legend

I do not. My company is distributed and we all use video chat a lot. Not sure VR would be especially convenient at this time, and right now, I think the medium of video is better. But that could change. In general, I'm pretty excited to see how VR infiltrates the way we work and do things.

Fucking Christ, man! Get a lawyer!

As for myself, no. But I did work in academia for a number of years, so it's kind of similar except I agreed to it.  

EDIT: Just saw your latter reply. If they still end up dragging their feet,  get back on that lawyer plan  

24 minutes ago, PaladinSolo said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/07/06/monster-heat-dome-threatens-all-time-high-temperature-records-in-southern-california-friday/?utm_term=.87f962eb9c86

 

 

1 minute ago, Rev said:

I need to finish that game. The only part that annoyed me was the philosophy part. I'm not sure why I shelved it.

What annoyed me about the philosophy part is I had great answers for all the questions, but they were never options  

In that way, it's a lot like too many modern philosophers who haven't kept up with what we learned in math since the 50s.

1 hour ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

 

I played it through from start to finish and it was literally the same puzzle mechanic from beginning to end. By the time I finished I was so fuckin' tired of pointing lasers, and the whole sentient A.I. philosophy got old about halfway through. I literally forced myself to finish it.

It literally was not the same puzzle mechanic from beginning to end. Not only are you being reductive, you're also wrong!  

16 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I'm not sure what you mean when you say the number of parallel actors sidesteps the issue of consequences.

So in RL, you have an agent. It doesn't know how to behave, so it takes an action and observes what happens. If that action was bad, too bad. If you want to know how something else would have turned out if you behaved differently, too bad. You don't get to magically reset to where you were. You'll have to somehow work your way back to that scenario (or something similar where similar is something you also have to learn) to see what else could have been. The agent is forced to deal with the consequences of what it did.

Because of how challenging that scenario is, a seriously important concept in RL is how the agent balances exploration vs exploitation. Is the current state a good state to try something new? Or should the agent instead try to exploit what it's learned at this point? This balance, and even how you choose to explore, are huge challenging topics, for which we by and large don't have good answers.

So what are people doing now instead? They've given the agent the ability to clone itself, or versions of itself, at huge scales so that in effect, any single decision isn't all that important and the agents don't have to worry so much about careful and useful exploration.

The way these huge numbers of actors learn is also often not merely equivalent to learning longer because of how the sequence of learning updates work. But that might require a bit more mathematical discussion to explain.

As I said, I think that they were explicitly looking at the evolution of reward functions is interesting and you have to investigate learning across a population to do that. So I'm less down on it here for the interest in that. But other stuff lately has been especially abusive IMO.

4 minutes ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

 

Too bad the A.I. didn't tell them their game was boring.

Psh. The Talos Principle is one of the best puzzle games out there.

This is cool work. Using evolutionary algorithms to learn the reward function is an idea that's been explored in literature before (as well work in which I was involved), but not on this scale. Their reports of learning time are a bit unclear and potentially misleading. I'll have to look at this paper, but I think it's 500,000 games for each member of the population (which is huge).

3 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Interesting that they used procedurally generated maps. I can only imagine the strategies that would develop if you allowed an AI like this to play 500k games on a standard map.

 

Now that I think about it, I wonder if that will become a standard way to find map glitches or loopholes while still in development. Let an AI play a few hundred thousand games and see if it figures out anything interesting.

It actually might not do as well as you'd think. Correlated experience, which is common if you only have one agent learning with its own experience, can really fuck with learning and make it behave badly. Increasingly, you're seeing papers that do these huge distributed learning spaces to try and avoid that issue. That may not have been the motivation for lots of maps here, but there is a reasonable chance.

It's also a direction that grinds my gears a bit. The reinforcement-learning problem is at its heart about learning when you have to suffer your consequences. This direction of huge numbers of parallel actors is side stepping that issue and isn't practice for many real world scenarios.

I do like that they're looking at the evolution angle though because I've always found the interaction of evolution with internal reward functions interesting. For that reason, I'll cut them some slack in this case  

3 hours ago, Raggit said:

How do they handle the AIs ability to aim? Because that would strongly impact their performance. If they're basically using aim bot, it's kind of unfair.  

