It’s kinda amazing how Unity shot themselves in the chest with this one. No, I don’t mean foot, they are now actively bleeding from the torso.
No Dev or Publisher is going to be okay with this, none. This basically leaves Devs on the hook for unlimited liability. Even with their walk back of “only initial installs” doesn’t help. I myself have both a Desktop and a SteamDeck. That’s possibly two installs out of the gate from one customer. Then any time I make an upgrade in the future, or heck maybe even switch Proton versions on my Deck, the Dev could be on the hook for more cash. There’s zero transparency with how these “installs” are detected or counted, so there is no way to budget or plan for the expenses.
Businesses hate unpredictable fees.
They’ll deal with utilities upping rates, because who are you gonna switch to in a monopoly? But if you’re just a tool for them, they’ll ditch you as soon as they’re able and never use you again.
And again, publishers will care about this too, since their whole job is distribution. Any Dev looking to sign with a publisher, even a subscription service like GamePass, will now be asked which engine they’re using, and I bet you 9/10 times the Dev will get rejected if they’re using Unity now. That puts even more pressure on Devs not to use Unity.
Unity will price gouge their existing customers(Devs), but will ensure that nobody ever buys their product ever again. At this point I doubt their reputation will ever recover even if they can walk this back. The fact that they believe they can unilaterally add enormous fees at the drop of a hat means they’ve ruined any trust their customers had in them.
Unity: I can charge you any fees I want, any time I want.
The real hit is free mobile games. Paying per install can be crippling when you naturally have low retention rates.
You can accidentally success yourself into debt if you don’t have preditary monetization.
I’m building a game ATM that’s meant to be fun and fair, monetization is really low. If it shot up as a front page item for some reason that now went from a huge success to a massive stress point as the number of installs would easily put me into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to unity overnight.
Who TF wants to take on that kind of risk? Does this not push mobile games into being even MORE preditary?? Since it’s now impossible to build a mobile game with Unity, and just release it as something free.
How would they even track that it was “only the initial install”, and what’s the metric for that? If i need to reinstall my OS due to a crash, is that a second install for the game? How about if I replace a piece of hardware that fails, is it considered a new system with a new install?
The whole idea that they can claim additional fees for an “install” is ridiculous.
They took a gamble and tried to play the streaming game - and lost
Did any of y’all Roku owners buy their device for the purpose of their streaming content? I know I didn’t - I bought it because of the promise of an excellent UI to organize all of my other already-existing-and-too-many services in an easy streamlined interface even my dad could use.
Yeah. Their expenses to try and add streaming was a waste. Plex did much of the same.
I bought Roku for the set top box replacement. They should continue to focus on that, though there really isnt too much more to do there either. They gotta innovate somehow i suppose and that means taking risk.
I will say they keep adding that goddam roku streaming channel to my list. I have exact an even number of lines of apps. It keeps throwing it off and its annoying.
I bought a Roku TV when I moved. Used it a few weeks and then realized the level of horrific tracking my pi-hole server was blocking from it. (thanks PiHole) I reset it to factory and no longer allowed it on the network. Now it’s an acceptable TV with a completely dogshit useless remote.
Sort of related- is it even possible to buy a “dumb” TV anymore or are we stuck paying 8x as much for “digital signage” panels now?
I shouldn’t be this excited about the link, but double-checked the specs on their official site and it’s not even equipped with ethernet/wifi- the world is so shitty these days that I almost squealed like a little girl. Thanks for sharing that.
The digital signage/business displays are still at a premium, but the upcharge is doesn't have to hit 8x, though you'll have to supply a source of course, plus also a bracket or stand for the VESA mount. Maybe $200 premium to deshittify?
There is a strong suspicion that the TOR network has been turned into a NSA honeypot by virtue of the NSA running more than half of the TOR exit nodes. Do you really want to take that chance?
Not to mention, pretty much the only thing most honest people use TOR for is to defeat geoblocking, and most geoblocked sites of any importance blacklist TOR exit nodes. So it’s not even that useful.
Idk if the NSA runs all those exit nodes but this is definitely not the first time I’ve heard that it isn’t secure. Luckily I have nothing to hide so I use Google for everything and send them a daily summary of my offline activities in case they missed anything.
I said suspicion, not evidence. The suspicion arises when you try to answer the following 2 basic questions:
Who wants to deanonymize TOR users the most?
Who has the resources to run TOR servers and provide the service for free and why?
