he/him

Materials Science PhD candidate in Pittsburgh, PA, USA

My profile picture is the cover art from Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, and was drawn by Casper Pham (recolor by me).

  • 2 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

    There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).


  • It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

    Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

    You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

    Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.










  • I don’t have hundreds of hours

    Don’t start with XIV then!

    So what is the most recent game in the series that I can start with that is worth it to play and wouldn’t confuse a newcomer?

    All of the FF games – baring the ones that are explicitly sequels, like X2 – are totally separate from each other, you can jump in anywhere. At most you might miss some references or easter eggs.

    If you want the most recent then, that’d be XVI, although I’d personally recommend looking up what the gameplay is like in the different games and starting wherever you feel you’ll have the most fun! There are some weirder ones out there, like crystal chronicles (my own first final fantasy game) and tactics, so you have a lot of options!





  • I’ve been working my way through Cross Code in the evenings after I get back home, and it’s as excellent as everyone says it is! I keep trying to decide what other games it reminds me of the most, and surprisingly I think I’m starting to settle on Legend of Zelda (the older ones, not BotW/TotK).

    The way it gates progress, the level & dungeon design, etc just really seems to be a part of that tradition. The moment to moment gameplay is pretty different though, and pretty unique at that!

    Really though it’s just been a nice escape in the evenings. It’s challenging enough that sometimes I decide to leave a tough fight or puzzle to pick up the next night, but it’s not punishingly hard and I feel like it respects my time.


  • Really interesting writeup, thank you for sharing! Many of the technical details go well over my head but nonetheless it’s very interesting to hear some of these success stories, and it also sheds light on how much work running an instance with a lot of users actually is. Here’s hoping that future versions of lemmy with (eg) more optimized database code will make life easier for all the folks in the operations team!


  • #notallgames

    Seriously though, I know you said “for the most part,” but I just want to emphasize that there are absolutely story-focused games out there. Games I’d even describe as downright literary, where the entire point is to tell a compelling story and explore some heady themes. One recent one I played like this was Pentiment, which explores some really interesting history and has a lot to say about religion, community, fallibility, family, etc…

    And, I mean, lots of other people have already mentioned Disco Elysium and I could write an essay about it but anyone who hasn’t played it should just watch this Jacob Geller video instead.




  • Oh yeah, exploring different tones, settings, systems, etc can be really interesting! I usually listen to more lighthearted things, so I don’t have a ton of recommendations, but you might like Dungeons and Randomness.

    It’s changed a lot since it started. In the beginning it was a pretty standard fantasy themed actual play between some friends, but has evolved into a pretty big living-world style campaign with several different groups of players. The tone starts out a little silly –e.g. there’s a magic item called the “gravy boat of pestilence” – but over time becomes much more serious. They start to deal with some fairly portentous themes, and some might even describe the tone as “dark” at times.

    If you check it out, I recommend skipping the first two episodes entirely (they’re almost irrelevant to the larger story and they feel a lot less polished). From episode 3 there’s some plot relevant stuff, but you could safely skip up to episode 16 or 17 (at which point there are already two adventuring groups) and you won’t miss too much. If you want to get straight into the higher production value stuff, there’s a recap after episode 200 (the first “arc”), at which point there are four different adventuring groups. I wouldn’t super recommend that personally, I think there’s a lot of good stuff in the first arc, but I’m pretty sure they do recommend doing that. Up to you, of course.


  • There are a lot of really good actual plays in a lot of different genres and systems! I feel like the most straightforward answer would be Dimension 20 – professional quality and Brennan Lee Mulligan is a frankly incredible GM. He’s also involved in a new show, Worlds Beyond Number. I haven’t checked it out yet but I’m expecting it to be really very good.

    But if you have a preferred genre or system I might have more specific recommendations!