nightshade [they/them]

  • 10 Posts
  • 165 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 31st, 2023

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  • The researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024, estimating 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period

    The estimate of 64,000 only accounts for people killed directly by weapons or bombing, similar to the count of ~40,000 that the Gaza Health Ministry was maintaining before they lost the ability to maintain the count.

    The estimate of 186,000 from the other study accounts for indirect deaths from destruction of medical facilities, lack of clean water, lack of food, etc., which is a much more important number, but is not receiving as much attention for obvious reasons.







  • According to Pew Research, the increased preference for Democrats at lower income levels and increased preference for Republicans at higher income levels only holds up until the highest income bracket, at which point there is a slight preference for Dems again.

    Party preference apparently also only changes significantly based on income in non-college grads, with college grads maintaining a preference for Dems at all income levels.

    According to their methodology, about 10% of the people they surveyed were classified as “upper income”, so it can more or less be said to consist of the top 10% of earners (though the classification is adjusted by local cost of living, so it’s not that clear). Given that this bracket is probably mostly made of college-educated professionals, it seems that education trumps income considerations for this specific bracket. So basically the preference for Dems/Reps based on income is only mostly true, with a spike in support for Dems amongst relatively wealthy college-educated professionals.






  • Edit: Text transcription

    Encrypting save games

    Why?

    Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

    But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life. No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let’s see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.



  • I’m pretty sure some of the newer ChatGPT-like products (the consumer-facing interface, not the raw LLM) do in fact do this. They try to detect certain types of inputs (i.e. math problems or requesting the current weather) and convert it to an API request to some other service and return the result instead of a LLM output. Frankly it comes across to me as an attempt to make the “AI” seem smarter than it really is by covering up its weaknesses.