Most of these companies are just arguing that they shouldn’t have to license the works they’re using because that would be hard and inconvenient, which isn’t terribly compelling to me. But Adobe actually has a novel take I hadn’t heard before: they equate AI development to reverse engineering software, which also involves copying things you don’t own in order to create a compatible thing you do own. They even cited a related legal case, which is unusual in this pile of sour grapes. I don’t know that I’m convinced by Adobe’s argument, I still think the artists should have a say in whether their works go into an AI and a chance to get paid for it, but it’s the first argument I’ve seen for a long while that’s actually given me something to think about.

Performance is not great, honestly. On my 3090 I had to sink settings to medium to get around 45 - 60 fps. However it does look nice, and even 30 fps is perfectly playable for a relaxed sim where my reaction speed doesn’t matter.

Playability is fantastic once I got the settings lowered. Love the changes to water and power, roundabouts are neat, roads are easier to manage, and the progression system has been surprisingly engaging. I really like the game and I’ll definitely keep playing while they work on optimizing it.

I can tell I’m really into a game when I end up ditching the objectives to just screw around. If I’m following the quest arrow I’m probably just in it for the plot or for some completionist urge, but if I really like the game I’ll start wandering off the main path to just enjoy the environment and satisfy my own curiosity about things.

Agreed! Especially since the behavior on clicking a thumbnail isn’t very consistent on mobile. Sometimes I click the thumbnail and it expands the image. Sometimes it follows a link. Sometimes going back from a link takes me back to the same Lemmy page I was on, but other times it reloads the page and I can’t find the post I was looking at anymore. An option to open all links in a new tab would really help me not lose the post I was looking at when I clicked.

Nope. I quit cold turkey on June 30 and haven’t been back. Well, not on purpose, at least. Sometimes a Google result sends me to Reddit, but when it loads I just close it and move to the next result. Lemmy works fine for everything I used Reddit for.

I just use the mobile website. It works and doesn’t harass me to use something else, which are both huge improvements from Reddit!

I use the term “autocomplete on steroids” because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.

LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we’ve come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it’s a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn’t make sense. They hallucinate facts that don’t fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they’re saying.

I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.

The Space Quest Historian does YouTube videos about classic adventure games with full playthroughs, historical deep dives, and creator interviews. He also actually hangs out here in the Fediverse: he’s on Lemmy as @SQHistorian@lemm.ee and on Mastodon as @sqhistorian@dosgame.club.

Also, SQH’s band Error 47 does industrial rock covers of retro game music and is criminally under-subscribed. They’re currently working on an album covering The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, which I’m really looking forward to.

I’ve also been really digging Quake Speedruns Explained lately, which is a really chill dude talking about one of the oldest and most competitive speedrunning scenes around.

Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that’s not what the AI actually does.

Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That’s all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we’d apply to a human.

To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy “bright line” for what counts and what doesn’t. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI “creates” is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.

Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn’t have all my old niche communities yet, but it’s got enough for me to log on and see what’s happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven’t been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.