Yikes, this god damn timeline.

Needless to say, you’re literally better off coming to the fediverse and talking to us than talking to an AI about thoughts of suicide. He had a therapist, he should have trusted them over some snake oil sold for the investment class. If you, yourself, need help, make sure to treat yourself well and find someone real to talk to instead of fake bots.

Bah, the fact that the AI helped push him toward suicide instead of away from it shows just how misanthropic this whole tech space is. Needless deaths, needless thefts and an immeasurable pile of grief as we walk a circuit guided path to a dark inhumane future. RIP

Exactly. This is really just hedging their bets. They know the carpet is being pulled and now they’re in the bargaining phase. (This plus Jensen asking people to be nicer about AI shlock.)

Alternative Advice: Buy up old used mini-pcs if hardware is too expensive. Don’t buy AWS unless you actually need cloud services (i.e. you’re hosting a website).

I won’t say VPSs don’t have their utility, but anyone framing it as an alternative to owning a PC is completely DeLuLu and need their head examined.

Will the AI still flame me if I ask the wrong question?

Is nothing sacred anymore?

Real talk though, it is concerning when it feels like 3/5 times you ask AI something, you’ll get a completely hair brained answer back. SO will probably need to clamp down non-logged in browsing and enforce API limits to make sure that AI trainers are paying for the data they need.

Right,

But just because it was a standard doesn’t mean it made sense as a standard. So when 99% of applications don’t care to adopt the standard, it really only makes sense to let the application space decide what to do with middle click and to fall back on the user’s system configuration if it’s unspecified (which can still be paste if you want it to be imo)

As someone who likes the middle-click to do mouse relative scrolling, I would be OK with this being configurable on a per-application level.

I don’t think it really makes sense as a “standard”. Blender will never use middle click as paste, for example.

I’m not trying to say that we should be making use of it.

But man, it makes a lot of their dick-ripping whenever biden sneezes a bit silly in retrospect, right?

checks notes, sighs…

Copycat infringement

“In principle I like being a democracy. But the practice of it? Nah, I’d rather we do secretive bullshit.”

Neat, I’ll keep this in mind next time the liberals are in power lol.

I think it’s just the amount of love for game consoles is much higher than phones, where people are a bit complacent.

I do agree it should happen more often.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart or Doctor Robotniks Ring Racers. It’s a good time if you have friends and there are still regular players online.

I mean, it seems like Pihole is generally talked about first as a “ad filter” when it’s discussed online and second as a dns resolver. But either way, just saying that the use for that is pretty much overblown and not worth actually trying for a smart tv, for example, where you can’t normally block ads anyway. (Might be nice for preventing software updates, though.)

I won’t bother engaging with the “gamergate” false equivalency. I think it’s disingenuous to try to tie any of what I said so far to a some fearmonger induced culture war, biggotted nonsense when we’re talking about a much broader wealth extraction mechanism and misanthropic tech movement. I think you’re saying this from a well-meaning place, but I actually don’t think what I’ve said is overzealous at all. The CEO is saying he’s using AI and, if you’re opposed to the social and financial repercussions of this, it’s fair game to boycott a product over this.

To pick a true real world example, some people won’t eat meat that isn’t free-range. This isn’t about the quality of the meat really, it’s about the inhumane treatment of animals. Not everyone subscribes to this, sometimes I don’t buy free-range meat either, but it’s not “wrong” for people to choose to not buy meat that isn’t free range. The same can and should be true about the media we consume, whether it’s games or films.

If it’s like an image/video model, they could start with existing open weights, and fine tune it. There are tons to pick from, and libraries to easily plug them into.

If it’s not, and something really niche, and doesn’t already exist to their satisfaction, it probably doesn’t need to be that big a model. A lot of weird stuff like sketch -> 3D models are trained on university student project time + money budgets (though plenty of those already exist).

…Look, if Divinity comes out and it has any slop in it, it can burn in hell. If it comes out that they partnered with OpenAI or whomever extensively, it deserves to get shunned and raked over coals.

I won’t get into this too much, but “open weights” is not “open source”, and even “open source” is not real “open source” when it comes to AI. Really, what you should be talking about is an open dataset based model, which there are very few of in reality. The issue isn’t the weights, the issue is the data that was used to generate the weights in the first place.

It’s not impossible that they’re using some bespoke model derived from an open dataset model, but considering the full transcript is now out and he name dropped ChatGPT in particular, I don’t really have much confidence that there’s some kind of ethical silver lining. Since he was the one who mentioned using AI in previs development, it’s actually up to him to clarify what models they’re using and whether they’re ethically sourced. I don’t really have to prove anything beyond them using AI and not thinking AI is to my personal pallet. That’s fine, everyone has their own tastes. To me, I was excited about the new Divinity until this news dropped, and the hype is simply deflated because it is against my morals. That’s on them, not on me.

If he wants to push for open datasets as an AI industry counter play, then fine – fair play and good riddance to closed source (closed data) AI industry players. But until that happens it’s actually just a fantasy and not based on reality. I’ll stick to what has been said and not extrapolate what could-be.

What if it’s a home grown model to assist with mocap?

