How dare A COMPUTER PROGRAM ON THE INTERNET!!11 be more supportive than the kids parents! WTF? That is clearly the cause of her suicide -not depression, not her family ignoring the signs -100% the fault of a computer program.

I'm kinda guessing you dont have much experience with this sort of thing. Never had a friend or family member off themselves. I've had a few.

Look heres the deal. The friend who comes to you, eyes full of tears threatening to kill themselves are the ones most likely to make it. Doesn't mean they aint in danger, they are, but it means they still havent completely closed the door on there being a way out of whatever nightmare is clouding their thoughts. You of course, drop everything and try and help, the alternative is horrifying.

But the ones who don't come to you, thats the biggest danger. They might seem happy, weirdly so, philosophical, apologetic for wrongs and seeming like they are are really turning a corner. Then they walk onto a bridge and step into oblivion.

My old best friends wife did that. Seemingly happy woman, though a little anxious at times. Asian girl, small, pretty , into fun times with her girlfriends. Then one day the police came to his house, said they saw her on CCTV walk to the middle of a bridge, and without hesitating climbed over the handrail and lept to her death on the rocks 8 stories below. He had no warning, she hadn't come to him complaining that he wasn't treating her right or that something had gone wrong. For all any of us can see they where happy newlyweds. To this day a decade later he still cant sleep racking his still grief stricken brain trying to work out what the fuck he missed.

Sometimes you just don't know. The kid might be hiding a secret. Maybe she's gay. Maybe she's trans. Maybe she's getting bullied so relentlessly at school she cant bear waking up. Maybe her uncle is fucking her and shes too ashamed to get help. Who knows why teenagers kill themselves. But sure as fuck they aint gonna be telling their parents.

Maybe dude, but your talking a country with extremely low technical literacy and a totalarian government.

The regional govenors making these decisions might be ignorant-ass country bumpkins, but they've got a militia behind them thats more than skilled at pulling off some intensely barbaric shit if provoked.

No ones going up against that for reddit access.

The problem with UE5 isnt really UE5 but a problem of workflow. A *lot* of games on UE5 started off as UE4 projects and the teams had moved across without fully appreciating the fundamental differences between the engines. The entire level streaming system is different, to account for the ultra high poly models, the lighting system is completely different, the way the shader system interacts with cards is different. Its just a different engine that just happens to be compatible with the some, but not all, of UE4s client sourcecode.

UE5 is perfectly capable of being performant, you only need to look at Fortnite and how well it runs with some pretty damn high poly models, particular in landscapes. But thats a game thats being written by the same guys who built the engine. Epic know intimately how to use the engine properly.

Theres nothing magic about a AAA studio. They dont have perfect knowledge and they also tend to have projects with pretty long development cycles which means right now , many possibly most of the current AAA UE5 games started off with UE4 and the misconfigured scripts and assets and coupled with shitty documentation and a lack of retraining, and you end up a total platypus of an unoptimized games.

Epic does still have to take the blame for this. If you believe the hype you can forget about having to LOD and decimate models, you can use lumen lighting everywhere and run ultra detailed landscapes far beyond what any other engine will do. And that is true, if your on a 5090 with a top of the line CPU and motherboard. But none of this absolves the developer from realising that not all of the dream of true photorealism is gonna be available to the average gamer on a mid-high system with a 3060 entry level GPU. So compromises have to be taken. Not every model needs to have millions of triangles. At least SOME lighting should be prebaked. And LOD is still a honking good idea. You still end up with a great looking game with decent FPS. But that means cautious optimization.

And yeah, maybe gamers need to start realising they cant expect 120fps on epic settings on a potato. And thats been true since Doom.

Maybe it doesnt need to be strong hand of the law stuff. God knows this current administration is so balls deep in with the tech bros that they wouldn't listen anyway. I mean these fuckers just tore away half the medicare their very voter base relies on.

But that isn't the only way power works in this society. Theres also commercial pressures, and commercial pressure starts with people saying "OK I'll buy that product", or saying "I wont buy that product".

Already we can see from this current proposals for 18 bans, putting pressure on companies to do the right thing IS possible. Bad PR is poison to these companies. So when they are doing bullshit, vote with your wallet and make a scene about it, and contact your friendly (friendly!) local journalist. Because, that actually works shockingly well sometimes. Cos nothing scares off Venture Capital faster than bad press.

This is kind of whats worrying me to. Like, I totally get focusing on keeping kids out of harms way. As far as I'm concerned kids are the most important people and we're just keeping the seats warm for them. But, maybe we shouldn't be letting the bots flirt with ANYONE, because we actually know this shit can have deleterious effects on adults too, and you end up with people in bizare parasocial relationships with fucking spellcheckers and going off the rails, abandoning family and friends so they sit around wasting what precious little time they have on this cursed planet feeding training data to machines. It seems a recipe for a pretty sad life.

And thats not even touching on the actual mental illness stuff where people are having schizotypal disorders aggravated into full blown paranoid schizophrenia due to AIs bizarre compliant behavior.

Maybe we need to put some rules on this AI shit. I don't know, I'm out of ideas.

