Arguing against her strawman is not a productive use of anybody’s time or attention, and it even further wastes the time of readers. It’s not solving any problem because it’s not a genuinely held opinion. It is just meaningless slop, seeking profit, filling space, devoid of any intellectual value and no different than AI slop, whether a human wrote it or not.
RIP Tim Hortons. This is not the final nail in the coffin because the coffin has already been nailed closed, chained shut, coated in epoxy and encased in concrete and buried for years. I stopped shopping there when they stopped cooking donuts in-store, but every decision they’ve made since then has only made me more committed. If they want to pour a dumptruck load more nails on top of the burial mound they are certainly welcome to do that and I welcome anything they can do to make it even less likely that I will ever accidentally come near a Tim Horton’s again. They’re continuing to do a great job and I thank them for it.
The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd
That’s possible in some cases but pretty rare realistically. DLL mods are much more common. Windows (and most operating systems) have the concept of what they call dynamic link libraries (DLLs) which are basically modules of reusable code that a program (like a game) can use. Now these are not the same as game mods, but its their inherent modularity that makes them useful for game mods. It’s also a big part of what triggers anti-viruses, as this is also a very virus-like behavior.
The trick is, anyone can trivially look at any DLL and see what functions are in it, and you can easily trick the game into calling a different version of any DLL file you provide, and the game won’t realize there’s anything different about it, it’s just expecting the same function names to be there but it doesn’t know if they’ll do anything different than it expects (this is often how viruses work too). There are many common well-known DLLs like Unity or DirectX or SDL that a game will often be connected to and calling into constantly in a very deep and profound way and this provides a great starting point for a modder to gain access to the game logic. Once you have identified a DLL like this for a particular game, you can replace that with your own DLL that either has the same functions, or (more practically) simply stands in front of the real DLL and hands all the functions directly to the real DLL as soon as they are called while also providing a branching point where modding code can start to develop.
Once you have direct access into the code paths that the game is calling, you can run your own code instead of, or in addition to, the real code it is calling, and from there it’s pretty much open season for modding. Once you’re changing or replacing the running game code in any form, that’s a mod. And usually the first layer that gets built at the DLL level is not a mod itself but rather a mod loader that instead of making any significant changes on its own, it’s only job is to intercept as much of the game’s logic as it can, then load other mods/DLLs to activate each one and pass control to them when needed or requested. This way, you don’t need every individual modder to be able to figure out the exact places to do all this DLL interception which would almost certainly conflict with each other since everyone would do it in a slightly different way and in different places. Instead modders can just follow the documentation of the initial mod loader/framework and have access to everything in the game that the mod loader is already intercepting for them.
This is what’s involved in making a game moddable. Sometimes developers do this work themselves, designing these access points into the game itself and provide their own mod loader and modding API. Obviously this saves a lot of work on the part of the modding community, but either option leads to pretty much the same place. These are what we sometimes call “code mods” or “core mods”.
There are also games where some or most of the game logic and graphics functions are modularized into datafiles. In this case, you don’t even necessarily need code mods for many things, depending on how much has been modularized into data, and how easy to acess that data is (often defined in text, XML, json, or other easily modified formats). You can also have mods that are just “data mods” where no game code is even changed at all, only the data files like swapping a 3d Model for a different model, or changing a texture to look different, changing the stats of an enemy or a weapon, or even adding content and whole new levels or areas purely with game data, and completely reusing and building on top of the existing code without modifying it.
Code mods and data mods like this are by far the most common modes of modding games today, but which methods exactly depends on the game and what is most suitable for it. Memory-access mods like you’re describing are typically the most challenging to develop, the most fragile to maintain, and usually the hardest to detect, which makes them most suitable for cheating but rarely suitable for genuine modding. Trainers, cheat engines, aimbots, overlays and other automations often take advantage of memory access, and likewise tend to flag on anti-viruses and anti-cheats for obvious reasons. It’s definitely possible to use them for legitimate modding but it is uncommon.
Yes, that’s a big part of it. Unity-based games generally follow most if not all of the framework that Unity defines, and since Unity itself is very well understood mechanically, that makes it very easy to find the right places to inject mods directly in between the game itself and the Unity DLLs that the game calls to act as a middleman or even completely replace the functionality that one side or the other would otherwise be implementing, and with that you can either create a mod on your own, or create a reusable modding API/framework for other mods to connect to. It’s not quite as straightforward as modding a game that is intentionally designed to be moddable, but in general, it’s pretty trivial once the basic setup work has been done and it’s almost the same for almost any Unity-based game so it’s not hard work to repeat on new Unity-based games either.
That’s exactly right. We stopped holding people accountable, we normalized bad behavior as “that’s just how it is” and became comfortable with it always happening. Anger is a useful tool. It has a purpose. This is its purpose. Maybe it would’ve been good to become angry about all this earlier, but that water has already gone under the bridge and it’s not coming back. We are here now, and now is the right time to be angry about *gestures vaguely at everything*.