Well, that’s not what it is (a), at least according to the CEO. They used it for concepts, not animations. And also, (b) I’m not really in the place to give people the benefit of the doubt when using AI that is trained off stolen materials. I sincerely doubt they’re using a “home grown model” because anyone who knows even a scrap of how LLM/GANs work knows that the data needs to train a model would be far beyond the reach of a company of Larian’s scale. They’ve likely just licensed it from one of the many grifting oligarch AI peddlers.

We don’t need defenders coming in here trying to pretend that the CEO hasn’t just clarified that they are using AI for preproduction, we know this and it’s not up for debate now.

Would that be enough to write it off?

As someone who really appreciates and likes animation, in that particular example, then yes it would probably be enough to write it off. And frankly, why do I need to play their game when I could just AI generate my own slop and save the 70 bucks? In reality, it’s actually fine for me, I have plenty of games and can replay the old Divinity games before these guys lost their way. They used to be a company that followed a passion for CRPGs with good-will behind them, but now that BG3 has been a runaway hit, it seems like they’ve forgotten about the community that got them to where they are today in favor of some AAA gaming nonsense.

Edit:

That’s an awfully early point to judge a game, with basically zero knowledge of what they’re actually doing/using.

Frankly, there are plenty of games that people judge from the outset. There’s a reason why we have the saying “First impressions matter”. They’ve left a bad taste in anyone who dares question the ethics of AI use, but thankfully there might be an audience of people out there who like slop more than I dislike it so they could be ok. No skin off my nose.

Depends on how you do it and what you need from it. I’ve actually moved on from my Pihole instance, for reasons I’ll get into later.

The broad appeal of using Pihole for DNS in a homelab is the ability to route services from domain names on the local host. This can be really useful, especially for “hacking” service availability onto other unintended devices. Additionally, it can be nice for less tech-savvy users who might not be comfortable editing /etc/hosts or just want to check out a service on their phone web browser.

I would generally recommend using an isolated device for Pihole needs; If you’re doing work on your home server, you’ll probably want all users on your service to keep their internet connection working to not be a burden to others living in your household (if you have others). A raspberry pi is a really good target for a pihole, and even a cheap old/used one from the interwebs can serve you well (I was using one recently on a pi3b and it was no issue.) Keep in mind that you can’t really do fallback dns configuration unless you’re ok with losing the key feature of pihole (blocking ads and redirecting domains). Notably, I’m actually not a proponent of running all services on individual compute units generally, I just think DNS is special and you don’t really want to tie it into docker services to keep a separation between the services and the server, so to speak.

This brings me to the second feature: adblocking. This one is really a mixed bag. Ultimately, I turned this feature off only because it doesn’t work for the websites that have arguably the most ad content (youtube, twitch) and really only serves to hurt the smaller players. Sometimes it’s great for blocking things like SmartTV advertisements or data encroachments, but it’s very hard to block ads from a web domain in a way that doesn’t outright block the service itself (so blocking youtube ads without blocking youtube is, seemingly, a fools errand.) I’m willing to hear other people’s opinion on this, I just couldn’t get this working to a satisfactory degree.

I’ve abandoned Pihole as a local dns resolver. This is because Tailscale suits my needs and also allows me out-of-house connectivity to things like my music or personal data so my phone never goes out of communication with my home network. When you use tailscale at home, it’s generally really good about routing that through your local network instead of the relay, so there shouldn’t be that many downsides. Note, I say generally, because there have been times where it goes through a relay unexpectedly which I haven’t solved yet (this is likely a local router configuration issue, anyway…)

I notice that you’re already familiar with Pihole, but just thought that it would be best to “explain” my thoughts on it in the form of a recommendation/editorial form.

As someone who owns D:OS2, this is really disappointing and below their standards. I’ll be giving this new Divinity a pass.

They don’t need to be using AI to create concepts, and if they do, I don’t think the “concepts” will be all that great in the first place. Not to mention the ethical perils of using models trained off other artists who are not licensed or compensated.

This is some classic CEO “step on a rake and then get mad at everyone else” nonsense. They openly talked about how they liked AI, and get mad at us for saying “cool, that’s a game I’m gonna skip then!”

The cat’s out of the bag

That’s 👏 not 👏 an 👏 excuse 👏 to be 👏 SHITTY!

The number of people who think that saying that the cat’s out of the bag is somehow redeeming is completely bizarre. Would you say this about slavery too in the 1800s? Just because people are doing it doesn’t mean it’s morally or ethically right to do it, nor that we should put up with it.

Penguin sounds intensify

Crazy how nVidia is the backbone of the modern tech oligarchy.

Glad Steve made this video to expose the craziness of the whole thing.

Used to go to SF for work events.

It felt like a town that once had culture that still wants to peek out, but it almost entirely covered with silicon valley monotony and misanthropic policies. It feels like a city where the people living there are the after thought, and the tablet where you order your coffee while you sit around a room where nobody makes eye contact or speaks to you is the product.

I’m sure there’s a part of the city where humanity still thrives, but it should be a cultural warning to those who are adopting silicon valley cures as anything other than snake oil.