I wouldn’t dislike Tim Sweeney so much if he didn’t write off Linux so much.
He’s diehard on primarily having the Epic Games Store support Windows, which is ironically the most monopolistic and anti-consumer OS right now.
(minor edit to acknowledge Windows isn’t the only platform since the EGS is also available on Mac)
So it’s actually a secret third option! That’s pretty rad.
Is that because it’s that simple, or just that the boilerplate is pre-written in the standard library (or whatever it’s called in rust)?
I’ve been able to nix so many intrusive web elements with the ublock picker tool, often without leaving a trace due to modern web design practices. The YouTube shorts shelf is one such case, and it’s shocking how well it worked!
Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.
People developing local models generally have to know what they’re doing on some level, and I’d hope they understand what their model is and isn’t appropriate for by the time they have it up and running.
Don’t get me wrong, I think LLMs can be useful in some scenarios, and can be a worthwhile jumping off point for someone who doesn’t know where to start. My concern is with the cultural issues and expectations/hype surrounding “AI”. With how the tech is marketed, it’s pretty clear that the end goal is for someone to use the product as a virtual assistant endpoint for as much information (and interaction) as it’s possible to shoehorn through.
Addendum: local models can help with this issue, as they’re on one’s own hardware, but still need to be deployed and used with reasonable expectations: that it is a fallible aggregation tool, not to be taken as an authority in any way, shape, or form.
On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.
The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.
ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.
90 days to cycle private tokens/keys?
I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it
Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.
The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.
Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.
Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.
Life is suffering. Once you accept that fact wholly, you may ascend
Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips
I had to resolder the switches on my G Pro Wireless. I absolutely love the mouse but they use pretty much the cheapest Omron switches they can, unless that’s changed recently.
Was surprisingly not terrible to take apart and reassemble but you do have to pull off the adhesive-applied low-friction sliders at the bottom, so I would recommend buying replacement ones if you find yourself in that situation. Doesn’t help that I also had a $150 mousepad that goes with it that’s proprietary to specific Logitech gaming mice.
For what it’s worth I only did it because I absolutely love the mouse and setup; I love the design and weight plus the convenience of a low-latency wireless mouse that literally never runs out of battery.
Desktop OSes, my bad.
iOS is still much worse than Android in terms of “walled garden” practices but Google has been slowly inching over that way, what with the recent crackdown on sideloading apps.
While the main quote I can find is like 6 years old at this point, Tim Sweeney directly compared Linux to a US citizen moving to Canada when they don’t like the political landscape. I’m sure his opinions have become more nuanced since then, but it’s still imo just needlessly antagonistic.
In that regard I think both Epic and Valve are trying to advance the industry in different ways: Steam trying to break PC gaming from Windows, and the EGS trying to free up restrictive mobile app store policies. We really should be able to directly buy and play mobile games from whatever storefront we choose, not being limited to Google Play or the App Store.
Since Valve and Epic are both for-profit companies, the advancements are largely for profit’s sake of course. I agree that we should take wins where we can secure them, but always be vigilant for how a company might turn the tables once they have the upper hand and try to mitigate that. We’ve seen the same anti-consumer practices happen many times over in the PC hardware market, such as with AMD v Intel or AMD v Nvidia, where a given company pushes for an open standard only when they are the underdog.