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).

  • 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jun 07, 2023

help-circle
rss

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.


Well I hear what you’re saying, although I don’t much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I’m no lawyer. I’d be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it’ll have a chance. As I said, we’ll see.


Yeah I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there’s no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn’t be subject to the same laws. We’ll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.


I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.


Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose


Flash games will work again? Moving away from NFTs? Well dang, I might just make a new neopets account! Lots of nostalgia there, it’d be cool to mess around with again after all these years.


You can send downvotes using 3rd party clients, but beehaw doesn’t register or track them. Hitting the button does nothing (and it’s not even present in the web ui)


Yeah that certainly took a little getting used to! I think can pretty much read the heights of everything now, but there was definitely a little while when I was accidentally jumping into the sides of ledges that were actually higher up than me!


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.


Yeah that makes sense, I’m not a mod in this community. If you go to one of my comments on /c/science it should display I think (although it’s been a bit since I tried using Jerboa)


Their actual username is xtremeownage, which is why it still links that way, but lemmy lets users set a display name that’s different from their username (in this case, HTTP_404_NotFound). Sounds like kbin doesn’t respect lemmy display name settings.


I’ll hop on just to add: the little plate that says “mod” can’t be turned off, but for us community moderators we can toggle a little shield icon when we’re trying to speak with the “mod voice.” We can only do it in our communities, but (I think) the admin team is by default modded in every community and should be able to toggle that shield wherever they are.

So if you see the shield icon next to the name, that was intentionally toggled on to show they’re trying to speak as a mod and not just a community member. If you only see the little “mod” nameplate you can probably assume they’re just talking as a member of the community (unless context makes it obvious that they just forgot to turn on the shield).

Edit: Here’s an example of how the shield icon looks to me from one of my posts; I’m on mobile with the darkly theme so it probably looks different to you unless you’re also on mobile, but hopefully still a useful example:

a screenshot showing the mod shield next to my username



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!


Thanks for sharing this, its the first I’d seen of it. It feels like a kinda message-in-a-bottle sorta thing. The few messages I read were a melancholy mix of people who were clearly going through some hard times, and people trying to share some positivity. (And also some chain-email style “If you see this message pass it on,” messages; very nostalgic.)


Probably referencing this lawsuit that the internet archive lost recently, related to the online library they launched during the pandemic.