arquebus_x

NPR is not free; it’s paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And “not for profit” is not the same as “no cost to the consumer.” In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).

This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”

“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”

“I was wrong.”

Wow, right up front, they’re being disingenuous:

“The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”

…No? Apple won’t bear that burden because they’re going to keep using WebKit. Firefox can keep using WebKit. Not using WebKit is a choice, with pros and cons.

Do you not understand how unions work?

The contract would be a combination contract, for performance and AI training. That’s explicitly the thing that’s been agreed to here.

That’s correct, but it’s important to distinguish something explicitly here. The voices may not be copyrightable, but the dialogue is, as long as it’s not also generated by AI (i.e., dynamically generated). Also, the trained model that generates the voice is still proprietary: only its product (and only the sound itself, not the words if the speech is from a script) can be openly used.

It does, yes. And they can also choose to opt out of future uses of their voice in the AI trained model. Which essentially means that their contracts are on a per-project basis, rather than allowing the game developer to force them to contract for the current project and any future use of the model by that game dev.

That’s… what this agreement proposes.

This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.

And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.

Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.

This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).

Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.

Ever try a hot cola?

I once drank a Coke that had been sitting in my car console for a day during the summer.

It was a revelation.

It makes sense why a Starbucks would be across the street from a Starbucks (coffee buyers are not, as a rule, brand-loyal, so they will go to the nearest/most easily accessible spot - so Starbucks grows like a weed to prevent other shops from taking the business of fickle customers). But two Apple Stores cheek to jowl… that’s weird.

Star Wars, drive-in, 1977. I was 4.

I’m curious: is this still a thriving community? Intel-based Macs are on the verge of being fully deprecated by Apple, so Hackintoshes will (within a year or two) be little more than “vintage computers.” Sure, you might manage to make one more cheaply or more powerful than an Intel Mac, but at some point there isn’t much that’s going to run. Already they’re stuck with older OS releases.

Duct. Duck is a brand name

Yes. But also mostly no.

Wikipedia:

“Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been in use since 1899 and “duct tape” (described as “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape”) since 1965

and:

In 1971, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson firm and renamed it Manco. In 1975, Kahl rebranded the duct tape made by his company. Because the previously used generic term “duck tape” had fallen out of use, he was able to trademark the brand “Duck Tape” and market his product complete with a yellow cartoon duck logo. Manco chose the term “Duck”, the tape’s original name, as “a play on the fact that people often refer to duct tape as ‘duck tape’”, and as a marketing differentiation to stand out against other sellers of duct tape.

People should really do the bare minimum double-check before showing their whole ass.

As others have noted, “duct tape” is the last thing you want to use on ducts. Better to actually call it “duck tape,” as it was for the first 65 years of its existence.

I can’t imagine there’s any way to make optical drives that much faster. The spin rate is already very high and the media size has been standardized. (You’d get a lot more data throughput with a laserdisc-sized drive spinning at the same speed as a CD/DVD.)

You probably already know this, but there’s a free open source version of all three original games, plus others:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

I’m much more interested in the original games, which are now available for free as Aleph One.

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Shit, why not just 30? The frame rate a viewer needs is very different from the frame rate a player needs.