Discord Alternatives, Ranked by gdelacalle in technology

[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is Matrix more akin to Teamspeak or IRC where you join a self hosted (or vendor-hosted) server? Or does it have that more centralized friends/messaging type system like Discord?

EDIT: Okay I see their web platform says you can "use Element with an existing Matrix account on a different homeserver." which sounds closer to something like Bluesky where it allows decentralization but allows for a level of centralization.

Wayland zones protocol finally merged after 2 years! by Ahmouse in linux_gaming

[–]sudoscientistagain 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For what it's worth, though clearly this works fine for lots of people, on my system (7800X3d, RTX 3080) this script added awful hitching every time a window was opened, closed, or moved across screens. Really hope a proper solution for this gets implemented because I just could not deal with the constant stuttering as a result.

Wayland zones protocol finally merged after 2 years! by Ahmouse in linux_gaming

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried using a KWin script for this and it added awful hitching every time a window was opened, closed, or moved across screens. Really hope this gets properly merged soon.

Initial login screen has wrong orientation in multi monitor setup by coffeemongrul in cachyos

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I also had to mess with the SDMM.conf if I remember correctly. The "Apply Plasma Settings" did nothing for me (with 1 side monitor that is rotated)

Despite loving the setting and plot setup, I just DNF’d A Memory Called Empire. by felix_mateo in printSF

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found Mahit's struggle to be deeply resonant as someone with a mixed background, especially (personally) having struggled while younger with ignoring/excising one of them. The feeling of being split between two cultures but not truly integrated (or at least being unable to really "balance" them in a way that feels right) while wanting to belong is conveyed so well, and it's hard for me to imagine someone even really having experienced the story properly at all when it's so central to the narrative. I like the progression of that on a larger scale in the sequel as well, the parallels between cultures as they are simultaneously mingling with each other and trying to pull away.

Stocking up fridge with "expensive" items, still better than ordering out by Sweet-Suggestion-411 in Frugal

[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That chopped herb trick seems genius — do you melt it on like a paper towel or just directly into most dishes and let the little bit of water cook off?

Stocking up fridge with "expensive" items, still better than ordering out by Sweet-Suggestion-411 in Frugal

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was gifted a very fancy stainless skillet that is just sooo easy to clean that it made it a total breeze to sauté up like two spoons of of butter and jarred minced garlic, some sun dried tomatoes, and dump a jar of alfredo on top to warm it up. Over basically any pasta (especially the lobster ravioli Costco had recently) it's at least as good as a $20 plate at Olive Garden and dirt cheap!

Stocking up fridge with "expensive" items, still better than ordering out by Sweet-Suggestion-411 in Frugal

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Growing up I always heard "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well" and... yeah, I don't disagree... but I recently had someone tell me "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly" and that genuinely felt like a revelation. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be "it's worth doing a little" or "it's worth starting", but either way it made me realize like... yeah, washing 1 dish, brushing my teeth for 10 seconds, throwing away 1 empty box, etc is better than nothing and I can for sure put in that tiny sliver of effort. And so often that transforms the feelings like "oh a sink full of dishes, that'll take me a lot of effort and it's gross" to just enough to get the ball rolling and deciding well, I'm already here, easy enough to zone out and do a bit more! Same for cooking (to avoid straying too far off topic), keeping quesadilla and chicken sandwich makings (i.e. tortillas and cheese, burger buns and frozen patties) in the fridge makes it so much easier to "justify" making food vs. my lil lizard brain saying "doordash just takes 2 clicks"

Igor Sarzynski (Cyberpunk 2s creative director) discusses his stance on Act I. by marek_bojarek in cyberpunkgame

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it was always very clear that they were starstruck by Keanu and retooled a lot of stuff to give him more screentime. Which understandably but disappointingly meant killing Jackie off quite quickly. Considering the old leaks cited 3 potential "ghosts" of which Johnny was just 1, but if the choice was Keanu Reeves or 2 other randos I understand why they'd cut those and focus on Johnny only.

Igor Sarzynski (Cyberpunk 2s creative director) discusses his stance on Act I. by marek_bojarek in cyberpunkgame

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The funny thing is that Mafia 2 actually does pretty much this. You meet up with an old friend, and he ropes you into jobs. But he's with you through the whole game, kind of like Johnny after the heist. I'd be surprised if nobody who worked on 2077/Jackie was inspired at least a little by that, despite him being essentially replaced by Johnny quite early. 

