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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Right, and when IT walks around to do literally anything and notices a weird microcontroller plugged in to a USB port that’s designed to announce itself as approved tech, there’s no way that will go badly.

    Places with good IT departments might even flag your machine for having a weird device config with two of the same mouse to go do a visual inspection, just because it’s abnormal and a VERY common attack vector as literally your not smart suggestion is what everyone else tries to do to get around USB restrictions either for convenience or for malicious intent.




  • I totally agree with you, but that problem is way harder to solve than LLMs and music generation.

    We got LLMs and music/image generators first because there’s so much written information, music recordings, and images to train models on. There’s practically zero data about how your body moves when you’re washing dishes and what it looks like in the sink, what a dirty plate looks like or a clean one, so we can’t just train robots to do it yet except in extremely specified environments with as few variables as possible.

    There’s a lot of advancement in this area, trying to solve these problems. Robotics is a very exciting field of advancement these days. Automated dish cleaning machines exist that don’t use AI, but they’re industrial and expensive. If you want something that uses dawn, a sponge, elbow grease, and your particular style and height and form factor of kitchen sink, we need a lot of data about people washing dishes to train models on.

    At least, at this point we do. We will probably get to a point where an AI enabled robot can learn new manual tasks, but think about how long it took YOU, a human, to develop and learn motor function and coordination. All that motor telemetry data, input sounds, sights, and tactile sensations are handled by your brain silently, and we take it all for granted. But it’s all built off a lifetime of your brain taking input data and processing it so you can run the biomechanical series of squishy meat levers and pulleys to wash the dishes.





  • Blackjack is pretty formulaic about the best move to make depending on what cards you get and what the dealer’s up card is. You can look it up, it’s a chart. Memorize it, walk in, and you’re in business. A lot of casinos will even give you a card to have at the table with all the moves on it if you ask. The only real variance is that casinos use multiple decks so it messes with the probabilities, so you’re always at a very slight disadvantage even if you play “perfectly.” Counting cards can swing that last couple% points of probability in your favor.

    So there’s no thought or strategy to it. If X, do Y. It’s pretty easy to learn, so it’s very beginner friendly. Also great for when I’m hammered and can’t play anything that I need to have mental skills for.

    Craps is gambling. There’s infinite numbers of “strategies” but they’re all just different ways to bet, just more complicated versions of “put 100 on black” at a roulette table, and none of them will beat the house over time.

    Poker requires tons of thought to play well, and there’s no skill ceiling. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a strategy game but there are strategies. It’s an adversarial puzzle game of broken information, it’s not gambling.



  • No judgement, I can see how it came off that way though.

    I like crazy 8s and rummy and stuff like that, but they’re in a different category of fun.

    Poker is a game of broken information, where you try to decode your opponent’s hand based off of their actions in relation to the board state and future possibilities, and what you know of their own personal style.

    Wild cards introduce RNG that throws the entire core game loop of poker out the window. People are free to enjoy it but it’s extremely rare for people who play the game regularly to want wild cards in their games. I can’t think of anyone in all my years of playing to be honest but I’m sure they exist. I would never play a game with cash with wild cards, what’s the point? And I can’t imagine wanting to play a free game with wild cards with anyone but kids.

    Wild cards+cash, I might as well play craps or any other gambling game in the casino, and then at least I get the fun of watching crazy superstitious people. Poker is NOT gambling, but there is an element of chance of course.

    Hope that helps clear it up.





  • Correct, blackjack is pretty much the only way you can make money reliably at US casinos, if you study and learn how to do it, which takes a lot of time and practice, and being in the right parts of the country.

    But it’s so BORING. I don’t understand who can just grind grind grind blackjack for a living.




  • Tangible loss is a big part of it because it helps keep betting sane. If there’s no stakes you can just do whatever you want and there’s not really much strategy to it.

    Cash games solve the problem of how long it takes. 20 years ago or so I’d play nickel, dime, quarter max bet cash games, dealer’s choice of the poker game, round robin dealing. On a real bad night you’d be down $15, or you’d be up $20 on a great night.

    It was a blast. $5 was the price of a premium fast food meal back then, if that helps to level expectations of stakes for the younger crowd.

    All the best parts of having stakes in the game without risk of losing your shirt. We’d hang out, make food, drink, etc. It was the best of all worlds.

    Periodically we’d do a tournament, usually hold em, stud, or Omaha. Then it was a $10 or $20 buy-in with maybe a rebuy depending on how long we wanted it to go. Usually top three were the money, depending on how many at the table. The early drops would start playing dice until there were three people to start a regular cash side game at the table (we’d just shift chairs)

    So there’s ways to address your points, but most people these days only know what they see on WSOP, which is no limit holdem. There’s SO many poker variants out there that the old dawgs played back in the 80s and 90s that didn’t come into light with the poker revolution. Red/black, no peek, guts, hi/low split, etc.




  • Until ads are responsible and don’t carry risks of injecting malware and trackers, I will block them without prejudice.

    Even back in the day they would try to hijack your browser, redirect you to some random page, destroy ability of your back button to take you out, and throw up a ton of popups.

    I don’t think blocking them is an asshole move until ads are served responsibly, without threatening my security or privacy. When, and if, that day ever arrives I will stop blocking them because I understand that most sites subsist solely off ad revenue, at least in this current Internet model we live with.