I think it was Mandrake Linux for me.
It no longer exists though. …I guess I’m old.

The word “Nazi” wasn’t part of the prompt though.

The prompt was “1943 German Soldier”… so if, like you said, the images are “Dressed as a German style soldier”, I’d say it’s not too bad.

While the result from generating an image through AI is not meant to be “factually” accurate, its seeking to be as accurate as possible when it comes to matching the prompt that is provided. And the prompt “1943 German Soldier” or “US Senator from the 1800” or “Emperor of China” has some implications in what kind of images would be expected and which kinds wouldn’t. Just like how you wouldn’t expect a lightsaber when asking for “medieval swords”.

I’m not convinced that attempting to “balance a biased training dataset” in the way that this is apparently being done is really attainable or worthwhile.

An AI can only work based on biases, and it’s impossible to correct/balance the dataset without just introducing a different bias. Because the model is just a collection of biases that discriminate between how different descriptions relate to pictures. If there was no bias for the AI to rely on, they would not be able to pick anything to show.

For example, the AI does not know whether the word “Soldier” really corresponds to someone dressed like in the picture, it’s just biased to expect that. It can’t tell whether an actual soldier might just be wearing pajamas or whether someone dressed in those uniforms might not be an actual soldier.

Describing a picture is, on itself, an exercise of assumptions, biases, appearances that are just based on pre-conceived notions of what are our expectations when comparing the picture to our own reality. So the AI needs to show whatever corresponds to those biases in order to match as accuratelly as possible our biased expectations for what those descriptions mean.

If the dataset is complete enough, and yet it’s biased to show predominantly a particular gender or ethnicity when asking for “1943 German Soldier” because that happens to be the most common image of what a “1943 German Soldier” is, but you want a different ethnicity or gender, then add that ethnicity/gender to the prompt (like you said in the first point), instead supporting the idea of having the developers force diversity into the results in a direction that contradicts the dataset just because the results aren’t politically correct. …it would be more honest to add a disclaimer and still show the result as it is, instead of manipulating it in a direction that activelly pushes the IA to hallucinate.

Alternativelly: expand your dataset with more valuable data in a direction that does not contradict reality (eg. introduce more pictures of soldiers of different ethnics from situations that actually are found in our reality). You’ll be altering the data, but you would be doing it without distorting the bias unrealistically, since they would be examples grounded in reality.

someone painting him as a morally righteous

The first thing @seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM said was: “Assange is a bit of a scumbag” …

The closest thing to “righteousness” said was: “his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others.”

Which, being true, it’s absolutely not challenged or contradicted by anything you said in response.

Note that “freedom of information” is totally compatible with “picking and choosing” the manner in which you exercise that freedom. In fact, I’d argue that the freedom of “picking and choosing” what’s published without external pressure is fundamentally what the freedom of press is about.

Assagne (like any other journalist) should have the freedom of “picking and choosing” what facts he wants to expose, as long as they are not fabrications. If they are shown to be intentionally fabricated then that’s when things would be different… but if he’s just informing, a mouthpiece, even if the information is filtered based on an editorial, then that’s just journalism. That’s a freedom that should be protected, instead of attacking him because he’s publishing (or not publishing) this or that.

The packager always should “explicitly require” what are the dependencies in a Nix package… it’s not like it’s a choice, if there are missing dependencies then that’d be a bug.

If the package is not declaring its dependencies properly then it might not run properly in NixOS, since there are no “system libraries” in that OS other than the ones that were installed from Nix packages.

And one of its advantages over AppImages is that instead of bundling everything together causing redundancies and inefficient use of resources, you actually have shared libraries with Nix (not the system ones, but Nix dependencies). If you have multiple AppImages that bundle the same libraries you can end up having the exact same version of the library installed multiple times (or loaded in memory, when running). Appimages do not scale, you would be wasting a lot of resources if you were to make heavy use of them, whereas with Nix you can run an entire OS built with Nix packages.

Huh? as far as I know it has its own libraries and dependency system. What do you mean?

The nice thing about Nix/Guix is that each version of a library only needs to be installed once and it wont really be “bundled” with the app itself. So it would be a lot easier to hunt down the packages that are depending on a bad library.

Flatpak still depends on runtimes though, I have a few different runtimes I had to install just because of one or two flatpaks that required them (like for example I have both the gnome and kde flatpak runtimes, despite not running either of those desktop environments)… and they can depend on specific versions of runtimes too! I remember one time flatpak recommended me to uninstall one flatpak program I had because it depended on a deprecated runtime that was no longer supported.

Also, some flatpaks can depend on another flatpak, like how for Godot they are preparing a “parent” flatpak (I don’t remember the terminology) that godot games can depend on in order to reduce redundancies when having multiple godot games installed.

Because of those things, you are still likely to require a flatpak remote configured and an internet connection when you install a flatpak. It’s not really a fully self contained thing.

