Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.

  In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gotta get those tickets!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The floor is the natural environment for babies, hence why they learn to craw before they learn to walk /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in Europe too and my experience with TOR is not quite the same.

  Then again I’m in one the more peripheric bits of Europe and not surrounded by countries were people run TOR noded, so it’s probably more bottlenecked.

  That said, surfing behind a VPN (which I pay for) plus provides me the level of privacy which I need at the moment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t TOR a bit too slow to watch videos in YouTube?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been getting a “You must sign on to see this content” from YouTube (refusing to play the video if I don’t) for ages when I’m behind a VPN, but if I disconnect the VPN and try again I don’t get it.

  Curiously, sometimes it doesn’t happen.

  I guess YouTube has a list of IP addresses of VPN exit points and will do that if it detects a connection coming from one of those, but at least for my VPN provider some exit points are not in the list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not a meme, just superpawsition⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but it also duplicates the cat owners, so there’s one whose cat has died and a different one whose cat still lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does he do it???⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, the paper linked from that Wikipedia entry is very interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t heard of bitnet.

  Then again my knowledge of Machine Learning is 3 decades old (so, even before Recurrent Neural Networks were invented, much less Attention) and then some more recent reading up on LLMs from an implementation point of view to understand at least a bit how they work (it’s funny how so much of the modern stuff is still anchored in 3 decades old concepts).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many boomers and even some gen x believe so peristently that if you dressup and show up in person anywhere you will get whatever you went there for?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because that’s how it worked for pretty much everything back in the day when your chances of getting a loan from the bank depended on the impression of trustworthiness you projected on the bank manager when you asked for it, rather than some obscure algorithm running in the bank’s systems that didn’t take in account any feedback from an actual human.

  Amongst large companies automation removed humans from the loop, at least at an early stage, so now your machine processable input and/or information about you extracted from some other sources about what you’ve done so far, matching whatever the algorithm is configured to favor is all that matters. Sure, beyond that you’ll almost certainly end up with a person making a final decision (for hiring, not for bank loans), but you first have to pass that big initial automated hurdle that’s supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  Amongst other things this has killed “being judged as having potential” as a way to get a foot on the door, unless you have a high score on a metric supposedly correlated to it such as good grades at a supposedly elite university, since unlike “impression” such metrics can be mathematically evaluated and compared by algorithms.

  Mind you, when looking for work in smaller companies that haven’t outsourced their hiring, impressions still work since your first point of contact is going to be a person whose opinion counts rather than an algorithm or a person too low on the pecking scale for their judgement to be taken in account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, if I understood it correctly, what you see as “IF” is the multi-headed attention stuff.

  However the Genetic Algorithms stuff is something completelly different from Neural Networks: it’s basically an Evolutionary method of finding the best “formula” to process inputs to generate the desired output by assessing different variants of the “formula” with the training data, picking the best ones and then generating a new generation of variants from the best ones and assessing those and keep doing it until the error rate is below a certain value.

  As far as I can tell Genetic Algorithms can’t really scale to the size of something like an LLM (the training requirements would be even more insane) though that technique could be used to train part of a Neural Network or to create functional blocks that worked together with NNs.

  And yeah, MLPs trained via simple Backpropagation are exactly what I’m familiar with, having learned that stuff 3 decades ago as part of my degree when that was the pinnacle of NN technology and model architectures were still stupidly simple. That’s why I would be shocked if a so-called ML “expert” didn’t recognize that, as it’s the most basic form of Neural Network there is and it’s being doing the rounds for ages (that stuff was literally used to in automated postal code recognition in letters for automated mail sorting back in the 90s).

  I would expect that for people doing ML a simple MLP is as recognizable as binary is for programmers - sure people don’t work at that level anymore, but at they should at least recognize it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean that they’re actually competing multiple variants of a model against each other to see which ones get closer to generating the expected results, and picking the best ones to create the next generation?

  Because that’s how Genetic Algorithms work and get trained, which is completelly different from how Neural Networks work and get trained.

