If you are looking for a #PhD and are interested in working on #OpticalComputing for #MachineLearning (and to spend some time in the UK and some time in Australia), contact me!
Got the funding but the official advert is not out yet. Will update when it is (but the deadlines are going to be short).
#VideoGameReview
A few days back I finished #Spiritfarer, and I have opinions.
If you don't know it, Spiritfarer is a 2020 resource management game with some platforming element. The general idea is that you are in a sort of land of the dead, and have to collect the spirits of the departed and take care of them until they feel ready to move on.
Let's start with the positives: this is 100% a "cosy" game with essentially no penalty for failing anything beside the time it takes to try again. It is also beautifully drawn and animated, and the idea that you have to keep piling weirdly shaped buildings on your boat gives it a very distinctive vibe.
Despite the fact that there are a large number of largely anonymous souls "living" in the archipelago the game is set in, you only help a relatively small number, and each of them has a well defined story and personality. The idea is that by the time you finally bring them to the "everdoor", you got attached to them and their departure feels emotional. Does it work? It depends. The souls cover a wide spectrum, and different people will resonate with some and not resonate with other. I personally only really felt for two of them (an old kind lady developing dementia and a young kid), but I understand that different people might get attached to different characters.
The moment to moment gameplay is largely about collecting resources, so you can build stuff that allows you to collect more and different resources. It is not a very original game loop, but it is well done and it works. For about half of the game.
Problem is, while you bring more souls to the everdoor, you have fewer souls to attend to, and after a while you find yourself with a ton of pointless stuff.
#PhysicsFactlet
The human eyes have "only" 3 different colour receptors, so multiple spectra can be perceived as the same colour.
(And this without considering all the ways the signal is processed before you actually "see" it.) #Optics#Colour#Color#Vision
Released into the #PublicDomain and uploaded to #WikimediaCommons together with the #Mathematica script used to generate it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ColorVSspectrum.webm
@j_bertolotti@apodoxus Dunno - to within some range, surely there's some sort of trade between the number of neurons used and the cleverness of their arrangement. I highly doubt that LLMs are anywhere near as well-organized as the human brain, so they may well be in the realm where "more neurons" still gives huge advantages. 🤷♂️ At some point there's a diminishing return, and then we'll need to talk about "better structure" (which I, personally, would guess means "more complex structure" - I'm staggered by how 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 the current crop of AI really are) but at any one time we might well be at a point where sheer quantitative growth can still beat out real advances...
Imagine: you make a game expecting it to do ok. It turns out to be an overnight success, with everybody loving it and your biggest problem is that you didn't expect so many people to want to play it.
Then your publisher gets greedy and makes a large chink of your playerbase super-angry. https://www.engadget.com/what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-helldivers-2-163829512.html?src=rss
Every time I see a "xyz explained without Math" kindnof post, I always wish more people wrote explainers WITH the Math, without skipping 90% of it, so that the explanation is actually understandable without having to rely on leaps of faith.
Dear wannabe barista: there is a difference between "warm milk" and "scalding milk". The difference is especially important when you are preparing it for a kid.
@j_bertolotti I have yet to ask for warm milk for my kids and get anything close to cool enough to drink. It must be a machine problem or a policy problem. I can't believe everyone is incompetent
@christianp It is sheer lazyness. The "warm up milk" function on a coffee machine is meant to make the foam for a cappuccino, so it is VERY hot. To make it at a decent temperature you need to mix it with cold milk, but that requires extra time/thinking, and thus it is often skipped.