tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Man who wanted to be 'Welsh spokesman' for Islamic State jailed 3 days ago:
Ali told police he had first come into contact with a man called Abu Qatada, whom he believed to be an IS member fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, while playing online games such as Roblox.
As time went on, it had become increasingly difficult to determine whether other Roblox players were legitimate jihadis or law enforcement agents operating undercover.
- Comment on "Life of Black Tiger", a hilariously bad looking game that somehow managed to get a gameplay preview shared by the official PlayStation YouTube account in 2017 3 days ago:
- Comment on Plastic hinges on modern headphones 4 days ago:
The older headphones there don’t look like you can rotate the pads, yeah? I mean, it’s that rotating hinge which failed here.
I guess one could say “well, I don’t want headphones with rotating pads”, but it’s that rotation that lets the XM5 headphones fit into a fairly-flat carrying case.
I will say, though, that the XM5s probably weren’t going to last over 30 years, if for no other reason than because they use an internal battery…
- Comment on Amazon streaming movie intermittently dropping the sound 5 days ago:
It’s possible that the video had surround sound, say, 7 channels or something, and that the commercials didn’t.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
I mean, it’s telling you to update the Address Library mod. If Fallout 4 gets an update, it may take them a bit, but they should roll it out.
www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/47327
That thing is required to know where in memory other mods need to fiddle to do stuff outside of the APIs that Bethesda provides, so it’s extremely dependent on the version of Fallout 4 — basically, it being updated means that all the other mods can rely on it knowing what the relevant addresses are and don’t have to be update itself. If Fallout 4 gets updated, you’re probably going to need to update it.
- Comment on Memory price hikes will kill off budget PCs and smartphones 1 week ago:
You have to have a thin client device to access the servers out on the Internet, which is…kind of what a sub-$500 low-end PC or budget smartphone would be.
- Comment on Jason Schreier says Sony is backing away from putting single player games on PC 1 week ago:
I also kind of think that the strongest argument for console gaming is competitive multiplayer, not single player.
The fact that the consoles are closed and locked down inherently provides resistance to cheating and such, where the open PC world tries to replicate the stuff via kernel anti-cheat stuff. The console world having (well, more-or-less) one option when it comes to hardware means that everyone playing against each other has a fairly-level playing field — same input hardware, people don’t get an edge from having fancier rendering hardware.
For single-player gaming, those console strengths become weaknesses — for single-player games, it’s preferable for the player to be able to do things like freely mod games, upgrade hardware to get fancier graphics, provide a lot of options as to what input stuff to use, etc.
If I were a console vendor and I were worried about the PC as a competing platform, I’d think that I’d try to emphasize my competitive multiplayer games, not single-player.
- Comment on We conduct affairs of state in a building that’s riddled with asbestos and mice. Can’t Britain do any better? 2 weeks ago:
The cavernous, ancient Westminster Hall, dating to 1097, where the late Queen Elizabeth II lay in state, is resolutely immune to getting any internet or mobile phone reception; highly impractical if you are arranging to meet people there who are running late and messaging you to say so.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picocell
A picocell is a small cellular base station typically covering a small area, such as in-building (offices, shopping malls, train stations, stock exchanges, etc.), or more recently in-aircraft. In cellular networks, picocells are typically used to extend coverage to indoor areas where outdoor signals do not reach well, or to add network capacity in areas with very dense phone usage, such as train stations or stadiums. Picocells provide coverage and capacity in areas difficult or expensive to reach using the more traditional macrocell approach.[1]
- Comment on Online shop's UK county selector 2 weeks ago:
I imagine that whatever shipping service the shop is using will work it out as long as they’ve got a non-ambiguous street address for delivery.
- Comment on France's Ministry of Economy disclosed that attackers used stolen official credentials to access FICOBA, the national bank account registry, exposing data on 1.2 million accounts 2 weeks ago:
The breach occurred in late January and impacted 1.2 million accounts, including IBANs, account holder names, addresses, and in some cases tax identifiers.
I’m not familiar with the specifics of the compromise, but I’d think that this would warrant having banks create new accounts for affected individuals, so that at least the IBAN is invalidated.
