your name here

The zach thing is crazy. So, these people have not only cracked the code on natural language processing (which is already extremely far-fetched in its own right) but they appeared have developed a general purpose human-level ai, which is basically science fiction. No ai system in the world trains based on written notes about how it's doing. I am convinced that this is an investment scam. Also this is nonsense. Trying to learn more about the organization, their telephone company doesn't have any rates or services. Their charity doesn't appear to have actually funded any initiatives. Looking at their filings, the charity doesn't do anything except own their other companies, and accumulate money. This is 100% a scam.

Actually, the "getting barfed on at the ballet" story is a common urban legend. This is just another example of how "I heard about it online" turns into "it happened to a friend," which turns into "it happened to me a few days ago and I vividly remember it, and also my wife was there and can corroborate." It's just amazing how these stories become more and more related to the teller in the retelling.

Concerning what jake said about the cat generating neural network: They augment the dataset with reflections. So, you very well could be looking at "backwards" gibberish text. Also, the video for that paper is very good. The sections on latent space interpolation are worth seeing. The first is on faces (at 1:50) the other is on objects (at 4:00), which includes the cat pictures The way these networks work, they take in random noise and use that to generate an image. If you didn't give it any random noise, it would always generate the same image. By smoothly varying the input noise, the output also smoothly varies (this is a result of how neural networks are built and it's a little hard to explain why this happens, but it does). So, every frame of the video is a real output image from the network.

30 sugar!

Check out my fun rebus puzzle: MOON IS REAL It means "Big Moon is real"

I've received some unexpected pushback about this theory from my friends and family, and let me just nip some counterarguments in the bud. 1. The sun is further away so it will appear smaller. Actually, our binocular vision can only perceive depth up to 200 meters away. So clearly anything beyond that will not appear any smaller. 2. The eclipse is on Monday, not Sunday. Where did you get that information? A scientist? I think we've already proven who we can and can't trust in this matter.

I renounce science moon and embrace Big Moon. Consider this: Scientists say that the sun is 64 million times larger than the moon, and yet on Sunday, the moon will be so large that it covers up the sun.

Concerning Big Moon: The next time you see Big Moon, stick out your hand and hold up your index finger. The width of your fingernail at arms length is approximately 1 degree. The moon is always more or less .5 degrees across, so it will always be about half as wide as your fingernail. Hopefully the illusion of Big Moon will fall apart in front of your eyes. If the numbers don't work out for your body for whatever reason, you can still compare the width of your fingernail at arms length to both Small Moon and Big Moon and see that they are the same.

"The Aisle" is clearly the franchise reboot of the Sam Barlow game "Aisle"

Are dogs especially sick? Seems like a slander against dogs.

Wow, Catacombs of Solaris is probably the least streamable game in existence. It's a good incentive to download it, because you can't really get an idea for what it looks like from watching a video.

You actually skipped the hacking tutorial by putting in the code 0451. The game in no way ever tells you the code to this door. In Human Revolution there's a similar door, but for that one the code is 1337.

The state of Far Cry 2 speedrunning is pretty dire. The current record is by HL2/GTA speedrunner S. However that run was lost two years ago when twitch deleted all of their archives. All that's left is this pastebin: http://pastebin.com/DWUn3UC3 The 3 hour run is rough, but still pretty refined as far as first runs go. I'd like to see you play on 1.0 since more glitches means that you're a better speedrunner.

Yeah, maybe should have made that more obvious. The real secret was supposed to be that you could navigate to previous episodes.

Thanks. I've been using this jam to learn unity, and it's been going slow. This is encouraging to hear.

I think in both cases, it's primarily the fault of the game actually being very challenging.

