Communick News

https://mastodon.social/@RustyNova/117450897746939451

[a character is worryingly thinking about a scene of themselves getting uppercutted in the genitals so hard they are lifted off the ground, next to a river labeled PUNCH IN THE NUTS RIVER]
This reminds me of that time I went to punched in the nuts river and got punched in the nuts

https://thebad.website/comic/ignoring_the_signs

The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.

“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site.

But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

AI-powered video game decomps and recomps (recompiling code after modifying it) are everywhere. People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on, or to combine various games in any permutations you could possibly imagine. In recent days, tools specifically designed to decomp games with AI have popped up, such as "decomp.wtf," which promises to "point the AI agent you already use at a game you own. decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original."

Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.

Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77050659

I have zero interest in Chromium. If I really need to use a browser that is not Firefox-based, I can install Ungoogled Chromium. So this is just taking up space in my list of programs both here and in my start menu.

In desktop mode, if I right-click that item in the start menu and choose uninstall, it just opens Discover to the page to download Chromium. There seems to be no way to just remove that "Install Chromium" item.

It seems to be bound to a .desktop file, but I cannot just delete that file because it's in a protected system directory or whatever. And if I were to force it and delete the file anyway, I assume it would just reappear after the next system update.

I cannot install Chromium to get rid of it. Sure, if I follow through and install Chromium, that "Install Chromium" shortcut goes away... but then I have Chromium itself in my list of programs. If I then uninstall Chromium, the "Install Chromium" program comes back.

There must be a simple way to get rid of this that doesn't involve unlocking the system to delete it after every update, right?

That money, in turn, depends heavily on the cash and expertise of one of the world’s fastest-growing multilateral banks, the International Islamic Trade Finance Corp., or ITFC.

Basically, several of the big oil-exporting countries are financing fossil fuels and not renewables.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/86379

Video reading by Tim Foley:

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During a speech at the Las Vegas Sphere on Saturday, Metallica frontman James Hetfield took aim at artists like Macklemore for making political statements about the genocide in Gaza during their concerts.

“I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, okay?” said Hetfield, adding, “We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, okay? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”

Defenders of imperial status quo apathy like Matt Taibbi are presently defending Hetfield from the backlash his comments are receiving, arguing that art exists on some kind of magical higher plane that transcends such trivial “political” concerns like whether or not genocide is bad.

I have no respect for this idea that art is somehow separable from politics. ALL art is political when you live in a genocidal dystopia, because all your expression exists in relation to our freakish civilization.

If you were on fire, any action OR inaction on your part would necessarily be happening in relationship to the urgency of your situation. If you chose to stand there strumming your guitar while the flames consumed your body, nobody would try to argue that your artistic expression in that moment was somehow separable from your failure to address your urgent need for extinguishment. Your inaction would be a self-destructive act, and your final song would have been about burning to death — whether you sang anything about fire or not.

In exactly the same way, western artists who ignore the abuses of the western empire are taking a political position and sharing a political message. They might be singing about romance, or dancing, or the Sandman, but their actual message is, “Here are those circuses you ordered, you vapid NPCs, you mindless empire automatons, you shambling zombies consuming the flesh of the third world. Distract yourselves from the burning ecosystem, from the screams of Gaza, from the suffering of the poor and the marginalized, from the AI-assisted surveillance system they are constructing all around you right this very moment. Pretend everything’s fine and capitalism is working out great for everyone. Here you go, you empty-headed human livestock, sedate yourself with some catchy rhythms while our rulers turn our world into a desert planet so a few billionaires can become trillionaires.”

Real art tells the truth, and facilitates a deeper connection with reality. It pulls us into intimacy with parts of ourselves we’d been neglecting, draws attention to aspects of the human experience we’d avoided, directs us, rebukes us, inspires us, encourages us, emboldens us and reassures us as we crawl forth on our adventure across this mysterious blue planet during our short few decades between birth and death. And in a healthy world it could do all these things without ever getting “political”, because the most urgent needs of the moment would typically just involve our feelings, our interpersonal relationships, and our struggle toward self-actualization.

But we do not live in a healthy world. We live under a tyrannical world-eating empire that is fueled by human blood and suffering. That is our reality, and your art is either real about reality or it isn’t. You’re either telling the truth about reality or you’re normalizing it.

It’s easy for the rich and the propaganda-addled to believe we are living in a healthy world where everything’s basically fine, but for everyone whose eyes are open to the reality of our situation as a species, it’s a five-alarm fire. A real artist is in tune with reality, and in this particular slice of spacetime our reality contains horrors that should be treated with the same urgency as we would have if our clothing caught fire.

Telling artists to shut up about politics is telling them to stop being artists and start being propagandists for the empire. It’s telling them, “Don’t say anything unless you have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. Your job isn’t to incite, your job is to distract and sedate. Your job isn’t to blow on the embers of human brilliance, your job is to play the fiddle while we smooth the pillow of a dying world.”

Fuck that. Make art. Be brilliant. Fight the empire. Free Palestine.

___________________

Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Dennis Radaelli — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78819699

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So that when they're threatened, A Koi, B Koi and C Koi will scatter.

Leaving behind the D Koi.

its my understanding that the US has banned Chinese EVs based on their “ability to send telemetry back to China” (fwiw, every manufacturer is doing something similar, but that’s out of scope for this question).

Waymo has a new class of car they’re using called the Ojai (Oh, hi) that is built by Zeeker, a Chinese company, that is built in China. This seems like it would run afoul of that ban.

I thought I heard somewhere that the car is built in China, but the infotainment system and ecu are then installed here in America, which bypasses that issue. If that’s the case. Why don’t other manufacturers import Chinese EVs and drop in their own infotainment systems for much cheaper?