Mossy Feathers (She/They)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Tbf, a lot of major AAA companies nowadays can probably afford to have a $500m loss. The thing that gets me, however, is that it wouldn’t even be a $500m loss. Just because you don’t make money doesn’t mean it’s a total loss, it just means you didn’t cover your costs.

    At what point is the loss worth the knowledge of what did or didn’t work?

    At what point is the loss worth having made the thing, because you were doing something no one else had done on a massive budget, even though you didn’t cover your original costs?

    Is $50m a reasonable loss?

    $100m?

    That’s where things get complicated and if all you do is look at spreadsheets then you’re going to miss the fact that your attempt was still worth something, even if it didn’t actually make money.

    These companies tend to have cash cows to offset the losses too. Keep developing and supporting your CoDs, Candy Crushes, and League of Legends so you can drop $500m on a high-risk, high-reward release. C’mon, do something interesting… Are you really unable to make up for a potential +$100m loss when you have Candy Crush making billions for you?



  • Yeah, uh, have fun with that. Microsoft tried that with the Windows Phone but it sucked because of the lack of apps. From what I remember, they weren’t terrible phones per se, they just had no third-party support. Granted, it sounds like they’re being proactive in trying to get app developers on their OS, but for me personally, it’s usually the small, niche things that can make or break a device for me.

    I actually kinda wish Microsoft would bring back the Windows phone now that phones have gotten significantly more powerful and Microsoft has their universal windows platform thingy alongside their cisc compatibility layer (I could be wrong, but I’m almost certain I remember reading that ARM windows has a compatibility layer for x86_64 programs). I probably wouldn’t buy one, but it’d be cool to see what kinda competition would come from having a phone platform that has compatibility with most windows programs.





  • I don’t have much to add; I don’t watch a lot of anime and when I do it tends to be pirated downloaded. However,

    High Guardian Spice is the biggest piece of trash to come out of anime in the last 10 years. It was marketed as anime for diverse groups, most notably highlighting their LGBTQ+ representation. Well, you know you messed up when even people in the LGBTQ+ community hate this show to death—like, no one likes this; this is terrible.

    I looked it up and damn. Yeah. I don’t even need to watch an episode, the art style has the “we’re trying to pander as hard as we can” look to it. I dunno if it’s just that it looks like Steven Universe (which I’ve heard is a good show about inclusivity, albeit with a shitty fandom) or something else; but something about it screams “look at how gay and diverse we are! Give us money!”




  • Google is still working on improving the Terminal app as well as AVF before shipping this feature. AVF already supports graphics and some input options, but it’s preparing to add support for backing up and restoring snapshots, nested virtualization, and devices with an x86_64 architecture.

    This is the part I cared about. Can it run x86_64 programs, or is it just an ARM-compatible version of Debian?

    If it can actually run x86_64 programs on ARM devices, then that’s kinda fucking sick and would likely help the world transition to ARM. Like, fuck Google, but this sounds like a good thing, maybe?


  • I unironically want to go back to the days where ads told you what the product was, what it cost, why you should buy it (compared to competitors) and where to buy it. All the cutesy “we’re gonna tell a story” advertising falls flat on its face because, as much fun as the “real deal” can be, 99% of it is designed by committees to reach as big of a spread as they can. It’s soulless. I’d rather my soulless advertising be straight and to the point than some eye-rolling, meandering, soul-sucking corporate garbage that takes 90 seconds to say what it could have said in 15s.

    Hey advertisers, quit wasting my time, and your money and quit fucking doing it. The reason why the, “narrative advertising” or whatever you call it, works is because it’s made by a small company and targeted at an equally small community. Chances are, it’s enthusiasts selling to enthusiasts, and they know the people they’re targeting better than you ever could.

    You. are. not. a. small. company. You. are. not. enthusiasts. Stop it.




  • I don’t think you understand. Your consciousness is just one process amid a myriad of processes that your brain runs. It’s that continuity that matters. You’re correct that I don’t know if my current consciousness is the same as prior consciousnesses, however what matters is that my brain has never shut off, giving me the feeling as though I am the same person; and it is because of that thread that I am the same person (though perhaps with a different consciousness).

