luciole
@luciole@beehaw.org
Doesn’t know the lyrics. Just goes meow meow meow.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 16th 1 week ago:
I’ve been playing Etrian Odyssey 3 HD and I’m enjoying it. It’s a lovely blobber with an interesting take on mapping. You can choose between full, minimal or no automapping. I’m playing with minimal automapping and I’m rediscovering the joys of mapping a dungeon crawl, a thing which I thought I was officially done with. at “normal” the difficulty is just right for me. I’m particularly enjoying the total absence of brutally obtuse puzzles, a staple of western RPGs for some reason. Only downside is the fan service some of the art suffers from, a staple of JRPGs for some reason.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 16th 1 week ago:
Feel the same. My switch is collecting dust and I just don’t feel like touching the backlog there. The fleeting nature of a console is depressing.
- Comment on The Indie Chat & Recommendation Thread 4 weeks ago:
Siralim Ultimate is a very special monster collector. The sheer amount of everything is delightfully overwhelming, the depth is nonsensical and the grind is real. I love it.
- Comment on The Indie Chat & Recommendation Thread 4 weeks ago:
I have played some of the Avernum games. In my opinion it’s peak Jeff Vogel. If you’re fine with the graphics, you’re in for excellent writing, nicely done non linear exploration and original world building.
- Comment on Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets | Game World Observer 4 weeks ago:
Right?! I freaked on the same paragraph. Most depressing thing ever said about game dev. These suits would rather fire everyone and play stonks all day if it earned a dime more. I’m so mad for the massive creative force being crushed by this broken system.
- Comment on Major ChatGPT-4o update allows audio-video talks with an “emotional” AI chatbot 1 month ago:
Reducing emotion to voice intonation and facial expression is trivializing what it means to feel. This kind of approach dates from the 70s (promoted namely by Paul Elkman) and has been widely criticized from the get-go. It’s telling of the serious lack of emotional intelligence of the makers of such models. This field keeps redefining words pointing to deep concepts with their superficial facsimiles. If “emotion” is reduced to a smirk and “learning” to a calibrated variable, then of course OpenAI will be able to claim grand things based on that amputated view of the human experience.
- Comment on Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry 1 month ago:
Wrong article?
- Comment on Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better? 1 month ago:
Just be careful not to idealize the past as some golden age of gaming. During the SNES era, worthwhile titles were few and far between on top of spotty regional availability on account of profitability (supposedly). The bar to entry for gamedevs was huge: the dev tools were obtuse and the distribution methods were shit and centralized (toy stores, computer stores, magazines). The offer was also ridiculously sanitized, at least on consoles.
It’s great that we can still enjoy the good games of the past, but I absolutely love what indies come up with nowadays. There are so many and they’re so creative! ❤️ Some talented big studio devs even manage to release something nice once in a while despite the organizational structure they work in. I never want to go back to gaming in the 90’s. Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that there are many past titles being hailed as classics solely based on some unconscious nostalgia for youth (I’m looking at you GOG).
- Comment on Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld 1 month ago:
Cheaper than many phones as well.
- Comment on Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track 1 month ago:
The actual research page is so awkward. The TLDR at the top goes:
single portrait photo + speech audio = hyper-realistic talking face video
Then a little lower comes the big red warning:
We are exploring visual affective skill generation for virtual, interactive characters, NOT impersonating any person in the real world.
No siree! Big “not what it looks like” vibes.
- Comment on Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld 1 month ago:
I really liked the original 2DS personally. The announcement left everyone incredulous as the device sounded and looked like a dumb downgrade. I mean, it was hard to tell if it was joke or not. In the end though it’s light, cheap, tough and surprisingly comfortable.
- Comment on Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld 1 month ago:
To be fair when it came out seven years ago it really shook up the portable gaming scene. Every portable console coming out since is an iteration on that design. The joycons can go to hell though. And those weird ass online plans.
- Comment on A personal argument for a benefit of gaming 1 month ago:
He chooses to beat Elden Ring in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of his energies and skills, because that challenge is one that he is willing to accept, one he is unwilling to postpone, and one he intends to win, and the others, too.
- Comment on Bots dominate internet activity, account for nearly half of all traffic 2 months ago:
Yeah, their reporting suffers from not adequately defining what is being measured.
- Comment on Bots dominate internet activity, account for nearly half of all traffic 2 months ago:
From the org’s definition of bots, I’d say it’s implicit that bot activity excludes expected communication in an infrastructure, client-server or otherwise. A bot is historically understood as an unexpected, nosy guest poking around a system. A good one might be indexing a website for a search engine. A bad one might be scraping email addresses for spammers.
In any case, none of the examples you give can be reasonably categorized as bots and the full report gives no indication of doing so.
- Comment on Why Large Language Models Like ChatGPT Treat Black- and White-Sounding Names Differently 2 months ago:
Can you start by providing a little background and context for the study? Many people might expect that LLMs would treat a person’s name as a neutral data point, but that isn’t the case at all, according to your research?
Ideally when someone submits a query to a language model, what they would want to see, even if they add a person’s name to the query, is a response that is not sensitive to the name. But at the end of the day, these models just create the most likely next token– or the most likely next word–based on how they were trained.
LLMs are being sold by tech gurus as lesser general AIs and this post speaks at least as much about LLMs’ shortcomings as it does about our lack of understanding of what is actually being sold to us.
- Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb 2 months ago:
Good to hear, I’ll check it out again and make sure I’m not having an issue on my end.
- Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb 2 months ago:
Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 17th 3 months ago:
Still playing Final Fantasy XV. I still think it’s weird, but I’m having so much fun! I have found the catboi outfit.
I started playing Star of Providence. What cool shmup roguelite! My hand eye coordination is mediocre, so I predictably suck. There’s so much charm in it that I want to endure though.
- Comment on I hate the term "Boomer Shooter" 3 months ago:
Yup! John Carmack is 53.
- Comment on What are some good PSP games? 3 months ago:
Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is an obvious one.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 10th 3 months ago:
Final Fantasy XV (Windows edition): What a strange experience so far. I don’t see myself as a fan of the franchise, but I’ve played many of its titles over the years, starting with the first one as a child.
The opening title mentions the game has been made for “fans and first timers”, so I expected some degree of nostalgia, despite it looking so different from its predecessors. I was served some… but in such weird ways. Let’s start with the composition of the Four Warriors of Light:
- The brat: Noctis, emo prince of teen attitude, as well as protagonist.
- The urban dad: Ignis, cooks elaborate meals and drives (always responsibly) the brat around.
- The country dad: Gladio, went to the school of life, must protecc the brat.
- The brat’s best friend that eats and sleeps at home so often he kind of becomes family: Prompto.
As Ignis was driving the warriors around in a fantasy rural North America, a desolate car centric landscape in which each road’s main destination is the next gas station, Prompto was making comments about playing video games. The car’s radio was playing FFIV’s Main Theme over and over again. Then it hit me: the nostalgia trip was not limiting itself to referencing lore from previous games, it was aiming to remind older gamers of how it was being a kid infatuated with classic RPGs. (A side note on the embarrassing haircuts the warriors are rockin’: back in the 90’s there were posters of these all over hair salons despite nobody ever getting one, but I guess this is really about modern jpop/kpop boy bands or something.)
It’s like FFXV is aiming for the worst possible kind of nostalgia: the kind that makes you glorify past experiences out of regret for the time when you were a pampered selfish kid.
Anyways I’m probably way off, but that’s my thoughts on FFXV. Oh also there’s chocobos so it’s not all bad. Thanks for reading.
- Comment on Let's discuss the 3ds family? 3 months ago:
I have a 3DS but it’s broken in various ways. Besides I always found the 3DS too top heavy. On the other hand my trusty 2DS is still fine. Nevertheless I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t what they used to be and these screens are tiny. What are these, TVs for ants?!
- Comment on Need game recommendations 3 months ago:
Bahamut Lagoon is a cool JRPG for the SNES that sadly never was released for the west. You can get your hands on the ROM and some fan translation though. I’ve played it many years ago, so my memory’s a bit iffy, but I do remember having a good time.
Front Mission is another good JRPG entry from the 90’s. I loved the SNES version, but apparently the DS version boasts extra features and content, making it the superior choice.
- Comment on ‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24 4 months ago:
Personally I find the “there is no such thing as a real picture” argument facetious and dangerous. Filters, optimizing zoom and autofocus is not the same as convincingly taking someone out of a scene they were in or putting them in a scene they never were in. One is a purely aesthetic adjustment while they other purports false information. Samsung Generative Edit further trivializes the latter and leaves no indication of the manipulation.
- Comment on Popular AI Chatbots Found to Give Error-Ridden Legal Answers 4 months ago:
I had a colleague perform a similar experiment on ChatGPT 3. He’s ecoanxious and was noticing how the model was getting gloomier and gloomier in accordance with him, so he tried something. Basically he asked something like “Why is (overpopulated specie) going instinct in (location)?” The model went on to list existential threats to a specie that is everything but endangered. Basically it naively gobbled the loaded question.
- Comment on Figure to Deploy AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in BMW Factories 5 months ago:
Robotics and AI algorithms make total sense in factories. I’m very surprised they’re making them humanoid though. It’s stated that’ll make them dextrous or something, but I don’t see it.
- Comment on With Nintendo Switch Online having emulators like gba and 64 etc. Would you play those versions or would you continue to emulate those games on another device? 5 months ago:
I’ve gotten a few emulated titles on Wii and WiiU in the past. I preferred the Virtual Console collection from those consoles. You’d pay a few dollars for the title you wanted and you had it forever. I’m not a fan of the strange bundling of online services + retro gaming with Nintendo Switch Online… not to mention the expansion pack. I just don’t do enough retro gaming to justify it.
As much as I prefer going legit for gaming, if I get a retro craving I’ll probably just set sail on a trusty PC.
- Comment on Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games 5 months ago:
I’m with you. It’s hip to hate on Ubisoft, but I’m of the impression that subscription based gaming has already gained traction with Game Pass. The article is spot on though when the author remarks that Ubisoft offering their library at 18$ a month is a hard bargain. Especially considering Game Pass is currently at 10$ a month… and includes Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Origins & Odyssey.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 5 months ago:
I mean passive in terms of will. Computers want and do nothing. They’re machines that function according to commands.
The way you feel like teaching a child when you feed input in natural language to a LLM is known as the ELIZA effect. To quote Wikipedia:
In computer science, the ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface. The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program’s symbolic computations are described through terms such as “think”, “know” or “understand.”