Sure. And you can buy a dirt bike cheaper than an ATV. Yet people still buy ATVs.

I’m not gonna do iOS dev or ML on a GMKtec no matter how cost-effective it is, just like I’m not gonna play x86 Windows games on a Mac even if I win a maxed-out unit in a giveaway.

Is there even a better ARM SoC? All I know of is the Snapdragon X Elites, which are either on par or slightly below the M4. And you can only get them in a laptop form factor at this point, cuz they cancelled the mini-PC dev kit.

True. It was just the first comparison I saw when I searched for M4 benchmarks.

Really, AMD isn’t even a fair comparison because we’re talking about an ARM SoC here. So maybe the Snapdragon dev kit that ultimately got cancelled?

It was supposed to be $900, for a special Snapdragon X Elite, 32GB RAM, and 512GB SSD.

cpubenchmark.net has comparisons to other X Elite chips, putting them pretty much on-par with the M4 or maybe just below it.

With the same amount of RAM and storage in a Mac Mini, you’re talkin $1200. So, $300 premium for a device that’s maybe 2-8% better, has retail support instead of being a dev kit, and… well, actually exists. It’s not a slam dunk for the Mini, but it’s clearly not a rip-off either.

M4 reportedly outperforms Intel’s Core i9-14900KS by 16%. That CPU alone is over $600.

It’s like if they were in the context of black folks being hanged, and he said to a black guest: “I hope they run out of rope for you”.

Like yeah, they’re technically saying they hope his life is spared, but only through a mistake.

We are playing with some dark and powerful shit here.

We are social creatures. We’re primed to care about our social identity more than our own lives.

As the sociologist Brooke Harrington puts it, if there was an E = mc² of social science, it would be SD > PD, “social death is more frightening than physical death.”

…yet we’re making technologies that tap into that sensitive mental circuitry.

Like, check out the research on distracted driving and hands-free options:

Talking to someone on the phone is more dangerous than talking to someone in the passenger seat. But that’s not simply because the device is more awkward. It’s because they don’t share the same context, so they plow ahead with conversation even if the car ahead of you brakes suddenly, and your brain can’t help but try to keep the conversation flowing even as your life is in immediate danger.

Hands-free voice control systems present a similar problem, even though we know rationally that we should have zero guilt about rudely interrupting a conversation with a computer. And again, it’s not simply because the device is more awkward. A “Wizard-of-Oz paradigm” perfect voice control system had these same problems.

The most basic levels of social pressure can get us to deprioritize our safety, even when we know we’re talking to a computer.

And the cruel irony on top of it is:

Because we care so much about preserving our social status, we have a tendency to deny or downplay how vulnerable we all are to this kind of “obvious” manipulation.

Just think of how many people say “ads don’t affect me”.

I’m worried we’re going to severely underestimate the extent to which this stuff warps our brains.

Cool. Gonna use it as an excuse to re-open the pier to faciltate another massacre and then shut it down again?

You just gotta believe.

This is where we need something other than copyright law. The problem with generative AI companies isn’t that somebody looked at something without permission, or remixed some bits and bytes.

It’s that their products are potentially incredibly harmful to society. They would be harmful even if they worked perfectly. But as they stand, they’re a wide-open spigot of nonsense, spewing viscous sludge into every single channel of human communication.

I think we can bring out antitrust law against them, and labor unions are also a great tool. Privacy, and a right to your own identity factor in, too. But I think we’re also going to need to develop some equivalent of ecological protections when it comes to information.

For a long time, our capacity to dump toxic waste into the environment was minuscule compared to the scale of the natural world. But as we automated more and more, it became clear that the natural world has limits. I think we’re headed towards discovering the same thing for the world of information.

I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.

• Deep Rock Galactic
• Tunic
• Pacific Drive
• Gorogoa
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Hand of Fate 2
• FTL
• Styx: Shards of Darkness
• House of the Dying Sun
• Hitman Go and Lara Craft Go
• VVVVVV

Not a new problem:

Julia is famous among psychologists because she was able to implant false memories into a group of subjects and convince 70 percent of them that they were guilty of a crime they did not commit, and she did so by using the sort of sloppy interrogation techniques that some police departments have been truly been guilty of using in the past.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2020/05/19/yanss-179-the-memory-illusion/

It’s worth noting that the book does contain several chapters which, on their own, would probably be classified as “historical fiction”.

They are clearly identified by the title “When Life Was Our Own”, and the author introduces them as a story which will provide context and depth for the surrounding non-fiction text.

A pretty reasonable approach for a children’s book, and also one which is thematically appropriate, given the importance of oral history in the preservation of Native American culture.

The book starts with a story, “When Life Was Our Own,” which describes Wampanoag life before any European contact. The story was created to re- late traditional Wampanoag culture, beliefs, prac- tices, and values based on our oral traditions and research done over many years. There are no writ- ten sources of these early times, due to the processes of colonization described in the other parts of the book. An understanding of precontact life brings clarity to the impacts of colonization on Indigenous people.

That video was a mess. Miller trying his best to not allow an actual question.

To be fair though, that reporter’s gotta step it up. You can’t give these guys an inch of wiggle room.

Looks like certified mail, not notarized. But still, ridiculous. https://retrofitness.com/faq/

I’ll keep saying it: We’re watching the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome in real time.

“No fair, you’re only supposed to enact regulations that voters don’t want!”

Good call, thank you.

Also: Referencing Wikipedia in this context is kinda funny.

So I put 2 and 2 together, and decide this whole thing is pissing me off.

Still waters run deep.

Unleashing generative AI on the world was basically the information equivalent of jumping headfirst into Kessler Syndrome.