Yup, being nice and polite to the people helping you is the single biggest way to get them to look the other way or have them bend the rules for you. The instant you start playing the asshole card, you usually get strict by-the-letter policy.

Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.

I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models--IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It's good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.

Here's the point since you clearly missed it:

If Brave gets even a moderate market share, Google will continue to mess them around like this as they really don't like people not seeing their adverts.

Ultimately it's software, so the Brave devs can do pretty much whatever they want, limited by the available time and money. Google's influence extends to making that either easier or harder, it much the same way as they influence the Android ecosystem.

Brave may not be particularly affected by this change, but that's besides the point. If Brave starts becoming a viable threat to Google, Google can easily start making changes to Chromium that target Brave and breaks the changes they make, just like they targeted uBlock Origin and broke it with manifest v3. Brave might be able to work around these changes, but it costs time and developer labor (i.e. money) that would have been spent elsewhere, and if Google makes things hard enough on Brave they could be forced to abandon the project.

And run red lights, and drive recklessly and...,

Deliberate ignorance, accelerationist "if we let the fascists win it'll totally result in a communist revolution, trust me bro, you definitely won't be one of the thousands whose bones are used for the foundation" idiocy, or actual fascists trying to depress left turnout. Take your pick.

OK, so I actually know a fair bit about this series since I went through (a good chunk of) it semi-recently myself!

The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan, where your party is yourself, maybe a few other humans, and most importantly, demons that you recruit, level up, and combine together to make new, more powerful ones. Like someone else said, SMT is sort of like Pokemon, but instead of fighting with cute electric rats and furry bait, you fight alongside various mythological figures (...and furry bait). The SNES games are first-person, grid-based dungeon crawlers, but later games largely drop the grid-based aspect.

Anyway, I started out with Shin Megami Tensei 1 on the SNES. It was pretty darn enjoyable, though I used a walkthrough--if you play the SNES games, I strongly recommend doing this, because both games are basically one giant labyrinth with an overworld. A walkthrough is pretty much mandatory to navigate which demons are worth recruiting and merging together, and to find the various secrets and treasures scattered throughout the world. A nice thing about the first game is that the level scaling is well-paced; as long as you don't run away from battles and are smart about your recruitment and demon fusions, you should generally be able to keep up with the power level of your enemies.

As for SMT 2... well, it spikes the difficulty up much higher than the first game. to the point where I actually wound up giving up about 10-15 hours in, even with a walkthrough and using save states. I had reached a point where the enemies were outleveling my demons and killing them over and over, I couldn't easily afford to revive them, and I was having trouble recruiting new demons to merge with my existing party into more powerful ones--there were multiple instances where even when I used save states to explore the demon's entire recruitment dialogue tree, it either took my valuable items/money and ran away, or attacked me. Forced to choose between sitting and grinding for at least 5-10 hours, or moving on, I moved on.

SMT 3 on the PS2 is the first real "modern" shin megami tensei game, and it introduces the press turn mechanic that forms the core of the mainline SMT series from that point on. Press turns work by giving each side a number of actions they can take based on how many members are in the party--in other words, if you have 4 members active in the party, you have 4 actions. If you hit an enemy's elemental weakness, you're given bonus actions you can take (up to a max of 2x your base actions), and if you miss an enemy, or attack them with an element they nullify, reflect, or absorb, you lose turns. Crucially, this also applies to your opponents as well, making combat tense, tactical, and deep: your demon is the only one that uses ice magic, which the enemy is weak to, but your demon is weak to lightning and the enemy can use that element. Do you switch out this demon to cover your own weakness, or keep it in to better exploit the enemy's weakness? Remember, if the demon dies, you not only have to spend a turn summoning a replacement, but your baseline actions go from 4 to 3, so you're penalized twice.

Admittedly, I didn't play SMT 3 myself, because it has That One Fucking Spell called Beast Eye, which is something only opposing demons can use, and spends a single action to grant the AI two turns (or Dragon Eye, which grants four turns). This gives SMT 3 a reputation for being incredibly difficult, even by the standards of SMT, and frankly I had no appetite for that after having just given up on SMT 2 over difficulty. That said, everybody I speak to who has played SMT 3 says that it's one of the best RPGs on the PS2, however, so it's still highly recommended, and later games mercifully got rid of Beast/Dragon Eye.

SMT 4 is... odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It's good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it's on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won't say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it's also good and I recommend it strongly.

There's also Persona. Where SMT is a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler, Persona (at least from 3 onwards) focuses much more heavily on time management. You play as a Japanese high school student in Persona, so a lot of your activities are based around juggling a schedule: attending classes, going to after-school activities, working part-time jobs, spending time with your various party members to build relationships, and saving the world in between. Persona is also different in that instead of having mythological figures fight alongside you as distinct party members, they're instead Personas that act more like Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure--they just give humans the ability to cast magic. Notably, the main character is typically the only one who can change their persona-- your companions all have their own persona, but they're stuck with the one they have, which conveniently gives them their own static elemental strengths/weaknesses and roles. The other big difference is that (up until Persona 5) the main dungeons were more roguelike, procedurally-generated designs, than the static designs of mainline SMT.

