Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Trash bags are one product that you buy just to throw away 1 day ago:
Food packaging also really irks me. Technically, it has a use beyond being thrown away, but there’s just so much of it. You can readily find products in the shops that should be advertised as “plastic trash” and they just stuck a bit of food inside to keep it in shape…
- Comment on Has the scientific community ever reconciled with the fact global warming is going to happen and there is no stopping it? 4 days ago:
As others said, it’s generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they’re losing hope.
If that’s the kind of reconciling you’re talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it’s something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.The problem is that you don’t want to give the public the impression that it’s hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don’t put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn’t become worse sooner.Climate change already affects our lives. We really don’t want it to become worse sooner.
- Comment on Choose your fighter 4 days ago:
- Comment on If you ask Yoshi-P, kids don't care about Final Fantasy anymore because they're taking too long to come out 5 days ago:
I feel like the series presents itself as a bit too serious for the kids, too. Especially FF16 with its Game of Thrones vibes pandered to an adult audience. It just doesn’t look like the kind of simple fun that kids tend to enjoy.
- Comment on NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus 1 week ago:
Dungeon Lawl Stone Soup 🙃
- Comment on NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus 1 week ago:
I think, the problem is that Nvidia has two customer groups. Those that buy their products and those that buy their stock options. Nvidia can produce garbage that completely misses the point of real-world usage, so long as they can convince investors that other investors will join the pyramid scheme. And for that, it just has to look like impressive tech, not actually good.
- Comment on Developers Were Left in the Dark About DLSS 5 1 week ago:
Will it smooth out a wall that is supposed to look like it can be destroyed?
Yeah, at the very least, it will throw a whole bunch of details into the general area, which will make it harder to tell what’s interactable.
We’ve had photorealistic games before, by taking literal photographs and using those as point-and-click levels. You practically don’t see that anymore these days, because not being able to tell what’s interactable was a major weakness.
Doesn’t mean that DLSS 5 or the like will strictly have the same problem, but it certainly feels like these companies are trying to throw in photorealism again, with no regards for the cost.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
I mean, yeah, but you’re kind of saying what the others here were saying, too, in that when something fits the anywhere close to the “old hag” category, that the probabilities will shove it entirely towards “old hag”.
That it’s somewhat fitting for this character, I would expect to be coincidence. Like, maybe they did actually give the image generator somewhat of a system prompt for this demo, that it should make her look extra wrinkly.
But yeah, shoving all depictions of women either towards young model or old hag is quite emblematic of these image generators, so personally, I don’t think, it was even necessary… - Comment on Nvidia's DLSS 5 Is a Slap in the Face to the Art of Video Game Design 1 week ago:
Don’t think the playable characters are supposed to be creepy, but yeah, a yassified zombie would probably fit right in. 😅
- Comment on Nvidia's DLSS 5 Is a Slap in the Face to the Art of Video Game Design 1 week ago:
Never cared for realism in games to begin with, so don’t particularly care to comment on how it looks, but I’ve been thinking that I genuinely find it creepy.
Not just Uncanny Valley material, but also having these faces stare at you, always fully lit, it just gives me the creeps, kind of like a panopticon situation.
I don’t fucking know, if that’s my own trauma playing into that, where for the longest time, people looking at me generally meant they’re about to bully me.But either way, I’m about to head to bed and genuinely feel like there’s a 20% chance I’ll have a mild nightmare from that shit.
This whole AI craze has been a wild ride of all kinds of nightmare fuel, from depictions with missing/additional limbs to the weirdest warping of objects+limbs in those fucking generated videos. And the worst part is that some folks seem to just not see it or not want to see it, so they keep using the nightmare generators. - Comment on Abandoned FOSS projects 1 week ago:
Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval.
Just to say, though, I feel like 99% of the software we deploy is open-source for that exact reason. Projects generally start out small, where you try to evaluate some concept. You’re not gonna spend months to go through the purchase process of some proprietary tool, if you can help it…
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
Yeah, there’s a bias in these image generator AIs, because model photographs are:
- easy to get in bulk and in relatively high resolution etc.,
- relatively uniform (even lighting, facial symmetry etc.), meaning they reinforce existing patterns in the training data, and
- relatively easy to generate good-looking results with them, for obvious reasons, so more likely to be optimized towards by anyone involved in the training.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
I think, why people perceive that right image as older is because the wrinkles carve much deeper. Yeah, same number of wrinkles, but it looks like they got chiseled down by 20 additional years…
- Comment on SuperTux 0.7.0 1 week ago:
Damn, did not know folks were still working on that. Really cool to see an update!
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, management wants us to use AI at $DAYJOB and one of the strategies we’ve considered for lessening its negative impact on productivity, is to always put generated code into an entirely separate commit.
Because it will guess design decisions at random while generating, and you want to know afterwards whether a design decision was made by the randomizer or by something with intelligence. Much like you want to know whether a design decision was made by the senior (then you should think twice about overriding this decision) or by the intern that knows none of the project context.
We haven’t actually started doing these separate commits, because it’s cumbersome in other ways, but yeah, deliberately obfuscating whether the randomizer was involved, that robs you of that information even more.
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s my biggest worry. I always have to hold colleagues to the basics of programming standards as soon as they start using AI for a task, since it is easier to generate a second implementation of something we already have in the codebase, rather than extending the existing implementation.
But that was pretty much always true. We still did not slap another implementation onto the side, because it’s horrible for maintenance, as you now need to always adjust two (or more) implementations when requirements change.