- Comment on Why there's no quick fix in sight for the problem of dazzling headlights 2 weeks ago:
If only there was a standard for how high the headlights are off the ground, regardless of vehicle height. Sigh, that ship apparently done sailed though…
Can’t change it for existing vehicles, but can for new ones. The existing ones will eventually age out.
- Comment on Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report 2 weeks ago:
AAA studios are doubling down on micro transactions, “performative” social justice, AI slop, and live service slop. - AC ShadowsI think that one factor driving either microtransactions, freemium, free-to-play stuff that does data-mining, or “incomplete” games with expansions is resistance to a higher initial price. I mean, if a studio isn’t making their return on the initial price, they’re going to look for alternate routes. AAA games cost more than ever to make these days. If people say — and I’ve seen plenty of people on here do so — “I absolutely will not buy a game with an up-front price of more than $N”…but then they’re okay playing freemium stuff or games with microtransactions, I mean…that’s what game studios are going to do.
I’m generally okay with an expansion model, because I like the idea of giving the studio the option to expand really popular games, and it de-risks things for both the player (you just buy the base game and get expansions if you want) and the publisher (you don’t put down a ton of money to create massive amounts of stuff for a flop), though honestly, I do agree that I miss the “just pay and get a complete game” approach.
- Comment on Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report 2 weeks ago:
I don’t care about the gambling (if it’s for money — I’m fine with variable-ratio schedule reward stuff in games, like having random loot drops in games). We know that that strongly appeals to humans.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[16]: 88 (ex. Gamblers win 1 out of every 10 spins on a slot machine, however this is an average and they could hypothetically win on any given turn)
Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction.
…and I’m amazed that people would be dicking around with cryptocurrencies as a form of recreation, but if you put out good games that have erotica that appeals to me in 'em, I’ll buy those. There are a lot of really bad video games with erotica out there.
In just the US consumption of Tiktok is up 39m hours a day compared to pre-COVID figures.
I really don’t like short-form video, but I do appreciate that a lot of people do like it.
In the 2025, American consumers spent roughly $5bn on Onlyfans.
My suspicion is that streamed pornography is likely presently more of a subsitute good for stuff like static pornographic movies than video games, though I’m willing to believe that I could be wrong.
During this 2025 period, AI apps that allowed for “role play, erotica, and art” have soared. The latest tracked statistic for installs for this software came to just under one billion worldwide.
Well, yeah. That’s new tech.
- Comment on Rural drivers to face steepest bills under UK’s mileage-based electric vehicle tax 2 weeks ago:
The UK has very substantial petrol taxes, which approximate a mileage tax. I don’t know how exactly the funding is managed in the UK, whether the money goes into general revenue or is allocated straight to road maintenance, but the ICE vehicle drivers are ultimately paying for roads one way or another.
And I’d say that that’s reasonable — I’ve no opposition to road vehicles at all, but road construction and maintenance is an externality, and you’d want to have that priced in, if you want the market to do efficient allocation of resources.
BEVs also make use of the road (and in fact, I suspect that due to the generally-greater-weight, they probably create more wear-and-tear, if anything).
- Comment on Brazilian butt lifts should be banned in UK amid ‘wild west’ industry, MPs say 2 weeks ago:
Brazilian butt lifts should be banned in the UK, MPs have said, as a report found a lack of regulation had led to a “wild west” of cosmetic procedures being carried out in garden sheds, hotel rooms and public toilets.
If people want said procedure sufficiently, I suspect that one side effect of a ban might be a number of people simply crossing national borders to get the procedure performed in another country.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism
Among the most popular destinations for cosmetic surgery include: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Iran, India, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Turkey and Thailand.[19][20]
- Comment on All US Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat 3 weeks ago:
¯\(ツ)/¯
- Comment on All US Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat 3 weeks ago:
Borges alleges that a little-known federal tech team called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE
“Little known”?
- Comment on UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry 3 weeks ago:
If I had to make a guess, one reason that this particular area might be particularly impacted might be because Internet-based ads have been eating the ad market for years.
My understanding is that part of the shift to online advertising has been to shift to more-targeted advertising than was possible in the past. Like, you can get finer-grained profiles on ad viewers. That’s basically what, say, Google enables — it has a profile of users based on information harvested, and it can show different ads tailored to different user demographics. Traditional media — say, print magazines, say — allows for only a limited degree of targeting, like you can put your “teen girl ad” in a magazine that is mostly read by teen girls. But you can only go so fine-grained with that.