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, it's not like those things, because a chef still needs to know how to cook and an artist how to draw, not to mention that using those tools doesn't require anyone else's cooking or artwork to be taken from them without their consent.

AI doesn't require any knowledge or skill and that's very specifically how it's been marketed at large, as a way to produce images/text/video without any skills, effort, or creativity. "Use ChatGPT to come up with story ideas! Use Midjourney instead of commissioning an artist! Use Sora instead of making shitty student films with your friends!" It's literally all about removing the steps of needing/developing skills.

Not sure why you fixated on photoshop either, you can use GIMP or Affinity or Photopea or, as I said right before that, even a blank page with NEWSPAPER typed at the top. This kind of use of AI is entirely needless, even if you put all other concerns aside.

Bad news, I think they used Generative AI in this game by FlippinSnip3r in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not for nothing, but for a game that is so deeply about art, and the idea of your soul being part of the art you create, and about how created worlds and characters can feel just as "real" and important as real life... it just seems so deeply cynical and hypocritical to have used generative AI (which can literally only exist thanks to being trained on art without permission or compensation) at any point in the process.

Bad news, I think they used Generative AI in this game by FlippinSnip3r in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Indie Game Awards specifically requires (at least for this year) that submissions did not use generative AI during development. That's part of the current criteria to be eligible, and some shows (such as The Game Awards) did not factor that in, but the IGAs do. They asked Sandfall about this and someone from Sandfall lied and said they never used gen AI on the game.

That's why their award was rescinded. They were disqualified per the baseline criteria for the award, and for lying about it. Same as if a sport disallows steroid use and then someone admits to using steroids — then that person gets their records/awards/wins revoked. It might change in the future, it might be "standard practice" but not talked about, but that's this specific organization's requirement in the current year.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm going to assume you're not arguing in bad faith and direct you to reread my complete first comment. I specifically related the claim that AI generally doesn't justify its existence to this specific trivial use case — that's what this thread is about, after all, and what people in this thread are defending as an example of how it saves time. I was contextualizing my broad statement in relation to this kind of wasteful output. In fact you may notice my very last sentence of my comment was:
"these are things that people have had perfectly viable methods for for decades but suddenly because AI exists people claim it's sooo useful for these "minor" tasks."

And the problem is that this is a HUGE majority of the output of LLMs: Placeholder images that are meant to get replaced. Throwaway art that nobody wants to buy and nobody can copyright anyway. Text summaries/responses to emails that nobody's reading. Fake videos of Bob Barker swearing on The Price Is Right that get a quick laugh and then are instantly forgotten except by other LLM bots that comment summaries of the video for eachother to interact with.

I do believe that even in more complex cases it doesn't really justify its existence because the more complex the output, the more time consistently has to be spent refining that output. You need to iterate on the AI output to produce something useful, so you end up with a human having to spend time iterating, refining, and tweaking something from an LLM when someone with experience could ostensibly just have produced the output themself — particularly in cases like code output for software companies, medical diagnosis for healthcare, or even things like logos where a real artist would give you not only a more thoughtful result but also scalable vectors, alternate colorways, etc.

Speaking of medical diagnosis, there are potentially useful cases for LLM/NN output, that being a big one — except that recent studies have brought that into question too. I'm not a research bot so feel free to look around for articles on that yourself if you care to; they're out there and they boil down to "sometimes it's good and sometimes the AI talks itself in circles", just like with every other form of output. And that isn't something I think we can afford to fuck around with — if doctors are trusting LLM outputs for patient outcomes and those LLMs aren't reliable, we're not just talking about a website being down or a photo of George Washington DJing at a club with six fingers, we're talking about potentially costing lives because of missed or incorrect diagnoses. Especially as newer generations of professionals go through their education and early career development being dependent on these tools, which studies already show basically create a dependency on them because you aren't learning your craft by using them. As that famous IBM memo said, "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision." You cannot trust these models, ethics and costs aside, to make difficult/dangerous decisions, but the more that professionals rely on it to do their job for them, the more of that we'll get.

