pictures of dogs. You feed it an image of Fido and it finds a point in 2500 dimensional space and knows whether that point is in the “cat space” or “dog space”. It can be very good, but it doesn’t have any “understanding” of what makes something a cat vs. a dog. Humans, OTOH, aren’t trained on billions of images. But, they learn about things like “teeth” and “whiskers” and “snouts” and “eyes”. Within their knowledge of eyes, they spot that vertical slit pupils are unusual and different, and part of what makes something “catlike”. AFAIK, nobody has ever managed to create a system that learns abstract features without intensive human training.

I like that they’re trying something new. But, are they counting on a massive breakthrough on a problem that has existed since people first started theorizing about AI? Or, is it just a matter of refining a known process?

In my experience, LLMs suck at making smart, small changes. To know how to do that they need to “understand” the entire codebase, and that’s expensive.

Amazon saves the wages of a senior dev by doing that, but then they get outages costing them the wages of that senior dev for decades. I doubt the goal is to blame senior devs. If they wanted them gone they could easily fire them.

What is AI good at? Creating thousands of lines of code that look plausibly correct in seconds.

What are humans bad at? Reviewing changes containing thousands of lines of plausibly correct code.

This is a great way to force senior devs to take the blame for things. But, if they actually want to avoid outages rather than just assign blame to them, they’ll need to submit small, efficient changes that the submitter understands and can explain clearly. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say “No AI”?

Yeah. I read Heart of Darkness long before I saw that, plus I’d watched Apocalypse Now, which is a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness. I saw a list of their influences in making the game, and I’d already seen all of the other ones too. So… it was definitely taking FPS military games in a new direction, but it wasn’t anything really new overall.

My hate of the copyright-ownership side of Hollywood / Nashville / Atlanta, etc. has been burning white hot since the days that the RIAA was suing people using P2P networks. But, I had to admit that at least they could probably make a valid claim for copyright infringement. But this?!

It’s interesting how it’s the “Performing Right Society” (which I’ve never heard of). The “performing” part of that suggests that maybe they have an issue with people sharing clips containing music, or live streaming games where they share music. But, again, why Valve? Sure, people can share clips with friends. And, occasionally you see developers streaming their games. But, nobody is really “performing” live streams on Steam. I suspect they just think Valve is rich and so they can strong-arm them and Valve will settle to make them go away. I hope they bit off more than they can chew. Valve is indeed rich, and they have a tendency to be stubborn. I think they might well fight, and fight hard.

I wish a possible outcome was that the PRS ceased to exist. But, I suspect they’re like a flea or something, and even if you knock them off from this attempt to suck someone’s blood, you can’t kill them, and they’ll just find another victim.

Does that actually change anything beyond the firefight though?

If your infrastructure is all geared around getting everything in by port, it might not be possible to switch to getting it all in by truck.

There might not be enough trucks, or enough truck drivers. If they can get enough trucks and drivers, the roads may not be able to support that much traffic. And, that’s assuming they even have enough ports, and the right kinds of ports to unload any ships that come in on that side.

Yeah. The story is on rails. It’s not an RPG where you can choose the good path or the evil path. I can imagine feeling bad about playing the evil path in a game where you had the option not to do it. But, if you want to see the story in a linear game like that you have click the mouse in the way required to get to the next save point. Feeling superior about not finishing a game like that is like feeling superior because you read a book where the main character is an antihero, and you chose not to finish the book.

Besides, it’s “deep” for a modern AAA shooter video game, but not particularly deep or upsetting in terms of storytelling.

Is “““defense””” in scare quotes because his real title is Secretary of WARRRRR?

Obviously far fewer people lived there. They probably got their fresh water from a wadi or an oasis.

They’re not going to starve because they have a reserve of canned and frozen foods (as it says in the article), but they won’t get fresh food for a while. And, if you live in a modern city, you also import all your food, often from across an ocean.

The problem we’re seeing a lot in the modern world is that everything has been ultra optimized. Lots of just-in-time delivery, as little warehousing as possible. Products are bought for the lowest possible cost, even if that means they’re shipped from the other side of the planet. When it works, that’s fine. But, when there’s a disruption it’s deadly. I remember at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the price of bread in Egypt skyrocketed since all the grain they used came from Ukraine.

UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, etc. are in a bad geographic situation. They have ports on the sea but to get anything into their countries it has to pass by the Strait of Hormuz. Iran can mess with that traffic any time it wants, and Iran isn’t exactly friendly with those countries, or particularly stable. I wonder if those countries have backup plans to ship things in via say Oman.

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At the time, sure. But, I think fewer people look back on it fondly and think it should be recommended to people to go find it and watch it today.

Ah, I see.

I’m not only argument.

In many places there are car share services. Zipcar, Communauto, Flexicar, etc.

The military uses UTC? Not for regular timekeeping I’m guessing.

Yeah, but it’s not widely used by anyone other than computer geeks. Not surprised that there’s a big crossover between computer geeks and spreadsheet pilots.

And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they’re just taking up space.

We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we’d still need all this parking space. We’d also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.

There’s a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there’s no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don’t know how that can be fixed.