Al.

No I am pretty sure I would notice Paul Rudd in the last movie.   I checked IMDB and I see no mention of him.

Really enjoying Cyberpunk but every now and then I do feel like trying something else rather than burning a bunch of time on it.   I stared at my collection today... couldn't decide what to play.. bought three more games.   I am the worst procrastinator.

There was physics!  Just not Earth physics... but you know.. they're aliens so that makes sense!

8 years later and I finally got my wish. I assume I've been diagnosed with terminal boneitis and no one has told me.

Ok, but what is the next movie and how much will it cost?

I think left to pure Open Source / community they'd have poo pooed anything other than VR tethered to a PC, as quality is paramount.   Mainstream adoption will never happen with the current form factors.  Strapping stuff to your face is tiring.  Even when I love everything about VR, and invested a lot in making it as comfortable as possible,  I can only play it for an hour or so.   I think it getting the in roads it did is as about as good as we can hope for with the current tech.  The Q3 is priced to the rich tech gamer.  The Quest 2's are under 200 bucks here now though. I think that could see more people at least trying it.

Over ten years since Facebook bought Oculus.  An event one person described as "This is the worst thing I've heard." (and I know for a fact he was taught about the holocaust in school... so make of that what you will).

In an alternative reality where Oculus remained independent or got bought out by a different, less evil, corporation what would the current landscape look like? 

Bizarrely in the end I think they might not have been the worst option.

Anything other than a Valve acquisition would probably have meant that the technology would have been gated to a console or some half arsed attempt at an alternative game store owned by Epic or Google that might have easily been abandoned.  Valve couldn't be trusted to have not given up themselves (much like they seem to have with the index).

I think Oculus didn't have the scratch to sell at the losses we see the first 2 quests being sold at, so remaining independent would have probably meant a bunch of PC tethered headsets that never took off beyond niche uses. 

I think getting to the standalone, battery powered, no tether headsets we have today would be a good few years behind and a lot more expensive without Facebook wanting to build a platform they control to steal our info.

Hard to say for sure of course and there's no denying Facebook are likely going to siphon our brains straight from the headset into some AI model of ourselves to sell things at, but I think we're not doing too bad all things considered.

 

It's 20s years since the smoking ban.  Maybe it saved some lives but with the rise of the far right in Ireland I think we can see that the only people it saved were Nazis!

There's apparently another Ghostbusters out and I have absolutely no idea what it is about, who is in it, if it is any good... anything.   Based entirely on the poster and name It just seemed like a movie that SHOULD have been stuck in development hell for years and years but somehow got made and is number one in the box office now.

The content is kinda pointless but if you remember Violet Berlin it is kinda cool to see she cared enough about gaming to hold on to a bunch of stuff from the 90s.

Really just running this into the ground now.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68574299

Maybe one day they'll make a bad theme park about the spin offs and then we can make more spin offs of those forever!

I had one crash. A couple of times, a stack of objects in a room did something odd, and if you go to the city limits, weird stuff happens with cars despawning, but nothing game-breaking or that annoyed me. Maybe when I am done, I'll try an early build for a laugh.

Ok the first couple hours I wasn't all that bothered with Cyberpunk but it just kicked off the training wheels and the story got going and I'm actually wanting to know what happens.  This feels far more compelling to me than the slow march to the inevitable that was the RDR2 plot. Hopefully i stick with it.

I started playing Cyberpunk last night.   Looks amazing with all the HDR/Ray Tracing etc.  The pure matter of fact approach to nudity is a bit shocking.  Full nudity in the character creation with options for what genitals and pubic hair style you want.  Not for the prudish.

I find it amusing that Amazon has Steam deck Accessories under a legacy header of "steam machines"

Ah yes nothing like coming out 18 months after everyone has forgotten about it.  Unless they just AI generate it up over the weekend, which would be fitting I guess.   If you care here is an interview with the Oompa Loompas but it is pretty unwatchable.
 

Why the fuck is there an edit clock of a few minutes all of a sudden?  A perfectly good rant on the state of idiot charlatans using "AI" lost. Tempted to Chatgpt it for irony factor.

Here are the bones 

Further details emerge that the guy behind the Wonka Experience debacle had "published" 16 "books" of "AI" generated garbage.  The script the performers were given was also "AI" generated.  https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41342837.html

Yada yada expect a decade of the worst people doing this sort of lark. Etc. 