    Furthermore, you can’t achieve immortality through digital consciousness if you just copy the whole thing and throw out the original. Again, it’s the continuity. It honestly confuses me why people think that’s a rational idea when the very obvious problem is, “what if something goes wrong and human me wakes up?”

    That’s why you have people, like me, who get frustrated when people start getting philosophical about this shit because they think you can “just make a perfect copy” of a person to achieve immortality.

    Seriously?

    No.

    You just killed yourself and made a copy of yourself. You didn’t achieve shit. Your new self might be happy, but your old self is dead. You’re not suddenly going to wake up as a digital clone. You’re not waking up at all, it’s your clone that’s waking up.

    And hey, if that’s good enough for you, then so be it. Just don’t pretend you’ve achieved immortality; it was your digital clone that did. You’re still going to die.

    It also confuses me that so many people seem to believe that you’re literally brain-dead while you sleep. If you were literally brain-dead then there’d be no way for you to wake up. Sleep seems to be when the brain processes memories too, so if your brain fully shut off, then it wouldn’t be able to processes memories while you’re asleep. Finally, afaik, once the brain shuts off, it can’t turn back on; evolution didn’t plan for a situation in which someone’s been dead long enough for brain activity to cease before their heart starts pumping again. So why does everyone insist that you go brain-dead the moment your head touches the pillow?


  • I’ll throw you a bone and say that, if/when AGI rolls around, I’ll be more than happy to extend concepts like creativity and artistic ability to it. I’ll throw you another bone and say you’re technically not wrong either.

    The question I’ve come to is less about what is “original vs remix”, and instead, “sapience vs machine intelligence”. If sentience is the ability for an individual to say, “I think, therefore I am”, then sapience is the ability for an individual to figure out that “I think, therefore I am”. Furthermore, in this context I define “machine intelligence” as something artificially created which demonstrates elements of sentience or even sapience but fails to meet all the criteria that we would consider necessary for human intelligence (basically machine intelligence is “fake” intelligence).

    AI at its current state appears to be nothing more than machine intelligence. It looks cool, it can fool you pretty good, however, in the end it appears to be about as conscious and self-aware as a jellyfish or siphonophore.

    Furthermore, the AI doesn’t have the ability to create unique experiences. It doesn’t have the ability to walk out the door, drive down the street, walk into a surf shop and buy a surfboard. Even if we say, “putting it in a robot is too hard, we’ll just put it in VRChat instead”, I still have strong doubts about whether or not the AI is actually experiencing anything.

    I mean, it can’t even learn from itself without human intervention ffs. Unlike a human, you can’t train an AI while it’s running. Unlike an AI, humans don’t ever fully shut off until we’re dead (no, your brain doesn’t turn off when you sleep; if it did then you’d literally be dead).

    So you’re not technically wrong, but at the same time AI brings nothing new to the table. It doesn’t have new experiences it can mix in with the artwork it was trained on, nor is there evidence that it’d be able to control or shape what it experiences. While I hesitate to attach the physical act of creation to the concept of creativity (I consider creativity to be separate from artistic skill), a large part of creativity is coming up with something new based on a combination of your own experience and the experiences of others. Whether or not you act on your creativity and how well you execute your idea is immaterial.


  • If you want to copyright the prompt, go right ahead. As far as I’m concerned that’s fair game; though I still think you’re a dumbass for getting mad about it.

    As for the image? Fuck off. You can convince people that AI is capable of original works, or you can convince people that AI is nothing but a tool to remix and mashup other people’s artwork.

    If you do the former, then the AI is the one that should receive copyright, not you. If the AI wants to then sell or transfer the copyright to you, then it’s free to do that… Except AI can’t hold copyright because there’s no evidence that it is intelligent enough to do so.

    As for the latter? You’d better start going through your training set to make sure none of the trained images exist in the final image in a large enough capacity to be considered infringing. Otherwise, you may be liable for copyright infringement.

    Either way, go fuck yourself.