MudMan

joined 1 year ago
[–] MudMan@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago (4 children)

According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.

Making games is expensive, you guys.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago

I don't disagree on principle, but I do think it requires some thought.

Also, that's still a pretty significant backstop. You basically would need models to have a way to check generated content for copyright, in the way Youtube does, for instance. And that is already a big debate, whether enforcing that requirement is affordable to anybody but the big companies.

But hey, maybe we can solve both issues the same way. We sure as hell need a better way to handle mass human-produced content and its interactions with IP. The current system does not work and it grandfathers in the big players in UGC, so whatever we come up with should work for both human and computer-generated content.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

That's not "coming", it's an ongoing process that has been going on for a couple hundred years, and it absolutely does not require ChatGPT.

People genuinely underestimate how many of these things have been an ongoing concern. A lot like crypto isn't that different to what you can do with a server, "AI" isn't a magic key that unlocks automation. I don't even know how this mental model works. Is the idea that companies who are currently hiring millions of copywriters will just rely on automated tools? I get that yeah, a bunch of call center people may get removed (again, a process that has been ongoing for decades), but how is compensating Facebook for scrubbing their social media posts for text data going to make that happen less?

Again, I think people don't understand the parameters of the problem, which is different from saying that there is no problem here. If anything the conversation is a net positive in that we should have been having it in 2010 when Amazon and Facebook and Google were all-in on this process already through both ML tools and other forms of data analysis.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm gonna say those circumstances changed when digital copies and the Internet became a thing, but at least we're having the conversation now, I suppose.

I agree that ML image and text generation can create something that breaks copyright. You for sure can duplicate images or use copyrighted characterrs. This is also true of Youtube videos and Tiktoks and a lot of human-created art. I think it's a fascinated question to ponder whether the infraction is in what the tool generates (i.e. did it make a picture of Spider-Man and sell it to you for money, whcih is under copyright and thus can't be used that way) or is the infraction in the ingest that enables it to do that (i.e. it learned on pictures of Spider-Man available on the Internet, and thus all output is tainted because the images are copyrighted).

The first option makes more sense to me than the second, but if I'm being honest I don't know if the entire framework makes sense at this point at all.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think viral outrage aside, there is a very open question about what constitutes fair use in this application. And I think the viral outrage misunderstands the consequences of enforcing the notion that you can't use openly scrapable online data to build ML models.

Effectively what the copyright argument does here is make it so that ML models are only legally allowed to make by Meta, Google, Microsoft and maybe a couple of other companies. OpenAI can say whatever, I'm not concerned about them, but I am concerned about open source alternatives getting priced out of that market. I am also concerned about what it does to previously available APIs, as we've seen with Twitter and Reddit.

I get that it's fashionable to hate on these things, and it's fashionable to repeat the bit of misinformation about models being a copy or a collage of training data, but there are ramifications here people aren't talking about and I fear we're going to the worst possible future on this, where AI models are effectively ubiquitous but legally limited to major data brokers who added clauses to own AI training rights from their billions of users.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It seems like it would have been hard to avoid acknowledging the mistake, given that the mistake was very clearly lodged into somebody's backyard, as opposed to still being attached to the rest of the plane, but alright.

Hey, some people can have a human interaction when doing damage control during a crisis, and apparently this CEO I didn't know about until just now isn't one of those. There are now two different lessons to take away from this, apparently.

For the record, flashy as this thing was it's not that big of a deal, but it sure is funny and spectacular.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm a bad shill for Picard, I am about as down on the whole thing equally. Ultimately I just don't need to revisit old heroes, ever. I hate this future of all our heroes being basically watching our dads grow old and sad and frail. But yeah, people like S3 more because it's more of a fanservice-y thing than trying to tell the adventures of old Picard by himself, so if that sounds appealing to you go for it.

As for Discovery... yeah, absolutely, skip Season 1. Season 2 is the one that ties into SNW, so if you watched that, you can jump in right there and it's almost a stand-alone show that feels a lot more consistent with SNW and a lot less consistent with Season 1. I'd still go back and watch S1 later if you enjoy the rest of it, but skipping that is absolutely a valid watch order if you don't want to do the "trudge through the bad first season" thing of most Star Trek shows. I actually quite like seasons 2 and 4 specially. I'd rank them above all of Picard and just behind SNW, as far as nuTrek is concerned, and I'd rather watch those than most of Voyager and DS9, if I'm being honest.

