Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 17 Posts
  • 3.4K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Where do you think we'd be in the current AI craze if the pandemic never happened?English
    29·
    10 hours ago

    Without spending a lot of time digging into it, I don’t think that the pandemic was a major enabling factor.

    Like, work on hardware-driven larger neural nets and generation of images had been going on pre-pandemic. I remember articles about Google researchers working on them quite some time back.

    searches

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream

    DeepDream is a computer vision program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev that uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dream-like appearance reminiscent of a psychedelic experience in the deliberately overprocessed images.[1][2][3]

    The DeepDream software, originated in a deep convolutional network codenamed “Inception” after the film of the same name,[1][2][3] was developed for the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2014[3] and released in July 2015.

    The dreaming idea and name became popular on the internet in 2015 thanks to Google’s DeepDream program. The idea dates from early in the history of neural networks,[4] and similar methods have been used to synthesize visual textures.[5] Related visualization ideas were developed (prior to Google’s work) by several research groups.[6][7]

    https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural-networks/

    Like, if you’ve used a diffusion model like Stable Diffusion and run low-iteration stuff in Automatic1111 or ComfyUI or something, that looks pretty familiar.

    And that was being released in 2015, half a decade before the pandemic started, and was based on pre-existing work.

    I think that the “why now” question mostly just has to do with hardware reaching the point where you can do some significantly-more-interesting things with neural nets, coupled with some mostly-iterative software improvements.

    I don’t think that it was a “people are staying inside due to the pandemic and that drove a lot of change” in the sort of sense that, say, there was an impact on video game sales, something that I was talking about on here recently.

    EDIT: If you want another data point, I was writing neural-net-based image enhancement software in the early 2000s. Far smaller neural nets than what people are using today for generative AI stuff, but…shrugs

    And while I was writing code for CPUs, I distinctly remember a buddy of mine at the time who focused on parallel scientific computing — though he wasn’t working on neural nets — talking about using GPUs to do scientific computation back then, so I know off-the-cuff that there were definitely people banging on that in that timeframe. That’s over twenty years back, and those two things are the fundamental elements behind genAI image stuff.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two YearsEnglish
    16·
    1 day ago

    I was about to say that I knew that COVID-19 caused video game sales to surge, and then crash, and there was over-hiring that had happened in response to those sales, but a third seems like an insanely high number.

    Looking at WP, it sounds like the surge was actually that high…but for mobile OS games and console games, not PC, where the surge was much more muted. I also hadn’t realized that mobile OS video game spending had become that much larger than PC spending.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2025_video_game_industry_layoffs

    The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in interest in gaming globally, and was a period of dramatic expansion in the industry, with many mergers and acquisitions conducted. In many cases companies over-expanded, as this rapid COVID-era growth was unsustainable. The industry began to slow in 2022, and amid spiralling costs and a shift in consumer habits, layoffs began.

    The first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a sharp increase in revenue for the gaming sector worldwide as people looked for indoor entertainment.[56] According to IDC, in 2020, revenue from mobile games climbed by 32.8% to $99.9 billion, while expenditure on digital PC and Mac games increased by 7.4% to $35.6 billion.[57] The amount spent on home console games increased significantly as well, reaching $42.9 billion, up 33.9%.[58][59]

    In the ensuing years, this growing pattern abruptly stopped.[60] Revenue growth from mobile gaming fell by 15% in 2021, and then fell even further in 2022 and 2023, to -3.3% and -3.1%, respectively. Sales of PC and Mac games saw a brief rise of 8.7% in 2021, a drop of 1.4% in 2022, and a rebound of 2.1% in 2023.[61] Similarly, after a surge in 2020, console game spending plateaued in 2021 with growth at 0.7%, followed by a decline of 3.4% in 2022, before returning to growth at 5.9% in 2023.[59][62]

    EDIT: Based on those numbers, the surge in mobile and console sales combined was basically equivalent in value to the entirety of PC video game sales. It’s like the equivalent of the entire PC video gaming industry materialized, existed for a few years, and then disappeared.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Elon Musk says Tesla ending Models S and X production, converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robotsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    I mean, human environments are intrinsically made for humanoids to navigate. Like, okay, we put stairs places, things like that. So in theory, yeah, a humanoid form makes sense if you want to stick robots in a human environment.

    But in practice, I think that there are all kinds of problems to be solved with humans and robots interacting in the same space and getting robots to do human things. Even just basic safety stuff, much less being able to reasonably do general interactions in a human environment. Tesla spent a long time on FSD for its vehicles, and that’s a much-more-limited-scope problem.

    Like, humanoid robots have been a thing in sci-fi for a long time, but I’m not sold that they’re a great near-term solution.

    If you ever look at those Boston Dynamics demos, you’ll note that they do them in a (rather-scuffed-up) lab with safety glass and barriers and all that.

    I’m not saying that it’s not possible to make a viable humanoid robot at some point. But I don’t think that the kind of thing that Musk has claimed it’ll be useful for:

    “It’ll do anything you want,” Musk said. “It can be a teacher, babysit your kids; it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries; just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”

    …a sort of Rosie The Robot from The Jetsons, is likely going to be at all reasonable for quite some time.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta’s Reality Labs cuts sparked fears of a ‘VR winter’English
    2·
    6 days ago

    I just am not sold that there’s enough of a market, not with the current games and current prices.

    There are several different types of HMDs out there. I haven’t seen anyone really break them up into classes, but if I were to take a stab at it:

    • VR gaming googles. These focus on providing an expansive image that fills the peripheral vision, and cut one off from the world. The Valve Index would be an example.

