I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.

There is no stronger bond of friendship than a common enemy.

— Frank Frankfort Moore

I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.

I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)

For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:

• Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.

• Kenshi. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.

The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.

Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend Satisfactory if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. Mindustry is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are probably my open-source Android favorite games. Dyson Sphere Program has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.

There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:

• Rise to Ruins is a colony sim and does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee from it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.

• Prison Architect. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.

• Timberborn. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.

• Gnomoria is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.

bash.org is gone and I can’t find a reliable way to search its replacements

https://bash-org-archive.com/

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Abash-org-archive.com+gentoo

That turns up four quotes with “gentoo”.

The closest, I think, is:

https://bash-org-archive.com/?464385

<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
<@insomnia> cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /
dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update &&
. /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/
bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab &&
emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make
menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome
mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/
grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/
grub.conf && grub && init 6
<@insomnia> that's the first one

I don’t know about Google’s site coverage, but it turns up one test quote that I remember:

https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds
to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in
my apartment it is.

looks further

This is supposed to be the entire archive:

https://archive.org/details/bash.org.txt

Grabbing it and unpacking it gives me 21,096 text files, one for each bash.org quote.

$ grep -i gentoo * -l|wc -l
13
$

So Googlebot’s index of bash-org-archive.com probably isn’t complete; it got a quarter of the hits. However…

$ grep -C500 -i gentoo *

…doesn’t appear to turn up anything that looks like your quote.

My guess is that you might have seen it on another site.

lol. i used Gentoo for 5 years or so. it’s the only distribution I don’t recommend.

There are like a million special purpose distributions that I’d recommend people not using as a general-purpose distro.

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases

https://www.techradar.com/computing/virtual-reality-augmented-reality/latest-meta-ar-smart-glasses-leak-has-killed-my-interest-before-theyre-even-official

Bloomberg has shared reports from unnamed insiders that the device, codenamed Hypernova, is expected to launch later this year and will feature a monocular design, as in it will use only one display rather than a pair of screens – two details we’ve already heard.

This single panel would sit in the lower-right corner of the right lens, so it should allow you conveniently see information by looking down without obscuring your vision greatly.

It sounds like they’re kinda trying to compete with the watch market or something. Like, not trying to display something that you’d spend your whole time looking at, or even a virtual overlay, but just some status information that you can glance at without being super-obvious about it.

They also have cameras. I don’t totally get the use case for cameras plus single screen on lens. I guess maybe you could take a picture of someone’s face, upload the photo to Meta, do facial recognition on it, and then have personal details sent back to the screen at the bottom of your right eye. Like, maybe that’d be useful for people who don’t want to be in a position of awkwardly forgetting names or security personnel or something.

EDIT: Or maybe people who want to photograph people without it being obvious that they’re doing so, and want to have some kind of status display that they can use to see what their camera is doing?

Just seems like an odd combination of features.

EDIT2: Not to mention whatever they’re paying for the Ray-Ban branding, so they’re probably not pushing for a really price-sensitive use case.

Meta helped fuck over the global economy.

What?

EDIT: You mean them spending a lot of money on VR stuff without it really generating a return?

If this sounds like a security nightmare, that’s because it is.

You can perfectly-reasonably implement suid binaries securely. They need to be simple and carefully constructed, and there shouldn’t be many of them, but the assertion that suid is “a security nightmare” is ridiculous. sudo itself relies on the suid bit.

There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though.

Gotta like the JRPG genre for those hours to be fun, though.

I think the last major JRPG I was willing to play to completion was Final Fantasy V.

I’ll play the occasional CRPG, but JRPGs aren’t really my cup of tea.

They’re all right, I suppose, but it wasn’t dissatisfaction with search results that caused me to want to use Kagi. Rather, that I wanted to use a search engine that has a sustainable business model that didn’t involve data-mining me or showing me ads.

