TehPers

@TehPers@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Midjourney's troubles get worse as Warner Bros Discovery sues the AI image generator for copyright infringement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Generally speaking, a person making fan art and not selling it is going to be protected under fair use.

  This is not generally true. The fan art also usually needs to be sufficiently transformative, and could still be violating, for example, if a character is widely licensed.

  Fair use is really complicated. Usually it’s better to see if the copyright holder has any public policies on community creations, like WOTC’s fan content policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Midjourney's troubles get worse as Warner Bros Discovery sues the AI image generator for copyright infringement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair use, in the US anyway, is based on four factors (source):

  (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

  Not selling fan art helps to bolster factor #1, though that alone isn’t enough. Fair use itself would need to be determined by a judge, but ensuring the work is transformative enough and doesn’t disincentivize someone from purchasing the original work is probably enough commercial or not, but noncommercial theoretically should help.

  (Not a lawyer, but I’ve followed this a bit)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Hollow Knight Silksong's 'cheap' price a problem for other indie games? Devs and publishers weigh up its impact | Eurogamer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The price of one game is not a problem for the price of another game. Make better games, or learn to market them better. Silksong’s hype is nothing short of a crazy marketing success, and its price is indicative of a dev team that wants people to actually play and enjoy their game.

  Also, I think it’s been made very clear that people would have been willing to spend more for it. Make a great game, and you’ll likely receive the same reception. And sure, charge $30 instead, and people will buy it if your game is good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I refuse to by a new mouse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Originally needed them for modded Minecraft. I ran out of keys on my keyboard for all the keybindings that mods wanted.

  Also tried using them in ffxiv, at least for the short period of time that I played it (fun game but I don’t have the time sadly).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a title of all time. Seems like it’s supposed to teach how to express empathy, not how to have empathy. That title goes in the books for being a fuck up of all time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I refuse to by a new mouse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Been using this mouse for years. The scroll wheel is already spazzing out whenever I use it. Still, haven’t had any complaints about it other than that (except for needing iCue).

  I don’t need all the side buttons anymore though, so I may go for something simpler for my next mouse. Still, it was the best mouse I could find with that many inputs available to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"There will be a Stardew Valley 1.7 update": Creator ConcernedApe confirms another update to the immortal life sim hot off a new Haunted Chocolatier tease⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are mods to do this.

  Would it be nice in the base game? Sure, but it’s not there, and speculating that he’s a transphobe because of that seems like a hell of a conclusion to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been fine for me as well. The article’s definitely a bit tin-foily in a lot of sections, so I’d go to specific ones that you care about and look at those instead.

  I just use it as an alternative search engine that is supported through a subscription rather than ads and sponsored results. Being able to manually rank sites is also super helpful and lets me bring sites like MDN to the top while pushing w3school and etc below it.

  Anything beyond that, as far as I’m concerned, is extra. Not selling user data is a big extra though, and I’ll likely reconsider if that ever changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well my choices were this or Apple, and F-Droid was only available on one of the two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Already on Android, but this will be me once Google starts shitting on its users and enforcing that new policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dumbest Phone Is Parenting Genius: Landlines encourage connection—without the downsides of smartphones.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re real. In gated communities.

  I’ve seen it before, but the homes cost multiple millions of dollars. Not in my price range lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly how most developers are being asked to use it

  [citation needed]

  At work, we get emails, demos, etc constantly about how they’re using AI to generate everything from UI designs (v0) to starter projects and how they manage these huge prompts and reference docs for their agents.

  Copilot’s line-by-line suggestions are also being pushed, but they care more about the “agentic” stuff.

  I watch coworkers regularly ask it to “add X route to the API” or “make a simple UI that calls Y API”. They are asking it to do their work.

  I have to review these PRs. They come in at an incredible rate, and almost always conflict with each other. I can’t review them fast enough to still do my work.

  Also, we get AI-generated code reviews at work. I have to talk to a chatbot to get help from HR. Some search bars have been replaced with chatbots. It’s everywhere and I’m getting sick of it.

  I just want real information from informed people. I want to review code that a human did their best to produce. I want to be able to help people improve their skills, not just their prompts.

  I’m getting to the point where I’m going to start calling people out if their chatbot/agent/LLM/whatever produces slop. I’m going to give them ownership of it. It’s their output, not the AI’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This isn’t how we’re being asked to use it. People are doing demos about how Cursor or whatever did the bootstrapping and entire POC for them. And we already know there’s nothing more permanent than a POC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.

  This seems like it pretty much sums things up from my experience.

  We’re encouraged (coughrequiredcough) to use LLMs at work. So I tried.

  There are things they can do. Sometimes. But you know what they can’t do? Be liable for a fuck up.

  When I ask a coworker a question, if they confidently answer wrong, they fucked up, not me. When I ask a LLM? The LLM isn’t liable, it’s me for not verifying it. If I’m verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?

  They fuck up often enough that I can’t put my credibility on the line over speedy slop. People at work consider me to be a good programmer (don’t ask me how, I guess the bar is low lol). Imagine if my code was just whatever an LLM shat out. It’d be the same exact quality as all of my other coworkers who use whatever their LLM shat out. No difference in quality.

  And we would all be liable when the LLMs fucked up. We would learn something. We would, not the LLM. And the LLM will make the same exact fuck up the next time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also American and I love stracciatella. I usually like to try some new flavors when getting gelato, but it’s a solid flavor to fall back on if I’m just not sure.

