I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.
But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.
He is a human trafficking serial rapist. End of story. Anything else is just spewing his own propaganda to legitimize the very real hurt he does to the world.
I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.
But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.
Because if people aren't looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can't look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.
And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an "effective" way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.
How often do images "not load" when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.
Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive...).
And it is why the various "youtube alternatives" like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don't have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.
And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.
Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren't a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren't running a charity (well... some actually ARE but that is a different mess).
Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.
That said, I do agree that it is a generational "problem". Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.
But... I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically "Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings".
And... I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about... anything all while dicking over "the little guys". Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren't getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.
A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.
If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people's internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.
As someone who very much "grew up" on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.
But also... I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends', it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with "weird vibes". Same with the people who went out of their way to "keep women out" by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.
But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents' basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.
And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying "Fuck all y'all" and shutting it down overnight.
And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.
But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and... it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.
And... going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no "small" communities that aren't private and spun out of larger ones.
So... I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren't all that "good". And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.
Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.
And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?
I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin' A.
So I finally broke down and made a very poor purchasing decision and ordered an e-ink writer to be a notepad/e-reader hybrid. Partially so that it is less of a hassle to read books I got from kickstarters and the like while still using the kindle app for the disturbing amounts of money I throw at Amazon....
It was inevitable (and is arguably the "logical" extension of sponsor segments).
As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.
On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads...
Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to "be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder" as a result.
I very much think smartphones do not belong in the classroom.
That said, I also very much think that assault rifles don't belong in schools. And until we can prevent that, we can't really take away the only way for parents to figure out if their kid is dead or just traumatized.
Are increasingly unavailable on basically any real phone plan and effectively require a dedicated purchase. Rather than giving the kid yoru old motorola you kept in the drawer.
Also, as 9-11 and other "holy shit" moments taught us, having a wide range of ways to communicate with people when EVERYONE is trying to call or even text people (SMS is a best effort protocol for a reason) is important.
Again, if we actually care about the children? Stop fucking shooting them to death. Maybe then we can figure out why they don't need to be constantly connected to everyone they know.
Obviously, these shootings happen, but the solution is not to arm each student with a cell phone, just as it sure as hell isn’t to arm each teacher with a firearm.
You're right. The solution is fucking gun control. Not isolating those kids out of fear that they might give the cops misinformation and there won't e a safe space to play flappy bird while children are being executed.
So how about you shut the fuck up about how it is more important to isolate the kids than to protect them? Hmm?
Got it. Fuck the "little derps". Their blood makes great gun lube, huh?
ANYTHING to prevent people from actually approaching the real problem of the mass availability of firearms that puts children in a situation where they need to be able to say goodbye to their parents before they are sacrificed to the altar of the AR-15.
Light phones also cost 300-800 (!?!?!) USD and aren't carried by phone providers who give people "a free upgrade" every few years.
Yes, there are the parents who buy their toddler a flagship iphone. The vast majority are just taking the phone they were totally going to recycle that has been living in the junk drawer for years and give it to their kid for emergencies and fortnite.
The vast majority of phone providers (in the US at least, which is where this is pertinent) have heavily subsidized phones if you agree to an N-month contract. And while the price of that can come out worse, it is also a lot easier for underprivileged people to spend an extra few bucks a month for two years than to set aside that money to make the couple hundred dollar purchase (for better or for worse).
And if you are willing to actually talk to a CSR you can often get the price to pay off that phone completely negated. Which IS good if that phone plan is good for you.
To my knowledge, Light does not partner with any of the major carriers so that is not an option. So you are buying those phones, regardless.
The Internet loves to build this strawman of a first grader who has the latest top end iphone. And... some of those do exist. But mostly it is parents getting a phone either "for free" or actually for free because they agree to not leave Verizon or whatever for 2 years and giving the old one to their kid.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.
And... Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.
A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not "fully voiced" which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can't rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is "as good as Baldurs Gate" in early access? it is a "failure". So there isn't going to be a "hey, let's see if this is still cool in four years" project.
My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, "Waa, it isn't Skyrim!!!") and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.
It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
GOOD voice acting
Significant "choice" and branching narratives
Plenty of content that players will "never" see.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were "losing out" a bit to support the VO. Because... we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
Proton I generally trust because they have made it abundantly clear just what they will give over to authorities in the event of a court order. I would rather it be less but I also prefer that over "We have your back and will fight the CIA if need be" nonsense.
That said: Bitwarden is still the kind of this. And the big issue with a keepass you sync (which I used to do) is that you can't really use that with yubikey style devices because it will get out of sync as far as the authentication codes go.
