Mirodir
@Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on "Fate/strange Fake" New Visual, PV 2 months ago:
I think people have managed to get it to run on Android (no official English version was ever released on Mobile but there are good fan translations, all we had until this year on any platform.)
There is also a website that works on mobile and has a playable version of the fan translation hosted and is mostly complete but missing some details.
Fun fact about the VN: When Nasu wrote FSN, they originally did not want to include any H-Scenes, but Takeuchi, the artist, thought it wouldn’t sell otherwise. This lead to the 2004 release having some legendarily bad (and often memed) H-Scenes in them as Nasu is not really known for writing ero-stuff. Whether or not you want to read those or read any of the remade versions where they replaced the spicy stuff with more tame stuff is up to you.
- Comment on "Fate/strange Fake" New Visual, PV 2 months ago:
As someone who does (sorta) get the Fate series, here’s a quick rundown for you or anyone else popping into this thread and who might be interested. Both on how it ended up like this and possible ways to get into the Fate franchise.
Quick history lesson to give some background on how it ended up like this: Kinoko Nasu’s Fate/Stay Night released as a visual novel in 2004 and is set in the same world as other works they’ve previously released (e.g. Tsukihime, Kara no Kyoukai) none of these are mandatory to understand FSN but can flesh out the universe, also called Nasuverse.
FSN has three routes called Fate, Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel. They all split off very early on and branch in totally different ways. Now what made FSN special is that the three routes are meant to be experienced in that order as Unlimited Blade Works builds on what you learn in Fate. Heaven’s Feel builds on both Fate and Unlimited Blade Works. So to fully understand the original work in its intended form, one would need to experience the three routes in that order. The original release and MOST but not all rereleases force you to experience the routes in that order.Now why did I write all this? It’s because FSN Fate never got a real adaptation. There is the Studio Deen adapation from 2006, which did mostly Fate and then mashed all three routes into one huge spoiler-mess towards the end that spoils the other two routes. This is the big thing stopping people from giving a clear answer to “Where do I even begin?”
In 2012 Ufotable released their adaptation of Fate/Zero, which is a prequel set 10 years before the events of FSN and co-written by Urobuchi (of Madoka fame) and Nasu. Sadly a lot of the plot points in FSN, especially in the later routes, are about finding out “what happened 10 years before now”, so this prequel does have some spoilers for those routes and vice versa.
Later on Ufotable then also adapted *Unlimited Blade Works *as an episode 0 and two seasons. Even later they adapted Heaven’s Feel as three movies.With all that being said, the BEST way is to read the original VN,at least for the Fate route. The VN got a good remaster (first time officially in English too) this year on Steam.
However, I do understand that not everyone has the time or patience to read such a wordy VN. The two alternatives I can present are either substituting Fate with the Fate/Zero anime, which will leave you with some spoilers and questions, but it’s not too bad. Or you rawdog the Unlimited Blade Works adaptation by ufotable as a starting point, which is less spoilery but probably a bit more confusing at the start. After Unlimited Blade Works, no matter where you started, it makes sense to watch Heaven’s Feel and then, if you didn’t already watch it, Fate/Zero. At that point you should have a broad enough understand of what Fate is about to be able to enjoy any of the spinoffs without being too lost.tldr to answer the question: “Where do I even begin?”
best: Read the original VN
otherwise:- Fate/Zero (ufotable) (prequel to substitute the missing Fate route adaptation, slight spoilers for HF)
- FSN Unlimited Blade Works (ufotable)
- FSN Heaven’s Feel (ufotable, movie trillogy)
or equally good:
- FSN Unlimited Blade Works (ufotable)
- FSN Heaven’s Feel (ufotable, movie trillogy)
- Fate/Zero (ufotable) (prequel was written to be enjoyed after HF, originally)
After that you’re really free to enjoy any Fate universe content. I could make some suggestions but I feel like this comment is getting too long already.
Addendum for people who are interested in what Fate/Strange Fake (FsF) is about:
FsF is written by Ryohgo Narita of Baccano and Durarara fame. Originally he wrote one chapter as an April Fool’s joke, but the people overseeing the Fate Franchise ended up offering him to write it as a light novel for real. I’ve read most of FsF that came out so far (there’s one final volume scheduled to release in 2025). It is, in my opinion, one of the best Fate works written ever since Nasu’s original VN. This is mostly thanks to Narita being really talented at writing a huge cast of characters and involve so many different viewpoints, which is very cool for a magical battle royale. Starting with FsF for interested newcomers isn’t impossible and it is written with that in mind too, but it is very much something that gets more enjoyable the more the reader/viewer already knows as there are many characters from other works that make cameos or references.If anyone’s curious about anything specific or if I was too rambly to be coherent in some places, feel free to reach out.
