You’re still out just as much

And then some. The landlord’s profit.

Right? I’m clearly far too American to understand. I’m more confused than I was before.

At the end of Idiocracy, they showed hoses pulling water out of toilets to water plants.

To extend the joke, I’m picturing devices strapped to people’s asses to let them type by wiping their butts.

$130k after 2 years? 2 years after I started I was making like… $60k? That’s not even counting the 4.5 years I spent starting a startup and making nearly nothing.

That said, I don’t live in Silicon Valley or anything. Pretty low cost-of-living here. Probably a big part of the discrepancy. I didn’t reach $130k until like 20 years of experience in the industry.

Took me longer than I care to admit to figure that out. Heh.

EUSA

Five bucks says it grows algae too, somehow.

Fallout: Pride Parade

It’s true that the public keys aren’t sensitive and nothing is compromised (in fact, it’s recommended) if the public key is available from, say, a key server.

But MITM is always a concern. Public-key encryption is supposed to mitigate that by ensuring that any third-party listening in in the middle can only get the ciphertext and cannot derive the plaintext of the communication.

But, if a jurisdiction legally forces a rule like the “we get to snoop on everything” one in this law, it changes things. They could, for instance, force key servers to to only give out keys that are generated/controlled by the EU agency so that they can MITM to their heart’s content. My guess at Aniki’s thought process is that if there’s a central distributor of keys, that can be legally strong-armed into bad things, but the people you’ve talked directly to are a different matter. “Web of trust” as it were.

I do think there are probably better ways to deal with that than what Aniki’s getting at, though. If you have Alice’s public key, you can verify signatures she generated, and you can be sure (hand-waves, rubber-hoses, caveat emptor, blah blah blah) that if you have a valid signature signing Bob’s public key with Alice’s private key, Alice vouches for that specific public key being authentically Bob’s public key.

Now, if you only ever get public keys from a small set of (compromiseable) central key servers, then the very first public key you get could be compromised and any other signature generated from the associated private key could be forged by an adversarial party (like the EU.) And theoretically the EU could generate a whole counterfeit web of signatures. So there’s benefit to having at least some of the public keys you trust come directly from the one who generated the key through a known-secure channel.

Before this law goes into effect, (maybe) we can trust at least some of the signatures in public key servers and use those as a basis for secure communication from which we can create a pool of known-uncompromised (qualifier, caveat, tin hats, etc) public keys, and based on those (maybe) detect forgeries and such.

(Mind you, I don’t know the details of this law or whatever. It might be that the law as written will require, say, GnuPG to introduce backdoors. Not that I think they should, no matter what the law says, but it might be that the EU isn’t really likely to engage in quite the lever of subterfuge that I’ve outlined above. It might be more of a blatant “fuck you, we’re the government and you’re going to comply” approach than a sneaky-sneaky trick-everybody-into-thinking-they’ve-got-security-they-don’t approach.)

Jesus. I’m not in the EU, but how is this the first I’m hearing about this?

Time to go back to email and GnuPG.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure the PS3 was that way, even. I’d have to imagine a lot of discs that are already out there would case to work the moment Sony shut down its servers. (And probably similarly so for Microsoft games. Switch seems much better about that, though they do sometimes require a firmware upgrade… unless you hack your Switch of course. And I have no frame of reference for how much that is the case for the Switch 2, but I can’t imagine Switch 2 being better than Switch 1 in that regard.)

FIFA is the same organization that invented a bullshit “peace prize” to give Trump. Apparently FIFA is the sort of organization that doesn’t need threats to french Trump’s asshole. They’ll do that for free.

Pirates might have to get more creative, but it’s possible.

Proxies that scrape and save server-side data while you play, going through as many areas as possible, for instance.

Even if the communication between client and server is encrypted, the client can’t decrypt if it doesn’t have the key. And if the key is on your computer, it can be procured.

Reimplementing the server from scratch can certainly be necessary in a lot of cases as well, of course.

Piracy will always be possible.

Look, it’s an objective fact that people have a hard time distinguishing AI generated video from real video.

Not without a lot of curation.

“this looks horrendous and nobody could ever like it”

I never said that. What I meant by the “do you really think this is the destination” comment is how can you look at a very curated collection of AI-generated video snippets and extrapolate from that that the Stable Diffusion (or whatever) model they used can be just unceremoniously dropped into a game engine without tons of random hallucinations like turning random wood grain in a fence into a full-ass hallucinated person or dog or steak dinner or whatever. And without making one character look drastically different now than they did the last time you visited them 20 minutes prior. (You’ve seen videos of beauty filter fails, haven’t you?) Let alone extra fingers and garbled text and accidental body horror and stuff.

