lvxferre
@lvxferre@mander.xyz
The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
- Comment on Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created 8 hours ago:
Let’s hope you’re right, and Matrix improves by a lot.
- Comment on Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created 1 day ago:
Yes but soon it’ll be better than Discord. Sadly not because Matrix would’ve improved, but because Discord went downhill really hard.
- Comment on Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created 1 day ago:
Discord is entering its second decade as a company and is seeking to go public.
I’m going to laugh my arse off at the muppets who migrated from Reddit to Discord, yet another centralised platform enshittifying itself.
Told ya. I told you all.
- Comment on Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers 2 days ago:
Disgusting.
This would be sad and highly unethical if coming from some small, relatively new company, struggling to keep up. But since it’s coming from a large, monopolistic and 30yo old corporation it becomes way worse.
I’m glad I stopped buying their cards. My last one is an AMD, and I’m going Chinese for the next one (a decade or so from now).
- Comment on I cheat on as many people as I want to 3 days ago:
Dunno, but I don’t think so. Otherwise when we broke up she would throw it on my face.
- Comment on I cheat on as many people as I want to 3 days ago:
Then you get crazy people who make shit up, out of nowhere, that you’ve been cheating. Even when you did not. Like my ex-fiancée - goddammit it was one of the many reasons I broke up with her.
- Comment on The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East 1 week ago:
And by a modder turned dev, so, professionalisation? :)
Yup - Kovarex is a great example of how the indie scene is actually professionalising people, not the opposite.
- Comment on The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East 1 week ago:
And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.
You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.
- Comment on The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East 1 week ago:
I played Factorio a fair bit, the fluid system was hell. But based on some LPs it seems Space Age fixed it rather nicely.
- Comment on The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East 1 week ago:
as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]
- The older games are not “overperforming”. The newer games are underperforming.
- Large studios are “struggling to drive sales” because customers take cost and benefit into account.
- The success of those solo devs and small teams is not “outsized”, it’s deserved because they get it right.
What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.
More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.
Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.
And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”
Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.
Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.
Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.
- Comment on Minecraft will finally let you craft saddles instead of hunting for them 1 week ago:
They should’ve made them craftable since the beginning. But hey, it isn’t like Minecraft follows any sort of design or logic, more like the developers say “ooohhh shiny” and add new features on a whim.
And this is likely associated with the happy Ghast mob. I’m not directly opposed to the idea of a flying mob that lets you stand on, to build stuff, but… come on, stop wrecking the theme of older mobs dammit.
- Comment on [DeliberatelyBuried] Ratatouille 1 week ago:
There’s a mini-Linguini controlling that amoeba.
- Comment on Hideo Kojima proposes a game where the protagonist forgets abilities if players take too long a break 1 week ago:
Skill loss itself is fine, the problem is to make it based on RL time. It’s a game, not a job; you shouldn’t need to clock in/out regularly to enjoy it. (Tamagochi had the same issue. Except it was character loss.)
I didn’t play Escape from Tarkov but two good examples come to my mind:
- RimWorld - colonists have ~10 trainable skills. They lose skills over time, faster at higher levels. This encourages specialisation, so when shit hits the fan the game cripples you even harder. (Fuck you, Randy.)
- Nethack - your character gradually forgets spells over time; to avoid it you need to either re-read consumable spellbooks, or use the spell often (thus using precious mana). It’s all about resource management, hoard spells and you’ll get yourself killed in no time, but if you prioritise useful spells you have a better chance of survival.
In both cases the player is always losing something, even with correct gameplay. But neither demands you to treat it as a job.
- Comment on Hideo Kojima proposes a game where the protagonist forgets abilities if players take too long a break 1 week ago:
Fucking dumb idea. It isn’t like the player themself won’t forget this stuff already.
- Comment on End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending 1 week ago:
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)
- Comment on End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending 1 week ago:
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says “Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition… bleeergh I can’t choose, I give up”.
- Comment on End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending 1 week ago:
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
- Comment on End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending 1 week ago:
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. for them.to look it up. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful. out", instead of telling them to search it.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
- Comment on End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending 1 week ago:
Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
- Comment on AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay 2 weeks ago:
Yes, it is expensive. But most of that cost is not because of simple applications, like in my example with grammar tables. It’s because those models have been scaled up to a bazillion parameters and “trained” with a gorillabyte of scrapped data, in the hopes they’ll magically reach sentience and stop telling you to put glue on pizza. It’s because of meaning (semantics and pragmatics), not grammar.
