mindbleach
@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent 1 week ago:
Are you confused by the concept of a used book store?
They’re buying old books. Books that are no longer in print. These specific copies were produced legitimately, by the rightsholders, but new copies are no longer being made. Whether the publisher could reprint them might be legally or logistically complicated. More often, nobody cares.
- Comment on World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent 1 week ago:
… yes, the entire idea of copyright is that owning a copy is distinct from the right to sell more copies.
- Comment on World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent 1 week ago:
That should be the answer, but thanks to Disney extending copyright to basically a century, they can’t.
- Comment on Intel Engineers Propose DRM Fabric For Linux 1 week ago:
Linux users propose Intel fuck a rake.
- Comment on What are the worst distro-specific problems you have faced? 1 week ago:
One time Ubuntu’s lead guy decided all windows would be left-handed like Macintosh… the day before an LTS feature freeze. That was such a shit-show that I went back to Windows 7 for most of a decade.
In more modern times, Mint XFCE was negligibly lighter than Mint Cinnamon, even on a ropey old laptop, and you can’t do half as much docking / hotkey stuff. And that’s before the relief that is gTile.
- Comment on We are regressing as a species. 2 weeks ago:
This was a tax dodge.
- Comment on "Machines that weren't game machines before will become game machines": Take-Two CEO predicts that streaming will help fix the industry's hardware pricing problem 3 weeks ago:
Google burned several billion dollars doing this properly, and still, nobody cared. Mainframes are almost never the right approach. Whatever hardware you connect from is usually capable of whatever you’re connecting for.
If we had to revert to PS3 levels of memory and storage, modern rendering and computing would remain obscenely powerful. Even new games on low-powered hardware would be-- wait, that’s not theoretical, just look at the Switch. The first one ran Wolfenstein II on the DOOM (2016) engine, with fantastic texture detail thanks to cell-phone compression. Not even joking. The second one still makes Resident Evil: Requiem look really fucking good.
Developers go where customers are. Anything that’s only possible on niche hardware… will probably form a niche market. So even if the bubble fucks us hard enough that we’re all stuck using battery power, that’s still a better option than a subscription for remote streaming. If everyone in 2036 is somehow stuck with the specs of a 2026 cell phone, I guess we’ll have to put up with games that are only as profitable as Genshin Impact and Balatro.
- Comment on An Indian Trans Person’s Harrowing Encounter Fuels Backlash Against Meta AI ‘Pervert Glasses’ 5 weeks ago:
Calling them that because of the camera is undercut by everyone already carrying a camera, and routinely having them pointed toward you by holding the device.
The problem is the part where it uploads shit to corporate spy agencies, not the hardware being a tiny phone on your face. The hardware is not meaningfully different from the tiny phone… in your hand.
- Comment on An Indian Trans Person’s Harrowing Encounter Fuels Backlash Against Meta AI ‘Pervert Glasses’ 5 weeks ago:
Y’all know phones have cameras, right?
- Comment on The last MPEG-4 Visual patent has expired 1 month ago:
And now, at last, we may consider open-source DVD decoding. Just in the nick of time.
- Comment on "Compliance-in-advance is never enough to appease a zealous censor": Robert Yang on the current challenge of bringing experimental gay games to Steam 1 month ago:
You’d think assholes demanding ID for everything would mean adults get treated like adults.
You’d really fucking think.
- Comment on Doom devs id Software were reportedly kicking around ideas for a new Perfect Dark, a John Wick-inspired game, and multiplayer demonslaying prior to layoffs 1 month ago:
You’d think Perfect Dark had some immersive sim DNA, the way every effort to revitalize it is fucking cursed.
- Comment on Germany's massive 60,000-game preservation project collapses after €1.5 million funding dries up 1 month ago:
Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.
- Comment on dBrand Companion Cube cancelled: 2 months ago:
So they humiliated themselves as a marketing tactic, to later promote fugly knockoffs.
We really are a month away from the Heavy Friendship Box with a pink thumbs-up on the side.
- Comment on dBrand Companion Cube cancelled: 2 months ago:
Off-brand PS5 shells should have been fine, unless they were dumb enough to copy Sony’s logos and whatnot. It’s just swoopy inert shapes and it’s only designed to work with official hardware.
