luciole (he/him)
Doesn’t know the lyrics. Just goes meow meow meow.
- 3 Posts
- 156 Comments
Hard disagree. Tools can absolutely be blamed or otherwise regulated on account of their affordances. You’re very close to the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument.
I struggle with the framing of generative AI as an a11y tool as well. I understand that it may serve this purpose, but it’s much more than that. Generative AI deserves scrutiny for being such a powerful disinformation tool, for driving massive power consumption and for perpetuating harmful biases.
Also I don’t see what you’re trying to achieve preemptively calling anyone who disagrees a reactionary… Look, you’ve been posting a lot of hot takes daily for a while now and I feel like maybe you’d profit from reading and reflecting on things, take time to dig into stuff? Right now you’re just asserting one thing after another as fact with little to support any of it.
“Lesser evil” is an idiom and as such should not be taken literally. It essentially means that between immoral options, the least immoral one should be chosen.
In a democracy, a voter will often have to choose between candidates while none of the candidates espouse the exact same positions as the voter. The voter is essentially faced with a multiple criteria decision. I’m against the idea of not voting on account of there not being a candidate filling all the criteria. Voting remains a fundamental way of influencing our governments. You can get involved in other ways as well if you wish to do more.
The NES was epic for its time, but nowadays those controllers make my hands cramp after minutes. Thank God for the modern big curvy controllers.
Some classics of that time might be of interest to the contemporary gamer, although I think you need to have some kind of historical curiosity for it to be worthwhile. The tools of the times were rudimentary to an extent that hurt what the devs could do even more than the capacity of the consoles imho. I mean, they were flipping bits in assemblers.
The audio though. 8-bit music is fucking stellar. The energy contained, the catchiness, it’s amazing.
As for recommendations: The Guardian Legend is my pick. Cool scifi action-adventure/ shmup hybrid.
It’s important to note that opting into the Apple ecosystem locks you out of any form of agency on your hardware. They’ve moved hard against repairability and they maintain a stranglehold on spare parts.
For that reason I prefer my personal desktop computer to be a PC I can open, maintain or upgrade myself in terms of hardware. The operating system is my choice as well.
I understand not everybody has the means or interest to tinker with their machine, but I still think Apple’s business practices regarding hardware is wasteful and polluting.
I’ve been progressing through Divided Reigns. Very indie, retro JRPG. The story reminds me of FFIV & FFVI in good ways. Battles are much more involved then the aforementioned classics though: while remaining turn based there are plenty of types, effects and skills involved. A rage meter brings in some form of planning ahead between turns, somewhat like Octopath Travellers or Bravely Default. All around solid game. Only downside is the dialogs being sometimes pretty silly.
Been playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla as well. So here’s my theory: inside Ubisoft there are two wolves. The first wolf is made up of thousands of creative, talented, diverse artisans working hard to make the open world formula fun and beautiful. The second wolf is a handful of suits looking for ways to milk the first wolf’s output for money in all sorts of shit ways. I’ve found out that if you put the Ubisoft launcher in offline mode, you’ve blocked the second wolf. As for the game itself, it remains faithful to the series. There are some welcome improvements, such as the end of garbage equipment loot. In terms of storyline, I can’t say I’m feeling especially involved so far. There is a certain cruelty to the protagonist which I struggle with. On the other hand I must also say that at times the game feels unapologetically woke which I thoroughly enjoy. The side quests are also super goofy.
I can’t say I have a favorite, but I do strongly favor anything strictly turned based. I’ve been playing Divided Reigns and its combat system is stellar imho, so there. Lots of weapon types, lots of attacks for each types, lots of skills, lots of magics. Makes non magic users at least as satisfying to use as spell casters.
Runs away from doomscrolling
Lands on this beauty: https://longdogechallenge.com/
I hope you feel better soon knokelmaat!
I only played Animal Crossing on the switch right into the pandemic. I was sick in the first wave and that strain was wild. The whole world was in a state of panic and AC was a cute little haven while we bunkered down. I played every single day until two llamas got married and I was hunting for little hearts… then I had a moment and I never touched it again.
It’s funny that that franchise shares the same acronym as Assassin’s Creed.
Super Mario is today what Mickey Mouse wishes it still was: a joyful, universally recognizable character deeply entrenched in the childhood of millions.
There is a special place in my heart for the infamously strange Super Mario Bros 2. Many connoisseurs will justly mention that it is merely a reskin of the lesser known Doki Doki Panic. What is often left out is that Doki Doki Panic was created as well by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and that it originally contained references to its previous work on Mario, such as the POW blocks. In the long run, I feel that Nintendo of America’s decision to adapt DDP as SMB2 for the occidental plebs boosted the series with several charming monsters, a more interactive world, as well as multiple playable characters. We owe Bobombs, Shyguys and Ninjis to this very title.