If you generate a bunch of stuff, throw away the stuff that doesn’t look right (a.k.a. “curate”), and carefully edit the remainder into a video, yeah, you can get some pretty decent-looking results. But that’s not how games work, unless you’re just talking about pre-rendered cutscenes.

this could move video games towards photorealism

This can’t. Not without something we have yet to invent. And thinking that whatever may some day exist that can is in any way related to the “this” that you refer to is speculation at best.

you’re saying nothing that precludes it.

I’m not saying photorealistic video games won’t happen. I’m saying that the companies forcing it on gamers are knowingly (or at least uncaringly) pulling a massive grift marketing what’s available today as the thing that will fill the promise of perfect photorealistic video games when nothing like that exists today and they have no reason to think it will any time soon.

You clearly hate AI

“AI” can mean a lot of things. I took a course in college in 2005 called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”. And in that class, they introduced me to the A* algorithm. (When you do an escort mission in Skyrim and an NPC follows you, the code that determines how the NPC should traverse the distance between the two of you in order to remain in proximity to you – accounting for terrain features, circumventing obstacles, etc – is almost definitely the A* algorithm or some minor variation of it.) I can say I’m fully down with the A* algorithm and have nothing against it. I’ve had occasion to play chess against chess engines several times. 10/10 would play again.

As far as LLMs, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E are concerned, guilty as charged. And the way the industry conflates all of “AI” as if it’s one thing and not a whole bunch of different things (touting advancements in drug research as some kind of proof that their completely unrelated LLM is competent or whatever, for instance).

and hate anyone who likes anything about it.

I mean, I think you’re pretty self-deluded, but not any more so than you think the same of me (as your “that blinds you to reality” states pretty plainly).

Beyond that, the whole world seems to be conspiring to make Generative AI not optional. Want to opt out? Fuck you, your search engine just spats slop on your screen now and some of your favorite content creators on YouTube are slathering it all over their videos now, and your phone and your computer and your browser just updated and now nag you constantly to use AI summaries and stuff. You also have to smile and be diplomatic about it at work because the CTO made a deal with Microsoft to push Copilot on you constantly. Plus, the communities that you’ve enjoyed previously are suddenly inundated by Generative AI fanboys filling your feed with shit.

And I have to imagine it would be hard for someone who thinks Generative AI is “a good thing actually” to really grasp just how fucking intrusive it is to be force-fed that so constantly. It has a way of turning a mild dislike into seething hatred. (Even if Generative AI was innocuous, the Green Eggs and Ham factor huge. At least that guy only had to deal with one Sam-I-Am.)

Summary by Brave Leo AI

I’m not usually one to kink shame, but in this case I can make an exception.

I’m fine with DRM as long as I can break it.

… in a jurisdiction with no anticircumvention laws, of course. 😶

You want to get peanut butter all up in the door chamber that the window recedes into?

10,000 years later someone finally figures out how to reverse the magic and defrost you. Congratulations, now you live in Shadowrun.

See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.

The first video in the search results in the first link here has “it got weird fast” in the title and NPCs are breaking the third wall and responding strangely to things in general. (The lady at the orphanage mentioned the player “looking through a flickering screen.” I didn’t watch much further than that.)

The second is likely heavily curated and variables very strictly controlled. The characters are perfectly centered in frame and standing mostly still aside from idle animations. The landscapes are… well, they’re inherently still life. There’s no actual gameplay showcased, and there’s no indication from the video just how many of the video creator’s attempts had major issues like too many fingers or were scrapped in favor of the ones that turned out better. The art style switches strangely between characters, with, for instance, the first one looking much more photographic and the second mimicking more what you’d get from a better-quality 3D render. And many of the characters feel very uncanny valley. (The third one, for instance. I haven’t watched that video much further than that either.)

So, yeah, if those videos are “testing it to see if it works”, the answer is a resounding “no”. There’s nothing workable there, and no indication LLMs and Stable Diffusion are a step in the right direction, despite what Nvidia might tell you.

I mean, do you watch those videos and think to yourself “this is it – this is the destination – we’ve done it”?

So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.

I mean, there’s no there there, and no reason to think there ever will be beyond the fact that humans seem pretty intent on developing AGI. Clearly what AI can do now isn’t any kind of boon. So what’s keeping people high on hype if not empty hopes for a breakthrough in the near future?

if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence.

That’s the opposite of what I said. The kind of real-time dynamic responding to things you’re talking about requires reasoning and intelligence, but LLMs possess neither.