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blindsight

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blindsight ,

Exactly my experience. I’m in a private tracker for books and audiobooks that sometimes has content that’s not on other sites (audiobooks, in particular).

I also just joined a different private tracker that specializes in pre-organized .img files pre-loaded for emulation setups. Like, a one-file 1TB image ready to roll with everything preconfigured.

For popular TV/film, private trackers are unnecessary, unless maybe you’re very particular about 4K/8K REMUX quality or something more specific.

blindsight ,

Stremio +Torrentio + a Debrid service. Cheap, reliable, and has almost everything we’ve searched for.

blindsight ,

I don’t see anyone else bringing up that, in the case of the Switch, emulation actually plays better than on original hardware. Higher framerate, resolution, and graphics settings. And no broken JoyCons.

Emulation also opens up save states, speed up/slow mo, romhacks, widescreen mods, ultra widescreen mods, save file editing, cheats, and lots of other legitimate uses. Speed runners often use emulation to practice the hardest sections using save states before doing their line run on OG hardware.

Some of those use cases are also possible on flash carts (romhacks, save file editing, and some forms of cheats), but a lot really on emulation.

blindsight ,

It’s not racism to identify white privilege/historical harms from pro-white racism.

blindsight ,

Eggs are a super food, too. They’re cheap, delicious, and have dense nutrition. And, if you live anywhere close to rural, you can get farm-fresh eggs from ethically treated, well fed chickens for cheap.

We minimize our meat consumption, but we eat lots of eggs, and I don’t see any ethical concerns with people’s backyard chicken coops.

blindsight ,

Oh, that’s brilliant. I hadn’t seen that one yet. The alt text is great, too.

blindsight ,

I needed that /s, lol.

Because isn’t that literally what conservatives do? Pick wedge issues then make quick soundbites about “common sense” “solutions” that align with simple black & white thinking and conservative values?

blindsight ,

They’re literal statements about facts and events that have transpired.

The only way this could be framed as racism is if you deny that white privilege exists and/or that there have been no harms from white supremacy.

If that’s what you’re claiming, then I suppose that means it would be racist to say the opposite. You’d be completely, egregiously incorrect, but at least that would be an internally consistent worldview. That’s such a ridiculous stance to take that the only logical explanation is that you’re trolling.

blindsight , (edited )

The Liberal government in Canada just announced “The Online Harms Act”, and a leading Canadian legal scholar/lawyer and information privacy advocate, Michael Geist, says that it’s actually good legislation (for the most part).

So, there’s movement in the right direction in other jurisdictions, too.

(Then again, our Senate is currently working on a bill to require age verification for porn, which we all know won’t work and is a massive potential privacy quagmire.)

Edit: lol, autocorrect “Lobster” instead of “Liberal”.

blindsight ,

I think it’s slightly different for a few reasons:

  1. It’s almost completely unregulated. Gatcha games, slot machines, loot boxes, and the like are all literal gambling, yet have mostly skirted gambling laws and other regulations.
  2. The in-game UX is unregulated and is designed to encourage spending and obfuscate costs. Games themselves are designed around maximum addiction. Then they include time-limited items/deals to encourage FOMO. Hell, the only reason Diablo 4 is a live service game is so people who buy skins have a (forced) audience to show off to.
  3. What happens on screens in virtual spaces may not be monitored by parents (or schools) at all, as closely, or as easily. Parents may not even know their child is buying in-game items and skins, or not understand how it’s different from buying games/DLC.
  4. The ads themselves are also mostly unregulated. Children’s TV ads are tightly regulated in a lot of the world, but digital ads have carte blanche to advertise to children directly.
  5. Social media acts as a magnifier, with high-status steamers and other content creators rocking high-priced skins acting as game-specific niche “celebrities”/influencers, and are also completely unregulated.

I worry for my kids that they will face a lot of pressures that just didn’t exist for me in the 80s and 90s.

blindsight ,

That’s not how LLMs work.

Super short version is that LLMs probabilistically determine the next word most likely to occur in a sequence. They do this using Statistical Models (like what your cell phone’s auto complete uses); Transformers (rating the importance of preceding words, so the model can “focus” on the most important words); and Relatedness (a measure of how closely linked different words/phrases are to reach other in meaning).

With increasingly large models, LLMs can build a more accurate representation of Relatedness across a wider range of topics. With enough examples, LLMs can infinitely generate content that is closely Related to a query.

So a small LLM can make sentences that follow writing conventions but are nonsense. A larger LLM can write intelligibly about topics that are frequently included in the training materials. Huge LLMs can do increasingly nuanced things like “explain” jokes.

