tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on xAI publishes system prompts for Grok on GitHub, including telling Grok to be “extremely skeptical” and not to “blindly defer to mainstream authority or media” 1 hour ago:
LLMs have no more beliefs than a parrot does.
Less. A parrot can believe that it’s going to get a cracker.
You could make an AI that had that belief too, and an LLM might be a component of such a system, but our existing systems don’t do anything like that.
- Comment on Star Citizen’s new cash shop offerings provoked fresh pay-to-win and predatory monetization accusations | Massively Overpowered 4 hours ago:
I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.
Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.
The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.
But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.
Take Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”
Or Duke Nukem Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.
In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.
The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten player expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up (which in Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay).
But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that they knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.
- Comment on Star Citizen’s new cash shop offerings provoked fresh pay-to-win and predatory monetization accusations | Massively Overpowered 5 hours ago:
that has promised not one but two games that are not coming out.
Not just the games. Don’t forget all the feelies, the physical stuff they promised to manufacture.
This guy lost a court case trying to get a refund on his $5k seven years back:
vice.com/…/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-th…
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
That was back when only $200 million had been sunk into the development.
- Comment on Star Citizen’s new cash shop offerings provoked fresh pay-to-win and predatory monetization accusations | Massively Overpowered 5 hours ago:
Star Citizen is a scam.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly mismanaged development process that ran out of control.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
- Comment on Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back 2 days ago:
For any change, or no, why would you take out part of your existing company before confirming that the new thing works for the new role?
- Comment on Insight: Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters 2 days ago:
Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries
Ugh. This is going to become an increasing problem with electronic devices. It’s too damn easy to link systems to the Internet now without users knowing about it.
- Comment on Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants 2 days ago:
You could definitely sell those for more then $0. The batteries alone aren’t cheap.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 3 days ago:
AI voice synth is pretty solid, and I think that there are good uses for it — e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can’t do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc — but audiobooks don’t really play to those strengths. I’m a little skeptical that in 2025, it’s at the point where it’s a good drop-in replacement for audio books. What I’ve heard still doesn’t have emphasis on par with a human.
I don’t know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can’t imagine that it’s that expensive; I doubt that there’s all that much editing involved.
kagis
reddit.com/…/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/
So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:
$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I’m contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.
So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.
That’s actually lower than I expected, but point stands. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can’t be that hard to make that back.
- Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce 3 days ago:
The article says that they outperformed expectations, and that they’d decided that they didn’t need some layers of management. I don’t think that that’s intrinsically crazy; there are tech companies that have emphasized having a relatively flat structure, like Google.
- Comment on Nvidia reportedly raises GPU prices by 10-15% as manufacturing costs surge — tariffs and TSMC price hikes filter down to retailers 3 days ago:
Initially, stores tried to manage demand by blocking tax-free purchases, hoping to discourage tourists, mainly from China, from buying cards.
For many, it still makes financial sense to fly to Japan, pick up a 5090, and either resell it or use it for.
Chinese board partners have long been suspected of selling GPUs directly to cryptocurrency miners, bypassing the consumer market entirely. Now, with the AI boom, these companies are shifting even more stock to AI server manufacturers, who are willing to pay a premium. That leaves even fewer GPUs available for regular gamers, making GPU-buying tourism a surprisingly viable option.
It does kind of illustrate how hard it is to restrict the flow of goods.
- Comment on Airlines Are Selling Your Data to ICE 6 days ago:
I’d think that they already have that due to the TSA.
- Comment on New Reform UK Council Leader Calls Ukraine War 'A Distraction' 1 week ago:
“We are going to get the auditors to come in and take a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book and appoint some sort of DOGE…
Um.
- Comment on This game has 100 endings, and it's pushing the creators to the brink of bankruptcy | PC Gamer 1 week ago:
I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.
- Comment on Skype was shut down for good today 1 week ago:
There is no stronger bond of friendship than a common enemy.
— Frank Frankfort Moore
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.
I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)
For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:
-
Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.
-
Kenshi. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.
The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.
Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend Satisfactory if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. Mindustry is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are probably my open-source Android favorite games. Dyson Sphere Program has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.
There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:
-
Rise to Ruins is a colony sim does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.
-
Prison Architect. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.
-
Timberborn. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.
-
Gnomoria is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.
-
Klei, the guys who developed Oxygen Not Included, are currently working on a new 3D colony sim called Mind over Magic. I have not played it, but if you’re desperate for more ONI and like colony sims, might be worth investigating.
-
- Comment on New Meta XR glasses again tipped to land later this year – well ahead of Apple's rumored AR glasses with Apple Intelligence 1 week ago:
techradar.com/…/latest-meta-ar-smart-glasses-leak…
Bloomberg has shared reports from unnamed insiders that the device, codenamed Hypernova, is expected to launch later this year and will feature a monocular design, as in it will use only one display rather than a pair of screens – two details we’ve already heard.