Yeah, a lot of this came from following Danielle on twitter, but her experience was hardly unique among people who I found stuck in the game. Very often people were stuck on a puzzle because they hadn't found the part that teaches you that mechanic yet. I remember lots of forum conversations along the lines of "Help I've been stuck on this for hours" "Have you done X yet" "No" "You're not equipped to deal with that puzzle yet." My assertion regarding what particular expectation they had wasn't really founded in anything but my own assumptions about why people won't move on from a puzzle that they can't solve. There's also the fact that people aren't used to games structured in this fashion. In most games you are generally trained to deal with a puzzle before you have the possibility to encounter it. The Witness does try to teach the player about the structure of the game early on, but it's not exactly something that's unmissable, and depending on the path you initially take through the game, it's not really ever reinforced for a while. Maybe the game shouldn't have opened up until you hit the town for the first time, rather than letting you go off to the left and do symmetry first. But, if you've been stuck on a particular puzzle that you aren't equipped to deal with for a while without leaving it and looking for puzzles you can do, at some point you have to think "This is what the game is asking me to do" which is something that's only possible if you believe that the game is really that demanding. The buzz surrounding the game at release definitely could help one to believe that. Also, as a post script: I'm not trying to say that The Witness is an easy game and you're all babies for finding it hard. Even absent this issue, there's some legitimately hard puzzles even once you know all the mechanics, and some of the tutorializing has some pretty big leaps between what one panel is asking you and what the next panel is asking you.

This is an awful lot like what I feel about The Witness. A lot of people made it very hard for themselves because they expected it to be hard. Rather than seeing a puzzle and thinking "I'm not equipped to deal with this, I'll wait until the game teaches me these concepts," as they would with a normal video game, they think "oh yes this is a hard puzzle in the hard video game 'The Witness,' I should spend 3 hours brute forcing it." Expectations make up a huge part of how we experience games.

It's been a while since we played, but our group usually plays with a short list of minor rules changes. The only one I can recall right now is that the base game says that you can't win if you get gender swapped. We just ignore that rule, it doesn't make a whole lot of flavour sense, and it seems to make the experience more fun than having it be a really difficult to get rid of status that you have to worry about. One of the things I really like about the game is how well the choice of source material matches the structure of the game. It's a game where a bunch of disjointed things happen, and they chose a story where a bunch of disjointed things happen, so it fits. Until Dawn is another game that makes me feel this way. When David Cage made a game where any character could die and the story would keep going, it didn't really make any sense narratively. Like, they introduce this character, she encounters the protagonist, and then goes investigating and gets killed without contributing anything to the plot and nobody ever talks about her again. Until Dawn takes that same structure and applies it to a archetype that fits it, where any combination of characters dying adds up to a coherent story.

http://i.imgur.com/8MLo3c3.gifv

Dear Nick: The wheezing is pretty much only on Flaming Buffalo. Most other female recruits won't have that.

In PW, you wanted a good male soldier and a good female soldier, because it let you have more loadouts, since male and female soldiers have different loadouts for the same outfit for some reason. Also, I didn't play Portable Ops, but I'm pretty sure Sokolov is a male character. PW also has a weird thing where plot missions require you to play as snake the first time, but then you can use custom soldiers on replays. MGS5 lets you use them any time, but then you turn into snake for cutscenes

Concerning Metal Gear, 2 thing: Kojima hasn't left Konami yet. The deal was that the senior Kojima Productions staff would stay on until december. Playing as a female character isn't a special thing. You can play as any member of your combat unit and while there strangely aren't any female enemy soldiers in the game, you get them from POWs and volunteerism. You don't need to beat the game, and there's more than one, though they do appear in lesser proportions than male recruits. It also feels like I'm getting fewer female recruits than in Peace Walker, though they're still not super rare.

I just wanted to say that gimp has had layers since 1998.

Yeah. When you click on server browser, and then join "Jim's cool server" and there's a bunch of custom server crap, it's something that you can understand. When you click on "play game", and get auto joined to Jim's server, it's a much more confusing experience. Though, on the other hand, in terms of appealing to people who have never played an online shooter before, maybe it is better to have a mode that doesn't require you to learn what a server browser is. Ideally, it would work like L4D, where auto-matching connects you to an unmodified server by default. In the end, it doesn't really matter either way. TF2 is so dense at this point that any new player on-boarding they have is woefully inadequate and you basically need to already be familiar with online shooters with progression systems to even stand a chance.