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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I got Persona 5 Royal in the Steam Summer Sale this year and I’ve been obsessed. I wanted to play Persona 4 when it came out but I was a teenager and didn’t have any realistic way to get ahold of it, and then I was just super busy when Persona 5 came out but it is truly an amazing game. It definitely takes some getting used to and I would definitely not recommend to someone who isn’t already a fan of JRPGs or anime but if you do like JRPGs and are okay with an anime aesthetic it doesn’t really get much better than this. I knew basically nothing about Persona going in other than that it’s about teens with JoJo-style Stands and it has a cool art style with interesting character designs, and I was pleasantly surprised at every turn. My only complaint is that the combat is really more about style than difficulty and the game is sort of easy even on hard mode. Definitely worth it for $15 even on its own.


  • This isn’t actually the problem. In natural conversation I would say the most likely response to someone saying they need some meth to make it through their work day (actual scenario in this article) is to say “what the fuck dude no” but LLMs don’t use just the statistically most likely response. Ever notice how ChatGPT has a seeming sense of “self” that it is an to LLM and you are not? If it were only using the most likely response from natural language, it would talk as if it were human, because that’s how humans talk. Early LLMs did this, and people found it disturbing. There is a second part of the process that gives a score to each response based on how likely it is to be voted good or bad and this is reinforced by people providing feedback. This second part is how we got here, because people who make LLMs are selling competing products and found people are much more likely to buy LLMs that act like super agreeable sycophants than LLMs that don’t do this. Therefore, they have intentionally tuned their models to prefer agreeable, sycophantic responses because it helps them be more popular. This is why an LLM tells you to use a little meth to get you through a tough day at work if you tell it that’s what you need to do.

    TL;DR- as with most of the things people complain about with AI, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s capitalism. This is done intentionally in search of profits.


  • The full article is kind of low quality but the tl;dr is that they did a test pretending to be a taxi driver who felt he needed meth to stay awake and llama (Facebook’s LLM) agreed with him instead of pushing back. I did my own test with ChatGPT after reading it and found that I could get ChatGPT to agree that I was God and that I created the universe in only 5 messages. Fundamentally these things are just programmed to agree with you and that is really dangerous for people who have mental health problems and have been told that these are impartial computers.



  • The views of the US Libertarian Party are essentially summarized by “taxes and regulations are bad” with few other guiding principles. As a party, it is largely separated from any sort of political theory (even libertarian political theory), and sort of relies on a politically disenaged and uninformed populous who vote for the people promising lower taxes and legal weed without really understanding that the Libertarian Party’s approach to “taxes and regulations are bad” are primarily in favor of large corporations rather than individuals. They posture themselves as a true alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties when practically they want most of the same stuff Republicans want for the most part, with token acceptance of progressive social ideas.

    Libertarianism more broadly is an ideology that believes that individual rights are the most important thing to creating a better society. This can be left wing (extending individual rights to include things like the ability to use land and other natural resources without being limited by property ownership) or right wing (believing that the right of the individual includes the right to accumulate wealth and power through accumulation of capital), and the distinction primarily depends on the approach to ownership and property. Libertarianism differs from Anarchism in that libertarians believe that a state is required for maintaining and guaranteeing individual rights through the use of laws and courts, and defending those rights from external threats via military action.

    All in all, my personal view is that libertarianism, along with anarchism and other “min-archist” movements, is unable to answer the question of “how do you prevent someone from accumulating material and social power and using that power to enforce their will upon others?” For many libertarians the answer seems to be that social norms in a libertarian society would prevent people from doing this and that they would be able to withstand external attacks from groups that do not hold their views. I do not believe this, and I think that human nature means that some people will always want to gain control over others through whatever means they can, and that only a government can effectively combat these tendencies. Social norms are powerful and are a required part of a functioning democracy, but ultimately the law, backed by the ability to apply the use of force in a way agreed upon by the public, is what allows the weak to resist domination from the strong.


  • The views of the US Libertarian Party are essentially summarized by “taxes and regulations are bad” with few other guiding principles. As a party, it is largely separated from any sort of political theory (even libertarian political theory), and sort of relies on a politically disenaged and uninformed populous who vote for the people promising lower taxes and legal weed without really understanding that the Libertarian Party’s approach to “taxes and regulations are bad” are primarily in favor of large corporations rather than individuals. They posture themselves as a true alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties when practically they want most of the same stuff Republicans want for the most part, with token acceptance of progressive social ideas.

