TehPers
@TehPers@beehaw.org
- Comment on X now lets any user AI-edit other users’ images without consent, and there is no opt out 16 hours ago:
Surely you have an example where it’s appropriate for a service to generate nonconsensual deepfakes of people then? Because last I checked, that’s what the post’s topic is.
And yes, children are people. And yes, it’s been used that way.
- Comment on Five Europeans denied US visas for combating hate speech online, accused of censoring ‘American viewpoints’ 1 day ago:
When someone clicks the “edit” button, I guess.
- Comment on X now lets any user AI-edit other users’ images without consent, and there is no opt out 1 day ago:
Ok yes you’re right. “Grok generate me some CSAM” is the same as opening up a photo editor and drawing a new real looking body onto someone’s child and putting it in a new body position. Same exact thing. No different at all. Twitter has no responsibility for running a service that can do this.
- Comment on X now lets any user AI-edit other users’ images without consent, and there is no opt out 2 days ago:
Grok, put this “small adult” into a bikini and have her bend over.
Creating nudes without consent, especially CSAM (even with consent), can be extremely illegal. Doing it in photo editor software makes you responsible and only leaves it on your device. ChatGPT will attempt to filter it, and their filters lean on the aggressive side, but that’s also between you and OpenAI. Grok will post it publicly.
- Comment on France seeks to ban social media for children under 15 3 days ago:
Modern* protect children bills would be more accurate.
The playbook these days is to use children, terrorism, etc to justify something that fails to address that problem and pushes some other agenda.
This has been true anyway in the US and UK. I have no clue how true this is in France and I won’t pretend to know, but from some other comments on the potential implementation could be better than what we’ve seen so far. I hope so, anyway.
- Comment on New Sponsor Announcement [Stardew Valley developer] | MonoGame 5 days ago:
JavaScript? C# is a statically typed, compiled language.
- Comment on New Sponsor Announcement [Stardew Valley developer] | MonoGame 5 days ago:
Considering MG is a continuation of XNA Framework, it’s kind of a given it’s C#. And for languages that were popular when XNA came out, C# is one of the nicest to work in these days.
- Comment on Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows 1 week ago:
Yeah that particular issue doesn’t bother me much anyway, just delays startup by a second or two.
- Comment on Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows 1 week ago:
For the past month or so, I’ve been getting “RDSEED32 is broken” and it seems to be an issue with AMD’s drivers? Either way, there doesn’t appear to be a solution for me outside of getting a new CPU, but it also still boots and works so I’m not too bothered by it either.
But when updates roll around? Yeah, usually a good idea to make a backup before updating. Same is true with Windows, of course, but I already expect Windows to need a reinstall every year or so.
- Comment on Linux has had a great year, but there are two reasons I can't tear myself away from Windows 1 week ago:
Ever since they bumped the min-spec Mac Mini to 16GB RAM, it has looked like such a great deal. The upgrades are still way too expensive (except RAM now I guess?) but base model is great.
- Comment on Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here 1 week ago:
Apple stores are the embodiment of wasted space.
Otherwise, there are ways to use negative space to help direct the user to important information. It’s just often abused to direct them away from it to sell something, sadly.
- Comment on Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons. 2 weeks ago:
Wow, i immediately installed flickboard, thanks!
- Comment on Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons. 2 weeks ago:
There have been touch-specific keyboard layouts, but not really for English or other languages with Latin characters. You can probably imagine that CJK touch KBs can be pretty creative sometimes though.
- Comment on Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons. 2 weeks ago:
I want the power button on my phone to protrude like an actual button so I can actually press it. The thing’s like 4mm wide and I’m supposed to somehow push this thing through the gap in the side of my case with my thumb that’s 5x the width of the button.
As for other buttons, I wouldn’t mind physical buttons for the Android controls at the bottom, but not really a huge deal to me tbh.
- Comment on Half-Life 3 Reportedly Delayed Due to Steam Machine Price, Leak Claims 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
wouldn’t it be smart for these companies to bid a bit more if they could, to make these builds with more resellable parts instead of using these crazy server rack combo platters?
Their customers don’t care about if they are resellable. They just want GPUs.
We aren’t their customers, and I mean this in the most literal sense possible. You can’t buy these. They only sell them to big companies.
Yes, it’s shit.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Nvidia sold many of their data center GPUs as full server racks. The GPUs aren’t in a form factor to use with a traditional PC and simply cannot slot into a PCIe slot because they don’t have that kind of interface. Look up the DGX B200, which is shipped in a form factor intended for rack mounting and has 8 GPUs alongside two CPUs and everything else needed to run it as a server. These GPUs don’t support video output. It’s not that they just don’t have an output port. They don’t even have the software for it because these GPUs are not capable of rendering graphics (which makes you wonder why they are even called “GPU” anymore). They cannot be plugged into a PCIe slot because there is no interface for it.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
To be more specific here, GPUs are really, really good at linear algebra. They multiply matrices and vectors as single operations. CPUs can often do some SIMD operations, but not nearly as well or as many.
Video games do a lot of LA in order to render scenes. At the bare minimum, each model vertex is being multiplied by matrices to convert from world space to screen space, clip space, NDC, etc which are calculated based on the properties of your camera and projection type.
ML also does a lot of LA. Neural nets, for example. are literally a sequence of matrix multiplications. A very simple neural net works by taking a vector representing an input (or matrix for multiple inputs), multiplies that by a matrix representing a node’s weights, then passes the result to an activation function. Then does that a bunch more times.