If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).
Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.
But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.
A Tesla owner's dream of taking his new Cybetruck for a spin turned into a nightmare. He landed in the emergency room with blood spurting from a wrist wound before even getting behind the wheel.
Hood ornaments were mostly an artifact of how radiators used to be filled. There was SOME discussion of whether they are more dangerous to a pedestrian but most were flimsy to the point that the corpse rolling up on your hood would snap it off rather than get impaled like a Spindlebeast is running a train on them.
Mostly... it was a mix of people wanting "sleek" cars coupled with those inevitably getting broken off and stolen.
People were skeptical of toilet water but after Not Sure et al demonstrated that it was effective, they embraced it.
We have people who were skeptical of... modern medicine. And when vaccinations were demonstrated to be effective they... shoved horse medicine up their asses and attacked medical workers.
The same reason most of NATO have been very hesitant and the like:
Supporting a defensive war is one thing. Supporting an offensive war, against a nuclear power that threatens to nuke people on days ending in 'y', is another. And while it is incredibly unlikely that putin would actually attack anyone (since they can't even handle a Ukraine with one arm tied behind its back), it will still lead to political turmoil as people insist the world is about to end.
But now? This is a REAL good way to distract people from the other, much less defensive, war that we are financing.
That is the same kind of mess that made the no fly zone so untenable.
But to the eyes of a public who are not sure if they are more afraid of World War 3 or Iraq War 3? Having that line of "We are only helping Ukraine to defend themselves, not to escalate this war" "works".
And if it sounds like we don't actually care about the Ukrainian people and just view them as a tool to keep Russia busy?
But this also really highlights an incredibly unexplored "setting" for Souls games (or even games as a whole): Battlefields.
To my knowledge, only Nioh 1 (and to a much lesser extent 2) ever really approached that. The feeling of being one unstoppable murder beast of a guy sprinting from cover to cover as what feels like hordes of mooks with rifles unloading on you. Diving into a trench to try and limit the directions you can be attacked from. And storming into an officer's camp to assassinate them.
Instead, we always get there after the war (which will likely be the case here since the story stuff is almost always set "in the past" for ER) or we'll be off on our own and just hear a few rumbles in the distance.
Giant Lord or whatever TLG's old name was has some vibes of it where explosions happen until the boss fight starts. But it is still very much on the outskirts of a battle with just a fancy skybox.
So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot,...
So I have this silly idea/longterm project of wanting to run a server on renewables on my farm. And I would like to reuse the heat generated by the server, for example to heat a grow room, or simply my house. How much heat does a server produce, and where would you consider it best applied? Has anyone built such a thing?
At "best", your server is a resistive heater. Aka "a space heater". Except that your server also has hardware designed to convert power into negative temperature (you know... fans). So you are at a lower efficiency than the space heater in the corner.
Also? Computers aren't meant to run all that hot for all that long. Yes, the safe margin for hardware is a lot higher than people would think. But if you want this to make a meaningful difference you are going to be running REAL hot for extended periods of time. Because you don't need heating when it is warm outside. You need it when it is cold and you are already going to be fighting a low ambient temperature.
The reason this works for larger data centers and specialized installations is that they are designed with this in mind. You generally either have direct water cooling of the racks (plural) or you have "water cooling" of the server room itself. With the water then being recirculated amongst the radiators in the building itself. And... those are quite often borderline "scams" because they don't actually keep the building all that warm in the winter (as discovered during The Pandemic when the lack of body heat from human beings caused issues for a lot of hybrid office/data centers) and they mean more HVAC costs to keep the building cool during the summer.
Which gets to the other aspect. Are you going to change all your fan and cooling settings on a weekly (or even daily) basis? Because maybe you want to get right up to thermal throttling during the winter because the ambient temperature means that heat will "dissipate" fast. But during the summer or even a warm winter day? You are turning your server room into the kind of inferno that even Tom Cruise has someone else deal with.
Don't get me wrong. Having a chonky and inefficient PC is great for late night gaming in the winter when you should have gone to sleep hours ago and your zone is already set for the "nobody but the cat is in there" setting. But, even at the datacenter level, it is not a good replacement for HVAC. And, as a lot of us will attest: Summer is when you grab the Steam Deck or go downstairs and use the xbox.
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.
But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn't fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah...
Which... is kind of message boards. Reddit was "successful" because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different "cultures" and so forth.
That said: I can't help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media... ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can't get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said "Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let's actually make a good town hall site" and... we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more "Wait, what are you trying to say?" kind of comments.
And... I am not sure what "lemmy" can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the... terrorist threats. But unless "lemmy" can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit... it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won't be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.