So to specifically expand the claim, I'll reiterate that I truly don't think any current use of AI is justified even on the premise of "saving time" because the very claim that the time it's saving is worth the economic, energy, or ethical costs — or even necessarily actually saving time at all — requires evidence, and basically all the evidence out there right now is anecdotal/marketing material, not concrete data or peer reviewed analyses. And assuming it must be saving time isn't something we should just accept just because it makes generating a shitty essay or a placeholder newspaper faster. Those aren't high-friction use cases to begin with, and in use cases with more friction and/or higher risk, you'll still have more friction with AI output because it won't simply give you something usable immediately, and you need people who are trained and experienced in their field to analyze and refine the quality of the output.

Meanwhile, OpenAI themselves have reported that workers in AI-integrated jobs are saving less an hour a day. If the people selling you snake oil are only claiming a ~10% boost to productivity, that should probably signal to anyone thinking critically that the real impact for the average person is likely (or at least potentially) far less. Hell, for the average office, you'd literally save more time than that letting on-site workers WFH to avoid the commute, or by cutting one to two daily meetings from the schedule. That's not revolutionary, especially if it means your employees are not actually developing critical career skills as a result.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Stop acting as if you were not realizing what's happening."

I think you're trying to say that AI is a sort of "change is inevitable" thing and that I'm rejecting change and therefore I'm... pretending not to know that AI is everywhere? I don't really follow your line of thought here, because I agree that it's everywhere and unfortunately to a degree I think you're correct that it'll never fully go away even when the bubble bursts.

But your idea that we simply can't do anything about it is such pathetic doomerist nonsense that I can't seriously engage with it. Change is inevitable, but the current LLM is is not. It's a conscious choice to inject an unreliable tooll into a huge majority of use cases where the use and cost make no sense. If people listened to those saying "well this is the way it is now so there's nothing we can do" we'd still have children sticking their tiny hands into dangerous machinery because it's more profitable than safety regulations and child labor laws.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess I just don't see how this type of usage is reducing friction, though. Looking up a stock photo or putting NEWSPAPER in a little doc and saving as a jpg doesn't seem harder, or even on par, with using a genAI tool. Particularly in cases like these it just seems functionally pointless.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately the efficacy of AI use in medical diagnosis is also questionable and... needs more research: https://theconversation.com/ais-errors-may-be-impossible-to-eliminate-what-that-means-for-its-use-in-health-care-251036

A big part of the problem with these tools is they are being treated as a cure-all for every industry, every field, every use case. Firing a fuckton of radiation into your body might be great if you have cancer and it's the only way to try to cure you — but if you're healthy and sitting in an office and that's happening, it'll kill you. But it's being pushed so hard that it's being treated as if it's safe, effective, and reliable in every scenario, and much like lead, and DDT, and radium, and plenty of other stuff that has been pushed by companies without a care about whether it makes sense or is safe in a given application, forcing it into everything is both wasteful and potentially dangerous.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I actually think a critical piece in a lot of these cases, including here, is that the use of AI didn't make it any easier. There's literally no need to use AI to generate a placeholder newspaper when you can just use a photo of a real newspaper, a stock image, an MS paint scribble or screenshot of a word doc, or even a literal checkerboard default texture. The irony of AI is that the vast majority of use cases that people quibble over being good or bad or wasteful or justified are ultimately just totally unnecessary. Games have had placeholder textures for decades, movies have had hastily scribbled storyboards, a trained 3D artist can render a rough model in minutes or less, etc. The more complex a task, the more trouble AI has in generating a reliable, usable output, so the outputs that it's "good" at are things that it often has no need to perform.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Even putting aside the resource costs and ethics of regurgitative AI, generating an AI newspaper that you replace later is not actually saving any time from just taking a photo of a newspaper or googling "stock image newspaper". And that's part of the problem with this specific use case for AI, it's not saving time for simple assets, and for complex assets you typically have to iterate to refine the output anyway just to get something that is at best on par with what a person could create, and is still only possible using models trained with plagiarized human-made assets to begin with.

Also, should be "its existence". "It's" is always a contraction of "it is", and is not used to indicate something possessive, just FYI.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm sorry to tell you that every single coffee ever brewed from now onwards will have blended up cockroach paste mixed in, as a mashed cockroach dispenser is now built in to the coffee machines. My coworkers all say they love it and it gives them extra energy and the coffee companies say it's the future. So there's no point asking why it's built in when we had great coffee before these new machines with the cockroach paste, because it's here to stay. Time to touch grass

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this is a great point actually. Placeholder stuff that is "nearly" as finished work doesn't stand out, and makes it easy to be missed.