And it’s horrible for debugging problems, because parts of the codebase will then behave subtly different from other parts. This also means usability is worse, as users expect consistency.And the worst part is that they don’t even have an answer to those concerns. They know that it’s going to bite us into the ass in the near future. They’re on a sugar high, because adding features is quick, while looking away from the codebase getting incredibly fat just as quickly.
And when it comes to actually maintaining that generated code, they’ll be the hardest to motivate, because that isn’t as fun as just slapping a feature onto the side, nor do they feel responsible for the code, because they don’t know any better how it actually works. Nevermind that they’re also less sharp in general, because they’ve outsourced thinking.
- Comment on Finally, an optimal monitor configuration! 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah, I was kind of playing devil’s advocate. It is certainly also cursed in many ways…
- Comment on Finally, an optimal monitor configuration! 2 weeks ago:
Hmm, that is kind of cool, in that you can have text on all 4 sides and it’s still generally readable. Not really possible for vertical panels…
- Comment on Sftp client gor android? 2 weeks ago:
I just saw this on F-Droid, will need to test it, but sounds like it could be really good: f-droid.org/packages/lu.knaff.alain.saf_sftp
I’m hoping, it works like mounting or FUSE on proper Linux, where you can just use normal applications to transparently access network files. Then you’d be able to use any old file manager app to actually work with the files…
- Comment on Sftp client gor android? 2 weeks ago:
You probably just misread, but just to note that SFTP is different from SMB. They’re similar in purpose, but basically competing protocols…
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
its a corp it cant just make claims and not follow on them
I don’t see why you think that. They can’t wrongly advertise a product, but this is far away from product advertisement.
Personally, I assume that there will be some flow, because you strictly need that for app development, but that they will try to make that as painful as possible for non-development use, because it eliminates their competition.
Ultimately, this should even fall under anti-competition laws, but people have no trust in that actually being enforce, at the very least not in a timely manner before the competition is dead. The only instrument we have is shitstorms, so as long as there is any doubt, it is safer to keep the shitstorm brewing.
- Comment on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse (blogpost) 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I always found it really valuable to know a person on the other side. Obviously, they’re not immune to propaganda either, but even just seeing the differences in propaganda can teach you a lot, both about which parts may be untrue, but also how propaganda works.
For example, I once saw a guy on Mastodon, who posted a populist Indian news article and expressed his agreement. The article was about some policy the EU was discussing, following Putins attack on the Ukraine, which would’ve affected India.
That policy was controversial here in the EU. I don’t remember what policy it was, but I didn’t feel good about it, my country (Germany) didn’t support it, but the EU as a whole did agree to it.Meanwhile, that article framed it as “Europe is doing a bad thing” and “the West is blah”.
Like, man, I doubt, I would agree with my neighbor about this policy, but somehow I’m being generalized into an amorphous blob, the size of half the fucking planet.
It dehumanizes. It makes it seem like we’re not open for discussion, despite us internally leading extremely heated discussions.But of course, we do the exact fucking same. We talk about India collectively all the time, even though it is much larger than the EU, with 1.4 billion different opinions. You don’t hear “the East” as often these days, but you do hear “Asia”, which is effectively just as meaningless of a word.
And yeah, just seeing the inverse happen to me, made it instantly clear why this is shit, which I would not have even thought about, if I only ever read our news outlets.
- Comment on Movim: Building a Decentralized Social Network on XMPP 3 weeks ago:
Oh man, seeing folks suggest it as a Discord alternative always had me uninterested, because I don’t even use Discord and it just seemed like yet-another-standard.
Now I’m reading this really technical title for a talk which mentions XMPP and I’m instantly sold.Well, to be honest, “Movim” also sounded like a VC-funded startup. Looks like it’s a bus-factor-of-1 open-source project instead, which I have significantly more trust in.
- Comment on It's literally science 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, extremely cheesy way of putting it: The best work position is the next one.
I.e. don’t stay in one position for a long time, but rather switch it up regularly.
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 4 weeks ago:
I’m always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don’t need them to exist to explain what’s happening around me.
Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don’t have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I’m constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they’ll make noises quite naturally.
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 4 weeks ago:
Their point is that one could come up with a billion hypotheticals for what might theoretically exist, because we cannot disprove it. If we spent as much time humming and hawing whether each one actually does exist as we do for ghosts, souls, gods, Big Foot etc., then you won’t be doing anything else in life.
That’s why it’s a typical position to just say that they don’t exist until proven otherwise.Or in the more general sense, this is Occam’s Razor: If there’s multiple possible explanations for something, then one should assume the simplest explanation until proven otherwise.
And if you hear a door slamming shut in your house, then wind is a much simpler explanation than ghosts. - Comment on Do smoke detectors have little speakers inside them? If yes, would it be possible to hack them to play a little jingle? 4 weeks ago:
I would guess that the units used in smoke alarms and microwaves generally have integrated drivers that only operate at a single frequency.
Yeah, you could more easily create a rhythm than a full melody. If you get a few devices, which beep at different frequencies each, you could do a lot more by having them beep in succession and in intervals.
Of course, this requires that they’re roughly in tune, which may not be the case at all. 🥴
- Comment on Xbox’s leadership shift proves it: the gamer era is over, AI runs the show now 4 weeks ago:
To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.
- Comment on Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. release 28 "Boiorix" is live 4 weeks ago:
Glasses for correcting far-sightedness do just use a convex lens like in a magnifying glass, so …yes?
- Comment on Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. release 28 "Boiorix" is live 4 weeks ago:
Hmm, there might be a more proper solution, but picking a lower resolution would probably make things bigger…