I selfhost my own nextcloud for notes and documents that I would like on my phone but not via google.
It is not a google docs/gmail/whatever replacement. They've spent the past few years hardening it and pushing for all the hallmarks of enterprise first software (e.g. making it a complete fustercluck to not have a proper domain name) but you still have stability and performance issues and the occasional upgrade issue that fucks up everything
I would also point out that if you aren't selfhosting, what are you actually getting out of this? You are just spreading your data out to other companies who are often less transparent about how they monetize you.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do "efforts" that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream "their" games... because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the "logical" extension of that. And, arguably, it is a "good" one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn't going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team's name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of "The Champion! just went through... A Table!"*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators' rights and control what can and can't be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain't going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done "ethically"? I don't know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume "not in the slightest". But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people's lives aren't tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don't think those aren't already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I'll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are "in character" to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her "Rosa" voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can't be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn't ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn't just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to "own" that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn't end up in a competitor's game next week.
I know most people that were on reddit at the time are fully aware of this and won't be surprised but don't dismiss the findings out of hand. It's important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
To add on to the people pointing out that science is data:
Yes, it is incredibly obvious that the turmp fanclub subreddit would radicalize people to become white nationalists.
What is not obvious is that this is happening everywhere. And, if you get a hold of one of the "leaked" white supremacist recruiting guides from the 80s and 90s, that is by design.
South Park Libertarians and all but it really is telling how many people, to this day, insist that the f-slur for gay people is really "Oh, we took that back. it means obnoxious motorcycle drivers". Let alone statements like "har har, you are so butthurt" that (regardless of what urban dictionary says) are on the same level as "ha ha, you are gay"
We see it every day. And it makes communities hostile. And if you call it out, you get driven out. Which means there are fewer people around to say "... what the fuck? How can we think this is acceptable?". And then someone whose entire vocabulary is "lolzors go woke go broke pepe pepe" gets rightfully made fun of elsewhere and now they are a victim and all those "for the lolz" become their identity.
We already have those near constantly. And we still keep asking queries.
People assume that LLMs need to be ready to replace a principle engineer or a doctor or lawyer with decades of experience.
This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know... they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly. An LLM making up some functions because they saw it in stack overflow but never tested is not at all different than a hotshot intern who copied some code from stack overflow and never tested it.
Where did I say "Fuck 'em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!"?
But yes, there is a massive labor issue coming. That is why I am such a proponent of Universal Basic Income because there are not going to be enough jobs out there.
But as for training up the interns: Back in the day, do you know what "interns" did? And by "interns" I mean women because sexism but roll with me. Printing out and sorting punch cards. Compilers and general technical advances got rid of those jobs and pushed up where the "charlie work" goes.
These days? There are good internships/junior positions and bad ones. A good one actually teaches skills and encourages the worker to contribute. A bad one has them do the mindless grunt work that nobody else wants to. LLMs get rid of the latter.
And... I actually think that is good for the overall health of workers, if not the number (again, UBI). Because if someone can't be trusted to write meaningful code without copying it off the internet and not even updating variable names? I don't want to work with them. I spend too much of my workday babysitting those morons who are just here there to get some work experience so they can con their way into a different role and be someone else's problem.
And experience will be gained the way it is increasingly being gained. Working on (generally open source) projects and interviewing for competitive internships where the idea is to take relatively low cost workers and have them work on a low ROI task that is actually interesting. It is better for the intern because they learn actual development and collaboration skills. And it is better for the staff because it is a way to let people work on the stuff they actually want to do without the massive investment of a few hundred hours of a Senior Engineer's time.
And... there will be a lot fewer of those roles. Just like there were a lot fewer roles for artists as animation tools stopped requiring every single cell of animation to be hand drawn. And that is why we need to decouple life from work through UBI.
But also? If we have less internships that consist of "okay. good job. thanks for that. Next time can you at least try and compile your code? or pay attention to the squiggly red lines in your IDE? or listen to the person telling you that is wrong?"? Then we have better workers and better junior developers who can actually do more meaningful work. And we'll actually need to update the interviewing system to not just be "did you memorize this book of questions from Amazon?" and we'll have fewer "hot hires" who surprise everyone by being able to breath unassisted but have a very high salary because they worked for facebook.
Because, and here is the thing: LLMs are already as good, if not better than, an intern or junior engineer. And the companies that spend money on training up interns aren't going to be rewarded. Under capitalism, there is no reason to "take one for the team" so that your competition can benefit.
Honestly? I think search engines are actually the best use for LLMs. We just need them to be "explainable" and actually cite things.