LLMs are not capable of evaluating truth or facts. It’s not part of the algorithm. And it doesn’t matter how big they get. At best, with enough examples to build a stronger Relatedness dataset, they are more likely to “stay on topic” and return results that are actually similar to what is being asked.

blindsight , (edited )

This can only work in contexts where the LLM already has a strong Relatedness database for the topic. LLMs are incapable of assessing the accuracy of any information they weren’t trained on with sufficient examples to build that database.

This paper, if I’m understanding it correctly, is saying the same thing: LLMs will always hallucinate and are incapable of identifying hallucinations in certain contexts.

The problem we face is that it’s hard to identify hallucinations in the exact context when LLMs are most likely to make them: in content that’s not widely known and understood with many examples in the training data.

Or maybe I’m off base and I need to read the full study.

blindsight ,

I liked this article, and I think a lot of the commenters here are missing that the general public is treating LLMs as AGI. I have a whole 5-10 minutes I spend on why this is when I present about LLMs.

“The I in LLM stands for Intelligence” is a joke I read (and include in my presentation to hammer the point home). Laymen have no idea what AI or LLMs are, but they expect it to work similarly to human intelligence, since that’s the only model they know, and are surprised to learn it doesn’t work that way.

Edit: Forgot what I came to the comments to post, before I read everyone else’s complaints about this, lol.

A small correction: the Air Canada example wasn’t an LLM, it was just an old “dumb” chatbot that was likely sharing outdated policies.

blindsight , (edited )

If there are less than 5 seeds, then I keep seeding indefinitely. Above that, I’ll consider deleting it to free up space once I’m done with the media.

Unless it’s from a private tracker, in which case I’ll just seed everything forever to get the sweet bonus points.

blindsight ,

I looked it up, and qBittorrent can easily handle hundreds of torrents, apparently. I haven’t noticed any problems running 180-ish. I’ll probably try to keep it capped to 300 or something like that.

blindsight ,

I don’t think it has any effect at all, but I’m not an expert. It’s just sending data by request based on hashes and indices, isn’t it?

blindsight ,

As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.

Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don’t even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it’s really chill, now. I’m thinking of selling most of my animals since It’s repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed…

Why aren't more releases x265?

Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I’ve been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have...

blindsight , (edited )

My old laptop can’t handle h265. I don’t think my old SmartTV can, either. We need h264 for those devices since they both have dedicated h264 decoding hardware.

deleted_by_author

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    blindsight ,

    I have 1000/200, but even then, my upload has never been maxed. That said, I mostly seed ebooks, lol.

    Piracy as a quality of service issue

    I am one of those suckers (:sigh) who paid for Youtube since it bundled Youtube Music with it. However, today I used the latter’s Revanced version and it was so much customizable. Right from removing menu items to the stupid cast button Google has forced on us; it seems a billion dollar company can’t compete with these folks...

    blindsight ,

    I don’t know about that. The ads and telemetry are how users “pay” for access. Removing ads and telemetry means users are no longer “paying”.

    If it’s not piracy, it’s definitely piracy adjacent.

    blindsight , (edited )

    Agreed. I copied that exact quote to see if someone called it out already. Also this one:

    educational messages tend to try and educate the consumer on the moral and economic damage of piracy.

    Citation fucking needed.

    As an anecdotal example, I pay for Netflix, Spotify, Prime, and Kindle Unlimited (and CBC Gem partly through taxes), I regularly buy videogames and ebooks (and pay for a library with taxes), and I buy phone apps. I’m paying as much as I comfortably can for media in various forms.

    I also pirate TV/film content, books, games, apps, operating systems, etc. A lot.

    But about half the TV/film piracy is content I have already paid to get streaming access to simply because it’s easier to pirate than figure out which service it’s on, and the other half is mostly freely available on YouTube at garbage quality.

    The content industry, net everything, is getting all the cash out of me that they ever will. Piracy has 0 net effect on my media spending; I’d just consume different content, content at a lower quality, spend more time on Where To Stream, and get books from the library a bit more often.

    blindsight ,

    As pointed out in the article, that’s not necessarily perfect, either. Lots of companies hire people to post to Reddit about their products.

    blindsight ,

    I was looking for someone to mention “opinionated”. I’ve been using computers since the 386 days, mostly on Windows, granted, but with some Linux tinkering here and there, and I have no clue what that means.

    Still, maybe I should just jump into Bazzite regardless since gaming performance is a consideration for me.

    blindsight ,

    Yeah, I was thinking something like “come home for lunch” and swap roles. Both work half the day, and both get half a day to do a few chores/errands each week and get some downtime to play/learn/explore/tinker. Then divide and conquer in the evening the same way; split parenting time and other-stuff time.