Its just looking at the image and deciding when, but they do say its reaction time and aiming is a result for some of its excellent performance, so in the further challenges they artificially added some random inaccuracy and it still did well.

I think my answer has to be Xbox. It was the first time a console started to bridge the gap between PC-style games and console-style games, with (eventually) high quality online gaming.

But more than anything, because it had Halo. Xbox with Halo released my senior year of high school, and myself and my friends took a day off school to get it from a preorder I had and played it all that day. 

But where it really took off for me was college the following year.  Halo was the medium by which myself and my best friends from college bonded. We played 4 player split screen on my then tiny 20" TV all the time and got really good. Then we bought a dedicated PC that we sat next to the Xbox just for running Xbox Connect so we could play Halo online against others.

So many good memories, and so many noise passes taken.

6 minutes ago, Bjomesphat said:

 

eShop has good sales. Nintendo games not so much. You might see a $20 discount for this game by Christmas. Just a guess though.

Alright, good to know. Thanks.

For me I guess it's the DS (or 3DS, but I never owned one). I was never a big handheld gamer because handheld games just didn't work for me most of the time for whatever reason. But DS did have some games that I enjoyed quite a bit. Fuck those corners and super small form though. Jesus Christ it would hurt my hand after awhile.

Otherwise, the answer I can't give would win it for me by a landslide  Switch is an example of why consoles can offer something beyond PC. Otherwise, I'd prefer all games to just be on PC.

Fuck. I'm waffling on this so much. If this were a steam game the decision would be easy: wait for a sale. But does Nintendo eshop have much in the ways of sales? If so, I haven't seen them yet.

45 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

I guess it's just weird to me that people can't click on a link to a forum when it's right in front of them. If it's an area I have interest in, I'm gonna click on it from time to time.

If I was actively looking to read about retro specifically, then I surely would at least click on it. But most of the time I'm not looking for topics that specific and just casually look at topics to see what interests me. Consequently, slow moving boards tend not to be visited. Furthermore, if I wanted to post something about retro, there is a good chance I wouldn't do it on the retro board because it might get more attention elsewhere. Back when R&P was a thing and GI was more active, on a number of occasions I would still posting something in GI instead of R&P precisely for that same reason.

36 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

I'll also just add that my world wouldn't end if Retro were collapsed in with everything else. It just more annoys me that people who have never been part of that little sub-community want to make suggestions on what to do with it, when those of us who do enjoy it there like it the way we have it. 

Why does that annoy you? As far as I can tell, no one has tried to seriously push it. Both Nokra and I rather quickly deferred to the subcommunity's preference, even if we don't understand the reasoning. I'm an engineer. Thinking about how to optimize things is what I do (to the point that my work is about optimizing how software can optimize!) and it's never done out of malice or intentional disregard for others. 

EDIT: to be more clear, I'm sorry if it came off as if I was try to attack your community.  I honestly just thought it would be better for everyone involved. If you guys feel differently, so be it.

2 hours ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

Yeah, I'm sure you guys would participate it it were done to your liking. 

 

You've had every opportunity to participate in the last 8 years, but haven't. It's not hard to click a forum if it interests you, so forgive me if I don't buy that argument. 

On various occasions in various boards I've not responded in threads because I realized just before going to type something up that it's actually quite a bit older by that point. I've also observed it happening in the reverse direction (same thread getting more attention on a different board, both on this site and others). In the past, I've often thought subboards would be better if they just acted as a filter and otherwise had the content appear in the main board and even have done some searching before to see if IP boards could be configured that way. I don't know why you refuse to believe I'm being genuine about my motivations or why you think this phenomenon is so uncommon.

I was looking forward to Mario Tennis, but I was disappointed that the SP is apparently so short. Is it only worth it if you plan to play online, or do you think it's still worth a buy regardless.

I'll probably cave and get it anyway for something relaxing to play before bed, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

42 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

We don't have any subcategory prefixes for The Newsroom.

I'm speaking abstractly, not that tags are actually implemented. That is there are numerous subtopics that Newsroom spans, and it makes sense to have one giant glob for that. And that is paired with the activity level for that glob and all of games being large enough that separating by those globs is common enough warrant a board. But we could also us entertainment for another example that does also have its already created.

3 hours ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

I don't get why you guys care so much, anyway. It's not like any of you ever really joined in on our discussions on the board. 

