As I recall, the basic differences between employee and contractor are whether the employer can dictate time, place, and manner. The problem for gig “contractors” is that they’re in a much tougher spot on exercising their rights, since not many people who can afford a lawyer deliver food. And they aren’t exactly in short supply, so if Uber oversteps and individual “contractors” try to push back, they’ll just be fired. Which gets back to the lawyer issue.

The issue will have to be litigated, but… A lawyer once told me that there aren’t really “lawsuits” so much as “factsuits.” The actual judgment in a trial comes more down to the facts at issue than the laws at issue. This sure looks an awful lot like IBM strong arming people into not exercising their rights under the license agreement that IBM chose to distribute under. If it is ever litigated, it isn’t hard to imagine the judgment going against IBM.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m pretty sure this article is a really bad attempt at satire. Or if there is a point, maybe it’s that… the fact that there have been things in the past that are not just fads (like SQL), that means that current things that are fads (like blockchain) are in fact not just fads?

It’s older, but The Longest Journey is good. Unfortunately, the final game in the series kinda sucks.

While it’s an ensemble, most people would agree that the main character of Final Fantasy VI is a woman—they just might disagree about which woman is the lead.

I also liked the first Xenosaga game, but again, it’s a series that goes pretty badly downhill.

I guess there’s a sense in which all computer science is table lookups, but if you want a nauseatingly technical summary of deep learning—it’s high-dimensional nonlinear regression with all the methodological seatbelts left unfastened.

The only thing this says about us is that philosophical illiteracy is a big problem in the sciences, and that computer science is the most embarrassing field in all STEM. Otherwise, you know, people find beauty in randomness (or in stochasticity, if you prefer) all the time. This is no different.

This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone’s already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.

I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called “hallucinations”) is that it’s neither a bug nor a feature, it’s just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there’s no meaning in that. Deep learning can’t be said to generate “true” or “false” information, or rather, it can’t be meaningfully said to generate information at all.

So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it’s pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they’re either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.

But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?

Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

It’s been a while since I messed with it, but I’ll try and give you my recollections that might be outdated.

First, GoG version, at the time at least, did not ship with the creation kit. So that sucks.

The big problem I think was the address library. Major version changes change the layout of the game’s memory, which means something that directly addresses game data has to update constantly. When I was playing it about a year ago, that mod had not been updated. A bunch of more sophisticated stuff depends on that library, so it breaks a lot of dependencies.

SKSE itself works, and more basic SKSE mods like SkyUI work fine.

So I mean, the GoG version is playable. Personally I despise how much Steam has normalized intrusive DRM and basically refuse to use it. If you don’t care, then you will probably have a better time with the Steam version.