When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”

Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.

I gave up on it for now when the questline involving the NPC learning to write broke, and then I started crashing to desktop (without any logs anywhere, either in the Buffout directory or even in Windows’ Event Viewer) every time I left the Swan or fast traveled directly to it, even though traveling to another point literally fifty feet south worked just fine. And since there’s no logs describing the crash, I have no idea how to fix it.

I could probably fix it by uninstalling and re-downloading it again, but I have a goddamn data cap that my roommate already blows through every month with the fucking massive updates Fallout 76 has taken to pushing out, I have zero desire to download 60 GB of data (30 GB base game + 30 GB FOLON) every fucking time I sneeze wrong and make the game start crashing again. =|

The most jarring thing is when I was picking up a prescription for my cat, and on the way home I was driving next to a plain vanilla, factory-stock GMC truck whose hood was literally taller than my entire car. And I don’t drive a miata or some other sub-compact, I drive a freaking Nissan Leaf, so about the size of your average sedan.

Since then it’s like a switch flipped in my brain, and I can’t unsee just how insanely huge modern-day pickup trucks have gotten.

There was a period of blissful ignorance circa 2006 where the only thing I knew about him was that he was rich and starred in the apprentice. Then a black man became president and the world hasn’t been free of his stench ever since.

And now we’re in full mask-off accelerationist theory “it’s okay to let Trump win as long as Democrats are punished” bullshit. You’re unhappy with Democrats, so you’re okay with letting throwing literally everyone on the left in the US under the bus, along with the entire country of Ukraine, and throwing even more bombs at Gaza.

What an entitled, smug, self-righteous, holier-than-thou position, utterly divorced from real life consequences. Thanks for admitting that you’re a thoroughly unserious poster, though!

It’s pretty okay. If you like the gameplay loop of scavenging parts to maintain and upgrade your car, and don’t mind the roguelite elements, it’s pretty fun, and it does a good job of creating tension–there’s been multiple occasions where I wanted to loot more but I was out of time and likely to die if I stayed much longer.

The world building is immaculate, but IMO unfortunately the plot doesn’t really pay off, and the ending isn’t… super satisfying. It does enough to drive you along (no pun intended). The best part of the game is easily the soundtrack, and the best song in the soundtrack is easily The Freeze.

Get a load of this maroon, they think LLMs are actually sapient! Thanks, I needed that laugh.

Spoiler alert, but Rosebud was his sled all along.

Not just that, but to sell a product that by its very nature threatens the livelihoods of the same people whose labor and creativity is being used without permission.

This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages.

Like fuck it is. An LLM “learns” by memorization and by breaking down training data into their component tokens, then calculating the weight between these tokens. This allows it to produce an output that resembles (but may or may not perfectly replicate) its training dataset, but produces no actual understanding or meaning–in other words, there’s no actual intelligence, just really, really fancy fuzzy math.

Meanwhile, a human learns by memorizing training data, but also by parsing the underlying meaning and breaking it down into the underlying concepts, and then by applying and testing those concepts, and mastering them through practice and repetition. Where an LLM would learn “2+2 = 4” by ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of instances of the string “2+2 = 4” and calculating a strong relationship between the tokens “2+2,” “=,” and “4,” a human child would learn 2+2 = 4 by being given two apple slices, putting them down to another pair of apple slices, and counting the total number of apple slices to see that they now have 4 slices. (And then being given a treat of delicious apple slices.)

Similarly, a human learns to draw by starting with basic shapes, then moving on to anatomy, studying light and shadow, shading, and color theory, all the while applying each new concept to their work, and developing muscle memory to allow them to more easily draw the lines and shapes that they combine to form a whole picture. A human may learn off other peoples’ drawings during the process, but at most they may process a few thousand images. Meanwhile, an LLM learns to “draw” by ingesting millions of images–without obtaining the permission of the person or organization that created those images–and then breaking those images down to their component tokens, and calculating weights between those tokens. There’s about as much similarity between how an LLM “learns” compared to human learning as there is between my cat and my refrigerator.

