he/him
Materials Science PhD candidate in Pittsburgh, PA, USA
My profile picture is the cover art from Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, and was drawn by Casper Pham (recolor by me).
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In FFXIV, I’m in the post-Shadowbringers DLC content. I’ve taken a bit of a break from the MSQ to get the Nier-themed alliance raids
Are you me? I’m just a bit into the post-ShB patches, and I just finished unlocking all three Nier raids. They’re really fun (although I agree: challenging). If you happen to be on Crystal DC and want to party up for some raids or something, lmk!
Think I might try a healer class next, just not sure which one
As someone who is very much a non-healer main, I quite like Sage. My first healer to 90 was actually Scholar, but a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was really into Summoner for a while: when I’m going to heal I usually hop on Sage.
I’ve put a few hours in and I agree, it’s just a fun little game that slowly pushes you bit by bit into slightly more challenging stuff. I really like how well the game meshes the diving and sushi restaurant aspects, too. (Plus, I’m a scuba diver – still pretty new to it – and I’m a bit on the larger side, so it’s a nice bit of representation.)
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! It’s a really good visual-novel-style game, but with the added element that you craft your own tarot-style divination deck and then draw cards from it during some conversations, and which cards you draw influence what kinds of readings you can give for people. It is established early on that since you were a kid your readings have never been wrong, and fittingly the game warns you early and repeatedly that your answers will affect your fate, dramatically. Well, no kidding! When I was playing yesterday I had a choice that I’d made hours earlier come back and bite me in the ass, hard. Almost made me want to quit and start over, but I’ve decided to see this play-through through and if by the end I still feel like I need to fix my mistakes I’ll maybe play it a second time.
tl;dr if you like beautiful pixel art, enigmatic beings from outside of space and time, witches, tarot, and/or choices that actually matter in your games, do give this one a go! I’m not done with it yet but I’d already love to chat with someone else who’s played it!
Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.
There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).
It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?
Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?
You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.
Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.
Well I hear what you’re saying, although I don’t much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.
My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I’m no lawyer. I’d be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it’ll have a chance. As I said, we’ll see.
I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.
I don’t have hundreds of hours
Don’t start with XIV then!
So what is the most recent game in the series that I can start with that is worth it to play and wouldn’t confuse a newcomer?
All of the FF games – baring the ones that are explicitly sequels, like X2 – are totally separate from each other, you can jump in anywhere. At most you might miss some references or easter eggs.
If you want the most recent then, that’d be XVI, although I’d personally recommend looking up what the gameplay is like in the different games and starting wherever you feel you’ll have the most fun! There are some weirder ones out there, like crystal chronicles (my own first final fantasy game) and tactics, so you have a lot of options!
Really interesting writeup, thank you for sharing! Many of the technical details go well over my head but nonetheless it’s very interesting to hear some of these success stories, and it also sheds light on how much work running an instance with a lot of users actually is. Here’s hoping that future versions of lemmy with (eg) more optimized database code will make life easier for all the folks in the operations team!
#notallgames
Seriously though, I know you said “for the most part,” but I just want to emphasize that there are absolutely story-focused games out there. Games I’d even describe as downright literary, where the entire point is to tell a compelling story and explore some heady themes. One recent one I played like this was Pentiment, which explores some really interesting history and has a lot to say about religion, community, fallibility, family, etc…
And, I mean, lots of other people have already mentioned Disco Elysium and I could write an essay about it but anyone who hasn’t played it should just watch this Jacob Geller video instead.
Exactly. Some things just can’t be studied as part of a double blind RCT. For example, see: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence. Observational data have shown that their use is associated with morbidity and mortality, due to both failure of the intervention and iatrogenic complications…
The paper is funny, but the authors are making a serious point. RCTs are great when they’re possible, but just because they’re not possible doesn’t mean we can’t gather strong evidence anyway.
Oh yeah, exploring different tones, settings, systems, etc can be really interesting! I usually listen to more lighthearted things, so I don’t have a ton of recommendations, but you might like Dungeons and Randomness.
It’s changed a lot since it started. In the beginning it was a pretty standard fantasy themed actual play between some friends, but has evolved into a pretty big living-world style campaign with several different groups of players. The tone starts out a little silly –e.g. there’s a magic item called the “gravy boat of pestilence” – but over time becomes much more serious. They start to deal with some fairly portentous themes, and some might even describe the tone as “dark” at times.