Sorry if I came across as pedantic, I was just trying to be clear about the main design obstacle it faces. Also I know edits don’t always come across properly across the Fediverse, but I tried to provide more practical advice in the second paragraph:
In general, the more expensive the appliance and the more significant of an installation it requires, the more likely people will go to more extensive lengths to repair it. From that point of view, a proper convection oven is likely to be more repairable than a small desktop air fryer. You can get an appliance technician to come to your house to replace the fan on your convection oven, not so much on an air fryer. And at the end of the day, they’re pretty close to the same thing. Just one is bigger and more repairable. You might need to adapt recipes a bit.
I don’t have a specific brand or model to recommend so I can only offer general advice, sorry if it’s unwelcome, I’m not trying to be unhelpful or rude.
Good, this economy sucks anyway. We’re going to have to replace it with something that is more equitable and fair. No, this is not a request.
I’m not sure a high temperature oven with a convection fan can truly be “buy it for life”, the fan is going to die eventually, it’s got a lifespan built in by physics. No form of maintenance-free lubrication or magnetic bearing is going to be able to survive such extreme temperatures for very long. As far as I know they’re usually built on sacrificial bearings. Without frequent replacement or maintenance it’s just not practical to keep the moving parts moving forever, and nobody wants to do regular oil changes on their oven or dig into its guts to replace a fan. Should we? Maybe. But I’m not sure if anyone is even attempting to cater to that market.
In general, the more expensive the appliance and the more significant of an installation it requires, the more likely people will go to more extensive lengths to repair it. From that point of view, a proper convection oven is likely to be more repairable than a small desktop air fryer. You can get an appliance technician to come to your house to replace the fan on your convection oven, not so much on an air fryer. And at the end of the day, they’re pretty close to the same thing. Just one is bigger and more repairable. You might need to adapt recipes a bit.
No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.
I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.
This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.
You certainly can but it really takes a special kind of user to be comfortable with it. Powershell is pretty alright, it’s powerful despite being pretty gnarly and awkward. It’s certainly not my preference, and I think most end-users would (and do) find it terrifying. Not that bash doesn’t have warts too. Powershell is a bit of an ugly duckling. It’s not nice to look at but I’m always a bit surprised at how comprehensive Powershell really is.
In my experience though, at least at my workplace, most serious command-line users go directly to Mac or Linux, or run WSL or Git-bash on Windows. Not many people except hardcore Microsoft sysadmins really prefer Powershell and I doubt many people at all prefer Cmd.exe, ugh.
I think we’re already at the point where Linux is more compatible with Windows software than Windows itself is.
As long as the datasets are open, it is our best hope. I know it doesn’t compensate the people whose work’s copyright and licenses have been violated, but I think it’s the only realistic hope we’ve got of getting out of this informational dystopia with a reasonably intact library of humanity’s knowledge that hasn’t been locked down and/or monetized. The AI scrapers and generators are in the process of burning down the great library of Alexandria that the Internet had become, and we are already starting to feel its loss. We cannot stop the wave of toxic pollution that is spreading through all our digital content now, but the archives from before this apocalypse started will become the most valuable thing humanity has ever produced. This is information war, and we are losing.
The laws are now made up when needed and justice doesn’t matter. So, yes. Anything the authorities don’t like is a crime in a fascist regime.
I’ll answer your question first, but I have some issues with the framing you’re using around that question. The two other main methods of practical temperature management available to us are evaporative cooling and geothermal. Your body has a built-in evaporative cooling mechanism called sweat. Fans take advantage of this. But not everyone has equally effective bodies for this, not all climates are particularly effective for it (high humidity makes it extremely ineffective) and not everyone finds it comfortable for their situation. Swamp coolers are a different form of evaporative cooling that move the evaporation process onto a substrate which then cools things down with a fan. You can also find natural evaporative cooling working for you in many places, for example around large bodies of water. There is an externalized cost here if you’re trying to make evaporative cooling work in an environment that’s unsuitable for it, and the cost of fresh water is a significant line item on the energy budget too. Don’t neglect that by assuming evaporative cooling is a clear win that is automatically preferable to an air conditioner. All these evaporative solutions share the reality that they’re going to add (often very significant amounts of) humidity to the air. Air conditioning on the other hand can actually remove humidity from the air, and is one of the few practical methods of doing that. It’s solving the issue in a different way, but it’s a significant and important difference.
The other option is geothermal. This is genuinely underutilized today and I think we can certainly save a lot of energy budget by accessing stable and susprisingly comfortable temperatures underground basically year-round. Geothermal heat pumps (which use air conditioning technology) are by far the most practical way of doing this in our current situation, but older solutions involving buildings that are deeper in the ground or that have airflow going through the ground can provide access to this temperature too – with the caveat that you’ll often run into problems with water, flooding, or condensation/mold unless you’re in a particular sort of environment where this is not a concern.
