Voroxpete
@Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Brits can get around Discord's age verification thanks to Death Stranding's photo mode, bypassing the measure introduced with the UK's Online Safety Act. We tried it and it works—thanks, Kojima 2 days ago:
The problem, as always, is that parents don’t want to put the work into educating their children, they want the government to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. And that’s what gets you half assed solutions like this.
- Comment on The Future is NOT Self-Hosted 3 days ago:
The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
- Comment on Tens of thousands knocked offline after software failure at Musk’s Starlink 3 days ago:
I have to support a remote client that uses Starlink. It’s a nightmare. We can deal with slow connections, we can deal with bad ping, but with Starlink what we get is the entire connection dropping every minute or so, and coming back up a short while later. It’s unbelievably bad.
- Comment on Day 366 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
Basically everything can be set through server / game rules. How do zombies work (speed, strength, toughness, hearing, vision, nocturnal or not, memory, intelligence, etc), how does the virus work, loot availability, XP gain, how long its been since the outbreak, whether power and water should shut off at some point, and so many other things. And that’s all without even touching a single mod. It’s incredibly versatile.
- Comment on Day 366 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
For the record (mostly saying this for the benefit of people who don’t play but might) Zomboid is one of the most customizable games ever. Rules like “How zombie virus transmits” are completely up to you. My wife and I play together and we decided that all survivors are immune to the virus in our world, so we turned off transmission entirely. It just made more sense to us if it was something like an airborne pathogen.
I often describe Project Zomboid as a toolkit for creating your own personal zombie apocalypse.
- Comment on Best plex/jellyfin compatible streaming box 1 week ago:
The Nvidia Shield is still the best option for this. I’ve tried all kinds of homebrew solutions and always had headaches. In the two years I’ve had my Shield, I’ve never had a problem. Smart Tube Next lets me cast YouTube without ads, Kodi/Jellyfin gives me all my media library, plus I’ve got official apps for Nebula, Dropout and Spotify. Custom launcher removes what little amount of ads there were (and that was unobtrusive background banner stuff even at its worst). Plus the pro version can handle some pretty powerful emulators.
- Comment on ‘Subnautica 2’ Leaders Say Krafton Sabotaged Game Over Payout [new events in the Subnautica 2 story] 1 week ago:
Was 100% going to buy it. Absolutely won’t now. Fuck em.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust | The chatbot is also praising Hitler and attacking users with Jewish-sounding names. 2 weeks ago:
There’s no way they actually retrained it for this, that would be much too expensive. They’re just editing the initial prompt to convince it to act more “right wing” and it’s performing the assignment to the best of its ability. The problem is that a chat-bot doesn’t understand context, so it just plays the character it’s been given as full mask off all the time, and as a result you get this.
- Comment on The System Wayfinder - (looking for feedback) 3 weeks ago:
This is really cool. I maintain a lot of systems that have to be worked on from time to time by far less experienced techs than myself (due to our relationship with the business partners that use the systems) and this sort of thing could be amazing for providing a kind of inline user manual.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 3 weeks ago:
My son has doubled in size every month for the last few months. At this rate he’ll be fifty foot tall by the time he’s seven years old.
Yeah, it’s a stupid claim to make on the face of it. It also ignores practical realities. The first is those is training data, and the second is context windows. The idea that AI will successfully write a novel or code a large scale piece of software like a video game would require them to be able to hold that entire thing in their context window at once. Context windows are strongly tied to hardware usage, so scaling them to the point where they’re big enough for an entire novel may not ever be feasible (at least from a cost/benefit perspective).
I think there’s also the issue of how you define “success” for the purpose of a study like this. The article claims that AI may one day write a novel, but how do you define “successfully” writing a novel? Is the goal here that one day we’ll have a machine that can produce algorithmically mediocre works of art? What’s the value in that?
