Mirodir
@Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' 1 day ago:
Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.
What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.
Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.
- Comment on Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' 1 day ago:
I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?
Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?
- Comment on This is a Test 5 weeks ago:
If House has taught me anything, it’s D, but then E.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 1 month ago:
I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.
Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.
You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas. - Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 1 month ago:
I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.
- Comment on She did her best ok? 1 month ago:
Because it’s a cat.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 1 month ago:
Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.
There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.
We’ve discovered this relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 1 month ago:
Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.
Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 1 month ago:
I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.
Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.
I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.
- Comment on Sousou no Frieren • Frieren: Beyond Journey's End - Episode 25 discussion 2 months ago:
This is definitely one thing. Her face lit up right after Fern suggested it at the end of the last episode.
After this episode, I think it also has to do with Flamme. It was Flamme’s dream to make magic commonplace among humans. A human mage being able to kill her after so many years of her being essentially untouchable by humans means her teacher’s dream is becoming more and more real.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
Not every meal in a “$x/plate” restaurant is gonna cost the same though. It’s not hard to reach a disparity between the cheapest and most expensive reasonable meal (similar sizes) of around a factor of 2 at many restaurants.
Why is the server getting twice the tip if I order the most expensive plate and dessert vs cheapest plate and dessert?
- Comment on Recommendations for Pirate Games? 3 months ago:
I sunk a lot of hours into Port Royale 2 many years ago. I’m not sure how well it holds up today or on its sequels. I think 3 was well received and 4 poorly.
- Comment on Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March 3 months ago:
no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects
I’m always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I’m not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I’d love to talk about aren’t in the top 10 most played games list.
Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there’s only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.
I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn’t surprise anyone they’re not sticking around after that.
- Comment on Visits to piracy websites have increased 12% in the past four years 3 months ago:
I was curious too and checked the article but skimming it, instead of a total, I found this:
A new analysis from MUSO, a U.K.-based anti-piracy analyst […]
With the study being done by a clearly biased person/group and that large omission, I think it’s fair to assume that the % of total web traffic going to pirates might not have gone up all that much, maybe it even went down.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 5 months ago:
Looking at the reviews on Steam, I don’t think the setting was anywhere close to the largest problem.
- Comment on A Spanish agency became so sick of models and influencers that they created their own with AI — and she’s raking in up to $11,000 a month 5 months ago:
I’m guessing they just generate a bunch of pictures, pick the closest and fix the rest in photoshop.
Not like real models aren’t already often photoshopped to (near) unrecognizability.
- Comment on As a beginner, how should I go about learning difficult concepts? 5 months ago:
I’m not really sure how to describe it other than when I read a function to determine what it does then go to the next part of the code I’ve already forgotten how the function transforms the data
This sounds to me like you could benefit from mentally using the information hiding principle for your functions. In other words: Outside of the function, the only thing that matter is “what goes in?” and “what comes out?”. The implementation details should not be important once you’re working on code outside of that function.
To achieve this, maybe you could write a short comment right at the start of every function. One to two sentences detailing only the inputs/output of that function. e.g. “Accepts an image and a color and returns a mask that shows where that color is present.” if you later forget what the function does, all you need to do is read that one sentence to remember. If it’s too convoluted to write in one or two sentences, your function is likely trying to achieve too much at once and could (arguably “should”) be split up.
Also on a different note: Don’t sell your ability to “cludge something together” short. If you ever plan to do this professionally or educationally, you will sadly inevitably run into situations where you have no choice but to deliver a quick and dirty solution over a clean and well thought out one.
- Comment on Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery 6 months ago:
Ignoring the fact that they were clearly talking in orders of magnitude, it was 8MB for a very long time and only recently got increased to 25
- Comment on RIP 6 months ago:
I would assume you could redirect them to where the scent trail is present/stronger again, i.e. very close to their hill.
- Comment on well duh. 6 months ago:
that’s not a problem, that’s a feature
I disagree.
Let’s say there are 4 candidates, A B C and D, and a large group of people have them in that order of preference, their (honest) acceptance would be A and B, but they’d much prefer C over D if those were the only two options.
A prominent forecast comes out and predicts a tossup between C or D. They all act in self-interest and strategically list A B and C as approved, to lower the chance of D winning over C.
Now that forecast was wrong about A’s low chances for whatever reason and had they solely and honestly put down A and B, A would’ve barely won. All of them adding C doomed them to have to put up with someone they don’t honestly approve of.
As you said before though, if we take this scenario into a single vote fptp system, we have all of them giving their single vote to C. Not only does this harm the chances of A winning even more, it also reinforces never voting for A as “A doesn’t have a chance anyway and voting for A would be a wasted vote”.
You can also construct a similar scenario the other way around for leaving out a candidate the group would approve of.
- Comment on well duh. 6 months ago:
so long as everyone votes honestly
That’s a big ask. If I think the vote will probably end up between two candidates I would be fine with winning, I am incentivized to only list the one I prefer. Likewise, if I think the vote will end up going to one of two candidates I would generally not be fine with winning, I am incentivized to list the one I perceive as the lesser evil regardless of my true preferences.
In the end, approval voting comes down to ranked choice voting, but instead of giving ranks you pick a rank threshold where everything above that rank is approved and everything below disapproved. The choice of that threshold is very vulnerable to strategic voting.
I do agree with you that it’s in most cases a better system than plurality though. Even if you strategically lower your threshold to put a lesser-evil type choice as your lowest accepted rank, you do still hand in an approval vote for every candidate above that one. Vice versa with disapproval and strategically raising the threshold.
- Comment on What's the most desturbing thing when you look up your username in SteamDB? 6 months ago:
That I spent ca a third of a dollar per hour of gameplay (in paid games only).
I expected my rate to be much worse with my huge backlog…
- Comment on YouTube Enhancement Megathread: Tools and Extensions for All Devices 6 months ago:
BlockTube
By now it allows to block (remove) other things: Auto-generated playlists, Explore page, Shorts, Movies and a few other things.
I mostly use it to block content about stuff I don’t want to get spoiled on. It supports regex so it’s fairly easy for me to very rarely see anything that would diminish my experience from a specific piece of media (assuming I don’t forget to do it in the first place…).
- Comment on ai is truly genius 6 months ago:
Roco’s Basilisk is an information hazard, not a cognitohazard.
- Comment on BBC will block ChatGPT AI from scraping its content 7 months ago:
You might not be able to stop an AI directly because of the reasons you listed. However, OpenAI is probably at least competent enough to not send the response directly to the AI but instead have a separate (non-AI) mechanism that simply doesn’t let the AI access the response of websites with a certain line in the robots.txt.
- Comment on Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. 7 months ago:
…and if they keep the emails they send out archived (which would be reasonable), they also have it stored in plaintext there.