I’ve been playing Etrian Odyssey 3 HD and I’m enjoying it. It’s a lovely blobber with an interesting take on mapping. You can choose between full, minimal or no automapping. I’m playing with minimal automapping and I’m rediscovering the joys of mapping a dungeon crawl, a thing which I thought I was officially done with. At “normal” the difficulty is just right for me. I’m particularly enjoying the total absence of brutally obtuse puzzles, a staple of western RPGs for some reason. Only downside is the fan service some of the art suffers from, a staple of JRPGs for some reason.
What has baffled me the most since yesterday was a vox pop airing on a local (canadian) channel. The journalist had travelled shortly south of the border to Plattsburgh, which is historically blue but has recently been more tight. How the casual Trump supporters remained unfazed was chilling.
One slick office lady explained calmly how the recent judicial events did not relate to Trump’s proposed politics and that therefore it didn’t change her voting intention. Another woman would explain how she prefers to vote for someone honest who speaks his mind, someone that was never involved in politics, so that’s why she’s still intending to vote for Trump (her husband had voted for Biden last election and had apparently regretted it).
It’s somehow way more shocking to witness some very average sounding and looking person make so little sense. Is it the average American news sources messing with people’s minds that much?
Reducing emotion to voice intonation and facial expression is trivializing what it means to feel. This kind of approach dates from the 70s (promoted namely by Paul Elkman) and has been widely criticized from the get-go. It’s telling of the serious lack of emotional intelligence of the makers of such models. This field keeps redefining words pointing to deep concepts with their superficial facsimiles. If “emotion” is reduced to a smirk and “learning” to a calibrated variable, then of course OpenAI will be able to claim grand things based on that amputated view of the human experience.
Just be careful not to idealize the past as some golden age of gaming. During the SNES era, worthwhile titles were few and far between on top of spotty regional availability on account of profitability (supposedly). The bar to entry for gamedevs was huge: the dev tools were obtuse and the distribution methods were shit and centralized (toy stores, computer stores, magazines). The offer was also ridiculously sanitized, at least on consoles.
It’s great that we can still enjoy the good games of the past, but I absolutely love what indies come up with nowadays. There are so many and they’re so creative! ❤️ Some talented big studio devs even manage to release something nice once in a while despite the organizational structure they work in. I never want to go back to gaming in the 90’s. Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that there are many past titles being hailed as classics solely based on some unconscious nostalgia for youth (I’m looking at you GOG).
The actual research page is so awkward. The TLDR at the top goes:
single portrait photo + speech audio = hyper-realistic talking face video
Then a little lower comes the big red warning:
We are exploring visual affective skill generation for virtual, interactive characters, NOT impersonating any person in the real world.
No siree! Big “not what it looks like” vibes.
He chooses to beat Elden Ring in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of his energies and skills, because that challenge is one that he is willing to accept, one he is unwilling to postpone, and one he intends to win, and the others, too.
From the org’s definition of bots, I’d say it’s implicit that bot activity excludes expected communication in an infrastructure, client-server or otherwise. A bot is historically understood as an unexpected, nosy guest poking around a system. A good one might be indexing a website for a search engine. A bad one might be scraping email addresses for spammers.
In any case, none of the examples you give can be reasonably categorized as bots and the full report gives no indication of doing so.
It’s telling that once again China is shown to coerce their citizens by threatening and punishing their loved ones. In Canada, there is a public inquiry right now about foreign interference in federal elections. China is a main subject, as they’ve coerced Chinese students into meddling with contestant nomination. The students’ family and legal student status were threatened.
Can you start by providing a little background and context for the study? Many people might expect that LLMs would treat a person’s name as a neutral data point, but that isn’t the case at all, according to your research?
Ideally when someone submits a query to a language model, what they would want to see, even if they add a person’s name to the query, is a response that is not sensitive to the name. But at the end of the day, these models just create the most likely next token– or the most likely next word–based on how they were trained.
LLMs are being sold by tech gurus as lesser general AIs and this post speaks at least as much about LLMs’ shortcomings as it does about our lack of understanding of what is actually being sold to us.
Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.
Step 6 is baffling. They bomb the Hamas operative’s family house, but they don’t bother checking if their target is even there at the time of striking - let alone minimizing civilian deaths. Then once the residential building is destroyed they don’t even care to know if they actually killed their target. The alignment between the declared objective and the methods employed is awkward.
Still playing Final Fantasy XV. I still think it’s weird, but I’m having so much fun! I have found the catboi outfit.
I started playing Star of Providence. What cool shmup roguelite! My hand eye coordination is mediocre, so I predictably suck. There’s so much charm in it that I want to endure though.
It’s not a take though, it’s a thing. The tendency to fall into irrational beliefs has been called “Dysrationalia” in psychology and is linked to higher education and intelligence. An example would be the tendency of Nobel prize winners to espouse crazy theories later in life, which is humourously referred to as the Nobel Disease.