Appimages are more self contained… but even those might make assumptions on what libraries the system might have, which makes them not as universal as they might seem. That or the file needs to be really big, unnecessarily so. Usually, a combination or compromise between both problems, at the discretion of the dev doing the packaging.

The advantage with Nix is that it’s more efficient with the users space (because it makes sure you don’t get the exact same version of a library installed twice), while making it impossible to have a dependency conflict regardless of how old or new is what you wanna install (which is something the package manager from your typical distro can’t do).

At least it’s just a “considering”…

I remember back when they scrapped the multiplayer promises they made for Cyberpunk 2077 there was also word about them preparing some separate standalone multiplayer game for the future instead. To me this “considering” is more of an indication that the new game won’t be multiplayer focused (if it has multiplayer at all), rather than a promise of anything.

And that was just the warm up.
850k concurrent players and rising right now…

I’m not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I’m sure it’s much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped… but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I’m not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I’m convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing “yet another one” in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics… but I don’t believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I’d argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy…

Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you’ll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products… without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I’d argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.

Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn’t be the first game that relies on the “unreliable narrator” trope.

Apparently, this article is talking about the “Legacy CS:GO Version” that was available (even after the CS2 launch) for devices that were unable to run CS2. It seems that was less than 1% of CS:GO players, so they are ending support for it, even though they claim it should still be available with reduced compatibility.

I think anyone can switch to this version in the “Beta” tab of the properties window for CS2 by selecting “csgo_legacy”.

What is the legacy version of CS:GO?

The legacy version of CS:GO is a frozen build of CS:GO. It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking.

What will happen after the end of support for the legacy version of CS:GO?

After January 1, 2024 the game will still be available, but certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail.

The problem is that people apparently like the abuse.
Why is so many people simping for Adobe products? And even promoting them in the education levels…
Even if the competition were technologically inferior (which I don’t know if it’s really true) I’d rather the industry sacrificed throwing away 10+ years of adobe-driven improvements if we could get rid of the shackles.

I don’t think “the development” is what is claimed to be at stake here.

OP is not talking about the software, they’re talking about the content. And the content model from Mastodon is not interchangeable with the one from Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc. they serve different purposes and have different models. In fact that’s the main interoperatibility barrier between them.

It’s like saying that if most people use gmail for email you will switch from email to audio calls to avoid communicating with google’s service. As if real time audio were the same thing as sending a message (or as if google was unable to add compatibility with that call service too if they wanted).

One thing you could argue is, instead of switching services, switching to an instance that does defederate if you dont want threads content. But that same argument can be said as well towards those wanting threads federation…

But dont think the point is what does the individual want (if that were the case, just use the option to block threads content for your user, without defederating), the point is what’s best for the fediverse. I think people are afraid that something similar to what happened with “google talk” and their embrace of xmpp will repeat.

Personally, I think there’s no reason to jump the gun this early… all of this post is based on a lot of weak assumptions. I dont believe that threads content would overwhelm the feeds, and if that were to happen then the software could be tweaked so the contribution of each instance to the feeds can be weighted and made more customizable, for example.

It’s also ironic that they say it offers a “compatibility” that didn’t exist before. Windows 98 with MS DOS under the hood was fully compatible with older games, and it was only with the Windows XP, 2000 & NT line when this compatibility was broken and those same old games no longer worked out of the box. The only way to get some level of compatibility back was to introduce workarounds and special “modes” that they had to add to XP which often didn’t really help if your DOS game was old enough.

Imho, getting rid of the underlying “command prompt” might have been a good thing for the more casual gamers, or the ones who were new in the hobby… but most gamers coming from MS DOS at the time were not afraid of COMMAND.COM, many of us only moved from Windows 9x when we were forced to (due to newer software no longer working, or having to change PC). To me, the newer editions always felt more opaque… giving less control for the sake of security. It was getting harder and harder to try to understand what your OS was doing. With Windows XP you no longer had an AUTOEXEC.BAT or a CONFIG.SYS for power-users to customize.

I wish this was a start towards a push for ActivityPub support across blogging platforms and feed readers.

In particular, it would be interesting if some form of support for statically-generated ActivityPub feeds was a thing among the software acting as consumers. That’s the one thing that still makes RSS/Atom be better of an option for many blogs that are built statically.

Even if they were the ones paying me $1 a year for having an account, I doubt I’d be using it.

Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term “deathmatch” was coined by the Doom game mode.

However, there was no frame interpolation in the original Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that “tic” (1/35 of a second), so the game might be laggy for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.

But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn’t even have an internet connection at that time, personally. In fact, even during the Quake age, I was only able to play on LAN… and I still liked coop better.

Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.

Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn’t exist.

If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say… in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it’d starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop… a game can be competitive and be PvE.

Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating your friend’s “score” or speed… almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.

I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it’s because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P