- Comment on The State of Consumer AI: AI’s Consumer Tipping Point Has Arrived - Only 3%* of US AI users are willing to pay for it. 3 weeks ago:
The key difference being that AI is a much, much more expensive product to deliver than anything else on the web. Even compared to streaming video content, AI is orders of magnitude higher in terms of its cost to deliver.
What this means is that providing AI on the model you’re describing is impossible. You simply cannot pack in enough advertising to make ChatGPT profitable. You can’t make enough from user data to be worth the operating costs.
AI fundamentally does not work as a “free” product. Users need to be willing to pony up serious amounts of money for it. OpenAI have straight up said that even their most expensive subscriber tier operates at a loss.
Maybe that would work, if you could sell it as a boutique product, something for only a very exclusive club of wealthy buyers. Only that model is also an immediate dead end, because the training costs to build a model are the same whether you make that model for 10 people or 10 billion, and those training costs are astronomical. To get any kind of return on investment these companies need to sell a very, very expensive product to a market that is far too narrow to support it.
There’s no way to square this circle. Their bet was that AI would be so vital, so essential to every facet of our lives that everyone would be paying for it. They thought they had the new cellphone here; a $40/month subscription plan from almost every adult in the developed world. What they have instead is a product with zero path to profitability.
- Comment on need help to make a minecraft server 4 weeks ago:
Seconding this. Itzg’s server is so easy, I taught my 15 year old niece to run one.
- Comment on Trump says 'not going to stand' for Netanyahu's continued prosecution 4 weeks ago:
“It is a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT, very similar to the Witch Hunt that I was forced to endure,” said Trump.
So you’re saying he’s guilty too?
- Comment on Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features 4 weeks ago:
What we’ve seen very clearly with fair use is that you end up being forced to defend it, as opposed to it being presumed. That means it’s very easy for a rightsholder with money to go after every use, fair or not, and force the user to spend time and money defending themselves (and also probably face a preliminary injunction that takes the image down until the case is over, which will often be after its newsworthy).
- Comment on Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features 4 weeks ago:
It’s not the standard because it will likely have a LOT of unintended consequences.
How do you share evidence of police brutality if they can use copyright to take down the video? How do newspapers print pictures of people if they have to get the rightsholders permission first? How do we share photos of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute if he can just sue every site that posts it for unauthorized use of his likeness?
Unless this has some extremely stringent and well written limitations, it has the potential to be a very bad idea.
- Comment on Self Hosted File Drop / File Upload 4 weeks ago:
Thanks, I didn’t know about that.
- Comment on Self Hosted File Drop / File Upload 5 weeks ago:
I love Seafile, but I’m not sure it really meets OP’s requirements. For example I’m not aware of any way to do upload without a login in Seafile.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 5 weeks ago:
Actually one of the characters in 1984 works in the department that produces computer generated romance novels. Orwell pretty accurately predicted the idea of AI slop as a propaganda tool.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 5 weeks ago:
There are, as I understand it, ways that you can train on AI generated material without inviting model collapse, but that’s more to do with distilling the output of a model. What Musk is describing is absolutely wholesale confabulation being fed back into the next generation of their model. It’s also a total pipe dream. Getting an AI to rewrite something like the total training data set to your exact requirements, and verifying that it had done so satisfactorily would be an absolutely monumental undertaking. The compute time alone would be staggering and the human labour (to check the output) many times higher than that.
But the whiny little piss baby is mad that his own AI keeps fact checking him, and his engineers have already explained that coding it to lie doesn’t really work because the training data tends to outweigh the initial prompt, so this is the best theory he can come up with for how he can “fix” his AI expressing reality’s well known liberal bias.