    Libertarianism more broadly is an ideology that believes that individual rights are the most important thing to creating a better society. This can be left wing (extending individual rights to include things like the ability to use land and other natural resources without being limited by property ownership) or right wing (believing that the right of the individual includes the right to accumulate wealth and power through accumulation of capital), and the distinction primarily depends on the approach to ownership and property. Libertarianism differs from Anarchism in that libertarians believe that a state is required for maintaining and guaranteeing individual rights through the use of laws and courts, and defending those rights from external threats via military action.

    All in all, my personal view is that libertarianism, along with anarchism and other “min-archist” movements, is unable to answer the question of “how do you prevent someone from accumulating material and social power and using that power to enforce their will upon others?” For many libertarians the answer seems to be that social norms in a libertarian society would prevent people from doing this and that they would be able to withstand external attacks from groups that do not hold their views. I do not believe this, and I think that human nature means that some people will always want to gain control over others through whatever means they can, and that only a government can effectively combat these tendencies. Social norms are powerful and are a required part of a functioning democracy, but ultimately the law, backed by the ability to apply the use of force in a way agreed upon by the public, is what allows the weak to resist domination from the strong.


  • I agree on one hand, but I also feel like video games and other online spaces are kind of unique because parents don’t really think about their kids having one on one conversations with adults on them. If your kid is going outside they are mostly talking to other kids and not other adults. If an adult in your kid’s life IRL starts telling them Hitler was right you will probably catch wind of that much more easily than if it’s online. If a guy on an obscure medieval combat simulation game starts telling your kid Hitler was right (not a hypothetical - this happened to me as a teen and thankfully I saw through what was happening) you’re probably not going to even know about it unless you’re really engaged with your kid and what they’re getting into. I agree that’s on the parents but a lot of the kids these guys are resonating with are the ones whose parents aren’t particularly engaged with them or what they’re doing. I think there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that this does happen and is an intentional strategy from the far right, and I think trying to pretend that there isn’t a problem that is specific to games and the broader gaming community is harmful.





  • I think what pisses me off most about this is everyone is just letting Trump get away with this shit and acting like this is a win because we didn’t get 30%. If everyone had just held strong and not wavered Trump would just destroy the American economy with his tariffs or chicken out like he did last time. Sure it would suck for a bit, but it would show that the international community can’t just be bullied around like this. Now, everyone has seen that this works and everyone will do it. Even worse, giving the US a deal that is this unbalanced against Europe just reinforces Trump’s political power back home. If they had just held strong Trump might have started feeling some real pressure from Congress when people ask why the fuck everything costs 30% more overnight. Now things will cost 15% more but all of the sudden corporations are suddenly able to just eat into profits to pay for it without raising prices because they’re so scared of Trump or think that it’s easy to get money sucking him off instead of competing fairly. The EU has fucked over everyone on Earth with this “deal” and not just their own citizens.



  • Headline is misleading and the beach is relatively small, but you should proactively freeze your credit anyway. I had my identity stolen a few years ago due to an insurance company I’d never heard of getting hacked and it was a huge mess. The whole incident taught me that it’s not a matter of if your identity will be stolen- it’s when. Thousands of companies have your PII (personal identifying information) even if you have never heard of them or have never done business with them because your insurance works with them or said companies legally buy your info from other companies or your state’s government. Most of these companies do alright protecting your data, but when there are so many parties that have it and it only takes one screwing up to get your identity stolen, it’s just kind of impossible for them all to do hold the line.

    It really pisses me off that citizens are responsible for"protecting" their identities on their own. Obviously the system isn’t working but nobody gives a shit or wants to do anything about it. If everyone should freeze their credit by default then why is this not the default state? Why is a 9 digit number given to us as babies on an un-laminated paper card the main thing standing between us and identity theft when you have to give that number to everyone to do anything anyway? It’s completely absurd.




  • I feel like I’m becoming jaded because any time I hear about some new shit that hurts poor people in this country I find myself wondering how many of these people voted for Trump in the first place. I get being desperate and feeling like some kind of change is needed… The first time. But we had a chance to see it was all bluster and bullshit already and still voted for this government. I know it’s a bad mindset but a lot of this stuff is hurting groups of people where the majority voted for Trump and I’m having trouble feeling sorry for them.


  • He calls me clanka, he calls the other kids clanka, he calls himself clanka. All the time. “Clanka this”, “Clanka that”, “Clanka, please”, “Bitch clanka”, “Clanka, have you lost your mind?”, “Clanka, check that ho”, “Clanka, you bullshit” and “Break yourself, clanka”. He says it so much, I don’t even notice it anymore. Last week in lunch, Optimus said to a classmate, “Can a clanka borrow a french fry?” And my first thought wasn’t “Oh, my God. He said the word, uh, the C-word”. It was now “How is a clanka gonna borrow a fry?” “Clanka, is you gonna give it back?” I’m telling you, my inside voice didn’t talk like that before he got in my class.