brucethemoose
@brucethemoose@lemmy.world
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 3 minutes ago:
Yeah, this is ridiculous. This doesn’t mean they’re enforcing a CoPilot quota or vibe coding the game, it could be simple autocompletion or (say) a component that makes the mocap pipeline easier.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 hour ago:
Well again, it depends.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something useful, but get immense, unwarranted backlash for it because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML.
AI is not bad. Tech Bros, and the virus they spread among executives, is.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 2 hours ago:
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 2 hours ago:
That sounds excellent.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around their dev’s and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 2 hours ago:
This is a fair point. When I made the original comment, I didn’t realize their in house engine went so far back:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Engine
If they can shoehorn in something like KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their workflows, that’d be perfect.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 hours ago:
Depends how much they “redo”.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the low level legwork for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 4 hours ago:
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
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Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
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Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
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Starfield
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Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
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A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release.
Now let’s look at some others:
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KCD2: CryEngine
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Expedition 33: Unreal
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Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
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Stray: Unreal
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As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are a lot of things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
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- Comment on 23 hours ago:
I mean, some of both curve up to Spain.
They usually peter out before then, but this is placed before they fizzle out.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 day ago:
since it’s needed to store training data.
Again, I don’t buy this. The training data isn’t actually that big, nor is training done on such a huge scale so frequently.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 day ago:
Aside: WTF are they using SSDs for?
LLM inference in the cloud is basically only done in VRAM. Rarely stale K/V cache is cached in RAM, but new attention architectures should minimize that. Large scale training, contrary to popular belief, is a pretty rare event most data centers and businesses are incapable of.
…So what do they do with so much flash storage!? Is it literally just FOMO server buying?
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 day ago:
HDDs should be fine. No?
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 day ago:
Well. I just FOMO ordered a SATA SSD. Thanks, OP.
Mostly because I got 2x64Gb sticks, 2 months before they shot up to nearly 4X the price!
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Ehhhh, except that hurricanes sometimes curl up that way.
- Comment on How Wikipedia Got Captured: Leftist Editors & Foreign Influence On Internet's Biggest Source of Info 2 days ago:
…I try to give videos the benefit of the doubt. As shady as that cited website is, I do.
But a recommendation for Grokipedia is an article instant block for me.
- Comment on LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash 2 days ago:
Irony is LG has their own open weights AI: Exaone 32B.
It’s… not terrible. But they gave it a license from the depths of hell, that even forbids reverse engineering and basically claims all its outputs, so no one uses it.
huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/…/LICENSE
Anyway, I find it darkly hilarious that they choose to snub their own research and shove copilot in instead.
- Comment on Fun/interesting things to self host? 2 days ago:
- Comment on Fun/interesting things to self host? 3 days ago:
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For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.
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LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.
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- Comment on Fun/interesting things to self host? 3 days ago:
Watch out for Open Web UI. I’ve heard rumblings that it’s starting to enshittify.
- Comment on Fun/interesting things to self host? 3 days ago:
FYI, A1111 is obsolete. The diffusers or comfy-based backends are way faster, richer, less buggy and support newer things.
- Comment on The Fed just ‘Trump-proofed’ itself with a unanimous move to preempt a potential leadership shake-up 3 days ago:
Well, what’s your solution?
I don’t have one.
I’m a believer in “a la carte” regulation: some sectors should be wildly unrestricted. Some should be radically socialized. Some, in between. Some “hybridized.” The optimum thing just depends, and the key is finding experts to determine this and constantly testing that balance.
That makes me kind of technocratic, I guess.
For power infrastructure specifically, this seems like one of those “hybrid” situations? Power making startups should frictionlessly slot in; lest we miss experimental tech like, say, geothermal coal plant conversions. But at the same time, distribution and some larger projects really need government organization. And that’s kind of what we already have?
The problem seems to not be the amount of regulation, but the incentives. For instance, a lot of lobbying from Big Oil sneaks in. And there’s a lot of complacency with “good enough for now,” infrastructure, tying into the public’s lack of interest in solving long-term problems until they blow up in their face.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 3 days ago:
AFAIK there are also problems that Chinese companies have their own tool chain, and are releasing high level truly open source solutions for AI.
One interesting thing about the Chinese “AI Tigers” is the lack of Tech Bro evangelism.
They see their models as tools. Not black box magic oracles, not human replacements. And they structure/productize them and such.
But with AI you can use whatever tool is best value, and switch to the competition whenever you want.
Big Tech is making this really hard, though.
For one thing, there’s a lot of paranoia about using Chinese LLM weights. Which is totally bogus, but also understandably hard to explain.
And OpenAI and such are working overtime to lock customers in. See: iOS being ChatGPT-only; no “pick your own API.” Or Disney using Sora when they should really be rolling their own finetune.
- Comment on The Fed just ‘Trump-proofed’ itself with a unanimous move to preempt a potential leadership shake-up 3 days ago:
I agree, but also this is an iffy example because power grids are relatively regulated, albeit in a patchwork way.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure we’re doomed. Voters have repeatedly shown they will gratify immediate “feelings” over thinking in the longer term, and finally elected a regime that embodies that short term hype perfectly. And debt is a boring “long term” problem that doesn’t fit into a TikTok video.
- Comment on It will trickle down any second now 4 days ago:
And this graph is old, isn’t it? Their wealth is snowballing rapidly, hence Larry Ellison is at $250B now.
- Comment on 2025 Game Awards Results Discussion 4 days ago:
Wuthering Waves
I have nothing against beautiful animesque games, but… does it have to be rail-thin women in schoolgirl skirts and stockings?
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 4 days ago:
And functional! You’re looking at Dakar rally champions, and hatchbacks that were literally so fast on dirt, their league was banned.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 4 days ago:
BG3 turned out well, though?
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 5 days ago:
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 5 days ago:
It’s literally style. Those pickup lifts often ruin durability and off-road capability.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 5 days ago:
Yeah, please no Starfield. I love space opera, I love Oblivion and Fallout, but that was so boring.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 5 days ago:
Oh that’s awesome. Yeah, I see the rumors now:
videogameschronicle.com/…/the-mystery-behind-the-…
Selfishly, I hope their other half’a working on a sci fi game. Or a cyberpunk one?
Shadowrun? Gods, that IP would be perfect for Larian.