    • AR goggles. I personally don’t like the term. It’s not that augmented reality isn’t a real thing, but that we don’t really have the software out there to do AR things, and so while theoretically these could be used for augmented reality, that’s not their actual, 2026 use case. But, since the industry uses it, I will. These tend to display an image covering part of one’s visual field which one can see around and maybe through. Xreal’s offerings are an example.

    • HUD glasses. These have a much more limited display, or maybe none at all. These are aimed at letting one record what one is looking at less-obtrusively, maybe throw up notifications from a phone silently, things like the Ray-Ban Meta.

    • Movie-viewers. These things are designed around isolation, but don’t need head-tracking. They may be fine with relatively-low resolution or sharpness. A Royole Moon, for example.

    For me, the most-exciting prospect for HMDs is the idea of a monitor replacement. That is, I’d be most-interested in something that does basically what my existing displays do, but in a lower-power, more-portable, more-private form. If it can also do VR, that’d be frosting on the cake, but I’m really principally interested in something that can be a traditional monitor, but better.

    For me, at least, none of the use cases for the above classes of HMDs are super-compelling.

    For movie-viewing. It just isn’t that often that I feel that I need more isolation than I can already get to watch movies. A computer monitor in a dark room is just fine. I can also put things on a TV screen or a projector that I already have sitting around and I generally don’t bother to turn on. If I want to block out outside sound more, I might put on headphones, but I just don’t need more than that. Maybe for someone who is required to be in noisy, bright environments or something, but it just isn’t a real need for me.

    For HUD glasses, I don’t really have a need for more notifications in my field of vision — I don’t need to give my phone a HUD.

    AR could be interesting if the augmented reality software library actually existed, but in 2026, it really doesn’t. Today, AR glasses are mostly used, as best I can tell, as an attempt at a monitor replacement, but the angular pixel density on them is poor compared to conventional displays. Like, in terms of the actual data that I can shove into my eyeballs in the center of my visual field, which is what matters for things like text, I’m better off with conventional monitors in 2026.

    VR gaming could be interesting, but the benefits just aren’t that massive for the games that I play. You get a wider field of view than a traditional display offers, the ability to use your head as an input for camera control. There are some genres that I think that it works well with today, like flight sims. If you were a really serious flight-simmer, I could see it making sense. But most genres just don’t benefit that much from it. Yeah, okay, you can play Tetris Effect: Connected in VR, but it doesn’t really change the game all that much.

    A lot of the VR-enabled titles out there are not (understandably, given the size of the market) really principally aimed at taking advantage of the goggles. You’re basically getting a port of a game aimed at probably a keyboard and mouse, with some tradeoffs.

    And for VR, one has to deal with more setup time, software and hardware issues, and the cost. I’m not terribly price sensitive on gaming compared to most, but if I’m getting a peripheral for, oh, say, $1k, I have to ask how seriously I’m going to play any of the games that I’m buying this hardware for. I have a HOTAS system with flight pedals; it mostly just gathers dust, because I don’t play many WW2 flight sims these days, and the flight sims out there today are mostly designed around thumbsticks. I don’t need to accumulate more dust-collectors like that. And with VR the hardware ages out pretty quickly. I can buy a conventional monitor today and it’ll still be more-or-less competitive for most uses probably ten or twenty years down the line. VR goggles? Not so much.

    At least for me, the main things that I think that I’d actually get some good out of VR goggles on:

    • Vertical-orientation games. My current monitors are landscape aspect ratio, and don’t support rotating (though I imagine that there might be someone that makes a rotating VESA mount pivot, and I could probably use wlr-randr to make Wayland change the display orientation manually) Some games in the past in arcades had something like a 3:4 portrait mode aspect ratio. If you’re playing one of those, you could maybe get some extra vertical space. But unless I need the resolution or portability, I can likely achieve something like that by just moving my monitor closer while playing such a game.

    • Pinball sims, for the same reason.

    • There are a couple of VR-only games that I’d probably like to play (none very new).

    • Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.

    • I’d get a little more immersiveness out of some games that are VR-optional.

    But…that’s just not that overwhelming a set of benefits to me.

    Now, I am not everyone. Maybe other people value other things. And I do think that it’s possible to have a “killer app” for VR, some new game that really takes advantage of VR and is so utterly compelling that people feel that they’d just have to get VR goggles so as to not miss out. Something like what World of Warcraft did for MMO gaming, say. But the VR gaming effort has been going on for something like a decade now, and nothing like that has really turned up.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?English
    9·
    6 days ago

    Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.

    If, say, the only thing that you’re exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there’s a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you’re fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.

    I’m not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the “big” stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I’d be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.

    To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn’t run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it’s got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy’s open-source project. That’s a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it’s probably rather lower than plain old malware.

    It’s good to be aware of what you’re doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Perchance slow renderEnglish
    23·
    6 days ago

    I don’t use Perchance, but what was the image resolution?

    I’d expect the processing time to grow linearly in the image area, and I imagine that you could probably find an image that, if the thing has sufficient memory available, will take quite some time to process.

    If it is particularly high resolution and you just want a test image to see whether you’re having some other problem, you might try using a low-resolution image to check.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGames@lemmy.world•r/Silksong joins lemmy!English
    5·
    7 days ago

    Plus, I mean, unless you’re using a Threadiverse host as your home instance, how often are you typing its name?

    Having a hyphen is RFC-conformant:

    RFC 952:

    1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
sign (-), and period (.).  Note that periods are only allowed when
they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See
RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for
background).  No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a
name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case.  The first
character must be an alpha character.  The last character must not be
a minus sign or period.  A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have
"-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name.  Hosts which do not serve as
Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of
their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last
part of its host name, if it is a DoD host.  Single character names
or nicknames are not allowed.

    RFC 1123:

       The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952
   [DNS:4].  One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the
   restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a
   letter or a digit.  Host software MUST support this more liberal
   syntax.

   Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and
   SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.