  Also the links in Neural Networks don’t at all use IF-functions: the output of a neuron is just a mathematical operation on the values of all it’s inputs (basically a sum of the results of a function applied to the input numbers, though nowadays there are also cyclic elements).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does he do it???⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression (from what I learned about how planes fly) that the spirals were actually a bad thing since energy was lost to turbulence via those (and hence why commercial jets have winglets on their wingtips) and the good part is the laminar flow of the air over and under the wings.

  Is this not so in animal flight?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, if you’re supposedly in AI/ML and don’t recognize a (stupidly simplified) diagram for a Neural Network, you don’t really make stuff with it, you’re just another user (probably a “prompt engineer”).

  Even people creating Machine Learning solutions with other techniques would recognize that as representing a Neural Network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t really done Neural Networks in 2 decades, and was under the impression that NNs pretty much dominate Machine Learning nowadays, whilst stuff like Genetic Algorithms were way less popular or not at all used anymore.

  Is that the case?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jesus hates American "Christians"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, sorta.

  You also see plenty of people delegating their sense of Good and Evil to for example political leaders.

  A great example is people who would look at what’s going on in Gaza putting aside politics and going “yeah, knowingly killing tens of thousands of children is objectivelly bad” but as soon as their favorite political leaders start opinating about it, all of the sudden they’re all “I don’t believe that’s a Genocide” (even after the UN officially deemed it a Genocide).

  I’ve seen it happen in the country were I live - people who previously admitted that what was happening was bad, suddenly when their favored rightwing politicians took an interest in it and sided with Israel, start voicing quite different opinions which ape what those politicians are saying.

  As I see it the problem isnt specifically Religion or Politics, it’s people with high Tribalism (hence easilly swayed by the leaders of their tribes, such as religious or political tribes) and lacking or with a very weak moral compass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon uses GOG⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That reminds me that Morrowind is currently discounted in GOG and I’ve been meaning to buy it and play it via OpenMW ever since I heard about the latter …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon uses GOG⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of games just came with a key on the user manual or the disk packaging, which was just an alphanumeric code the user entered during game install or on first launch and which was validated algorithimcally (no “phone home” to check a database of installs, back then).

  Some games did required the disk to be inserted to play: the floppy, CD or DVD were mastered with strange characteristics that could only be there is mastered read-only media and could not be replicated in recorded media, so they worked like a physical key that allowed only one instance of the game to run at any one time. I would say this was a form of DRM, but non-intrusive since it didn’t try to take over parts of the OS and only affected that game when it was running.

  The era of highly intrusive DRM whose impact went beyond the game itself started in the 00s when the use of the Internet became widespread, i suppose partly because it’s the cheap-ass solution for the problems of cheating in online games (the costly solution involves proper game server and systems architecture design and is more computationally demending on the server side) and online gaming was becoming big during that decade (for example, WOW is from 2004) and partly as a counter to how the Internet made it much easier to distribute first game keys and later game cracks.

  The stuff we see in Steam is basically a centralized online keycheck, so the kind of thing which was common in the early 00s, only this one is more intrusive because it will check the key EVERYTIME YOU LAUNCH THE GAME, whilst the original key checking (both the earlier algorithmic check and later the “phone home” online checking) only checked once, either during install or at first launch, so with the Steam version you have less freedom: in the old days, algorithmic key check meant games could be installed and run entirelly offline, plus you were able to install the game in more than one machine, whilst online validation did require online during install or first launch but never again after that so you could play offline forever from then onwards, whilst the Steam kind at best only lets you be offline for a certain time period and then requires online.

  The stuff in GOG is mainly how it was way back in the 90s before even game keys or, at most (and only for a handful of games) you get a game key which is validated algorithmically on install or first start, thus online is never required and nothing restricts you from installing the game in more than one machine (which is absolutelly legit if they’re all your machines and you only ever play the game in one of them at a time).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.

  This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.

  That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.

  When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.