And I’d bet that generative AI is an close match to that. Like, I’d guess that one probably typically has copywriters that deal with a particular demographic. Like, say you want ads that target, oh, middle-aged white men, or lesbians, or whatever. I’d bet that the norm with human writers is to have someone familiar with what appeals to a particular demographic.
But then if you’re an ad agency, if you want to let your customers target N different demographics with an ad campaign, you need N copywriters familiar with a given demographic.
And if the ad delivery platforms permit for N to be a lot bigger than it was, say, 30 years back, than you really want to be able to generate copy for all of those N demographics to be competitive in your ads. And that’s going to increase copywriting labor costs. And generative AI is going to lower copywriting labor costs and avoid the “expert per demographic” constraint.
I’d also bet that a lot of ads use pretty similar tactics to appeal to a demographic. Like, this is relatively-repetitive content similar to existing material that just needs to merge aspects of two different things — (1) a product type with (2) ad techniques that target a given demographic group. That is something that LLMs are fairly good at doing a reasonable job of.
- Comment on UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry 3 weeks ago:
ad agencies
I don’t know specifically what positions are being cut, and the article doesn’t say, but I remember reading an earlier article saying that copywriters had been particularly impacted, and this article references “junior” and “creative” positions.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting
Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. Copywriting is aimed at selling products or services.[1] The product, called copy or sales copy, is written content that aims to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or group to take a particular action.[2]
Copywriters help to create billboards, brochures, catalogs, jingle lyrics, magazine and newspaper advertisements, sales letters and other direct mail, scripts for television or radio commercials, taglines, white papers, website and social media posts, pay-per-click, and other marketing communications. Copywriters aim to cater to the target audience’s expectations while keeping the content and copy fresh, relevant, and effective.[3]
- Comment on Discord Game chat alternatives? 3 weeks ago:
Gotcha. I don’t use non-Threadiverse stuff myself, but if you do use communities like that, you might also be interested in retrolemmy.com:
- Comment on Discord Game chat alternatives? 3 weeks ago:
I’m assuming that you aren’t wanting Threadiverse-based stuff like !retrogaming@lemmy.world?
- Comment on News Publishers Are Now Blocking The Internet Archive, And We May All Regret It 3 weeks ago:
Actually, thinking about this…a more-promising approach might be deterrent via poisoning the information source. Not bulletproof, but that might have some potential.
So, the idea here is that what you’d do there is to create a webpage that looks, to a human, as if only the desired information shows up.
But you include false information as well. Not just an insignificant difference, as with a canary trap, or a real error intended not to have minimal impact, only to identify an information source, as with a trap street. But outright wrong information, stuff where reliance on the stuff would potentially be really damaging to people relying on the information.
You stuff that information into the page in a way that a human wouldn’t readily see. Maybe you cover that text up with an overlay or something. That’s not ideal, and someone browsing using, say, a text-mode browser like
lynxmight see the poison, but you could probably make that work for most users. That has some nice characteristics:-
You don’t have to deal with the question of whether the information rises to the level of copyright infringement or not.
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Legal enforcement, which is especially difficult across international borders — The Pirate Bay continues to operate to this day, for example — doesn’t come up as an issue. You’re deterring via a different route.
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The Internet Archive can still archive the pages.
Someone could make a bot that post-processes what you do, but you could sporadically change up your approach, change it over time, and the question for an AI company is whether it’s easier and safer to just license your content or to risk poisoned content slipping into their model.
I think the real question is whether someone could reliably make a mechanism that’s a general defeat for that. For example, most AI companies probably are just using raw text today for efficiency, but for specifically news sources known to do this, one could generate a screenshot of a page in a browser and then OCR the text. The media company could maybe still take advantage of ways in which generalist OCR and human vision differ — like, maybe humans can’t see text that’s 1% gray on a black background, but OCR software sees it just fine, so that’d be a place to insert poison. Or maybe the page displays poisoned information for a fraction of a second, long enough to be screenshotted by a bot, and then it vanishes before a human would have time to read it.
shrugs
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- Comment on News Publishers Are Now Blocking The Internet Archive, And We May All Regret It 3 weeks ago:
I’m very far from sure that this is an effective way to block AI crawlers from pulling stories for training, if that’s their actual concern. Like…the rate of new stories just isn’t that high. This isn’t, say, Reddit, where someone trying to crawl the thing at least has to generate some abnormal traffic. Yeah, okay, maybe a human wouldn’t read all stories, but all you’d have to do is create a handful of paid accounts and then just pull the content, and I think that a bot would just fade into the noise. And my guess is that it is very likely that AI training companies will do that or something similar if knowledge of current news events is of interest to people.