    Edit: Also depends if we can freely recombine and split. Merge to eat (most of the time) and sleep (amidst always) to minimize costs, split to do stuff in between.

    blindsight ,

    To clarify, it was still a very bad idea because of added mass, it just wasn’t necessarily a bad idea for rust since they could have mitigated risk of rust in one of several ways.

    The added mass is really bad for battery performance/range, pedestrian safety, safety of other motorists, and total greenhouse gas emissions in production (and added fuel costs for the marginal power increase, of course).

    blindsight ,

    Yeah, exactly. 10MM is peanuts to huge tech companies. It’s not reasonable to split up services in a way that would still be profitable.

    The Fediverse would likely be exempt, but any social media with advertising and any scale at all will hit 10MM revenue pretty quickly.

    blindsight ,

    Alt text:

    Changing the names would be easier, but if you’re not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.

    XKCD isn’t complete without the alt text.

    blindsight ,

    That part of the article was a hypothetical about someone driving while wearing a passthrough AR headset. It was not talking about VR sickness. There was no claim in the article that VR causes car collisions.

    blindsight ,

    X-Manager for Android works well.

    blindsight ,

    I’m kinda tempted to upgrade from my 6650 XT for doubling the video memory, but I probably won’t do enough AI work to justify the upgrade price, and 24+ GB is really needed to load really good models anyway.

    Still, nice to see a budget card with 16 GB.

    blindsight ,

    So good. I love British panel shows and I’m a parent of young kids. It’s one of my most-listened-to podcasts in the last 4 years.

    Didn’t realize it ever went Spotify exclusive. That must have been between my binge sessions; I’ve only listened (on Podcast Addict) to a small fraction of what my wife listens to (on Spotify).

    blindsight ,

    I have ADHD and almost always have an audiobook (TTS, technically) or podcast on while driving it doing chores.

    What I like about TTS is that I can speed it up enough (~6× speed) that my mind doesn’t wander, to match my adHd. Podcasts I usually max out at 2.0× speed because human voices are harder to understand at higher speeds. Any slower and they can’t keep my attention. 1.0× speed is painful, and I don’t take anything in.

    blindsight ,

    $30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it’s free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.

    To get the “full” experience, I suppose you’ll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I’d guess?) without spending a cent.

    But MTX in a game that’s over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ

    blindsight ,

    I haven’t played much since before Ascendancy Classes were added to the game, so I’m well out of the loop (although I do keep up with some of the news), so maybe I’m still emotionally attached to the studio I started following in alpha.

    That said, I don’t really have a problem with their business model. They need to get paid, and they don’t sell game-breaking MTX, beyond needing a map tab, a currency tab, and a premium quad tab. I don’t regret the money I spent on supporter packs; I got over a thousand hours out of the game.

    blindsight ,

    Nice. I just got back into Soulstone Survivors. It’s a really good Vampire-Survivors-like. Plays a dream on the Steam Deck, too, although it uses a lot more battery power.

    blindsight ,

    lol, I love the editorial comment in the headline!

    Edit: not much detail in the article, either. “Improved gamut mapping for HDR titles on Deck OLED.” I don’t know what that means, but my plebeian eyes probably won’t notice a difference, I’m guessing.

    blindsight ,

    I use AdAway to modify the host file on my Android phone. I literally can’t load ad content; sometimes it gets in the way since the ad is the easiest way to get to what I want to click occasionally, lol.

    Also, the Vanced app can modify apps to eliminate ads. Or X-Manager for Spotify does a similar thing.

    Then there are alternative front-end apps, like NewPipe/LibreTube for YouTube, Xtra for Twitch, and others.

    Or there is just straight piracy to avoid the ads, but in their own apps. Stremio + Torrentio + a Debrid service is basically a pirate Netflix app with full control of your stream quality.

    Regardless, I think his point mostly stands; it’s a very small percentage of users modifying apps to avoid ads or telemetry.

    blindsight ,

    Comment unclear. Does he say a buttload of good things that should be read more broadly?

    blindsight ,

    My Pixel 7a’s battery life was so terrible I just gave up on the phone. I was literally charging it 2 times a day from sub-10% to 100% with light use (no games, no intense apps, under 2h SoT for the full day). I lost 7%+ per hour idle. Days when I actually needed to use my phone, I’d need to bring my charger for a third mid-day top up to 100%.