Or put another way, apart from a few idealists like the Calyx Institute, nobody in their right mind would foot the bill to run servers mostly used by hackers and pedos. Therefore, the most likely operators are law enforcement and nefarious barely-constitutional three-letter agencies.
TLAs, LEOs and criminals are both Tor end users and have an interest in attacking Tor users.
Everybody has the resources to run Tor relays and even exits, though the latter can become a massive legal nuisance. Servers are cheap. Read the Tor mailing list archives.
As to ‘mostly used by hackers and pedos’, please provide the evidence. Factual one, not non-sequiturs based on faulty assumptions.
Ok so the CIA, NSA, and FBI are running the majority of Tor nodes. Is there evidence that the data is being used to prosecute/harass/intimidate people?
Wouldn’t there be unusual IP addresses on exit nudes?
Is there evidence that the data is being used to prosecute/harass/intimidate people?
So you’re okay with the TLAs snooping around and watching what you do provided they don’t act on it? I’m not, if only as a matter of principle. To quote the great movie Anon, it’s not that I have something to hide, it’s that I have nothing I want them to see.
Besides, remember, this is the United States: just say terrorism or national security, and due process and habeas corpus go out the window - in which case, you may not hear about somebody being harassed or prosecuted at all.
Regarding your second point, I worked in IT at a large university about 15 years ago and set up an exit node briefly on a spare system I had. The IT security team tracked it down fairly quickly because of the sudden flurry of malicious traffic associated with it. So I had to shut it down fairly soon after I fired it up.
Most networks are likely going to have a similar reaction if running an exit node results in malicious activity on those networks. Ask yourself - who would willingly allow that to happen? It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer is organizations that want to monitor that traffic for one reason or another.
I typically don’t have the time to watch videos but I did in this case. It’s not wrong. The question is: what is your threat model?
First, Tor is not designed to protect you from a global passive adversary nevermind an active one. Global network probes can be used to identify individual sessions by traffic timing correlations. Locating hidden services is quite easy that way, since they’re sitting ducks. It is fairly easy to remotely compromise hidden service marketplaces for TLA players and/or use physical access to hardware and/or operators to make them cooperate with LEOs.
If you are trying to avoid ISP level snooping and blocking, advertisers, Google and national scale actors then Tor is the right tool to use. And by all means, do run your own relays to help the network. The more relays we have, the harder the attack.
Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled “TOR”. Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven’t read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.
“Over the last year and a half there have been a lot of questions around what might happen if influence operations use generative AI,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, told members of the media in a press briefing
Here’s a clue, look around you.
ChatGPT isn’t the only fish in the sea and state actors using a public service like it deserve to be caught. Running your own system privately, without scrutiny, without censorship, without constraints is so trivial that teenagers are doing this on their laptops, so much so that you can docker pull your way into any number of LLM images.
Seriously, this is so many levels of absurd that it’s beyond comprehension…
I’m still baffled at how good Ollama is on working on paltry hardware like ARM and small VMs. Give it GPUs and it’s amazing.
The next step should be to encrypt information at Transit and rest to as to purchase GPU power from the cloud but maintaining client-side encryption throughout. That’ll bring even more power to the masses: imagine giving Ollama a Cloud endpoint to remote GPUs which it can compute on without the consumer purchasing any hardware.
Having tried many different models on my machine and being a long-time GPT-4 user, I can say the self-hosted models are far more impressive in sheer power for their size. However, the good ones still require a GPU that most people nor teenagers can’t afford.
Nonetheless, GPT-4 remains the most powerful and useful model, and it’s not even a competition. Even Google’s Gemini doesn’t compare, in my experience.
The potential for misuse increases alongside usefulness and power. I wouldn’t use Ollama or GPT-3.5 for my professional work because they’re just not reliable enough. However, GPT-4, despite also having its useless moments, is almost essential.
The same holds true for scammers and malicious actors. GPT-4’s voice will technically allow live, fluent conversations through a phone using a dynamic voice. That’s the holy grail for scamcallers. OpenAI is right to want to eliminate as much abuse of their system as possible before releasing such a thing.
There is an argument to be made for not releasing such dangerous tools, but the counter is that someone malicious will inevitably release it someday. It’s better to be prepared and understand these systems before that happens. At least i think thats what OpenAi believes, i am not sure what to think. How could i known they Arent malicious?
Saying you wouldn’t use ‘ollama or gpt3.5’ is such a… I want to say uneducated statement? These are not two like terms
You’re aware that ollama isn’t an LLM? You’re aware there are LLMs available via ollama that exceed gpt4s capabilities? I mean, you’re right that you need an array of expensive gpus to run them effectively, but… Just comparing ollama to gpt-3.5 is like comparing an NCAA basketball star to the Harlem globe trotters. It’s ridiculous at its face. A player compared to a team, for starters.
