They have common ancestors, but it really should be "the crocodiles had split from the avian lineage", with avians including dinosaurs at that moment in time
A split is a split. Archosaurs split into a crocodile line and a dinosaur/bird line--"the avian lineage" (birds being a kind of dinosaur, and the only ones still living) ... that's what "the avian lineage had split from crocodiles" means -- it is not saying that birds are an offshoot from crocodiles, it's saying that the two lines (both kinds of archosaur) split from each other. Likewise, crocodiles are not an offshoot of dinosaurs.
The funny thing is that it would make more sense (going by our popular impression of what dinosaurs looked like) if dinosaurs were in the same lineage as crocodiles, not birds.
AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.
This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now.
I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.
But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.
> Or is it more young men vs the establishment where the establishment wins the vast majority of the time but occasionally a young dude makes the right longshot bet?
Seems like the latter - except that not only describes how people perceive gambling, but the entire economy considering startups, silicon valley, the current crop of tech billionaires and how they made their fortunes, etc.
So, why not gamble on crypto, NFTs, or prediction markets? Might as well go for the longshots since everything is a longshot anyway
A poor person paying $5.00 for an odds–adjusted $4.99 lottery ticket a couple dozen times in their life is likely not making her worst investment. And if she does win, it is hard to argue against the wisdom of it.
The gamblers, however, will see a future where they have paid $5.00 for a $0.03 ticket and still won the lottery a couple dozen times in a row because they deserve it so they will buy all tickets they can right now ending with 3 —because that's important.
Even when you think you have a legitimate insight so the book is mispriced for your actual odds, you should consider the risk.
Risk management is foremost.
What happens if I lose the almost certainly sure bet?
This may come as a surprise to you, but in the real world, there are not few people whose business is making you think you have an edge on your "long shot".
> It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.
As far as I know, nope.
Some games also get really confused if you have Xinput and DirectInput devices plugged in at the same time - for me, Silksong (and unity games in general) don't work if I have a throttle+stick plugged in.
And it's worse than just taking input from the wrong thing, the game can't recognize input from any of throttle, stick, or controller.
Only controller by itself works.
Especially if you use auto-complete AI, ironically. You type a few characters, the line fills out in less than a second, as opposed to a reasoning model that takes maybe a second per 2-3 lines it writes out.
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece
Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).
And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.
For the OG controller on Linux, it was/is possible to use third-party open source software like "sc-controller" to map the pads and rebind things the way Steam does, without needing Steam running.
I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.
SDL2 and SDL3 have steam controller support. Also, now that SDL2-Compat is a thing (alongside sdl12-compat), this means literally every game/software that uses SDL 1-3 for controllers on Linux (and windows too) should support the steam controllers.
> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.
I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase
Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json
Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs
And then they apparently posted an alibi "I'm sorry" here. Or maybe it is genuine, but the choice is between incompetence and fake "I'm sorry". Where is QA?
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
The World Co-ordinator in "the evitable conflict" was a positronic robot (not known to the public), but I think you're right that the machines are never identified as either positronic robots or VACs. But iirc, in the Susan Calvin universe (of which "the evitable conflict" is a part), robots were generally illegal on Earth, the that must make the machines in that story non-robots.
I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
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