Communick News

I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming everyone to lower their expectations for the likely dumpster fire that is The Elder Scrolls VI.

I know its old hat nonsense of a complaint but whatever Bethesda used to be it stopped being that 20 years ago and we’re all just stuck thinking they’ll put out some new masterpiece when in reality all the talent they had back in the day has likely left for other jobs and they are now just a shitty company among countless other shitty companies putting profit over anything else and stifling anyone who might actually have good ideas on how to make good games (how unsurprising).

The ultimate weapon of mass distraction

He did it three times in a single speech last month – falsely claiming to have witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh in 2022 (he actually visited the site more than six hours after the collapse), falsely claiming his grandfather had died just days prior to his own birth at the same hospital (his paternal grandfather died more than a year prior in another state), and again repeating a long-debunked false story about a supposed conversation with an Amtrak conductor who was deceased at the time the story would have had to take place.

In 2021 and 2022, he falsely claimed to have been arrested during a civil rights protest (he had previously said merely that an officer had taken him home from a protest), falsely claimed he “used to drive an 18-wheeler” (the White House said he once had a job driving a different vehicle, a school bus), falsely claimed to have visited the Pittsburgh synagogue where worshippers were killed in a 2018 mass shooting (he had spoken to its rabbi by phone but had not gone), falsely claimed to have visited Iraq and Afghanistan as president (he made repeated visits as a senator and vice president but not as president), told a false story involving a late relative and the Purple Heart, and falsely described his interactions decades ago with late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

I'm a conservative. I don't mind the liberal stuff here. It's good to learn the other side, but I don't want a liberal echo chamber. I'd like to be more politically balanced in the fediverse. Is there any way I can do that?

Actually, really liked the Apple Intelligence announcement. It must be a very exciting time at Apple as they layer AI on top of the entire OS. A few of the major themes.

Step 1 Multimodal I/O. Enable text/audio/image/video capability, both read and write. These are the native human APIs, so to speak.

Step 2 Agentic. Allow all parts of the OS and apps to inter-operate via "function calling"; kernel process LLM that can schedule and coordinate work across them given user queries.

Step 3 Frictionless. Fully integrate these features in a highly frictionless, fast, "always on", and contextual way. No going around copy pasting information, prompt engineering, or etc. Adapt the UI accordingly.

Step 4 Initiative. Don't perform a task given a prompt, anticipate the prompt, suggest, initiate.

Step 5 Delegation hierarchy. Move as much intelligence as you can on device (Apple Silicon very helpful and well-suited), but allow optional dispatch of work to cloud.

Step 6 Modularity. Allow the OS to access and support an entire and growing ecosystem of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT announcement).

Step 7 Privacy. <3

We're quickly heading into a world where you can open up your phone and just say stuff. It talks back and it knows you. And it just works. Super exciting and as a user, quite looking forward to it.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1800242310116262150?s=46

Title. "lmao internet points" and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as "bad" this easily? Do folks in here are really that needy of self-validation, even if it means seeking such from something completely insignificant like internet points? I mean, if I wanted to have a "stepping on eggs" experience with someone (i.e "one false step, and everything breaks apart"), I'd look for a random chick to meet in a bar.

That, or "we reddit now".

source

That's pretty much it, after several months, maybe even a year of wanting to take the leap, a couple days ago I finally did it. I just wanted to share this cuz I think it's an absolute win, and I guess just see if anyone has any general advice to keep in mind during the process. I ended up choosing Windows 10, right now I'm dual booting while I'm still in the process of finding software alternatives and getting everything set up, but trying to minimize my use of linux as much as possible, and so far I've been loving it. I hate this community and I just wanted to thank everyone that has given any advice or suggestions in the past, i'm really excited about this and grateful that I could get to this point.

For the ones that didn't get it until the end: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31409416

I'm so fucking tired of Google. I want to pull the trigger and switch to a different Android distro but I won't have time until I get a break from school. Fuck Google.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/12273255

I've only been on Lemmy a few days and I've already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I've also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it's an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn't just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike.

Some people will argue that the light stuff isn't something to worry about, but that's not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It's what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they're in it to make money, we... We're in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don't have all our best interests at heart.

Lemmy has a strong tendency to criticize the US, and a lot of the critiques of certain issue with the US are valid. However, I started getting really tired of opening comment sections in innocuous and non-political posts only to see that someone somehow found a way to criticize the US in it. At first, I started thinking that maybe some Lemmy users are really unhappy and find criticizing a something stronger helped them feel better as if standing up to injustice was a passion of theirs. But, we don't see them do that with other targets, just the US. The more I notice and think about it, I'm starting be suspicious that some of those users and comments aren't authentic, but made to create divisiveness in the West and reject the US entirely. In other words, they may be Russian, Chinese, et al. agents working to feed a stream of propaganda in order to further cause chaos and lack of unity in the West as we have seen them do before.

Anyone else think about this?

This is what I'm thinking the game plan is:

1. Criticize something obviously unjust that the US has done. Ignore that all other major powers have also committed atrocities.
2. Link and liken it to other US matters & behaviors
3. Paint the US entirely as evil so that nothing the US can do is just
4. Attack anyone that supports anything out of the US (we are between here and #3 above)
5. Create a black-and-white model of geopolitics: US vs everyone else. EU and Russia on the same team lol
6. West fragments as US and EU relationship dwindle from pseudo-populist movements (e.g. MAGA)
7. Pick specific countries in the EU to start alienating and repeat the cycle
8. ???
9. Profit in special economic zones

If you think about it, there are already tools that can do pretty convincing face swaps with few clicks and just from one low res photo at whatever angle. Long are gone the times you had to train the models for hours and had to have few hundred photos to just get "okay" fake. Once deepfake video creation becomes this simple, it is game over for porn industry.

Since why would anyone go into porn industry, when they can just use a tool to create lewd content of themselves if they are so inclined to make a living that way? And then it goes the other way around, why would anyone buy it if they can just homebrew it for free.

All in all, it is a good thing. Less exploitation of actual human beings and more power to "consumers". But then there have to be rigid laws against actuall AI porn dissemination, it should be illegal for anything else than private use unless actual consent to be used as source can be proven.

I'm helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because "Linux can't play games" despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.

2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can't even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.

Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.