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urbnspacecowboy

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I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account.

Service provider lesson #1: Never ever ever enable auto-pay! The convenience (and even the savings, if applicable) aren't worth the risk of the service provider autonomously slurping up all your money.

Resetting Xbox 16 days ago

Some specifics from George Broussard: https://x.com/georgebsocial/status/2074282537946386833

I've seen comments like "the MS layoffs weren't so bad".

re: id software.

Reports are that 50% (95ish of 200) of the studio was laid off. Here are some quotes on other details:

“Tools, programming (except a couple), Quake Champions team, testing team. All gone.”

“Yeah seems like all they left was leadership and art/design. I think Xbox forgot quakecon is next month.”

It really does sound as if id is now a support team for Bethesda/others. Rip idTech, which was amazing. Maybe Machine Games will carry it on or maybe it will be dropped for future games?

But the read is that id is essentially dead. At least for the time being. Yes, the studio wasn't closed and half still have their jobs. That's great.

re: the studios set free by MS to be sold or mgmt returned. One view is this is great. For MS they get decent PR for being "good guys". But the truth is that in at least one case (and maybe others), retaining the IP in such a case was written into the original contract when MS purchased them. Second, these studios now are out of the MS lifeboat, on their own, and will have short time to find new deals or funding and they will make it or not. Never mind they sold to MS originally to avoid this grind and be 'safe'. Yes they have a second chance but more layoffs may simply be deferred and outside the current umbrella of today's layoff round, so MS doesn't really get the bad PR of simply shutting studios down. This means continual worry by the employees and stress for mgmt.

re: Arkane. Same as the above but timing and process is different due to French labor laws, etc.

The layoffs are still happening. A substantial portion of Obsidian was let go today (near 1/3). Worries that they now don't have the staff to complete current projects. Deep layoffs at Zenimax Online. Even Bethesda or Activision studios were hit (with a minor round and numbers that are small enough that it reads more like "everyone has to take a hit, even the star studios"). More details will emerge, but it's a lot of people.

So it's bad. Real bad. Good luck to all affected.

Resetting Xbox 16 days ago

Entire post text:

This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.

Allocate one magic number for "start line with space" another for "start line with asterisk" then any other number means this many of the current character and then swap character.

The galaxy brain move would be to always arbitrarily start with one character, replace the two special numbers with a single "don't output any characters, just swap" number, and then... congratulations, you just reinvented CompuServe RLE!

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=CompuServ...

"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.

Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.

It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative...

Is it really, though? As commenters on JWZ's blog pointed out (once you get around his HN link blocker, hah), the project contains very questionable LLM work.

1. No way in heaven or earth I'm using my real name with this.

2. Alfred E. Neuman < https://www.intheweights.com/p/alfred-e~2e~-neuman > is either "Mad magazine mascot" (11 responses), or "German-American writer, novelist, and playwright" (1 response, from Llama 3.2 1B, classed as a hallucination). Maybe the odd one out means the German writer Alfred Neumann? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Neumann_(writer) >

3. Tamamo-no-Mae < https://www.intheweights.com/p/tamamo~2d~no~2d~mae > is either a "Caster-class Servant in Type-Moon's Fate franchise, based on the mythological fox spirit" (3 responses), or the "Legendary nine-tailed fox spirit" (12 responses, the vast majority, but all classed as hallucinations)!

4. Thank goodness for Firefox's "mute tab" toggle; the thumping and keyclick sounds get real old, real fast.

GLM 5.2 Is Out 1 month ago

GLM 5 and 5.1 models were released openly, so there's a good chance 5.2 will be eventually. Complaining about censorship isn't very constructive with models that can be self-hosted (and tuned, and de-censored).

people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory,

and true in practice too. what you get out of an ai demuxer isn't an exact match for what went into the mix. it's a plausible approximation, much like ai upscalers, upsamplers, colorizers, and such.

Can anyone help me understand why this particular issue is any different than...

Questions like this are basically whataboutism, in effect even if not intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The question essentially assumes the premise that nobody complained about Anthropic's previous actions. In case you can't tell, I strongly reject this premise. People have been criticizing "safety" rhetoric from Anthropic and other LLM providers practically since the start. Remember Goody-2, the parody of excessively safety-tuned LLMs that refuses to do anything ever? That was released in February 2024, two years ago! (And it's still running, amazing. https://www.goody2.ai/chat )

What Is a Dickover? 2 months ago

Maybe the marketing vocabulary only has YES?

Almost! Your options are "yes" and "maybe later"...

(... and "add yet another custom filter to Ublock Origin".)

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term woke. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term social justice. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term critical race theory. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term diversity. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

And on and on and on. Why should we stop using terms because bigots demonize them "in the common parlance"? Bigots demonize every term.

The source code Scott & co. released is word-for-word exactly the same as the pirated source code that's been floating around the Internet since at least 2009, and that pagetable.com wrote about in 2018:

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774

This is what Microsoft slapped a license and an AI-slop README on. Sure, they can legally do that, they still own the copyright, but it's still pretty funny that they're essentially laundering pirated software.

The Zork I/II/III releases were even more blatant, with git commits adding license texts to existing pirate (or, if you prefer, archival) releases of the old source code:

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork2

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork3

It makes me wonder how many of Microsoft's other releases of old source code are laundered pirate releases, but I don't want to be too harsh. Microsoft's actions in these cases are considerably nicer than, say, what Warner Bros. did about pirated Mortal Kombat 2 source code (takedown), or Nintendo's continued legal hostility toward everyone everywhere. Maybe other companies could learn not to be so dog-in-the-manger about their precious Intellectual Property.