    I bought a Sony Xperia 10 V to replace it. It’s not perfect (it doesn’t support all the NA carrier bands so signal is a bit spotty in big stores), but the battery life is amazing. Same usage patterns and I only go from 80% to 50% most days. I only 100% charge once/month for battery health. I frequently go 1½-2 days without charging. I don’t know how well it plays games, but with 8GB RAM, it’s snappy with app multitasking. Oh, and I can plug it into my car (3.5mm). And it’s a 68mm wide, so quite easy to use one-handed.

    I had been buying Google phones exclusively since the early Nexus days, but I’m unlikely to buy one again. At least for the foreseeable future.

    I hope Google can figure their shit out. It’s bad for everyone when Apple and Samsung capture increasingly large marketshare, and Google’s fuck ups are turning people off smaller vendors.

    blindsight ,

    Might have been Firefox. My phone reported it was Amazon Photos, so I uninstalled it, but then it was another app instead, which I uninstalled, then it was a third one (which I think was Firefox?). At that point I gave up, assuming it was a problem with the G2 Tensor chip not cycling down while idle, not a specific app. Even if 3 apps that I’ve never had a problem with on other phones all have problems on the Pixel 7a, that’s just not good enough.

    Steam Next Fest February 2024 is live (store.steampowered.com)

    Steam Next Fest is a week-long celebration featuring hundreds of FREE playable demos as well as developer livestreams and chats. Players try out upcoming games on Steam pre-release, developers gather feedback and build an audience ahead of their Steam launch, everyone wins!

    blindsight ,

    I enjoyed it for quite a while. Last I played, the meta gets a bit stale at the higher ratings, but it’s a really great game up until diamond ranking, at least.

    I’ll probably buy the full version when it releases.

    blindsight ,

    It’s not addressed in the article, but I assume this must be rendering quite slowly, not in real time. Still, it’s impressive that a videogame engine has the fidelity required for film.

    Amazon- and Google-backed AI firm Anthropic says “general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the training material (www.computerweekly.com)

    Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however....

    blindsight ,

    Right, but I think it’s going to be a tough legal argument that using a text to adjust database weighting links between word associations is copying or distributing any part of that work. Assuming courts understand the math/algorithms.

    blindsight ,

    This whole article is concerned that companies are going to self-sabotage themselves so badly with one hardware vendor that they lose access to that segment of the market. I’m not too worried that’s going to become a trend. What’s the incentive?

    blindsight ,

    I feel attacked.

    j/k. I’m happy in the education sector. The code I write won’t be seen by anybody but me.

    blindsight ,

    I hadn’t heard of the game before, but this looks really cool. From what I’ve gathered over the last little bit watching videos:

    It’s a turn-based tactical board/war/role-playing game based on “the best game Games Workshop ever made”. It’s set in a brutal post-apocalyptic fantasy world with permanent injuries and death, so there’s always tension that you could lose a unit permanently in any battle.

    Negative reviews for the game are largely based on the randomness of the system; you need to carefully plan defensive strategies and use positioning effectively to mitigate the risk of bad rolls. You are expected to lose your team and restart. Often, when you first start. This isn’t so much a game to “beat”, as a virtual boardgame to play and see how far you can get.

    It sounds like it’s a pretty complex system, too, where you need to carefully balance your team’s synergies and stat points to minimize risks. It sounds like there’s a very high skill ceiling to work towards.

    This definitely isn’t a game for everyone, but I think it might be a lot of fun for me!

    blindsight , (edited )

    The problem isn’t the number of providers, the problem is exclusive licensing deals.

    If it was like music, then (theoretically), more choice is better. AFAIK all the platforms have pretty much all the music, so there is some choice available.

    With TV and film, it’s so fractured that it’s literally easier to just pirate things, even for shows I (potentially) have ad-free paid access to already. With Stremio + Torrentio + a Debrid service, I just launch one app and everything’s available in seconds. With paid services, I need to search Netflix, then Prime, then CBC Gem, by which point I’d already be watching.

    Plus, torrentio lets me pick the video quality I want, so I can force 4K H265 on my big screen for films or just pop on a 720p H264 on my small underpowered laptop (that can’t decode H265 fast enough for smooth playback).

    It’s not even about price, it’s just a better experience to pirate. And that’s a Big Problem for the industry.

    blindsight ,

    But you said yourself that you miss out on a lot of gaming sessions because you won’t buy EA games. If the game is fun, then who cares what it’s labeled? Presumably, your friends think the game is fun enough to play in its current state.

    I don’t really understand the problem with “Early Access”; just make a decision based on whether the game is currently worth what they’re asking for it.

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