AndrasKrigare

@AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org

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AndrasKrigare ,

Yeah, I feel like the article would be more persuasive if they gave any examples of what research they are doing which requires these specific old games.

AndrasKrigare ,

Huh... Will this message then get re-ingested by chatgpt? Did it just poison itself?

AndrasKrigare ,

I disagree with one of their points

Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) a VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation.

Sure, they can't control the network firewall, but why would you do that when you can change your local firewall? Set an iptables rule to drop all traffic going out the physical interface that isn't destined for the VPN server. I'm 70% sure some vpn clients do this automatically.

AndrasKrigare ,

For your specific case, sure, but for that quote, I haven't had those issues in years. I'm also running Mint, but on a desktop and have had zero issues. Mouse "just works," extra monitors "just work," and (most surprisingly to me), printer "just works," games on Steam "just work" with all they've done with Proton. I switched to Google docs a long time ago, so at least for me the Office thing isn't relevant. It natively supports discord, my password manager, Spotify, everything I've wanted. I switched my wife's Mac to it years ago since it had gotten slow from bloat, and she's been just fine despite not being very tech literate.

AndrasKrigare ,

My thought was that it was going to be just about WiFi internal to the house and it was an issue with interference from neighbors (which then gets shut out in the rain).

AndrasKrigare ,

Look into my eyes and it's easy to see
One and one makes two, two and one makes three
It was destiny

Quests from the Infinite Staircase will cause such a shitstorm ( ttrpg.network )

B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they're here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I'm sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses "ruling...

AndrasKrigare ,

I disagree. DM's always have the ability to put in their own choices and, in this case, room descriptions, regardless of what a module says. But that is work, and one of the things you buy a module for.

To make an extreme example, imagine I sold a campaign module called Blank Slate, where every page just says "and then you decide what happens next" and "decide what rooms are in this dungeon and what monsters are there."

AndrasKrigare ,

That's awesome, reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the Bourne movies. Bourne knows some agents are coming after him to the building he's in, so he picks up a phone, calls the police and says "I heard gunshots, I think they're Americans" and then throws the phone against the wall, fires a few random shots, and leaves. The police then catch the agents sneaking up to the building and arrest them.

WWII first person shooters

I'm looking for recommendations for WWII single player fps games for the pc. In particular, I'm looking for older games from the 90s to early 2000s. I always hear how the market used to be over saturated with these games, but after playing through the early Call of Duties and Medals of Honor, I don't know of any games that would...

AndrasKrigare , (edited )

I'd just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000's thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you're willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren't nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn't take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).

In terms of specific games, I don't have any that aren't already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.

‘Significant security loophole’ found in Google software container system ( therecord.media )

The issue affected Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a system used to deploy, scale and manage how applications are “containerized.” GKE — the tech giant’s implementation of the open-source Kubernetes project — is used widely in healthcare, education, retail and financial services for data processing as well as...

AndrasKrigare ,

misconfigured

Makes me skeptical this is a real "loophole"

The issue revolves around permissions, with GKE allowing users access to the system with any valid Google account. Orca Security said this creates a “significant security loophole when administrators decide to bind this group with overly permissive roles.”

Orca Security noted that Google considers this to be “intended behavior” because in the end, this is an assigned permission vulnerability that can be prevented by the user. Customers are responsible for the access controls they configure.

The researchers backed Google’s assessment that organizations should “take responsibility and not deploy their assets and permissions in a way that carries security risks and vulnerabilities.”

Yeah, PEBKAC

AndrasKrigare ,

That's not true. If you're intentionally logged in to a website, sure, but tracking without an account requires action on the part of your browser, assuming you're using a VPN. Cookies, ad-IDs, user agent, preferred language, etc. is all information that the browser can decide if it provides or not.

AndrasKrigare ,

I know it inherently seems like a bad idea to fix an AI problem with more AI, but it seems applicable to me here. I believe it should be technically feasible to incorporate into the model something which checks if the result is too similar to source content as part of the regression.

My gut would be that this would, at least in the short term, make responses worse on the whole, so would probably require legal action or pressure to have it implemented.