And YET FUCKING AGAIN, here’s the fucking Google Books argument. To repeat: Google Books used a minimal portion of the copyrighted works, and was not building a service to compete with book publishers. Generative AI is using the ENTIRE COPYRIGHTED WORK for its training set, and is building a service TO DIRECTLY COMPETE WITH THE ORGANIZATIONS WHOSE WORKS THEY ARE USING. They have zero fucking relevance to one another as far as claims of fair use. I am sick and fucking tired of hearing about Google Books.

EDIT: I want to make another point: I’ve commissioned artists for work multiple times, featuring characters that I designed myself. And pretty much every time I have, the art they make for me comes with multiple restrictions: for example, they grant me a license to post it on my own art gallery, and they grant me permission to use portions of the art for non-commercial uses (e.g. cropping a portion out to use as a profile pic or avatar). But they all explicitly forbid me from using the work I commissioned for commercial purposes–in other words, I cannot slap the art I commissioned on a T-shirt and sell it at a convention, or make a mug out of it. If I did so, that artist would be well within their rights to sue the crap out of me, and artists charge several times as much to grant a license for commercial use.

In other words, there is already well-established precedent that even if something is publicly available on the Internet and free to download, there are acceptable and unacceptable use cases, and it’s broadly accepted that using other peoples’ work for commercial use without compensating them is not permitted, even if I directly paid someone to create that work myself.

And to the argument itself: Just because AI is better at learning from existing works, faster, more complete, better memory, doesn’t meant that it’s fundamentally different than humans learning from artwork. Almost EVERY artist arguing for this is stealing themselves since they learned and was inspired by existing works.

Tell me you’re not an artist without telling me you’re not an artist

Fucking Christ I am so sick of people referencing the Google books lawsuit in any discussion about AI

The publishers lost that case because the judge ruled that Google Books was copying a minimal portion of the books, and that Google Books was not competing against the publishers, thus the infringement was ruled as fair use.

AI training does not fall under this umbrella, because it’s using the entirety of the copyrighted work, and the purpose of this infringement is to build a direct competitor to the people and companies whose works were infringed. You may as well talk about OJ Simpson’s criminal trial, it’s about as relevant.

Do you drop trou and stand in front of a toilet every time you need to toot the flesh whistle?

Shit, there’s roughly even odds that the records of her employment no longer exist because the franchise she worked at shut down, or destroyed them because they were 40 years old.

I used to work at a Sprint call center in the early '10s, but if you asked me to prove it I literally couldn’t, because the staffing agency I was hired through, the call center, and Sprint itself no longer exist. Doesn’t change that I worked there.

Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.

I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models–IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It’s good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.

Yeah, do NOT watch end of Evangelion if you’re in a bad mental headspace. The original series ending might be better for you despite the “ran out of money and cobbled together a clip show” values, since it at least has a relatively upbeat tone. EoE starts with “all the main characters are comatose or going through a mental breakdown” and it gets worse from there.

They’re both extremely excellent. The original series is a fair bit darker and more depressing, and End of Evangelion is definitely a lot more WTF than anything that happens in the rebuild movies (which isn’t a bad thing necessarily). The rebuild movies,meanwhile, have much higher production values, and the fights are generally much better–most of the gifs of Ramiel you see are from the rebuild. The characters are also a lot more mentally stable–they’re all still depressed and dealing with heavy shit, but it’s “I’m taking my meds” depression instead of “untreated spiral” depression.

Watch up to the last episode, then watch End of Evangelion for the canon ending. And/or watch the rebuild movies for a condensed retelling that goes in its own direction.

assign everyone a government mandated fursona

Freak the fuck out.

Pull back from Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia, and negotiate an immediate ceasefire.

Call as many political scientists and scholars as possible and get their advice on how the fuck I can design a reformed system of democratic governance that is robust enough to withstand the inevitable attempts to undermine and corrupt it.

Find the multitude of stashed billions from the various oligarchs and seize it, use the money to invest in overhauling Russian society–improving infrastructure and education, improving the standard of living, etc.

That feels like it’s rather besides the point, innit? You’ve got AI companies showing off AI art and saying “look at what this model can do,” you’ve got entire communities on Lemmy and Reddit dedicated to posting AI art, and they’re all going “look at what I made with this AI, I’m so good at prompt engineering” as though they did all the work, and the millions of hours spent actually creating the art used to train the model gets no mention at all, much less any compensation or permission for their works to be used in the training. Sure does seem like people are passing AI art off as their own, even if they’re not claiming copyright.