You could use a canary trap, and that might be more-effective:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. It could be one false statement, to see whether sensitive information gets out to other people as well. Special attention is paid to the quality of the prose of the unique language, in the hopes that the suspect will repeat it verbatim in the leak, thereby identifying the version of the document.
The term was coined by Tom Clancy in his novel Patriot Games,[1][non-primary source needed] although Clancy did not invent the technique. The actual method (usually referred to as a barium meal test in espionage circles) has been used by intelligence agencies for many years. The fictional character Jack Ryan describes the technique he devised for identifying the sources of leaked classified documents:
Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so lurid is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it.
There, you generate slightly different versions of articles for different people. Say that you have 100 million subscribers.
ln(100000000)/l(2)=26.57…So you’re talking about 27 bits of information that need to go into the article to uniquely describe each. The AI is going to be lossy, I imagine that but you can potentially manage to produce 27 unique bits of information per article that can reasonably-reliably be remembered by an AI after training. That’s 27 different memorable items that need to show up in either Form A or Form B. Then you search to see what a new LLM knows about and ban the bot identified.Cartographers have done that, introduced minor, intentional errors to see what errors maps used to see whether they were derived from their map.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of “trapping” potential plagiarists of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the “trap street” on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other “trap” features (such as nonexistent towns, or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_island
A phantom island is a purported island which has appeared on maps but was later found not to exist. They usually originate from the reports of early sailors exploring new regions, and are commonly the result of navigational errors, mistaken observations, unverified misinformation, or deliberate fabrication. Some have remained on maps for centuries before being “un-discovered”.
In some cases, cartographers intentionally include invented geographic features in their maps, either for fraudulent purposes or to catch plagiarists.[5][6]
That has weaknesses. It’s possible to defeat that by requesting multiple versions using different bot accounts and identifying divergences and maybe merging them.
And even if you ban an account, it’s trivial to just create a new one, decoupled from the old one. Thus, there isn’t much that a media company can realistically do about it, as long as the generated material doesn’t rise to the level of a derived work and thus copyright infringement (and this is in the legal sense of derived — simply training something on something else isn’t sufficient to make it a derived work from a copyright law standpoint, any more than you reading a news report and then talking to someone else about it is).
Getting back to the citation issue…
Some news companies do keep archives (and often selling access to archives is a premium service), so for some, that might cover some of the “inability to cite” problem that not having Internet Archive archives produces, as long as the company doesn’t go under. It doesn’t help with a problem that many news companies have a tendency to silently modify articles without reliably listing errata, and that having an Internet Archive copy can be helpful. There are also some issues that I haven’t yet seen become widespread but worried about, like where a news source might provide different articles to people in different regions; there, having a trusted source like the Internet Archive can avoid that, and that could become a problem.
- Comment on OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’ 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s something that I’ve wondered about myself, what the long run is. Not principally “can we make an AI that is more-appealing than humans”, though I suppose that that’s a specific case, but…we’re only going to make more-compelling forms of entertainment, better video games. Recreational drugs aren’t going to become less addictive. If we get better at defeating the reward mechanisms in our brain that evolved to drive us towards advantageous activities…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
In science fiction, wireheading is a term associated with fictional or futuristic applications[1] of brain stimulation reward, the act of directly triggering the brain’s reward center by electrical stimulation of an inserted wire, for the purpose of ‘short-circuiting’ the brain’s normal reward process and artificially inducing pleasure. Scientists have successfully performed brain stimulation reward on rats (1950s)[2] and humans (1960s). This stimulation does not appear to lead to tolerance or satiation in the way that sex or drugs do.[3] The term is sometimes associated with science fiction writer Larry Niven, who coined the term in his 1969 novella Death by Ecstasy[4] (Known Space series).[5][6] In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the term is used to refer to AI systems that hack their own reward channel.[3]
More broadly, the term can also refer to various kinds of interaction between human beings and technology.[1]
Wireheading, like other forms of brain alteration, is often treated as dystopian in science fiction literature.[6]
In Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, a “wirehead” is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant known as a “droud” in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain. Wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting their basic needs in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of humanity without self-control.