On 11/27/2023 at 9:57 PM, Al. said:

It's empowering the worst people to make the worst "content".  The whole "prompt artist" label makes me want to punch someone.  Just people with zero artistic talent somehow convinced they're geniuses now. 

https://www.ign.com/articles/willy-wonka-experience-promoted-using-suspected-ai-art-was-so-bad-that-customers-called-the-police

I see you beat the main campaign and have discovered the final "fuck you!" from Rockstar... ANOTHER SIX HOURS of game!  

Selling your data and a computer will look at what you wrote and try to write like you are a little different. 

Imagine you were browsing the web and saw a cheeky user, with a penchant for Hitler and ape jokes and a massive massive boner for Reddit dot com and you realised it was a bot powered by an LLM trained on your posts? Does that not seem violating?

It's a little different than TripAdvisor suggesting you visit the Austrian zoo.

I think LLM stuff will work out 20% life improving stuff we want and 80% enshitified versions of things we used to like.  Frankly I'm pretty sure all technology is trending towards that stat.

Oh cool. I'll let that company know they gave Reddit 60 million for nothing!

Seriously, one of the problems with content built by LLM's scraped from the general Internet is the massive copyright issues around it.  The companies are taking multiple paths to get around this. 

One of them is to hope to change the laws around copyright.  They say that their particular situation is so unique and special and needs protecting, that everyone who produced the original content they're built upon, should just accept that they're allowed make Trillions on the backs of their work, for no redress.  This is a fun one, as pro business (read bought and paid for) politicians have AI companies in one ear and media companies in the other.. all waving fists of cash at them.  There is a non-zero chance they'll create some sort of twisted law, that would allow content from jo-soap internet to be used for free but, keep THE MOUSE happy.

If that fails they're also trying to have situations where they can say their LLM is trained on content they own.  That is what this Reddit deal is.  Microsoft are also doing it by throwing Co-pilot directly into Windows 11 in the latest update.  There are lots of "this shit will train off you and we will own that" paragraphs hidden in the EULA of Windows now for that.. Much like there was in the user Agreement update Reddit sent there the other day. 

I know you've to be completely pro-reddit or they detonate the chip in your brain but, perhaps, maybe you see this is not just Reddit being all cool and great?   What will you do in the future when you won't be able to tell virtual Bryan Cranston from real Bryan Cranston?  Ask what he had for breakfast?  The AI OWNS THAT NOW!

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/your-reddit-posts-may-train-ai-models-following-new-60-million-agreement/

https://www.instagram.com/willsmith/reel/C3i5vAZvRS3/

Massively improved 

To demonstrate the AI text features, here is the paragraph above about it, corrected and in businnes and polite styles.

However, what I find truly fascinating is the AI text editing. You can write something, and it will correct the grammar and spelling (I have not used it here) and also change the writing style from casual to business. Some of this is amusing, while some of it is surprisingly useful. I do not believe that either the text or image editing features are entirely new, but having them integrated into the keyboard or camera app with a single button is quite impressive. Some of these features rely on the cloud, so it will be interesting to see how much I can do when I am in a field for a music festival.

Nevertheless, what I find genuinely intriguing is the AI text editing capability. It can correct grammar and spelling errors (which I have not utilized here) and modify the writing style from informal to formal. While some of this is entertaining, some of it is surprisingly beneficial. I do not believe that either the text or image editing features are entirely novel, but their integration into the keyboard or camera app with a single button is quite impressive. Since some of these features rely on cloud access, it will be interesting to see how much I can accomplish while attending a music festival in a remote location.

Nevertheless, what I find genuinely intriguing is the AI text editing feature. It possesses the ability to rectify grammatical errors and correct spellings (a feature I have refrained from utilizing in this instance). Additionally, it can transform the writing style from casual to business-like. While certain aspects of this feature may elicit amusement, others prove to be surprisingly useful. Although I do not believe that either the text or image editing capabilities are entirely novel, their seamless integration into the keyboard or camera application with a single button is indeed impressive. It is worth noting that some of these features rely on cloud-based processing, which raises the question of their accessibility in situations where internet connectivity may be limited, such as during a music festival in a remote location.