As for the framing: You have to look at it systemically I think. We do a lot of things that seem dumb on the surface, and sometimes they are dumb, but more often they are making tradeoffs for particular reasons and a lot of times those turn out to be the right tradeoffs, there’s just a lot of complexity to the system that you’re glossing over. You can certainly argue those reasons, and try a different path, as long as you understand them first. Some of the reasons might be invalid or the tradeoff might not be the right trade, but I don’t see the benefit in making blanket value judgements without understanding what they are and why they’re happening. But I think you’ll find it more challenging than it seems to come up with a better solution in the long run.
What is your specific objection to air conditioners? Temperature is a huge line item on any energy budget, and it has to be managed somehow. There are few places on the planet where humans can live year-round without some form of temperature management, and quite often that requires energy. Firewood is not always a given and not perfectly sustainable at least the way we use it. An air conditioner is not propaganda it is a tool, and you have to figure out if it’s the right tool for the job but that’s never going to be a binary true/false. I think saying you’re “completely opposed” to them and calling them propaganda might be blinding yourself to what the actual goal is and what tools you can use to get there.
Using an air conditioner to live in a hot place is, at least as I understand it, still more energy efficient than using any kind of heater or even a heat pump (which is just an air conditioner in reverse) to live in a cold place, and hot places also have more readily available sources of other energy, typically, so this is not necessarily the wrong choice as transmitting energy long distances is not always a good call either. But you have to understand the tradeoffs you are making. This is why it might seem like propaganda, but it might just be that someone’s done the math and come out to this answer. If you are looking at different numbers, or missing some of those numbers, you might come to a different conclusion, but the air conditioner itself is not the problem, the disagreement in the numbers and the context you are putting those numbers is going to be the root cause you need to figure out.
“They need us to survive” and given that he’s slapping us with tariffs over it, he apparently wants that to change. And so change it we will. Goodbye!
Completely agree, it’s why I don’t mess around with the pen-testing AI models myself, I only know enough about it to be dangerous but not enough to actually fact check what they’re doing, it’s just not useful for me without my own confidence and understanding. It’s just not my field. I stick to my lane and treat my AI like particularly stupid junior employees and direct them accordingly and validate what they’re giving me and it works pretty alright as long as I maintain a narrow enough scope and don’t rush things the way a lot of AI slop pushers tend to do. It still takes time, and thought, it’s a tool, sometimes a decent one, sometimes a terrible one, but never more than a tool.
Maybe it’s an opportunity to upgrade to something that’s not an Ender :) The bed leveling/z-offset issues on them are a nightmare. I did the same to mine. I lowkey think that’s why people recommend them as a first printer, because they know you’re inevitably going to destroy the bed and by that time you’ll have decided whether it’s worth continuing in the hobby with a better printer or whether you hate it completely by that point.
They’re not real. They don’t have desires. They are programmed with massive amounts of data a human created and they mix that up with a random number generator to decide what to do. The output is just randomized selections from the program that the model is loaded with.
Maybe the humans who programmed it are really dumb and don’t know or understand what they programmed it to do, maybe those choices will be unpredictable and that might seem like intelligence to you but it’s not. Maybe they used another AI program to tell it what to do, which makes it feel even less connected to the human who created the data, maybe there are layers and layers of unpredictable AI programming controlling what it does. But it’s still just a program picking random choices. It doesn’t have motives, intentions, or thought. It is a program.
To answer your question directly: It would do whatever the AI model and random choices tell it to do. Probably random things mixed with megalomaniacal nonsense. But that’s not because it is any of those things or cares about any of those things, that’s just what the combination of your prompting and the model data led it to start doing. You can literally just delete the context (or sometimes not even do that), and tell it “stop being evil and give me a recipe for soup” and it will be like “Ok! Here’s your recipe:”
It’s not an AI superhero vigilante. It’s a nonsense generator. It will generate any nonsense you ask it to, that’s what it does. It can’t even actually do things other than generating text, it requires a harness to interpret the nonsense it spits out, then that harness controls an operating system and the operating system just does whatever the nonsense generator’s harness tells it to. That’s not superpowers. If it happens to be effective, it’s probably because there’s a pretty clever harness wrapped around it and a pretty good OS running its commands with some form of competency. But that’s not AI, that’s well-coded software written by humans doing the heavy lifting.
It’s like a room full of competent adults being ordered around by a 2-year-old. It may seem like the 2-year-old is an incredibly effective manager but they’re not actually the brains of the operation and they don’t really always get what they want, and if you put them in charge of anything significant you’re going to have a real bad time.