The TOS Kirk thing is... interesting. I mean, you're not wrong, Kirk was supposed to be just an all-around good guy Mary Sue who's always great and right. It's just that 60s Trek take on that turns out to be almost comedically horny and rash, especially as parsed by Shatner's acting choices, especially when you retroactively compare it to TNG, which, let's face it, is the de facto standard people have for what default Trek is. I think SNW's Kirk splits the difference just fine... but he feels like an entirely different character. I can almost see Pine's Kirk growing into Shatner's more than I can Paul Wesley's. But from the perspective you present? Yeah, they paint him as being more aggressive than Pike, for better or worse, but also mostly just smart and nice rather than a horny hothead. Definitely not doing Shatner, though, and less iconic than either of the other takes, I'd say. Which is fine, it's Anson Mount's show anyway. If anything I'd have liked less Kirk in the two seasons they've done so far. Hell, I'd have taken that cast in a standalone show rather than a prequel.

Shout out to Martin Quinn's Scotty, though. He got like two episodes so far and already he's the one cast member who I can see as the same character from TOS. The others are fine, they're just playing their own take on the character's premise, as opposed to the same character from the original.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

For sure, that's my whole point. There's enough Trek now, and it's all different enough that it's hard to not have at least one or two things you enjoy from the past five years of it or so.

I think the idea of having a Trek show that is following the one character through a season-long story is interesting. The problem Disco has is that the crew and the classic Trek dynamic is just too good, you end up resenting not spending more time with the crew early on. Like every show, though, they course correct and it all ends up being some take on TNG. Which is fine by me.

Picard got that, too. I would have stuck with a Picard-less La Sirena crew for a season. I didn't need the nostalgia trip. And it's telling that in Season 3 everybody just wanted to have Legacy be a thing because the idea of that crew was more interesting than the self-centered nostalgia porn stuff in the rest of the show. Which, hey, it's fine. I think SNW being exactly that is very helpful in allowing the other shows to be their own thing.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago

I don't know, man. I mean, I know about that last part, that is definitely a thing. I don't know if that's it or if the perception here is different or what. I wasn't even trolling, I'm mildly curious about Rice-a-roni now. Just mildly enough not to google it. Maybe the Carrefour versus Pepsi thing reads as a Europe vs the US thing? I hadn't even considered that until just now and it seems hilarious.

For the record, we obviously get a ton of cereal, including very sugary cereal. You can get those pillowy things with nutella inside them, which are less cereal and more a way to pretend you're having breakfast when you're really just inhaling a full box of chocolate cookies.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Up to you. Disco starts a bit rough, and I get why people didn't enjoy the gritty tone and the reworked Klingons in Season 1, although I wasn't as outraged by them (frankly, Disco S1 is no more off-tone than early Enterprise or late DS9, if you ask me). However, by Season 2 they had course corrected hard and later seasons of Discovery mostly just differentiate from Strange New Worlds in that SNW is episodic and Disco does season-long arcs. Otherwise they're pretty much bang-on tonally. I think a lot of the pushback these days comes from people bouncing off early, making it a crusade to hate it and never checking back. Which, again, big Enterprise undertones right there.

But yeah, if you're out there going "nuTrek sucks" to me these days you come across pretty detached. Watch what you like, obviously, but new Trek is all over the place in tone and feel and there's tons of great stuff in there, as far as I'm concerned.

Also, Lower Decks season 1 feels off to me and always has, but it gets pretty good later and depending on your tolerance for watching cartoons meant for younger kids, Prodigy is pretty much just a sequel to Voyager, so if you're more continuity and nostalgia driven you may want to give it a look.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

I don't like any Picard and I do really like all of Discovery.

But even then, there's so much right now that even discarding those there are two animated series and one live action show left. That's still quite a bit of homework. And given that Picard and Disco are divisive but not universally hated, I'd say if you're into Trek you still want to check those out and see if they're for you or not.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago (10 children)

There's so much modern Trek at this point I don't even know if that's necessary.

Anyway, I'd say I see a ton of overlap between liking Trek and liking The Expanse, although it's more political and less "alien of the week diplomacy". Still, it goes places, give it a look.

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