Both functions want GPUs, but both need different things from it. AI wants GPUs with huge amounts of memory (for these huge models) which are optimized for data center usage (using cooling designed for racks). Games want GPUs that don’t need to have terabytes of VRAM, but which should be fast at calculating, fast at transferring data between CPU and GPU, and capable of running many shader programs in parallel (so that you can render more pixels at a time, for example).
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Also a lot of data scientists aren’t really programmers. They just learned Python to do data science. Learning a new language for this purpose would be both very difficult and, in their eyes, often unnecessary.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 2 weeks ago:
Proper multi-level tooltips can do far more to teach the user in 4X and grand strategy games than a chatbot can. It’s pretty much how I learned to play AoW4.
- Comment on Firefox dev clarifies that AI features will be 'opt-in' and there will be a 'killswitch' to disable them 2 weeks ago:
I’m not really sure how that’s a response to my comment.
Looks like from another response, you moved to Waterfox? You’re still using a fork of Firefox, though your comment made it sound like you moved entirely away from Mozilla (Waterfox still depends on Mozilla developing FF, from my understanding).
Anyway, seems like a good choice at least. Personally, I’m on Zen now. Hopefully we’ll get a real alternative at some point though.
- Comment on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 loses a GOTY award over use of gen AI 2 weeks ago:
Magic has less staying power than Pokémon.
Nobody even plays the Pokemon TCG. Well, I guess a couple dozen people might, but that’s about it.
The video games are basically the same game repackaged over and over again. No disrespect to people who like Pokemon of course, but the Pokemon Company could do a lot more than they do now. But it has stuck around because people really like the brand for some reason.
MTG, on the other hand, is shitting itself currently, but the core gameplay has evolved over 30+ years into the framework for a very detailed game with countless possible interactions. There are dozens of actively played formats for the game, and despite WOTC’s best attempts, will not be dying anytime soon.
E33 is not even in the same category as those games. To begin with, it’s a single game, not a whole franchise. It seems a bit unfair to compare it to those games in terms of staying power. Regarding gameplay, E33 is far more interesting than Pokemon. It doesn’t have the same depth as MTG or D&D, but MTG’s comprehensive rules is a PDF with around 300 pages, and D&D has entire rulebooks. E33 is far easier for people to learn than those two games as a result.
Chess, uh, is not a very popular game. People play it of course, but it stuck around because of its history. Also, the demographic of people playing video games regularly and classic board games regularly doesn’t have a huge amount of overlap.
- Comment on The LCD Steam Deck is no longer being manufactured 2 weeks ago:
The main appeal of the LCD one was you could get the cheapest Steam Deck, then swap out the hard drive for a 1TB+ drive. The total cost was super cheap, far less than a Switch 2 anyway.
It sucks to see it gone, but the whole economy around tech is fucked, so I guess it’s another casualty.
- Comment on Firefox dev clarifies that AI features will be 'opt-in' and there will be a 'killswitch' to disable them 2 weeks ago:
Well you haven’t exactly specified what browser you’re moving to, so we’re left wondering if you’re using a Servo dev build, a terminal-based browser, or carrier pigeons.
- Comment on Journalists convinced a AI Vending Machine Things to give them free stuff like a PS5 2 weeks ago:
Even if we assume they want to do discriminatory pricing (they probably do), they can do that without using LLMs. Use facial recognition and other traditional models to predict the person’s demographics and maybe even identify them. If you know who they are, do a lookup for all products they’ve expressed interest in elsewhere (this can be done with either something like a graph DB or via embeddings). Raise the price if they seem likely to purchase it based on the previous criteria. Never lower the price.
That’s a complicated process, but none of that needs an LLM, and they’d be doing a lot of this already if they’re going full big brother price discrimination.
- Comment on Firefox dev clarifies that AI features will be 'opt-in' and there will be a 'killswitch' to disable them 2 weeks ago:
try not to be determined that we’re going to do the wrong thing here.
There’s a lot Mozilla has done right, but there’s a lot they haven’t done right as well. These days, the cynical view has proven itself to be more reliable in general, so it’s hard not to apply it here as well.
That being said, FF has supported AI chatbots for a while and I haven’t seen it come up once in my browser beyond when they said “this is a thing now”. But this has also been a good opportunity to explore alternatives, so I’m trying out Zen now (ff-based still).
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming For the Internet. We Built You a Resource Hub to Fight Back. 3 weeks ago:
How would age verification even work here? Would it work?
Depends on the exact wording of the law, but an attempt can be made. It would be a horrible waste of everyone’s time as well as require significant time investment from instance admins though.
The whole concept is idiotic, especially since even the most complex age verification schemes can be bypassed by using an adult to verify on behalf of a child (and most can even be bypassed with video game screenshots). You end up with the same system, functionally a checkbox asking if you’re old enough, but with all the added invasiveness and potential risk.
- Comment on Ford ends F-150 Lightning production, starts battery storage business 3 weeks ago:
We had a Tacoma growing up and it was honestly a great car. Wasn’t too big to park, could fit a good amount in the bed, and had enough seats for five, though the second row was for the shorter passengers. It’s also still being driven today. We had a small car for commuting as well, and the Tacoma mostly functioned as a second vehicle (for when two people need one, helped when I got a license) plus for whenever we went to Costco.
- Comment on Ford ends F-150 Lightning production, starts battery storage business 3 weeks ago:
This. People either want a giant diesel-guzzling truck, or they want a small efficient truck as their second vehicle for moving things around. Nobody’s looking for a giant EV truck, especially at that price.
All they had to do was make an EV Tacoma. Instead, they made an EV F-150.
- Comment on "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry 3 weeks ago:
and then the company suffered a collapse and everyone got laid off.
This feels like the ending to most stories these days. My friend’s company shoved AI down his throat, and then the company suffered a collapse and everyone got laid off.