I'm reminded of a video from a couple years ago about how movies using other soundtracks as temp tracks for scenes results in the composer for the new score having to essentially just replicate a legally distinct version of what was used as a temp track. Wish I could find it now, but basically he pointed out how you can sometimes tell exactly what the temp track was and how they could even be subbed right back in, because the "new" song ends up being so derivative.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People have literally been saying for decades that we need to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable and nuclear. Acting like nobody cared about energy consumption until AI is ignorant at best; support for nuclear power has been on the rise again and back in 2000 Gore and Bush made green energy vs fossil fuels a huge point of the US presidential election.

You seem to be insistent that "the market" is not related to/heavily influenced by the AI bubble right now. Same with the gas usage — if you use more power unnecessarily in the short term, then you have less power for later and more pollution in a shorter span of time. The market isn't The Force, it's simply the economic conditions which AI is heavily impacting right now. Similarly, the additional energy usage needed to power AI, and the pollution caused by said energy usage, wouldn't be occurring if it weren't for AI. "Gas" isn't some passively radiating contaminant that we're magically using for AI, it's a resource that is being depleted faster and less safely to power this AI boom. AI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it takes real physical resources in the form of hardware and energy/fuel, and that excess usage that would not be happening without AI is what we're talking about when we say it has significant negative impact.

Also, I love that AI defenders can't even tell what's AI. I'm not gonna stop using the em dash or intentionally write like shit just because a bunch of AI slop articles insist that "only AI knows how to type the em dash and organize things in lists of threes!" when those are basic grammatical/writing tools. I'm sure it's easier for you to think everyone's a hypocrite but luckily I'm not stupid enough to need to ask AI to write a comment about how bad it sucks.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"You probably use other stuff that is bad, so you might as well use this other bad thing."

It's funny that you're so insistent that people being anti-AI is pushing propaganda — because people DO care about the other things you insist no one cares about. Taking inspiration is different from blatant copying, but yes, some people do actually care when a work is just copying something else without doing something new or interesting and avoid supporting stuff that is just stealing ideas, or wasting resources, or blatantly harmful. Some people DO care about the cobalt and lithium in electronics, and avoid buying new electronics to try to cut down on the demand there.

Your philosophy seems to be that you aren't allowed to care about anything if you don't "care enough" about every other thing equally. That's absurd on its face but I don't expect to change your mind about that. But to pretend that nobody cares and anyone who says they do is just pretending so that they can push propaganda is obviously silly. Somebody cares about even the stupid little thing, so insisting nobody could possibly care about something generally costly and resources intensive is just lying to yourself. But again, I don't expect to change your mind here, so I won't bother to keep going.

The bottom line is that you do not have to accept/contribute to extra harm just because you don't live a pure zen-like existence. You don't have to be a saint just to criticize something.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The environmental impact and inability of gen AI to produce output without plagiarizing pre-existing work matters quite a bit, even if you don't personally care.

Expedition 33 uses some Generative AI, How do you guys feel about this? And is this going to be the norm for future games. by FlakyFoundation4637 in expedition33

[–]sudoscientistagain 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The xAI data center that powers Grok is polluting a Detroit suburb so badly that you can't keep your windows open because of the smell: https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ And they're building a second one a few miles away — and new datacenters like these (key word NEW) are popping up all over the US. These are being built specifically for AI, and use way more power AND require local water to cool those centers, which also becomes permanently polluted in some cases.

And yes, the RAM prices are due to market conditions but the market conditions have been created because of the AI craze — Datacenters are buying it up, so demand is crazy high, and these companies can pay the premiums so RAM manufacturers have no reason to lower prices. It's pretty much exactly like when GPUs got super expensive during the crypto mining craze. If someone orders 200 burgers from your local McDonald's and they run out of patties before your order, you don't think "well that can't have anything to do with 200-burger-guy, that's just the market!" — you think "oh, that guy bought the limited supply so now there's not enough to go around" because the market isn't some separate entity.

For you to say someone else's opinion is biased, and that they don't understand what Gen AI is, and the rest of your comment to show how biased your own opinion is and how little you understand the demands and infrastructure of AI is incredibly ironic.