 

I mean, with your logic, why have separate boards at all? Just have one big forum and tag everything, since that's your solution for everything. 

I explained why I cared (and so did Nokra) but I think we both have stated that while we do have a preference, neither of us care "so much" and are completely willing to defer to your guys preference  Also, that we haven't really joined in on the discussions is kind of the point. The nature of the setup makes it less likely for us to participate, whereas we would be more likely to participate in it via a tag because we would see it.

As for why not a single board, it's because to my knowledge there is no such thing as hierarchical tags, and dealing with such tags would become messy. For example, there are many subcategories to video games, and many for CEB/Newsroom. Given that, it is convenient to be able to filter based on that meta category, and that's precisely what a separate board does. Whether something with clear subcategories warrants its own board would be a function of activity over those subcategories.

Looks like your browser failed to download the CSS file.

Apparently most games I've played this year came out earlier or were released on Switch on this year but came out earlier.

Excluding those:

• Pillars of Eternity 2
• Far Cry 5

Shit, I guess that's it or just about!  

41 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Why do I feel like this is just legend's weak attempt to crowd source his settings for Skynet?

2 hours ago, Remarkableriots said:

Skynet AKA Legend is trying to take over the world!

15 minutes ago, Slug said:

I see what you're getting at.  It just rubs me wrong somehow.  I'd assume the program would be tax-funded.  The thought that I could be paying for a public benefit that I don't get to make use of because my kid is a D student or something just doesn't sit well in my head.  It'd be like denying someone that free health care because they don't go to the gym and love tacos a little too much.

 

What I was thinking was that each tax-paying, established resident and qualifying dependent gets X years from initial college enrollment (to cover folks who maybe don't want to or can't go to college immediately out of high school) to earn their degree, academic performance during that period not being a factor.  Any education beyond that (whether they fail to earn their degree in the covered time or desire to continue into higher level programs) they would have to pay for themselves or secure private funding.

To your point, I was actually a terrible student in high school. It wasn't until halfway through college that I became serious. Although I may have acted differently in high-school if I knew it would affect my ability to go to college free or not. I'll consider your suggestion. (Even though I'll never have the opportunity to directly act on any of this maybe some day a candidate will come that pushes hard on this kind of thing!)

18 minutes ago, Slug said:

I'm on board.  ¡Viva Leyenda!

 

I think the only thing I'd adjust on your list is not making the paid college merit based.  If someone has been resident in and paying taxes to a state for some determined period of time that should translate into X number of years of state college credit each for them and their dependents.

That's an interesting direction. My motivation was to try and combat paying for people going to college who weren't really working at it, but making it available to anyone who was actually serious about learning. I would absolutely be open to considering other alternatives, or maybe it's a concern that just wouldn't be worth the overhead to try and combat.

The first thing I would do is hire (yes, hire) a panel of experts to challenge me on all of the following ideas and design the actual policy which is beyond my expertise.

All policies would be recommended with cause and effect reasoning and forecasts. A second body of experts would be hired to monitor the effects of the policies and evaluate whether they were failing to hit the forecasts or had unforeseen negatives consequences. Upon these events, the policies would be reworked by the original team, or someone other than the evaluation team with a new set of forecasts.

My initial draft of goals would consist of the following:

• Free health care
• UBI and scrap other welfare programs
• Cheap government-regulated housing options
• Increased pay for teachers
• University full-paid scholarships for anyone above a certain performance and who maintains their GPA and credits in college
• Free easily-available abortions
• Legalize and regulate marijuana
• Legalize and regulate prostitution
• Decriminalize all drug use
• Science-based drug rehab covered under government health care
• Send fewer people to jail with permanent record marks in favor of more community service demands
• Reduce military funding over some TBD time period by 25%; work with NATO to distribute responsibility.

How insane am I?  

EDIT: adding one more

• Much stronger gun regulation. Personal ownership would be acceptable for certain kinds of rifles suitable for hunting. All guns released for such ownership would have to be explicitly approved and be more like an ESRB system to avoid people gaming fixed rules. No handguns would be allowed for personal ownership. However, various other kinds of guns (including hand guns) could be "owned" if they were stored at gun-regulated ranges which is the only place they could be used. The security of these ranges would be required to be similar to that of a bank.

 amazing!