If you decide to play Persona, I'd start with Persona 3--either Reload (the recent remaster) or Persona 3 Portable (which has some extra content like that wasn't included with the remaster for some godforsaken reason). DO NOT start with Persona 5 like I did--to be blunt, it's way more polished than 3 or 4, and it'll be hard to go back and enjoy the previous games afterwards. You can also technically start with Persona 1 and 2, but they're waaay different than the later entries--they lack the time management/dating sim aspect entirely, and honestly there isn't a whole lot of reason to play them unless you wanna beat the shit out of Hitler for some reason.

After reading this article that got posted on Lemmy a few days ago, I honestly think we're approaching the soft cap for how good LLMs can get. Improving on the current state of the art would require feeding it more data, but that's not really feasible. We've already scraped pretty much the entire internet to get to where we are now, and it's nigh-impossible to manually curate a higher-quality dataset because of the sheer scale of the task involved.

We also can't ask AI to curate its own dataset, because that runs into model collapse issues. Even if we don't have AI explicitly curate its own dataset, it's highly likely going to be a problem in the near future with the tide of AI-generated spam. I have a feeling that companies like Reddit signing licensing deals with AI companies are going to find that they mostly want data from 2022 and earlier, similar to manufacturers looking for low-background steel to make particle detectors.

We also can't just throw more processing power at it because current LLMs are already nearly cost-prohibitive in terms of processing power per query (it's just being masked by VC money subsidizing the cost). Even if cost wasn't an issue, we're also starting to approach hard limits in physics like waste heat in terms of how much faster we can run current technology.

So we already have a pretty good idea what the answer to "how good AI will get" is, and it's "not very." At best, it'll get a little more efficient with AI-specific chips, and some specially-trained models may provide some decent results. But as it stands, pretty much any organization that tries to use AI in any public-facing role (including merely using AI to write code that is exposed to the public) is just asking for bad publicity when the AI inevitably makes a glaringly obvious error. It's marginally better than the old memes about "I trained an AI on X episodes of this show and asked it to make a script," but not by much.

As it stands, I only see two outcomes: 1) OpenAI manages to come up with a breakthrough--something game-changing, like a technique that drastically increases the efficiency of current models so they can be run cheaply, or something entirely new that could feasibly be called AGI, 2) The AI companies hit a brick wall, and the flow of VC money gradually slows down, forcing the companies to raise prices and cut costs, resulting in a product that's even worse-performing and more expensive than what we have today. In the second case, the AI bubble will likely pop, and most people will abandon AI in general--the only people still using it at large will be the ones trying to push disinfo (either in politics or in Google rankings) along with the odd person playing with image generation.

In the meantime, what I'm most worried for are the people working for idiot CEOs who buy into the hype, but most of all I'm worried for artists doing professional graphic design or video production--they're going to have their lunch eaten by Stable Diffusion and Midjourney taking all the bread-and-butter logo design jobs that many artists rely on for their living. But hey, they can always do furry porn instead, I've heard that pays well~

Humans also have the benefit of literally hundreds of millions of years of evolution spent on perfecting bicameral perception of our surroundings, and we're still shit at judging things like distance and size.

Against that, is it any surprise that when computers don't have the benefit of LIDAR they are also pretty fucking shit at judging size and distance?

Yeah, literally the only pathway to ruling Trump is not barred is by throwing out the entire finding of fact by the Colorado supreme court that Trump engaged in an insurrection. It's not impossible since appellate courts do technically have this power, but appellate courts are usually supposed to give extreme deference to lower courts when it comes to their findings of fact--the standard from my brief bit of research is that the lower court's findings must be "clearly erroneous."

So given how batshit our current court is I expect at least two surefire no votes from Thomas and Alito. Gorsuch is probably a yes vote given how much of a strict textualist he's turned out to be, as are the entire liberal bloc. Ironically, Roberts is yet again the most likely swing vote, and I honestly don't know if he'd sign off on disqualifying him. I could see anything from 7-2 in favor of upholding to 5-4 or 6-3 overturning. Considering their recent signal in the form of denying Smith's request for expedited review, I'm... honestly not optimistic.

Who says the government has to hire anyone? Have the sysadmin set it up, have your existing Twitter staff swap to using mastodon, done.

Nah, I got that, you're all Gucci

I really don't want to rely on security through obscurity... MS-DOS was written back when every programmer trusted everything that ran on the computer, security wasn't even an afterthought, and encryption was the sole domain of math nerds, conspiracy theorists, and the nerd equivalent of doomsday preppers because it was "too computationally expensive." Its sole saving grace in terms of security is that it doesn't support multitasking so malware can't run in the background, but you can just target whatever software it's running, instead.