Now, of course, you’d expect that to be a powerful evolutionary selector, sure, but the flip side is the question of whether even that pressure can keep up with our technological advancement, which happens very quickly.
There’s some kind of dark comic that I saw — I thought that it might be Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but I’ve never been able to find it again, so maybe it was something else — which was a wordless comic that basically wordlessly portrayed a society becoming so technologically advanced that it basically consumes itself, defeats its own essential internal mechanisms. IIRC it showed something like a society becoming a ring that was just stimulating itself until it disappeared.
It’s a possible answer to the Fermi paradox:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nat…
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.[1][2][3]
The paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who informally posed the question—remembered by Emil Konopinski as “But where is everybody?”—during a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos with colleagues Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York.
Evolutionary explanations
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. The astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner stated that the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors—the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former potentially leads to complete destruction, while the latter may lead to biological or mental degeneration.[98] Possible means of annihilation via major global issues, where global interconnectedness actually makes humanity more vulnerable than resilient,[99] are many,[100] including war, accidental environmental contamination or damage, the development of biotechnology,[101] synthetic life like mirror life,[102] resource depletion, climate change,[103] or artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypotheses.[104]
- Comment on OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’ 3 weeks ago:
Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users.
I am confident that one way or another, the market will meet demand if it exists, and I think that there is clearly demand for it. It may or may not be OpenAI, it may take a year or two or three for the memory market to stabilize, but if enough people want to basically have interactive erotic literature, it’s going to be available. Maybe else will take a model and provide it as a service, train it up on appropriate literature. Maybe people will run models themselves on local hardware — in 2026, that still requires some technical aptitude, but making a simpler-to-deploy software package or even distributing it as an all-in-one hardware package is very much doable.
I’ll also predict that what males and females generally want in such a model probably differs, and that there will probably be services that specialize in that, much as how there are companies that make soap operas and romance novels that focus on women, which tend to differ from the counterparts that focus on men.
I also think that there are still some challenges that remain in early 2026. For one, current LLMs still have a comparatively-constrained context window. Either their mutable memory needs to exist in a different form, or automated RAG needs to be better, or the hardware or software needs to be able to handle larger contexts.
- Comment on This guy parked his car on the sidewalk, right outside a school 4 weeks ago:
No. What in my comment gave you that impression?
- Comment on This guy parked his car on the sidewalk, right outside a school 4 weeks ago:
This is New York City, and from the Google Street View image, it looks like there’s not a lot of street parking there.
My guess is that a number of cities with a lot of density, like NYC, probably should mandate a certain amount of public parking garage space for users in an area. Multistory parking garage space isn’t cheap, but using up street space via committing space to street parking also has costs in terms of congestion, even if the business owner doesn’t bear the costs.
- Comment on Amazon's Fallout countdown ends up being pointless 4 weeks ago:
Amazon’s Fallout countdown delivers possibly the only thing more pointless than a New Vegas or Fallout 3 remaster
I’d buy a remaster.
- Comment on Children taught to use battlefield drones at Russian school in London 5 weeks ago:
The Russian Embassy School in Notting Hill educates the children of diplomats and spies, as well as a small number of children whose parents are not Russian officials, including those who hold British citizenship.
Other classes taught last term included one on fortifications engineering; two on first aid on the battlefield; and another on how to protect oneself against radiological, biological and chemical weapons.
It also stipulates that children at the school be given instruction in how to fire a weapon accurately, how to build trenches and how to march in formation, as well as provided with practical information as to the differences between conscripted and contracted military service.
I would be a little grouchy about my benefits package if I were a Russian spy and one of my state-provided perks was an education for my kids and it wound up being aimed at peacetime instruction in general infantry skills.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
YouTube video of someone dong a speedrun using the exploit from the Reddit article linked by the IGN article.