  I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I considered making a really insulting comment on this just for fun, but I just can’t be arsed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Using materials obtained outside the Earth’s gravity well, we can make much larger ships than of launching them from the surface of Earth. Of course that requires some kind of materials processing facilities in space, which is depending on stuff like Moon bases and the years of development of materials science in low and zero-gravity environments possible in those.

  Further, the Apolo Program has most definitelly shown we can buy progress. Not “beyond the known principles of present day science” progress (so, no amount of money is going to get us FTL travel) but certainly Engineering progress (so solar sail towed asteroids, moon mining, moon-based nuclear reactors, mass drivers to push loads from the Moon surface into orbit, alternative ship designs using materials found outside the Earth’s surface and/or low weight designs such as the insuflable space stations that were at one point suggested and even test at a small scale, and so on).

  It wasn’t by chance that what I suggested was asteroid mining and Mars stations rather than interstellar travel - the money wasted in the Iraq invasion alone over the decades since could have built the infrastructure needed, to get the engineeringe experience required to be able to do those things.

  Instead, we have Facebook, over the counter credit derivatives and LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was the fall of Rome this stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nowadays with mass media and the internet, we get aware of much more of the stupid shit happening all over than a common person would in the Western Roman Empire because stupid shit anywhere can be brought to people’s attention everywhere quickly, and since stupid stands out it does get brought to people’s attention.

  Also real power is more centralized nowadays, also because of the speed with which information and people can travel enabling more centralised Command & Control systems.

  So I would say that a fall due to internal social and political degenrence will happen faster and look a lot more stupid to bystanders, than back in Roman Empire days. Also the density of stupid timewise is probably higher now since everything is happening faster and in a lot more places at the same time.

  That said, what’s happening in the US has been developing since at least Clinton’s time, maybe even Reagan’s, maybe longer than that - it’s just that the earlier stages which made the structural changes and created the conditions for what’s happening now, weren’t obvious to anybody but a handful of experts in some domains who of course weren’t given airtime on mass media or were deemed kooks by the rest of people when they did get airtime: any system’s eventual doom is guaranteed as soon as criticism of the structurs system itself is repressed or even de facto suppressed, though it generally takes time for it go through the stagnancy and then the internal-pillaging stages that lead to it cracking and collapsing from becoming unable to serve most people in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I would give my life savings for something that eradicates them from my apartment 😌⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All my pets are spiders and they don’t even know they’re my pets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hah, as if the current fucked up trajectory will ever bring us to a future of high tech space exploration.

  The way things are going Mankind is vastly more likely to end up in some Dystopia were society has regressed to outright Feudalism and the most technological advanced stuff are at best mass distraction devices or some kind of ML-based social mass manipulator, possibly just the implanted equivalent of slave shock-collars and the systems to control large number of those.

  We’re not currently evolving, we’re devolving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say remote working less productive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends a lot on a person’s personality.

  Myself I find it much harder to have the discipline to do that when working from home, plus it’s far easier to get distracted at home, so I chose to work from a coworking space which is about 15m walk from home.

  Also, from the Covid days I found out I that for my own sanity I need to go out if only to be outside four walls, which I get to do regularly with my current setup.

  So as I see it you’re both right and as somebody else says, it’s only a problem when this forced on people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say remote working less productive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  London Tube, maybe the Green Line that goes the Heathrow?!

  Using the Tube at rush hour was so bad I switched to cycling for my commute (which turned out to take the same time whilst being far more pleasant), this before before cycling in London was fashionable so when I started doing it there weren’t all that many of us and drivers weren’t yet used to cyclists so you had to be extra careful with things like being on their blindspot near places were they might turn.

  Also some of the Tube lines in London are old and hence the tunnels are less high, so the tube trains that run there (like this one) have lower ceilings and feel extra opprossive.

  Mind you, using the Tube is still a superior experience to driving since you can actually bring a book and distract yourself by reading in the Tube.

  Definitelly not the thing I miss about London.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Curiously, actual scams also go through “a speculative boom that looked like a scam in the moment”, and then they turn out to actually be an overhyped scam that doesn’t in fact change the World.