If you check it out, I recommend skipping the first two episodes entirely (they’re almost irrelevant to the larger story and they feel a lot less polished). From episode 3 there’s some plot relevant stuff, but you could safely skip up to episode 16 or 17 (at which point there are already two adventuring groups) and you won’t miss too much. If you want to get straight into the higher production value stuff, there’s a recap after episode 200 (the first “arc”), at which point there are four different adventuring groups. I wouldn’t super recommend that personally, I think there’s a lot of good stuff in the first arc, but I’m pretty sure they do recommend doing that. Up to you, of course.
There are a lot of really good actual plays in a lot of different genres and systems! I feel like the most straightforward answer would be Dimension 20 – professional quality and Brennan Lee Mulligan is a frankly incredible GM. He’s also involved in a new show, Worlds Beyond Number. I haven’t checked it out yet but I’m expecting it to be really very good.
But if you have a preferred genre or system I might have more specific recommendations!
Yeah as far as I can tell without a close read of the paper – which I just don’t have time to do – it’s a review paper that just happens to have been written by some of the people involved in this commercial endeavor. (I imagine they don’t want to share their proprietary composition and architecture.) It seems like the reporter covering this didn’t catch the distinction.
To my previous comment, this means we really have no idea if they’re using a lead-containing composition or not. Like I mentioned, perovskites are a large class of materials. Since the review paper has a section on the challenges around lead containing compositions I’d hope they’re not using lead, but who knows 🤷♂️
I feel like I should clarify because the article didn’t do a good job at explaining: perovskite is a kind of structure, not a particular material. They have the generic formula ABX3 (where A and B are different kinds of cations and X is some kind of anion), although not everything with the formula is a perovskite.
Simple perovskites include some lead-containing materials like lead titanate, but also lead-free materials like barium or strontium titanate. And in general there are a lot of different kinds of perovskites, especially because some of the structural sites can be filled by small organic molecules instead of pure elements.
Edit: I think I was misreading the journal article before my edit (it’s early I’m not awake yet lol). I had said it looks like they’re using a lead-based perovskite but actually I can’t tell what exactly they’re using with a quick skim. The article is very review-y, the formula I thought they were using is from another paper. I’ll have a more thorough look later.
Edit 2: It’s a review paper, and the way it was described in the linked news article is kinda misleading. Its not specifically about this company’s particular composition or architecture.
Objective numbers: Steam tells me my most player game is Tabletop Simulator, but that one doesn’t really count since it’s lots of different games. My second most played game is still Destiny 2 at 285 hours, despite the fact that I stopped playing years ago. My most played non-steam game – also my most played game by quite a large margin – is Final Fantasy XIV, at 990 hours.
My favorite game I’ve played so far this year has been Citizen Sleeper, and that took me around 13¼ hours. Pentiment is probably my second favorite of the year, and that one took like 16¾ hours. I’ve done one playthrough of Disco Elysium and at 33¾ hours that one was starting to feel a bit long. Webbed was a really fun experience that felt nice and bite sized, and that one got 7½ hours. The most memorable game I played last year was probably Before Your Eyes, and that game is about two hours long!
Subjective thoughts and feelings: These days I much prefer games that keep themselves contained. I’ve got one big game I’m investing a lot of time in (FFXIV), but that’s over the course of years and also a game played with friends, which I feel changes the dynamic. For solo games I look for things that tell a compelling story or offer a compelling gameplay experience, and don’t feel the need to pad out gameplay to 200 hours (so most AAAs are kinda out for me these days).
I’m just busier these days than I used to be. Most nights when I get home from the lab I’ve got 4, maybe 5 hours free if I have leftovers and don’t need to cook, there are no chores, I don’t need to go grocery shopping, etc. Some nights I’ll want to use those hours playing FFXIV with my friends. Some nights I’ll want to work on other hobbies. Some nights I’ll just be tired and want to lay down to read or watch someone else play some games on YouTube.
So even though a game like Disco Elysium only took a bit under 34 hours to finish, that was spread over like a week of evenings dedicated only to playing that game. I will admit to having lost sleep for Citizen Sleeper (ironically); I beat that one in about 2 days despite the length, because it was compelling enough to really not want to put it down. And Webbed I beat in its entirety in one long weekend day (plus coming back the next day to 100% it, something I almost never do anymore).
Nobody needs to write an essay; I wrote two (maybe three?) sentences in mine. You just need to actually be interested in beehaw for what makes it different from other instances and express that. My application wasn’t really any longer than this paragraph
Registration happens to be behind right now, mainly for technical reasons as alyaza mentioned, but the admin team is working diligently on it (♥)
You wouldn’t, but that’s fine with Match Group: JP Morgan[1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they’re monetizing human relationships.
I’m sure other investment firms are pleased as well, but JP Morgan was the firm mentioned in the article ↩︎