Even going back to the AOL days, Ask Jeeves was awesome and a lot of us STILL write our google queries in question form when we aren't looking for a specific factoid. And LLMs are awesome for parsing those semi-rambling queries like "I am thinking of a book. It was maybe in the early 00s? It was about a former fighter pilot turned ship captain leading the first FTL expedition and he found aliens and it ended with him and humanity fighting off an alien invasion on Earth" and can build on queries to drill down until you have the answer (Evan Currie's Odyssey One, by the way).
Combine that with citations of what page(s) the information was pulled from and you have a PERFECT search engine.
This would have been probably early last year? Had to look up how to do something in fortran (because fortran) and the answer was very much in the voice of that one dude on the Intel forums who has been answering every single question for decades(?) at this point. Which means it also refused to do anything with features newer than 1992 and was worthless.
Tried again while chatting with an old work buddy a few months back and it looks like they updated to acknowledging f99 and f03 exist. So assume that was all stack overflow.
Actually, nvidia recently announced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Basically the idea is that you take an "off the shelf" LLM and then feed your local instance sensitive corporate data. It can then use that information in its responses.
So you really are "teaching" it every time you do a code review of the AI's merge request and say "Well.. that function doesn't exist" or "you didn't use useful variable names" and so forth. Which... is a lot more than I can say about a lot of even senior or principle engineers I have worked with over the years who are very much making mistakes that would get an intern assigned to sorting crayons.
Which, again, gets back to the idea of having less busywork. Less grunt work. Less charlie work. Instead, focus on developers who can actually contribute to a team and design meetings.
And the model I learned early in my career that I bring to every firm is to have interns be a reward for talented engineers and not a punishment for people who weren't paying attention in Nose Goes. Teaching a kid to write a bunch of utility functions does nothing they didn't learn (or not learn) in undergrad but it is a necessary evil... that an AI can do.
Instead, the people who are good at their jobs and contributing to the overall product? They probably have ideas they want to work on but don't have the cycles to flesh out. That is where interns come into play. They work with those devs and other staff and learn what it means to actually be part of a team. They get to work on really cool projects and their mentors get to ALSO work on really cool projects but maybe focus more on the REALLY interesting parts and less on the specific implementation.
And result is that your interns are now actually developers who are worth a damn.
Also: One of the most important things to teach a kid is that they owe the company nothing. If they aren't getting the raise they feel they deserve then they need to be updating their linkedin and interviewing elsewhere. That is good for the worker. And that also means that the companies that spend a lot of money training up grunts? They will lose them to the companies who are desperate for people who can lead projects and contribute to designs but haven't been wasting money on writing unit tests.
I know we need to shit on China every chance we get but...
That is perfectly normal and it is clear that the team that let this article through has never been out to Yosemite or any crowded wall. I prefer to stick to the less crowded routes (and am not huge on big walling) but I've definitely run into a few multipitches where my partner and I kind of just hang out at the anchor waiting for the people ahead of us to get far enough that we can go again. And when they are taking ages to progress on a 5.9... we tend to wait until they are almost at the next set of anchors before even starting. I think our record was two hours because we were pretty certain we would have to rescue the idiots in front of us... and we did. Was basically wait until their leader was panicking and then jug up to get them sorted and then have them rappel back down with us because we didn't feel like having to walk around their splatted corpses when we got down.
Also, based on the picture, this is a via ferrata route and they were part of a tourism group. For those not familiar, those routes aren't "real" rock climbing as they involve staying constantly clipped in to fixed metal cables with a personal anchor and often involve using outright ladders. They (allegedly?) go back to World War 1 and 2 when troops would need to traverse mountains to get to the enemy. They are REALLY fun and I encourage them to people doing the tourism thing but you also almost inevitably get stuck behind someone because you probably don't have the skills to clip past them to keep moving.
But this isn't someone who is in direct on a single cam or even someone clipped in at an anchor. It is basically the equivalent of leaning against a railing on the side of the road.
Israel and Hamas both never cared about the Palestinians. Hamas leadership continue to kick back and relax by the pool in Other Country.
But there are likely still troops on the ground. As well as people who were radicalized by seeing their entire family get wiped out in a bombing because a pesky journalist was walking by.
And... that is the real problem. Because we (The West) have seen what happens when you just nope out of a conflict in this region. you get islamic state powers taking over that are totally not directly allied with iran. And that causes massive issues for everyone down the line.
Because Hamas are not the heroic freedom fighters that internet people have decided they must be.
