alternative_factor

My favorite little derps

Very true but they don’t always win, and besides, there are other lobbyists who are out there batting for Disney. If there is one hint of Micky Mouse™ in their data set they might as well just dissolve the company now.

Yeah I’ve done a tiny bit of AI stuff for what I do (biology) and I think it’s very sus they can build such a strong model out of data which costs lots of money. The reason the algos in my field of biology are so strong is because the NCBI has the genomes of everything that’s be sequenced FOR FREE, because obviously you don’t want people patenting genomes and it should all be free for science, etc.

Which begs the question how the a start up that started out as a non-profit get that much user data and keep costs low? I know you can buy user data and I’m not sure how much it is to buy a bunch of google docs from a data broker, but if you buy from hackers who just data breached or used some illegal crawler you can probably cut that to prices a nonprofit could afford.

I think he was probably lying about where he got all the data used to train the model from, I’m guessing training a model on tons of copyrighted material and stolen user data won’t be legal in the near future.

You are right but classic WoW hardcore has really fixed most of those issues because if you rush things you will probably die. Anyway I really agree with this headline because I logged into retail WoW during a thunderstorm because if you DC while you are playing it’s basically an automatic game over, anyway I was bored as hell immediately. Retail is all about doing raids and dungeons, which is fun if you like that but I actually enjoy simply leveling in classic hardcore way more, and the best part is I don’t have to be logged in for hours at a time leveling unlike in raids.

There are a few great Chinese single player games out there like amazing cultivation simulator, but they are all indie games. The Chinese government restricted how Steam works in China so I have no idea how indie Chinese games are getting out there, if at all.
https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-china-launch/
I played a little Genshin after it first released but was put off by the underage characters being portrayed sexually. The sad fact of the matter is that its a great game made with passion, and many Chinese games have a “”“lolicon”“” issue. I tried the game Mahjong soul after getting into Mahjong from Final Fantasy, and it has the same issue.
And when I say “”“lolicon”“, I mean kids as young as 11-13, maybe even younger. it’s disgusting. Otakus seems to run the industry there as far as I can tell, or at least what makes it to the west because to know real stuff about Chinese culture you have to be at least kinda a weeb for Chinese stuff. I got into Xianxia from my love of manga which lead to Manhua. The Xianxia scene has a lot of problems but “”“lolicon””" hasn’t been one of them.
TL;DR The chinese video game industry is run by otakus, at least for whats made it into the west. The worst part is that HoYoVerse WAS an indie developer whose motto was “by otakus, for otakus” they aren’t hiding what they are about, but unfortunately have become #1 for pandering to the lowest possible denominator

Genshin actually has a surprising amount of horny teenage girls who play it, too. One article says its 55% male to 45% which is honestly very impressive.

It might mean something though, FFXIV is a classic example of a game that almost nobody plays on Steam, but its Steam charts line up somewhat well with the game’s increasing popularity especially with Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Of course you have to look at actual data to back that up, but soemtimes it can show trends.

Kbin is probably in the center. I just want to grill in my Linux computer.

Great to see cassette beasts getting tons of love. I’ve played Siralim and TemTem but cassette beasts really scratches the same itch as Pokemon while also doing some cool new stuff.

TemTem is 3D but they had a bigger team and budget than my beloved Cassette Beasts.

I’ve been an MMO gamer for a VERY long time and I would say the whaling thing is a perfect analogy. I often pre-order expansions to MMOs like WoW and FFXIV but I have never bought cosmetics other than two race changes for FF, which would make me a “dolphin”.

I noticed in WoW and FFXIV that if someone has one mount you can only get from the cash shop, they are VERY likely to have bought TONS of other cosmetics from the cash shop. If they don’t have any cash shop mounts, they won’t have any cosmetics from it either. It seems like most people are either “all in” or nothing, people like me are very rare.

Yup, this is why the last two Diablo games have been always online, no one is going to spend $25 on a skin macrotransaction when nobody else can even seen it.

Ah well that would be why it’s completely pointless to me. Since all science is politicized now, I guess there is no reason to use it.

I signed up to it from instagram to track my favorite epidemiologists and h5n1 only to discover it has no hashtag system to look up trending topics and most of my favorite epidemiologists aren’t even on it. So it’s worthless for even following COVID, avian flu, and probably every other news topic.

LOL! No it helped cheer me up honestly.

Honestly when I feel my worst I enjoy comforting media, but what’s a very bizzare and unethical bad habit of mine is reading stuff people with worse lives than me post online (I never interact with them- prime directive!). I know it’s wrong and voyeuristic but it always makes me grateful for how comparatively together I am.

Damn what a set-up, e-tabletop with lego? I’m so jealous.

Similarities between Linux and the bible:

1. Free
2. If someone is into it they will tell you unprompted
3. If someone is into it they will try to convert you

I think you’re right on the money, I recently took a vacation and i had the luxury to turn everything off I wanted and truly enjoy it, most Americans can’t do that.