Rentlar

u/Rentlar@lemmy.ca
246 posts · 9.9k comments

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I still can't say it wouldn't be worth it at $1.5k for people that really wanted to get into VR... but unfortunately my price limit is $750 US for me to consider a launch day order, and obviously that ain't happening. With component prices being what they are, it's not realistic for me to expect any lower anymore.

But the best I can hope for is a memory crash and DRAM makers come scrambling back to fill the sinkhole void from the collapsing circular financing cycle. Today that's just a pipe dream.

I don't think so, domestic electronics manufacturers have an enormous need for memory that is performant but doesn't necessarily need the top-of-the-line, and probably China's government is pushing to reduce the need for imported memory components from Korea or Taiwan as well, so demand for production is there coming from both the private and public sector.

I agree with the article in the sense that eVTOL isn't currently feasible for commuting, but the article doesn't mention that an appropriate solution for the modern and future commuter already exists, and doesn't require eVTOL technology. What the article missed is trains, that's exactly what I pointed out after reading (the whole article and not just looking at the title) because the article doesn't contain a single mention of trains or railways except as a means to mask eVTOL noise or as a usecase to inspect existing infrastructure, not as the solution itself. I framed it as the article ignoring it because that was indeed ignored as part of the solution to the issue of commuting, not organ transport or medivac.

Decompiling. Use ILSpy for games coded in .NET for example. You take a .dll for the game that you think contains the code that controls the behaviour you want to change. You decompile it. You change the code and recompile it. Then you replace the original .dll with your new one.

Sounds easy, but the tricky thing is that decompilers only parse what the code does, and if the code was compressed of obfuscated, it usually doesn't provide what the coder called the variables and functions to indicate what they were for. So a function that was coded as:

function damagePlayer(characterRef *Player, int damage) {
*Player.health = *Player.health - damage;
}

It will look like this after decompilation:

function func238(objRef *var4748, int local1) {
*var4748.param35 = *var4748.param35 - local1;
}

So a lot of the effort is interpreting what these functions actually do then replacing the generic names. The hints come from when they are called (if the game can be debugged, you use breakpoints to pause the program when that code is called).

If there is a common engine or way programs are compiled, people develop libraries that work for many games, and all you have to do is have the library hook into the spots of each game where it does the common things like load resources or manage global variables, to have them loaded from a separate additional files rather than replacing everything (See BepinEx for example). Then that saves people work from having to compile and replace files themselves, and they can get right to changing the code where they want to. Then more modding tools make the earlier modding tools easier to use, so on and so forth.

I did study both computer neural networks and music so I can tell you pretty definitively that what AI has gotten good at is imitating human artistry.

The problem is that AI style is that it doesn't have unique repeatable style, it's kinda just averaging of a bunch of styles, so it will only ever be an imitation, in its current form.

So yeah, I've been "tricked" by AI before, thinking it is a real song, and probably you could trick me in the other direction too. However, just like a lawyer would be checking a hallucinated citation, I checked my facts. After I found one cover that happened to autoplay into slightly intriguing enough to want to hear more of the covering artist's discography, but I wouldn't be able to because this artist doesn't exist. I did feel empty and disappointed after that. The variations to the original song I thought to myself tended towards the mean, well before I had any suspicion it could be AI.

Upvoted for unpopularity. Objectively speaking, based on the foundation of how AI models work, their output tends to the mean (average). If the music in the example is considered "good", then objectively the standard has moved downward a lot. I'll start with visual AI as analogous to make my point:

Various people and businesses, big and small, have decided that AI generated images fit their needed purpose. I see a few places downtown that have made their store logos AI slop. Is it objectively well drawn image? In a sense that maybe they make fewer mistakes than before, but besides that, "average" is a more objective moniker for it than "good" on a factual basis. Subjectively you can decide whether you like it, I can judge you for it but the decision is yours to make.

Back to AI genned audio, even before it became widespread, people were making Muzak for elevators, phones, commercial jingles etc. It was fit for purpose to keep you occupied in the background. AI soundtracks seem to fit that niche for you and that's fine. It may be "good enough" for you, but it's not "good" and I doubt will ever be if judged objectively as music.

I listened to the instrumental track, and sure it is coherent at a very basic level, but the harmonies just keep going back to the same, any semblance of a musical idea or fluorish ends or is replaced with another entirely different one within 4 bars. That's the reason why I don't think any song is memorable, without any fundamental changes to the underlying tech I doubt any will. AI generated songs like "We are Charlie Kirk" are memes because they are monuments to conservative tastelessness.

People will tell you not to listen to or support that, I won't stop you but I'd agree in the sense because I think of it as supporting an industry for elevator and phone hold muzak over real musical artists, that also sucks power and water and pollutes a lot. I personally don't care about your tastes, you can like it, but calling it "objectively good music" is an affront to art.

I think there are two suitable uses of it: generating a cover or pastiche of two unrelated artists that would never have made something (Frank Sinatra sings "Rock the Casbah"), or completely filler music. Which if the second is meeting your needs, great, but that doesn't make it objectively good. Perhaps good for Muzak consumers to have a flourishing industry but not for music consumers.