Correct, i kept it simple on purpose and could probably have worded it better.
It was a meant as a broader statement including “both publicly available free to download models like those based on the ollama architectures as well as free to acces proprietary llm’s like gpt3.5”
I personally tried variations of the vicuna, wizardLM and a few other models (mostly 30B, bigger was to slow) which are all based on ollama’s architecture but i consider those individual names to be less known.
Neither of these impressed me all that much. But of course this is a really fast changing industry. Looking at the hf leaderboard i don’t see any of the models i tried. Last time i checked was January.
I may also have an experience bias as i have become much more effective using gpt4 as a tool compared to when i just started to use it. This influences what I expect and how i write prompts for other models.
I’d be happy to try some new models that have since archived new levels. I am huge supporter for self-hosting digital tools and frankly i cant wait to stop funding ClosedAi
Llama3-70b is probably the most general purpose capable open source
There are a bunch of contenders for specific purposes, like coding and stuff, though. I wanna say Mistral has a brand new enormous one that you’d need like 4 4090s to run smoothly.
There's a safe bet that if you've put something on the internet, it's been scraped by a bot by now for training. I don't like that, for the record, just saying I'm not surprised at this point. Companies are morally bankrupt
I don’t know why everyone is all shocked all of a sudden, there have been various scraper bots collecting text info for…many years now, LONG before LLMs came onto the scene.
I agree, but it’s one thing if I post to public places like Lemmy or Reddit and it gets scraped.
It’s another thing if my private DMs or private channels are being scraped and put into a database that will most likely get outsourced for prepping the data for training.
Not only that, but the trained model will have internal knowledge of things that are sure to give anxiety to any cyber security experts. If users know how to manipulate the AI model, they could cause the model to divulge some of that information.
I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.
You don’t need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.
The way these work is basically:
users connect to relay nodes
relay nodes connect users directly
users continue communicating directly w/o any servers
Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.
The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn’t need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.
You never do. Its only use case is a payment system for online crime. And even for that many criminals prefer gift cards because it’s such a hassle to explain crypto-tokens to your victims.
It’s useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.
Don’t buy it as an “investment” or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.
That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).
But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).
What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.
And then we get into the issue of where your energy is coming from. Since cryptocurrencies are global, they can be done anywhere energy is cheap. For example, daytime purchases can be done using excess energy in an area where it’s night. For fiat, that energy use is more local, so you’re more likely to process a transaction during peak energy use (afternoons), thus higher energy capacity needed. It’s a really complicated topic, and I’d love for someone smarter than me to break it down.
But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.
But all of that is kind of irrelevant to the discussion about whether it’s useful. If it’s not useful, any amount of energy use is wasteful, but if it provides value, there’s certainly an amount of energy we’re willing to spend on it, so what exactly is that amount?
Also Ethereum is extremely inefficient compared to conventional tech (like just a database). All you need is to realize that complete trustlessness is impossible to understand that a distributed ledger has no problem to solve. And that’s why there is no practical application after all these years.
But energy use isn’t as simple as measuring transaction efficiency, there’s a lot more to a currency than storing who transacted with whom. There’s:
security of transactions - fraud and whatnot
coordination costs - international transactions, etc
cyber security, websites for managing money, etc
Or in terms you’ve used, someone needs to maintain that database, that database needs to be in some facility, and someone needs to audit the database. All of that is baked into cryptocurrencies. Yet the comparisons I’ve seen either account for way too much (e.g. bank tech support), or not enough (e.g. only POS and network costs).
The biggest individual difference is that bluesky makes identity independent of the hosting server (via cryptographic keys) and makes content location independent of the hosting server (via content addressing).
And these features together also enable more efficient caching and propagation in the network as well as enabling features like custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tooling which works the same independently of which server you’re on. So Bluesky can give you a better global view of the network and more efficient communication between users on many different servers in the same thread.
Ironically enough, Jack’s other favorite place Nostr (which is built as P2P with repeater nodes) is also adding moderation tooling similar to that in Bluesky (labelers making use of the content addressing and account key ID) to flag stuff
First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.
Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.
First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.
