Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • As a person who used to work at MSFT:

    I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

    They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

    The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

    Itll probably take half a decade.

    For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

    Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

    I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

    We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

    Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

    Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

    The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.


  • MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

    Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

    The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.



  • Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.

    Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.

    Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).

    Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.

    The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.

    Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.

    These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.

    Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.





  • Unless you go to basically a non franchise, non chain, actual asian/chinese restaurant/take out place… yeah basically if you dont do that, you are getting pretty much reconstituted chicken puree doused in… not really even real orange chicken sauce.

    As with much modern food in America… its got waaaay more sugar and is missing other vital parts of the original way of making it.

    Real orange chicken from a real chinese place tastes significantly different, and varies from place to place if they actually make the sauce on site. Usually a different medley of spices and oils… way more flavorful than extremely sweet orangeness.



  • Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

    1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

    2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.



  • After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

    The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

    It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

    What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

    While the official mechanisms of government existed… people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

    Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

    Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

    Overtime… yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin’s tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco’s tenets of fascism.

    One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

    But now, is it a dictatorship?

    Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man… or if the entire economy/society collapses.

    Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

    tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

    Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco’s tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator ‘if only for a day’. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

    Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.