This single panel would sit in the lower-right corner of the right lens, so it should allow you conveniently see information by looking down without obscuring your vision greatly.
It sounds like they’re kinda trying to compete with the watch market or something. Like, not trying to display something that you’d spend your whole time looking at, or even a virtual overlay, but just some status information that you can glance at without being super-obvious about it.
They also have cameras. I don’t totally get the use case. I guess maybe you could take a picture of someone’s face, upload the photo to Meta, do facial recognition on it, and then have personal details sent back to the screen at the bottom of your right eye.
- Comment on New Meta XR glasses again tipped to land later this year – well ahead of Apple's rumored AR glasses with Apple Intelligence 1 week ago:
Meta helped fuck over the global economy.
What?
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though.
Gotta like the JRPG genre for those hours to be fun, though.
I think the last major JRPG I played to completion was Final Fantasy V.
I’ll play the occasional CRPG, but JRPGs aren’t really my cup of tea.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
They’re all right, I suppose, but it wasn’t dissatisfaction with search results that caused me to want to use Kagi. Rather, that I wanted to use a search engine that has a sustainable business model that didn’t involve data-mining me or showing me ads.
If Google or whoever offered some kind of comparable commercial “private search” service with a no-log, no-data-mining, no-ad offering, I’d probably sit down and to compare the results, see what I think. I kind of wish Google would do that with YouTube, but alas, they don’t…
Kagi does have a feature where they will let you search the complete Threadiverse that I make use of, since I spend a lot of time here; there isn’t really a fantastic way to accomplish this on Google or another search engine that I’m aware of. They call that their “Fediverse Forums” search lens; that’s probably the Kagi-specific feature that I get the most use out of.
They have other features, like fiddling with the priorities of sites and stuff like that, but I don’t really use that stuff. They do let you customize the output and stuff. You can set up search aliases and stuff, but I can do most of that browser-side in Firefox.
They have the ability to run a variety of LLM models on their hardware, provide that as a service. I have the hardware to run those on my own hardware and have the software set up to do so, so I don’t use that functionality. If I didn’t, I’d probably find some commercial service like them that had a no-log, no-data-mining policy, as it’s more economical to share hardware that one is only using 1% of the time or whatever.
I dunno. They have some sort of free trial thing, if you want to see what their search results are like.
- Comment on Can local LLMs be as useful and insightful as those widely available? 1 week ago:
I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.
I mean, you can train a model that’s domain-specific that some commercial provider doesn’t have a proprietary model to address. A model can only store so much information, and you can choose to weight that information towards training on what’s important to you. Or providers may just not offer a model in the field that you want to deal with at all.
But I don’t think that, for random individual user who just wants a general-purpose chatbot, he’s going to get better performance out of something self-hosted. Probably it’ll cost more for the hardware, since the hardware isn’t likely to be saturated and probably will be shared.
I think that the top reason for wanting to run an LLM model locally is the one you ruled out: privacy. You aren’t leaking information to someone’s computers.
Some other possible benefits:
-
Because you can guarantee access to the computational hardware. If my Internet connection goes down, neither does whatever I’m doing with the LLM.
-
Latency isn’t a factor, either from the network or shared computational systems. Right now, I don’t have anything that has much by way of real-time constraints, but I’m confident that applications will exist.
-
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I’m gonna bet that you’re going to get a much-more-economical return there by powdering whatever iron is used in building that thing and then dumping said iron powder into the ocean at an appropriate point.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
You can bioengineer algae to do pretty much anything.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
They are psychologically calming for people as well.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides
Dendrocnide moroides, commonly known in Australia as the stinging tree, stinging bush, or gympie-gympie, is a plant in the nettle family Urticaceae found in rainforest areas of Malesia and Australia.[3] It is notorious for its extremely painful and long-lasting sting.
Depends on the tree.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Let’s tie him up and sneeze on him.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
As I recall, at least under US law, you can’t copyright genetically-engineered life, just get a twenty year biological patent. So I don’t think that FOSS status would be directly germane other than maybe in how some such licenses might deal with patent licensing.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
and Terraria are all close to 500h as well.
If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour
My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 1 week ago:
Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:
-
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, though that’s going back a few years.
Some others with a fair bit of playtime:
-
Steel Division II (really primarily a multiplayer game, but I only play single-player)
-
Elite: Dangerous. Though I don’t remember how I accumulated that many hours. Wasn’t super-impressed with the game, and would have sworn that I’d have more time in X3 (though maybe that gets split across the DLC or something).
-
Carrier Command 2 (Primarily intended to be played multiplayer, but I play single-player)