Bluesky is open source and have a site for documentation
Splitting off identity means you can bail and take your friends and post history with you when a server either goes down, gets hacked, or if the admin goes insane, or if it gets freenoded (hostile takeover and impersonation)
On bluesky the closeness comes more from the personal connections plus the choice of feeds
Wasn’t this guy hired to be some kind of poster-boy CEO because he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache? Why is he giving everyone business advice now?
he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache
Source? I’ve never heard of this (never cared much about him or Twitter) and tried to look it up, but I’m not seeing it anywhere.
I don’t understand how anybody can do something for a while, make millions or even billions off of doing that thing, and then they try to do other things to make more money and stay in the public eye. Just buy an island and fuck off for your remaining decades of retired decadence. What more could you want?
I’ll have to dig it up tomorrow, but that was an illusion to a mountain climbing injury he sustained at some point earlier in life (to an arm) that left him in constant pain. He was able to function by mentally mastering the discomfort which he credited to meditation or something like that.
I believe it was an interview that aired on NPR at least 5 years ago.
I’m with you. When I saw The Saint as a kid it seemed like the perfect plan. Do crimes and retire when you hit 5 million ;-)
Seriously, I think it’s a widespread addiction. You see your nest-egg turn into millions and then billions… it’s got to be a rush.
When you have that much money, running a business is just a game to you. And it’s apparently a pretty entertaining game considering how popular is is with people who have “fuck you” money.
This is why I keep a physical backup of all my emulator installers on an external hard drive. They get rid of some emulators, I still got my personal copies!
If Nintendo stays consistent, they went after Yuzu because they were accepting donations. They went after ROM sites that had advertising. They left everyone else alone if they aren’t making money off their games. Right now Ryujinx has a Patreon page…
After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one towing it.
Having worked at Waymo for a year troubleshooting daily builds of the software, this sounds to me like they may be trying to test riskier, "human" behaviors. Normally, the cars won't accelerate at all if the lidar detects an object in front of it, no matter what it thinks the object is or what direction it's moving in. So the fact that this failsafe was overridden somehow makes me think they're trying to add more "What would a human driver do in this situation?" options to the car's decision-making process. I'm guessing somebody added something along the lines of "assume the object will have started moving by the time you're closer to that position" and forgot to set a backup safety mechanism for the event that the object doesn't start moving.
I'm pretty sure the dev team also has safety checklists that they go through before pushing out any build, to make sure that every failsafe is accounted for, so that's a pretty major fuckup to have slipped through the cracks (if my theory is even close to accurate). But luckily, a very easily-fixed fuckup. They're lucky this situation was just "comically stupid" instead of "harrowing tragedy".
They've already been testing on private tracks for years. There comes a point where, eventually, something new is used for the first time on a public road. Regardless, even despite even idiotic crashes like this one, they're still safer than human drivers.
I say my tax dollar funded DMV should put forth a significantly more stringent driving test and auto-revoke the licenses of anybody who doesn't pass, before I'd want SDCs off the roads. Inattentive drivers are one of the most lethal things in the world, and we all just kinda shrug our shoulders and ignore that problem, but then we somehow take issue when a literal supercomputer on wheels with an audited safety history far exceeding any human driver has two hiccups over the course of hundreds of millions of driven miles. It's just a weird outlook, imo.
People have been hit and killed by autonomous vehicles on public streets due to bad practices and bad software. Those cases aren’t hiccups, those are deaths that shouldn’t have happened and shouldn’t have been able to happen. If a company can’t develop its product and make it safe without killing people first, then it shouldn’t get to make the product.
People have been hit and killed by human drivers at much, much higher rates than SDCs. Those aren't hiccups, and those are deaths that shouldn't have happened, as well. The miles driven per collision ratio between humans and SDCs aren't even comparable. Human drivers are an order of magnitude more dangerous, and there's an order of magnitude more human drivers than SDCs in the cities where these fleets are deployed.
By your logic, you should agree that we should be revoking licenses and removing human drivers from the equation, because people are far more dangerous than SDCs are. If we can't drive safely without killing people, then we shouldn't be licensing people to drive, right?
I’m all for making the roads safer, but these companies should never have the right to test their products in a way that gets people killed, period. That didn’t happen in this article, but it has happened, and that’s not okay.
People shouldn't drive in a way that gets people killed. Where's the outrage for the problem that we've already had for over a century and done nothing to fix?
I mean, yeah. I signed up for a year of Prime last summer. They just decide to put in ads? At least wait for the subscription to expire before pulling this crap.
Every time they do something like this, I wait longer and longer to resubscribe. It’s just been getting worse, not better.
Bezos, just go to Mars already with the rest of the billionaires. Guess how much taxes you’ll save up there. We don’t need you.
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