- Comment on US | Trump Reportedly Greenlights Plan for US Attack on Iran Without Congressional Approval 5 weeks ago:
Also the 2001 Authorization of The Use of Military Force, which has no expiry date, and allows unrestricted military action against anyone the administration believes played a role in the 9/11 attacks. As far as I’m awarel Trump has to do is claim Iran produced or sheltered terrorists at some point (even if it was in the past) and he’s more or less legally in the clear. There’s already precedent.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the 2001 AUMF was used to justify the deployment of US forces to Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia.
businessinsider.com/a-bill-to-repeal-the-aumf-jus…
Again, past decisions.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 1 month ago:
The difference, you have to remember, is that the worse stuff is all hurting the people they want him to hurt. But betraying his made in America promises hurts the people who voted for him. That’s when they suddenly start to care.
- Comment on The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible 1 month ago:
Sorry, I meant “that and made in the US”, but I get that that’s not what I said.
- Comment on Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone 1 month ago:
Thing is, there’s going to be a lot of public attention on that “Made in the USA” claim, given how central it is to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy.
Sure, the FCC can turn a blind eye, but all it takes is for one worker at the assembly plant to call up a journalist. And let’s face, and journalist worth their salt is going to be hanging around every bar near that place. Even trying to screen specifically for MAGA friendly workers won’t help them much when one of those workers feels betrayed by how much of Trump’s product is actually coming from China.
My point is, there’s no good way to keep this under wraps. If they don’t actually build this thing in the US, word is going to get around, and it’s going to be seen as a total repudiation of Trump’s entire tariff strategy.
- Comment on The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible 1 month ago:
Except that they’re claiming Android 15, USB-C and 12GB of RAM.
No existing device has that combination of features, plus a headphone jack.
This thing is a fantasy, plain and simple. Nothing about it is real.
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 month ago:
I mean, that’s exactly what makes it so “mid” to my mind. It’s not an atrocious disaster like Gollum. It’s not appalling bad, or even moderately bad. It’s just… There. The shooting isn’t dreadful, just dull. The map, the movement, the exploration… None of it is exactly bad, but none of it left any kind of impression on me. Like you said, it scratches that “running around and collecting stuff” itch, the numbers go up, you unlock new powers, etc. But it all just kind of passes straight through you and at the end you’re left with “Well, that sure did kill a few hours.”
Horizon: Zero Dawn suffers from all the usual modern open world hallmarks, the map littered with things to collect, the towers, the grinding to level up abilities, etc, etc. But the story is an absolute banger, and even a lot of the random collectible junk is full of little moments of deeply moving storytelling. I remember collecting every single one of the vantage points because I absolutely needed to hear all of the short story you unlock by doing it. It has zero relevance to the plot, but it’s just a great piece of writing. In comparison Ghost Wire is just, sort of… There.
- Comment on Is there any open source tv focused os/ui? 1 month ago:
Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.
In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.
I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 month ago:
Ghost Wire: Tokyo.
It sells itself on cool aesthetics, but the moment you get past that you realise it’s just a very, very generic open world shooter with incredibly bland and boring shooting layered over an impressively faithful recreation of Shinjuku. And even the aesthetics wear thin very quickly, being largely just a whole lot of “Hey I know that anime” level stuff cribbed from Japanese culture. The game is mostly just running around a map collecting stuff.
- Comment on Amazon Doubles Prime Video Ads Per Hour 1 month ago:
I’ll do you one better. I’m upping the ads on mine by 1,000,000x.
- Comment on What game has the best tutorial, in your opinion? 1 month ago:
I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 85% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 1 month ago:
It is vitally important to understand that throughout the “potato famine” Ireland was a major exporter of food to the rest of the UK.
Irish farmers were growing all kinds of crops. Grains, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, etc, etc. All of these were sold to pay for the oppressive rents that they were forced to pay to English landlords who had stolen all of their land.
The potatoes the Irish grew were for subsistence, because all of the rest of their crops went to market. Even when the potato crops failed, there was more than enough food for everyone in Ireland, if the English would simply suspend rent collection for a short while, until the crop failures had passed.
Many motions to do so were put before parliament. All of them were rejected.
The Irish famine was not caused by a disease. It was caused by the intentional cruelty of the English.