AndrasKrigare ,

I don't see why it wouldn't be able to. That's a Big Data problem, but we've gotten very very good at searches. Bing, for instance, conducts a web search on each prompt in order to give you a citation for what it says, which is pretty close to what I'm suggesting.

As far as comparing to see if the text is too similar, I'm not suggesting a simple comparison or even an Expert Machine; I believe that's something that can be trained. GANs already have a discriminator that's essentially measuring how close to generated content is to "truth." This is extremely similar to that.

I completely agree that categorizing input training data by whether or not it is copyrighted is not easy, but it is possible, and I think something that could be legislated. The AI you would have as a result would inherently not be as good as it is in the current unregulated form, but that's not necessarily a worse situation given the controversies.

On top of that, one of the common defenses for AI is that it is learning from material just as humans do, but humans also can differentiate between copyrighted and public works. For the defense to be properly analogous, it would make sense to me that it would need some notion of that as well.

AndrasKrigare ,

Ones I've played, in no particular order

  • Rust
  • Civilization
  • Valheim
  • Project Cars
  • Battlebit
  • Stolen Realm
  • Hell Let Loose
AndrasKrigare ,

I feel the same. Something about having agency in the game has never really made them scary for me, but I guess horror movies don’t do it for me either so I guess it’s just not my thing. I loved RE4, though; horror aside it’s such a good game.

AndrasKrigare ,

Surprised to see New World in there, I’d thought it had imploded

AndrasKrigare ,

If it were me, I’d find it easier to change the lore so you can do planar exploration at lower levels than to deal with all the mechanics and balancing of level 20 characters

AndrasKrigare ,

2004 would have my vote. For the lazy:

  • Halflife 2
  • Halo 2
  • World of Warcraft
  • GTA San Andreas
  • Counter Strike: Source
  • MGS3
  • Fable
  • Star Wars Battlefront

And a bunch of other bangers

Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" ( www.gamesradar.com )

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...

AndrasKrigare ,

I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.

But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.

AndrasKrigare ,

That’s easy to say, but what can they actually do that provides a better service than piracy at this point? They can’t compete on price, number of shows, or quality of shows with piracy by a long shot. They can potentially provide a better ease of experience with quick downloads and casting, but they already have that and I don’t know that it can get any better.

As a general rule, I’d assume more piracy means less money into an industry, and less money in means fewer and less risky products that appeal to the lowest common denominator.

AndrasKrigare ,

I already said, they can’t compete on price. Cheaper prices will always be more than free. Same with interoperability, if you have the actual file you can run on anything. Group watching already exists.

More equal promotion of shows/movies and pay distribution don’t actually help make the experience better for the consumer, that’s more relying on the consumer behaving ethically and that they believe piracy is wrong. It only helps for the people who think it was only sometimes wrong, which I don’t think is a huge group (although they are certainly the most vocal supporters of piracy)

AndrasKrigare ,

In general, fantasy isn’t my favorite setting, but this looks pretty cool and will definitely be keeping my eye on it. I’m curious if it’ll keep NMS’s general minimalist story structure or do something more akin to GTA with set built story elements/missions, and then a sandbox to explore in between

AndrasKrigare ,

Extremely excited for Rise of the Golden Idol. Loved the first one, and one of the few games my SO enjoyed playing

AndrasKrigare ,

I’d personally want to support making the player characters during session 0 (maybe not the full character sheet, but at least personality/background and class).

I’ve done campaigns where everyone came into the session 0 with their characters all ready to go and the idea of the characters being adjusted wasn’t really brought up but more the rest of the aspects you mentioned. Differences and some antagonism between characters can make things really interesting, but at least in one of them two of the characters fundamentally wouldn’t ever be in a party together. One of the players felt some cognitive dissonance in wanting their character to stay in the party, but not being able to find a rational reason they would, and kinda had to retcon their character.

AndrasKrigare ,

I think those are all good points, but I think they’re also potentially surmountable ones; I think the key would be to be as restrictive as necessary for which mods are allowed to charge. If only a small fraction of the most clear cut and expansive mods can charge, maybe even hand-picked by the developer, I think that’s still a better state than it was before.

