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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 12h

I'm really fond of there riichi mahjong cheat sheets. I bring them, just in case I have to teach people how to play the damn game (it always happens):

zes.sx/riichi/

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 14h

That and the last two games were plagued by a mana draught so severe that I was playing a 3.3 mana average deck with just about 4 mana both games.

Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 14h

I went 2-3, which for me is fairly respectable. The problem was, I think, that I had too much of a reliance on stations, which have so far not really worked out for me. They're fairly expensive, and even if I tap to crew them I feel like I'm leaving myself open.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 14h

Played my first proper Quick Draft after saving up for about a week's worth of gold in MTG: Arena. I think my heart was in the right place, but it didn't seem like a very functional deck compared to what I was playing against. I drafted this weird Izzet Aggro Artificer/Artifact deck.

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Reposted by Arty

Today is Friday in California @fridaypacific.bsky.social · 1d

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

My current train of thought is trying to figure out Arch or some Arch-derived distro, since I remember not liking Ubuntu at all. That and SteamOS is Arch-based, so I have some minimal experience with it there. The current standout seems to be CachyOS, which comes highly recommended.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Every single thing I hear about Windows 11 convinces me that this is the year of the Linux desktop.

I am no longer not entertaining the thought of just converting over my Windows partitions and taking the plunge. My SteamDeck has convinced me I can absolutely do it and not feel instant regret.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

The whole discussion is weirdly myopic. It has in it a naive sort of optimism for humankind, which feels misplaced. They say that LLMs can be useful if "used properly" or "used as an aid" but what does that even mean. Some people can't use search engines as it stands, let alone some mythical AGI.

Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

I used to think it was hilarious that in the first week of university I had genuine lectures as to what critical thinking was and how to attain it. You would think it would have been too late, if I was just now finding out?

Then again my grades were also lowered because of attendance, not my memory

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

If someone managed to live well into their mid-twenties and still hasn't developed the critical thinking skills or found a topic that fascinates them, they most likely were never going to, even if the options were presented to them decades ago.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

This is obviously true, to an extent, but neglects how schooling is mostly graded based the ability to remember, rather than an actual examination of knowledge.
Being able to memorise the entire school-book looks and sounds like knowledge, but it is limited to the scope of that book's covers.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

The other point they raised is that the use of LLMs will negatively impact the effects of schooling, since students will use it to get the right answers and skip the part where they know why they're the right answers.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

The plain old internet has been the modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria for several decades now, and some people still only enter it to use the toilet.

No amount of fancy chat bots or naturalistic Turing-test-passing machinery will make people look at the knowledge on the shelves.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Knowledge, in a way, needs to be tempered by something else. Be that risk assessment, critical thinking, or even plain old common sense. Knowledge and access to knowledge don't mean anything if you don't know what you're looking for.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Some people can find anything on the internet, while others will struggle to find a recipe for banana bread, regardless of how much technology you aid them with.
No amount of tech innovation will topple the Occam's razor that is general human stupidity.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Just as some people still cannot use a search engine properly to find anything
They lack the intuition of how to ask the initial question that gets them to the knowledge. There's a giant rift between asking "how do atom bombs work" and "what is the critical amount of xenon-135 for a nuclear reactor"

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Regardless of how many bullets (fragments of knowledge) a person might have, I'd imagine a significant portion of them would still miss the broad side of a barn, without knowing what to apply said knowledge with.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

They speak of LLMs as something akin to the old Colt slogan of "God created men. Colt made them equal." Yet, I can also imagine that despite the democratisation of knowledge (exclusive knowledge and jargon being a feudal system anyway) that most people still won't know what to do with it.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

Whatever you think LLMS might be capable of, you must realise that the same internet it has access to is currently available in its traditional form for humans to use as well. If someone wanted a new strain of influenza, they would have been able to find and make it via your usual search engines.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

One of the statements was that LLMs will, in some scenario, lead to some maligned lab tech unleashing some custom strain of influenza, since the DNA for the Spanish flu is publicly available on the internet.

It sounds alarmist, naturally. Yet, I think it has an obvious counterpoint.

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 1d

I was listening to this panel for no particular reason, and disregarding the sensationalism of the title and some of the statements, most of the guests and the members of the audience seem to believe that LLMs are some sort of great equaliser.

Ash Sarkar calls silicon valley tech bros 'emotionally maladapted psychopaths' | BBC Question Time

YouTube video by BBC News

www.youtube.com

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Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 2d

Nine Inch Nails - Deep

YouTube video by Mesmer

www.youtube.com

Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 2d

Made this stupid deck around Kavaero, Mind-Bitten as a commander, and it's a really fun idea. You just destroy or counterspell all their cool mythics and copy them for relatively cheap with Kavaero. Especially flying life-links or Ouroboroids. Those are extra fun.

Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 3d

Happy birthday, man! Thanks for showing me how to use Multimedia Fusion 2 back in the day.

Arty @artylo.bsky.social · 3d

With Burmese Harp done, I now get to roll a new set of films from the infinite abyss that is my watchlist.

And what a batch it is! I hit some landmines (Children of Paradise and The Beaches of Agnes) and two limited series. There's some real trash in there too. But finally hit Audition! Yippee!

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