  Also, I would think very few Americans actually know what it is. From my experience, most know the basic ice cream flavors, but a lot might not even know what gelato is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  LLMs are super cool. You provide text A, and text B, add a little cosine similarity or something, and you’ve got a distance between the two texts.

  Right, they also generate text. I guess embeddings aren’t really new.

  Well the embeddings are nice anyway. Makes it easy to so semantic text searching (or even images or other kinds of inputs). Not sure what that has to do with the general public, but it’s great if you’re writing a search tool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who plays Animal Crossings New Horizons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Make sure to look at mods! Stardew Valley has a ton of awesome mods, ranging from full on expansions to replacing the game with Pong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who plays Animal Crossings New Horizons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Back when I was playing it, I believe it’d work just fine without the steamapi DLL if purchased through Steam.

  Plus, the modding scene is big enough that these days you can pretty much compile the PC version of the game from source, assuming you can find a suitably cleaned up decompiled version of it. (Do pay for a license if you go this route, it’s definitely worth the price.)

  No idea about the Switch port. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s harder to find though due to the Switch being more locked down in general.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our GPU Black Market Documentary Has Been Taken Down by Bloomberg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  FYI if you didn’t watch the documentary, it’s great. Well worth the watch (when it’s back).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Framework Desktop and Linux have shown me the path to PC gaming in the living room⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree. Bringing that hardware to a desktop form factor is incredible and opens it up to be used in ways that wouldn’t be possible in a mobile form-factor.

  None of those ways are gaming. It’s not a gaming PC. It’s for very specific workloads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Framework Desktop and Linux have shown me the path to PC gaming in the living room⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, from my experiences, I’ve only come across issues with games that are already buggy in general. I don’t play a lot of multiplayer games though, and the couple I do play either have no anti-cheat software (it’s unnecessary) or whatever they do have is non-invasive.

  There are definitely games out there you want Windows for since they either won’t run on Linux, or the effort required to run them just isn’t worth it. But it’s like you say - consoles can’t play all games, only those compatible with the console, and generalizing “PC” as a console is not really fair to begin with given the modularity of a PC, hardware/software requirements of games on it, and what software may not exist anymore. Plus, you get most of what you want by dual-booting, plus none of the advertising crap Windows throws at your face these days when on Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Framework Desktop and Linux have shown me the path to PC gaming in the living room⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As a Steam Deck upgrade, seems like a decent choice for a home console. But I also think someone who can build a PC from scratch (or knows someone who can) would want to consider some SFF builds.

  The Framework Desktop’s CPU (both options) is great. For a laptop. Or a handheld. It’s not really a desktop CPU. The fact they got it in a desktop with the configurability that comes with their custom mainboard is incredible. But while it’s super cool if you just want to share your system memory with your GPU for training a model, for example, it’s not going to have the performance that mid to high end builds will on more demanding games.

  For the same price and some deal hunting, you should be able to put together a decent SFF home-console-style PC with a more clear upgrade path.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Banning 4chan for that reason would be valid if they had a law against that to enforce.

  But in the same way you don’t go after someone for tax evasion in a country they’ve never been to or interacted with, you don’t fine 4chan because they won’t start collecting IDs from users when the company is not even in your jurisdiction.

  Either way, I can’t imagine people there missing 4chan. They just need to give a valid reason to block it instead of BSing a fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TikTokers are calling LA ICE raids 'music festivals' to trick the algorithm⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The platform choices of the general public tend to be like this. Whether the platforms becoming large leads to them being shady, or whether the results of them being shady is what draws people to them, I have no idea.

  Either way, a lot of people use TikTok, and there’s no changing that, at least easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework is teasing a ‘big’ update for August 26th — could it be Framework 16?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had only positive experiences with mine. Also curious about what issues you ran into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ollama bug allows drive-by attacks - patch now⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This makes me less enthusiastic about local models. I mean, nothing on the internet is inherently secure and the patch came quickly, but local LLMs being hackable in the first place opens a new can of worms.

  Everything downloaded from the internet is hackable. Web browsers are the most notorious for being attacked, and regularly need to mitigate exploitable vulnerabilities. What’s important is how they fix the vulnerability and how they prevent it from happening again in the future.

  Personally, when I do run Ollama, it’s always from within a container. I mostly do this because I find it more convenient to run it this way, but it also adds a degree of separation between its running environment and my personal computer. Note that this is not a sandbox (especially since it still uses my GPU and executes code locally), just a small layer of protection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  banning the Bible for the sexual imagery in it

  What I would give to see this happen.

  To be clear, by no means do I want the bible banned. But I’d love to see it happen just once if they’re gonna start banning books and blocking websites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is the database public? It’d be interesting to see if I recognize any of the names.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan is getting fined in the UK by the Office of Communications(Ofcom) under Online Safety Act; 4Chan Respond by appealing to Trump administration and intending to fight it in the U.S courts.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is also hilariously relevant with export-controlled GPUs in China. GamersNexus put out a great video on it recently, but basically in China there’s no laws preventing someone from buying or selling the GPUs (despite the US’s attempts to block it), so entire above-ground businesses operate on selling these GPUs, even providing their own warranties and support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan is getting fined in the UK by the Office of Communications(Ofcom) under Online Safety Act; 4Chan Respond by appealing to Trump administration and intending to fight it in the U.S courts.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Websites have no way to know where a user is located. They can only use heuristics to predict a user’s location. Such a law would be unenforceable anyway because 4chan can just tell the UK to blow themselves and there’s nothing the UK can do in US territory except politely ask Trump to ship them to Europe.