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Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser ( www.windowslatest.com )

Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser....

Mirodir , (edited )

Remember the people who created malicious libraries that ChatGPT made up and suggested, in the hopes someone would blindly install them? You can do this a lot easier here. Check what websites this tends to hallucinate when typing "google" "youtube" "facebook" etc. and if any of them don't exist yet, register that address and host a phishing version of the corresponding site there.

Mirodir ,

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.

Mirodir ,

but we did damage a 5000-year-old monument

As far as I could find out, they used orange cornflour that will just wash off the next time it rains. The most amount of damage anyone could seriously bring up was that it could harm/displace the lichen on the henge.

That's not to say that I specifically condone the action, but it's a lot less bad than this article makes it sound. It's the same with the soup attack on one of van Gogh's painting, which had protective glass on it. So far all the JSO actions targeting cultural/historical things (at least the ones that made it to the big news) have been done in a way that makes them sound awful at first hearing, but intentionally did not actually damage the targeted cultural/historical thing.

I think the biases of the journalist/news outlet/etc. are somewhat exposed by which parts they focus on and which they downplay or omit entirely.

Mirodir , (edited )

I hope you’re right because this article says they used a spray can.

Which brings me back to the last point in my comment.

I also hope I'm right. The two times I looked into it (right after the attack and before writing my comment) both came up with that result. Also it seems that English Heritage came out today saying there was "No visible damage".

As I said, I'm not writing to defend the action, just pointing out that the OP article is, willfully or not, omitting certain aspects that could make JSO look a little bit better.

Edit: Formatting

Mirodir ,

Same. I had PayPal do an automated charge back because their system thought I was doing something fraudulent when I wasn't. Steam blocked my account.

Talking to support and re-buying said game did fix the issue for me.

Mirodir ,

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?

Mirodir ,

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.

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