  Crypto currencies are a good example.

  Your “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” statement makes a lot of sense in the early stages, when we don’t really know yet if what’s being overhyped might or not be just the beginning of something big, hence one shouldn’t just discount a tech because there’s a massive hype train on it. The thing is, this was maybe 1 or 2 years ago for things like LLMs, but by know it’s becoming obvious that it’s a dead end since the speed of improvement and cost relative to improvement ratio have become very bad.

  Whilst broader Machine Learning tech is useful, as it was useful already since when it started (back in the 90s Neural Networks were already used to recognized postal codes on mail envelopes for automated sorting), this bubble was never about the broader domain of Machine Learning, it was about a handful of very specific NN architectures with massive numbers of neurons and huge training datasets (generally scrapped from the Internet), and it’s those architectures and associated approaches to try and create a machine intelligence that are turning out to not at all deliver what was promised and as they’ve already reached a point very low incremental returns, seem to be a dead-end in the quest to reach that objective. What they do deliver - an unimaginative text fluff generator - turns out to be mainly useless.

  So yeah, if you’re betting on the kind of huge neural networks with huge datasets used in the subsection of ML which has been overhyped in this bubble and the kind of things they require such as lots of GPU power, you’re going to get burned because that specific Tech pathway isn’t going to deliver what was promised, ever.

  Does this mean that MLs will stop being useful for things like mail sorting or other forms of image recognition? Of course not, those are completelly different applications of that broad technique which have very little to do with what people now think of as being AI and the bubble around it.

  Machine Learning has a bright future, it’s just that what was pushed in this bubble wasn’t Machine Learning in general but rather very specific architectures within it - just like when the “Revolution in Transportation” which turned out to be the Segway and kind crap thus quickly fizzled didn’t destroy the entire concept of transportation, so the blowing up of the LLMs bubble isn’t going to destroy the concept of Machine Learning, but in both cases if you went all in into that specific expression a technology (or the artifacts around it, such as massive amounts GPU power for LLMs), that the broader domain will keep going one isn’t going to be much comfort to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shrimp fried rice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To get that photographic level of precision, I would expect more something along the lines of a modern horse using an Image Generation AI coupled to a Natural Language Processor trained on horse sounds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shrimp fried rice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also one would expect to see a theme more interesting for horses - like, say, grass - in a drawing from a horse, though maybe this one could be more of a social critique, subtly alluding to the plight of enslaved horses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I remember it correctly, the Dodi repack just needs some audio library configured in the Wine instance via Winetricks as a built-in library.

  If using Lutris, you need to enable logging for that game, then try and run it. After it fails to run, look at the log and near where it stops you’ll see it complain about failing to load a certain DLL (and after that lots of failing to load other DLLs as a consequence of failing to load that original DLL). Google the name of that DLL and you’ll find which library it is part of. From Lutris, run Wintricks for that game (it’s in a pull-down next to the “Start” button for the game) and under Winetricks “Libraries” add that library to that Wine instance as a built-in library (if that doesn’t work, download the DLL, put it in the game dir and try adding it as native).

  If what you see in the logs is, instead of a “Couldn’t load DLL”, a “Couldn’t find function in DLL” what you have is not a missing library but instead a library version mismatch. Go to Winetricks an try to force the use of the native version of the library (sometimes the built-in version of a common DLL in Wine is the wrong version, and you need to force Wine to use the version of that DL that comes with the game, i.e. the “native” version).

  If all that fails, Google that game’s name together with “Linux” to see if somebody else has figured it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At least from Lutris you can run your games (pirated our otherwise) genuinelly sandboxed with something like Bubblewrap or Firejail, which as far as I can tell you can’t do in Steam (unless you sandbox Steam itself, which is problematic if for example you want to deny networking to some games but not others).

  IMHO, if you sandbox them it’s actually safer to run pirated versions of games in Linux than running the official versions from Steam with no sandboxing, at least for AAA since pretty much all those companies have done or do abusive shit.