Also, natural languages don’t really have nonsensical rules; sure, sometimes you see some weird stuff (like Italian genderbending plurals, or English question formation), but even those are procedural: “if X, do Y”. LLMs are actually rather good at regenerating those procedural rules based on examples from the data.
But I wish it had some broader use, that would justify its cost.
I hope the opposite - that they cut down the costs based on the current uses. Small models for specific applications, dirty cheap in both training and running costs.
- Comment on AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay 2 weeks ago:
I’d go further: you won’t reach AGI through LLM development. It’s like randomly throwing bricks on a construction site, no cement, and hoping that you’ll get a house.
I’m not even sure if AGI is cost-wise feasible with the current hardware, we’d probably need cheaper calculations per unit of energy.
- Comment on AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay 2 weeks ago:
Why not quanta? Don’t you believe in the power of the crystals? Quantum vibrations of the Universe from negative ions from the Himalayan salt lamps give you 153.7% better spiritual connection with the soul of the cosmic rays of the Unity!
…what makes me sadder about the generative models is that the underlying tech is genuinely interesting. For example, for languages with large presence online they get the grammar right, so stuff like “give me a [declension | conjugation] table for [noun | verb]” works great, and if it’s any application where accuracy isn’t a big deal (like “give me ideas for [thing]”) you’ll probably get some interesting output. But it certainly not give you reliable info about most stuff, unless directly copied from elsewhere.
- Comment on AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay 2 weeks ago:
The whole thing can be summed up as the following: they’re selling you a hammer and telling you to use it with screws. Once you hammer the screw, it trashes the wood really bad. Then they’re calling the wood trashing “hallucination”, and promising you better hammers that won’t do this. Except a hammer is not a tool to use with screws dammit, you should be using a screwdriver.
An AI leaderboard suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates.
So he’s suggesting that the models are producing less accurate results… because they have higher rates of less accurate results? This is a tautological pseudo-explanation.
AI chatbots from tech companies such as OpenAI and Google have been getting so-called reasoning upgrades over the past months
When are people going to accept the fact that large “language” models are not general intelligence?
ideally to make them better at giving us answers we can trust
Those models are useful, but only a fool trusts = is gullible towards their output.
OpenAI says the reasoning process isn’t to blame.
Just like my dog isn’t to blame for the holes in my garden. Because I don’t have a dog.
This is sounding more and more like model collapse - models perform worse when trained on the output of other models.
inb4 sealions asking what’s my definition of reasoning in 3…2…1…
- Comment on velosaur 2 weeks ago:
velociraptor = distance(raptor)²/timeraptor
acceleraptor = veloci(raptor)²/timeraptor = distance(raptor)²/(timeraptor)²
momentumraptor = mass(raptor)²/velociraptor
…you know what, I’m going to use dinosaur derivatives instead. GIMME A CHICKEN!
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment 2 weeks ago:
🤣
…although frankly I still get some Schadenfreude from seeing Reddit wreck itself.
- Comment on Paradox Interactive announce Europa Universalis V 2 weeks ago:
[Replying to myself to avoid editing the above]
Just for curiosity I went to Reddit, to check r/eu5. Guess what! It’s now controlled by the powertripping circlejerk that controls other Paradox subreddits. “Yay”.
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment 2 weeks ago:
Clean TP is useful. Used TP has negative value, it’s the sort of nasty trash that you see with disgust, and that you can’t wait to get rid of.
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment 2 weeks ago:
Yup. It isn’t like Reddit is known for efficiently tackling the problems that appear.
- Comment on Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit [VGC] 2 weeks ago:
I feel like I’ve been using this metaphor a bit too often, but: Nintendo is shitting its pants to make Pocketpair (PalWorld dev) smell. So far, the results of the litigation have been slightly bad for Pocketpair, but really bad for Nintendo - just the sheer amount of negative publicity is likely costing Nintendo more money than it could ever get from this turf war.
- Comment on Console prices could rise by 69% in the US due to Trump tariffs, tech trade association warns [VGC] 2 weeks ago:
69%? N… … …nevermind. 🫢
Serious now, I wouldn’t be surprised if USA’s video game industry was suddenly gone - because for countries not directly caught in the tariffs war, businesses outside USA (like Sony and Nintendo) will get another competitive advantage.