Some potential examples: a mod isn’t allowed to charge if it has any mod dependency. Games supporting paid mods must support opt-out updates (steam already supports this easily via "beta branches) and mods have at least one version available to consumers that are guaranteed to work. Depending on the mod, it could be possible to do some automated regression testing, similar to how the Steam Deck verification works.

AndrasKrigare ,

Somewhat related, I’ve always disliked the RAW for 5e for weapon swapping. Burning your action to swap is pretty outrageous, and having players drop weapons so they can only draw has just been annoying to track in my experience. One free swap per turn’s always felt better to me, surprised that’s not how it’s written in the rules.

AndrasKrigare ,

The ethics get muddier for your average person, though. Piracy is (to a good chunk of people) clearly wrong: there is something someone made that most people had to pay for and you’re getting it for free. That’s not how things are supposed to work.

With this, you are still paying money for the game, it’s just cheaper, but games are cheaper when they’re on sale, too. I think a much larger group of people will make use of “used” digital games without giving a ton of thought to the fact that the game creator is getting less than those who are fine with pirating games. On top of that, ethics aside, one of those activities is illegal and the other potentially legal, which does affect how people make decisions as well.

AndrasKrigare ,

Not really, though. NFTs only benefit is to distribute trust/authority. In this case there still needs to be some central authority who will actually honor it and provide the game at the end (either Steam or the game’s creator or something else). It is far more energy efficient for that central authority to also track who has what without performing useless work.

AndrasKrigare ,

Why would they discount the game when the used market is an option.

I think the key part there is that when they disconnect a game they still get (almost) pure profit off that sale. For a used game, they’re only getting some percentage of it if the person selling is getting a cut or majority. I think the creator would always prefer sales and avoid the used market at any cost, since it provides them no value and actively hurts their more lucrative sales.

AndrasKrigare ,

I fully acknowledge that it’s a grey area, but I’ve personally always considered resale of digital goods (goods which can be obtained purely digitally, even if sold in a physical medium) to be unethical, although legal. If I’m going to pay money to it, I want the money to go to the person who created it, not to someone else who happened to purchase it or, worse, some company that provides no value other than encouraging those transactions.

To me, resale on physical goods is ethical because there are two core differences with those which could be acquired purely digitally. Physical goods degrade with use, providing reduced value compared to new goods. And it is better for unwanted physical goods to continue to provide value for someone than for it to enter a landfill.

AndrasKrigare ,

That’s an interesting idea to me, particularly regarding preservation of games of bankrupted companies. I’d still be in favor of a central registrar as opposed to NFTs, just because of the huge inefficiencies and environmental impact of that (essentially useless) computation.

There would need to be some governing authority dictating that companies need to honor the download of games not purchased from them (essentially the government of each country that has this as a law). It would make sense to me that that same government could host a service to keep track of the transactions. Or, more likely, the government just mandates the companies to play nice and exchange purchase data with each other. Sure, in some sense you’re letting the wolves run the henhouse, but it also isn’t that different from a game company refusing to give you a game you purchased from them. They could do that, but you would take legal action against them. Same thing here.

AndrasKrigare ,

I have someone in my campaign who keeps accidentally saying “I cast fireball” instead of “firebolt” and it freaks me out

AndrasKrigare ,

I’ll actually use Bing’s AI/LLM on occasion. I get frustrated in some of the conversations that come talk about the limitations of AI in generating false information that can be tracked when Bing’s does cite it’s sources if you want to fact check.

AndrasKrigare ,

New Zealand strikes back after being excluded from so many maps

AndrasKrigare ,

I get the sentiment, but don’t really agree. Humans’ inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why “genres” even exist. AI’s not there yet, but the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.

AndrasKrigare ,

Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a “/s” at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So… yeah, I’m not going to take someone who cites “people who understand things really well” as a source at face value.

AndrasKrigare ,

No, I didn’t read the entirety of the comments you’ve made, I read your comment and the one you replied to. As a general rule, I (and I’d assume most people) read down a thread before replying, and don’t first look through all of everyone’s comment histories

AndrasKrigare ,

You didn’t read their question, did you? Because your quote does not answer it.

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