- Comment on "We have to have free human expression in some capacity": Patreon CEO shares frustrations about getting adult content past payment processors 2 months ago:
Trouble is, cash you can e-mail became a wiggly line going up, so people bet on it and ruined everything.
Proper cryptocurrency would constantly lose value and be a hot potato people seek to get rid of. Readily available - valuable through exchange - aggressively encouraging that exchange.
- Comment on Microsoft’s Satya Nadella: We Can’t Let AI Giants Eat the Economy 2 months ago:
“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this, and give him a spanking!”
- Comment on Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: The Push for Online Safety Risks Mass Surveillance 2 months ago:
Like it’s an accident.
- Comment on God of War Laufey and Wolverine are snubbing PC, as rumoured, but I bet they come crawling back sometime after the launch of PS6 2 months ago:
Abolish consoles.
The war is over. Software has won. Everything’s a computer now, and some of them act stupid. We should tell them to stop.
- Comment on Unsanctioned GTA Online modding platform Rage:MP is shutting down thanks to a cease and desist from Take-Two 3 months ago:
Repeal the DMCA.
- Comment on Meta AI will analyze faces of teen users 'but it's not face recognition' 3 months ago:
Argumentum ad nuh uh.
- Comment on "A handful of bottlenecks" remain for Morrowind remake mod Skywind, but it's still progressing steadily towards release 3 months ago:
Meanwhile InfernoPlus has most of the game working in Elden fucking Ring in a matter of months, because that dude is built different.
- Comment on Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety 4 months ago:
‘It’s not any kind of independent intelligence, it’s just a mirror.’
‘Also we need to censor the mirror.’
- Comment on Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore 4 months ago:
Crime.
- Comment on New US Congress bill proposal requires all operating system providers to verify ages 4 months ago:
“But I’m a League player!”
“We take those.”
- Comment on Teardown of unreleased LG Rollable shows why rollable phones aren't a thing 4 months ago:
Modern electronics are as bendy as electronics have ever been, and they still super duper do not like to bend.
Any sane expanding display has to be a projector. Preferably onto that comb-filter material that’s black outside the narrow wavelengths emitted by RGB LEDs. But I’d also settle for some frosted transparent nonsense with abysmal contrast, because if you’re buying this sort of nonsense, cool factor comes first.
- Comment on Raise up the decapitated head of the goddess of love in a flower pot in the charmingly silly Tomak: Save the Earth Regeneration 5 months ago:
@kallidorarho.bsky.social
The author’s brazen fetish, presented with such hedonistic flair and open pride it makes you feel a little embarrassed for needing to hide your own passions behind self-effacing jokes in order to preserve a sense of safe, pseudo-ironic detachment
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 5 months ago:
Yeah imagine if I had the media literacy to describe an establishing shot’s form and function, even if it was borrowed or fabricated. But as someone who’s never seen a movie before, I could never suggest costume and set dressing conveying expectations beyond their literal imagery.
What are you doing?
Yes, professor, how and why I show an elephant will matter more than ‘hey look, an elephant.’ But in order for my intent to matter, when showing an elephant, I do require the ability to show an elephant. A depiction can’t mean anything unless I can in fact depict it. If I just tell you to use your imagination, that’s not a movie, that’s a book.
These tools let you show basically anything at basically no cost. What you want and why is your own problem. The premise, the message, and the edit are still entirely human art. This only replaces the part where real photons bounce off a fake building and look real enough on a sensor. (Or the part where a guy fakes that in Blender.)
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 5 months ago:
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Do you expect audiences should be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
- Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood 5 months ago:
Okay, here’s reality from the recent past: some guy recreated GPT-2 for $20. Same size, similar training data, equal performance. The original required VC funding. This guy spent pocket change. That was a year ago. That’s how much efficiency has already improved, for training these models. These assholes only spend billions because it’s exclusionary, and they’re all caught in a dollar auction to see who can lose the gentlest. I’m sorry any hypotheticals about that are incompatible with your moral crusade.
Meanwhile, it does the thing.
That’s not going to change and you kind of have to deal with it. We now have programs that just do what you ask, for any output that’s text, images, audio, or video. They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
That utility is new and it’s not going anywhere.