They are a terrorist organization who basically gained de facto political and military control of the Palestinian people (with just a bit of help from the Israeli government...). In large part because the PLO were (allegedly) starting to get too much traction and it is a lot easier to fight against bloodthirsty savages.
So yes, they do have some boots on the ground to organize the radicalized victims of both sides and point them at Israel/the IDF. But the actual leadership are kicking back and relaxing while making big political statements about the kind of ceasefire they would accept. Just like any other politicians.
Organizations like the United States where Dubyah (of all people) was directing a war against The Enemies of America on the other side of the planet? Or putin and his generals and their attempted genocide in Ukraine?
This is bog standard. Do you think bin laden was personally visiting every single al qaeda fighter on the regular? Do you think isis/isil leadership are doing the same? No. They basically have the equivalent of NCOs and junior officers leading terror cells that do the actual work while they live in luxury.
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was "we have Diablo at home" but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of "how to do business". Like Digital Extremes, they are a "legacy" studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC... and was still a mess after). It was mostly "lucking out" and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And... Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That's right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from "typical" and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
And this is WHY the smaller studios are on the chopping block and not core Bethesda.
Because smaller games that are incredibly solid don't matter. What matters are AAA tentpoles. And Tango's A/AA games were "lukewarm" at best. They had an AMAZING B/A game but fuck 'em. Same with Arkane Austin
And... probably same with Obsidian this fall (?) when their Elder Pillars game comes out and people decide it isn't Skyrim so it is bad. Ignore that Pentiment was amazing or their long legacy as one of the best studios in CRPGs. People will just talk doom and gloom because it isn't The Last Of Us.
Which will lead to MS continuing to try to be Sony rather than take advantage of the studios they actually have. And people will continue to talk about how they can't compete with Sony because they don't have a Horizon Zero Dawn.
I've been saying it ever since MS started buying every studio they could. They have an AMAZING roster and can basically dominate the market by "flooding" it with high production value "indie" games. But... people want their AAA tentpoles.
"Soundblaster" was such an 80s/90s name for a computer part. ( lemmy.world )
Elon Musk has another secret child with exec at his brain implant company ( www.theverge.com )
Used VPN for cheaper YouTube Premium? Congrats, your subscription has been canceled ( www.androidauthority.com )
Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. ( www.xataka.com )
Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork ( privacy.thenexus.today )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11571975...
Selfhosted alternatives to Goodreads?
So I finally broke down and made a very poor purchasing decision and ordered an e-ink writer to be a notepad/e-reader hybrid. Partially so that it is less of a hassle to read books I got from kickstarters and the like while still using the kindle app for the disturbing amounts of money I throw at Amazon....
SponsorBlock (and DeArrow): "YouTube is currently experimenting with server-si…" - Fosstodon ( fosstodon.org )
YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream....
New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools ( www.theguardian.com )
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed ( www.youtube.com )
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Proton Pass Arrives on Mac and Linux ( www.howtogeek.com )
Advice for moving my files (or if I should even bother)
Hey Folks,...
Delivery Goes Wrong: New Cybertruck Slices Owner's Wrist During Inspection ( www.ibtimes.co.uk )
A Tesla owner's dream of taking his new Cybetruck for a spin turned into a nightmare. He landed in the emergency room with blood spurting from a wrist wound before even getting behind the wheel.
New Doomsday Clock just dropped ( lemmy.world )
The US is thinking about letting Ukraine use its weapons to strike Russia, even if it enrages Putin: report ( www.businessinsider.com )
US officials are considering letting Ukraine strike Russia with US weapons, The New York Times reports....
ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree | Story Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
An increase in bad seeds on Bit Torrent?
So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot,...
Server as heating device - how do I do this?
So I have this silly idea/longterm project of wanting to run a server on renewables on my farm. And I would like to reuse the heat generated by the server, for example to heat a grow room, or simply my house. How much heat does a server produce, and where would you consider it best applied? Has anyone built such a thing?
Is Lemmy a good alternative?
New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?...
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' ( www.pcgamer.com )
r/The_Donald helped radicalize users into far-right identities and discourse – Active users on r/The_Donald increasingly used white nationalist vocabularies in their comments within three months. ( journals.sagepub.com )
I know most people that were on reddit at the time are fully aware of this and won't be surprised but don't dismiss the findings out of hand. It's important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT ( www.tomshardware.com )
Chinese climbers stuck on cliff for more than an hour due to overcrowding ( www.cnn.com )
Revealed: UK military has flown 200 spy missions over Gaza in support of Israel ( www.declassifieduk.org )
UK military has flown 200 spy missions over Gaza in support of Israel...
Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda ( www.ign.com )
Affected devs:...