- Comment on New Rule 2 months ago:
Osamu Dazai himself
- Comment on I won’t be reading the replies 3 months ago:
It’s only from spells and only the player itself is immune from them. I don’t think this would even see play in YGO.
- Comment on [News] 'Sousou no Frieren' Gets Second Season 3 months ago:
it was almost guaranteed we would get a sequel but it’s still nice to have an official confirmation now!
I’m just relieved to see マッドハウス (madhouse) on there. I was mildly worried they’d give it the OPM treatment.
- Comment on The chat in World of Warcraft is what keeps me coming back 4 months ago:
Despite all that, there was the Warlock who Ninja’d the Sword dropping in Naxx on the final day. Fun times. Now that we’re slowly approaching Classic MoP we’ll finally see if the masterplan worked out too.
- Comment on Is Google Training AI on YouTube Videos? 4 months ago:
That data is also publicly available (of course), so a model could be trained on it. I’d love to say I’d doubt Google/YouTube would ever do that, but at this point nothing would surprise me.
- Comment on Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
Does it? I worked on training a classifier and a generative model on freely available galaxy images taken by Hubble and labelled in a citizen science approach. Where’s the theft?
- Comment on Was it Good? - Neverwinter Nights 5 months ago:
With Larian’s previous game having great DM tools and them saying they would’ve loved to do DM tools for BG3, I think WotC telling them not to is a fair assumption to make.
- Comment on The Apothecary Diaries' Manga Artist Has Been Sentenced To 10 Months In Prison for tax evasion 6 months ago:
The person who was caught is the artist of the manga adaptation and not the writer of the original light novel.
(Also both the ln-writer and the manga-artist are female.)
- Comment on Bethesda Game Studios workers have unionized 6 months ago:
I didn’t say that.
I expect it to be about as awful as Starfield. However, unlike Starfield (which didn’t sell horrendously by any source I can find, just not great) it has incredible brand recognition behind it. I have no doubts it will sell based on that alone as long as it looks like Skyrim 2 at first glance.
- Comment on Bethesda Game Studios workers have unionized 6 months ago:
5.5 years? No way they’ll shut down this quickly. The next Elder Scrolls alone will carry them into 2030. (As much as I would enjoy you being right though…)
- Comment on Top 30 Artificial intelligence terms everyone should know 6 months ago:
Have you tried reading it? It’s written so poorly that I really hope no human was involved in this and it’s just AI generated garbage.
- Comment on Front and Backflipping 6 months ago:
My bad, I wasn’t precise enough with what I wanted to say. Of course you can confirm (with astronomically high likelihood) that a screenshot of AI Overview is genuine if you get the same result with the same prompt.
What you can’t really do is prove the negative. If someone gets an output then replicating their prompt won’t necessarily give you the same output, for a multitude of reasons. e.g. it might take all other things Google knows about you into account, Google might have tweaked something in the last few minutes, the stochasticity of the model is leading to a different output, etc.
Also funny you bring up image generation, where this actually works too in some cases. For example they used the same prompt with multiple different seeds and if there’s a cluster of very similar output images, you can surmise that an image looking very close to that was in the training set.
- Comment on Front and Backflipping 6 months ago:
Assuming AI Overview does not cache results, they would be generated at search-time for each user and “search-event” independently. Even recreating the same prompt would not guarantee a similar AI Overview, so there’s no way to confirm.
- Comment on Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes 6 months ago:
Assuming we shrink all spacial dimensions equally: With Z, the diagonal will also shrink so that the two horizontal lines would be closer together and then you could not fit them into the original horizontal lines anymore. Only once you shrink the Z far enough that it would fit within the line-width could you fit it into itself again. X I and L all work at any arbitrary amount of shrinking though.
- Comment on Automation 7 months ago:
So is the example with the dogs/wolves and the example in the OP.
As to how hard to resolve, the dog/wolves one might be quite difficult, but for the example in the OP, it wouldn’t be hard to feed in all images (during training) with randomly chosen backgrounds to remove the model’s ability to draw any conclusions based on background.
However this would probably unearth the next issue. The one where the human graders, who were probably used to create the original training dataset, have their own biases based on race, gender, appearance, etc. This doesn’t even necessarily mean that they were racist/sexist/etc, just that they struggle to detect certain emotions in certain groups of people. The model would then replicate those issues.
- Comment on Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser 7 months ago:
I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
Can that image viewer extract text so that a user could easily copy/paste it? I think if whatever pdf I was opening didn’t allow me to do that I would be really frustrated.
- 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' 8 months 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' 8 months 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 9 months ago:
If House has taught me anything, it’s D, but then E.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 10 months 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 10 months 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? 10 months ago:
Because it’s a cat.
- Comment on Steam :: Introducing Steam Families 10 months 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 10 months 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 10 months 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 10 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 11 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? 11 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.