Yeah science videos are really getting brutalized by AI right now. Theres just floods of absolutely horseshit videos of the "SCIENTISTS DISCOVER PROOF OF GOD IN JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE" type shit that'll have some utterly banal voice droning on for 10 minutes about made up hallucinations from cGPT over a combination of stolen imagery and AI slop images. And you can see these vids having 1 - 2 million views filled with imbiciles on the comments "praise lord! i knew it was true" type shit.

Its really depressing when there are educators like Sabine Hossenfelder, Anton Petrov, the various Brady Haran (numberphile/computerphile/etc) channels and so on have been slogging away for years struggling to make whats often actually pretty dry stuff entertaining and having their viewership numbers utterly sniped by shit content farms.

Theres growing evidence from cognitive psychology that the primary differences between liberal and conservative people is rooted in thinking styles, and that these seem to have some degree of neurological basis. In essense liberals tend to be more pluralistic thinkers whereas conservatives are more polar thinkers. The end result is where liberals see differences and sort of go "Ok, thats interesting!" conservatives will see differences and go "Ok, thats dangerous!". This becomes particularly notable when encountering things that dont cleanly fit into categories (ie transgenderism, religious conversion, immigration, interacial marriages and other transgressions against category) but in general its anything thats not "us" is a "them" and to be feared.

Theres a whole bunch of conjecture and inquiry as to how this all works, but the main theory is its about how people process fear in the face of uncertainty. Some people delight in uncertainty, some people find it genuinely dyphoric. How you fit on that spectrum of uncertainy handling is likely to fit very close to your political identification.

The problem with the IOS (and Mac) MFA apps is they are strictly apple only affairs. In my own home, I've got an iPhone, a mac, a windows machine a linux machine and assorted black boxes (samsung tv, etc). I can get 1password running on all of them except the TV. The apple one only runs on the mac and iphone.

Too many people major in a subject they like, instead of ones that are in demand. So many people end up with a degree in an area with limited job prospects. Makes it look like college isn't worth it. Don't go to college JUST to go to college. You need a goal. Problem is few high school seniors are informed enough to make this decision, and we are seeing the results.

I dont think thats really too great a problem. The point is usually to have *a* degree, unless your really focusing on getting the job in your field in which case yeah, you might need to loosen up expectations.

Quite often people cite humanities degrees as one where its not job friendly, but in reality humanities degrees have employment rates in the 1-2% range (with some outliers) and often have pretty great wage outcomes, because employers value them for clerical work as they've proven skills in communication and thus have promise in managerial work. STEM is a little more diverse, some fields are proven earners, some not so much. But again employers will generally appreciate the analytical mind and the fact they've hung in there for 3-4 years on a project (the degree).

And a kid being railroaded into a major they aren't interested in is a kid liable to drop out and not finish the degree. My two majors where in philosophy and journalism. I work as a software engineer at a lab that does climate research. Its all good. You find your place eventually.

I'm growing to hate social media. This last week I've been using a browser plugin to just block facebook, twitter and instagram due to the fact its just a sea of people hating and accusing each other of psychotic bullshit over the CK murder and like...... get a fucking grip americans.... Its just bad for the soul to be flooded with hyper partison aggravated political bullshit all day. So I've blocked it, and despite my inner idiot wanting to get on there and yell at people, I'll take the dopamine loss and just do something else. Like play the piano, or run the storyline on that new Dune Awakening expansion. Or go and drink rum with friends. Or fucking anything other than doomscroll on facebook again.

If AI kills social media , then maybe AI might just be good for something.

Some experiments show that light doesn't exist unless we look at it.

No experiments show that. Its just a strange interpretation of certain features of photons. But to be clear that doesnt mean "the photon is not real", rather it shows probabilistic properties under specific circumstances. Strange does not mean fake.

as for whether it 'experiences' time. Well thats a complex question. Due to time dilation , from *its* inertial frame, one would things happen pretty much instantly, it is effectively always at the end of its own time cone. But from an observers inertial frame, it would be travelling at precisely the speed of light (in a vacuum).

These are, I should note, entirely different things, and it would muddy the mind to mix these two ideas together.

One day we will learn in school that empathy is bad. An out of date emotion that was only useful when we were a grazing herd.

Spoken like a true sociopath.

Without empathy we dont have society. Without empathy we don't have morality. Without empathy were little more than apes dashing each others brains out with rocks over territory.

What a stupid claim. Evolution gave us the mirror neuron for a goddamn reason.

"Python is one of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking changes"

Eh? the 2 -> 3 transition was well over a decade ago dude, and the API stability of python libraries has always been one of its selling points. Considering its rivals like JS and its never ending library updatge hell, thats a weird claim to make

Why have one authoritarian country have all the AI when 3 authoritarian countries can have all the AI.

(Sorry americans, but right now I'm counting you guys as an authoritarian country. With that said, if you guys arent using that constitution anymore, can we have it? )

One of my more bonkers moves as a 20something in the 1990s was busting a girlfriend out of a mental ward she was being held involventarily in. she was actually fine , but some asshole psych had her basically captive because apparently not complying with her turbo christian parents is madness.

So after an afternoon at the pub, me and a bunch of the boys just barged in and walked her out the front door with the "We are bigger and scarier and you have no power over us" glare.

The wild thing is ..... it worked. The cops didnt come for her, and to this day 30 years later she's never heard a thing from the ward. I've long suspected there was something very wrong going on in that hospital and they decided it better to just let her go than have the cops involved.