If Google or whoever offered some kind of comparable commercial “private search” service with a no-log, no-data-mining, no-ad offering, I’d probably sit down and to compare the results, see what I think. I kind of wish Google would do that with YouTube, but alas, they don’t…

Kagi does have a feature where they will let you search the complete Threadiverse that I make use of, since I spend a lot of time here; there isn’t really a fantastic way to accomplish this on Google or another search engine that I’m aware of. They call that their “Fediverse Forums” search lens; that’s probably the Kagi-specific feature that I get the most use out of.

They have other features, like fiddling with the priorities of sites and stuff like that, but I don’t really use that stuff. They do let you customize the output and stuff. You can set up search aliases and stuff, but I can do most of that browser-side in Firefox.

They have the ability to run a variety of LLM models on their hardware, provide that as a service. I have the hardware to run those on my own hardware and have the software set up to do so, so I don’t use that functionality. If I didn’t, I’d probably find some commercial service like them that had a no-log, no-data-mining policy, as it’s more economical to share hardware that one is only using 1% of the time or whatever.

I dunno. They have some sort of free trial thing, if you want to see what their search results are like.

I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

I mean, you can train a model that’s domain-specific that some commercial provider doesn’t have a proprietary model to address. A model can only store so much information, and you can choose to weight that information towards training on what’s important to you. Or providers may just not offer a model in the field that you want to deal with at all.

But I don’t think that, for random individual user who just wants a general-purpose chatbot, he’s likely going to get better performance out of something self-hosted. Probably it’ll cost more for the hardware, since the local hardware isn’t likely to be saturated and probably will not have shared costs, though you don’t say that cost is something that you care about.

I think that the top reason for wanting to run an LLM model locally is the one you explicitly ruled out: privacy. You aren’t leaking information to someone’s computers.

Some other possible benefits of running locally:

• Because you can guarantee access to the computational hardware. If my Internet connection goes down, neither does whatever I’m doing with the LLM.

• Latency isn’t a factor, either from the network or shared computational systems. Right now, I don’t have anything that has much by way of real-time constraints, but I’m confident that applications will exist.

• A cloud LLM provider can change the terms of their service. I mean, sure, in theory you could set up some kind of contract that locks in a service (though the VMWare customers dealing with Broadcom right now may not feel that that’s the strongest of guarantees). But if I’m running something locally, I can keep it doing so as long as I want, and I know the costs. Lot of certainty there.

• I don’t have to worry about LLM behavior changing underfoot, either from the service provider fiddling with things or new regulations being passed.

I’m gonna bet that you’re going to get a much-more-economical return there by powdering whatever iron is used in building that thing and then dumping said iron powder into the ocean at an appropriate point.

kagis

https://liquidtrees.org/team

Nine Indians, four Spaniards, and a German, apparently.

You can bioengineer algae to do pretty much anything.

They are psychologically calming for people as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides

Dendrocnide moroides, commonly known in Australia as the stinging tree, stinging bush, or gympie-gympie, is a plant in the nettle family Urticaceae found in rainforest areas of Malesia and Australia.[3] It is notorious for its extremely painful and long-lasting sting.

Depends on the tree.

Let’s tie him up and sneeze on him.

As I recall, at least under US law, you can’t copyright genetically-engineered life, just get a twenty year biological patent. So I don’t think that FOSS status would be directly germane other than maybe in how some such licenses might deal with patent licensing.

Just give me a 4U tank somewhere where someone else can deal with harvesting the algae and a webcam aimed at it and I can enjoy it just fine from here. For me, selfhosting is mostly about the privacy, not principally about needing to be resistant to loss of Internet connectivity or the like.

Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you’re getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.

If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you’re going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don’t count DLC price, (b) short games sold in “chapter” format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one “game”, (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.

I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours — but I haven’t done so, never will do so, because I’ve lost interest; they’re no longer providing fun gameplay. I’ve gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I’ve played to completion a number of times, and some games — particularly roguelikes/roguelites — which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it’s not the hours to complete the game that’s relevant, but the hours I’m interested in playing the game and have fun with it.

For some genres, this doesn’t vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren’t usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won’t be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.

But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don’t really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.

and Terraria are all close to 500h as well.

If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?