MudMan

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Well, no, it’s a concise way to say some objections are logical and sound and some are stemming from a moral panic.

Whether I agree with the objections on each camp is, again, irrelevant.

I disagree with some of the non-moral panic objections, too, and I’m happy to have that conversation.

Four possible types of objections in this scenario, if you want to be “logical” about it:

• Objections that aren’t moral panic that I agree with.
• Objections that aren’t moral panic that I disagree with.
• Objections that are moral panic that I disagree with.
• Objections that are moral panic that I agree with.

I think there aren’t any in that last group, but there are certainly at least some objections in all other three.

Neither of those things happened here.

The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).

Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it’s all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn’t fit your description.

I hadn’t clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread… well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn’t read it. I’m guessing that’s the only English instance?

As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.

You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it’s human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don’t use/lines they haven’t seen in situ.

That is correct.

It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.

For the record, I think “AI” is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.

This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.

For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:

Luddite noun Ludd·​ite ˈlə-ˌdīt : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change

One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.

I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.

Just so we’re clear, the first pass of localization of every game you’ve played in the past decade has been machine-generated.

Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it’s been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it’s pretty nuts.

Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I’m… kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn’t clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.

As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I’m confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it’d be a bit of drama.

I guess I don’t know what “AI generated” means anymore.

I haven’t bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I’m playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn’t have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.

That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.

I am remarkably annoyed by this guy making predictions on measurable things that he then entirely vibe-checks.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.

The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.

The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.

Less bad, maybe?

Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.

If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.

Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.

Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).

So there’s an opt-out.

The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?

I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.

The nunchuck was super comfortable. I think the boxy stick idea for the remote itself made sense conceptually but you probably would want to smooth it out a bit otherwise.

But yeah, agreed, it was surprisingly functional, all things considered. And cheaply made in the right ways. Everything I said about joycon would still apply if the thing was wired. Razer, I think, did a wired split controller for PC. I never got to buy one before they were discontinued, and they’re a bit of a collectible these days.

I love them and if PC connectivity with them wasn’t so terrible and laggy they’d be my go-to.

Since they don’t play nice with PC I’d take a literal carbon copy. Love the button d-pad, love the size, love the layout.

I get most people don’t, and that makes sense, but for my particular set of appendages they are pretty much ideal. I’d pay good money for that exact thing just better built and for other platforms.

Instead whenever somebody tries they either make them even smaller for phones or they try to make them as big as a console controller, which doesn’t work at all. For a split controller you need to be able to wrap your hand all the way around the thing and there is no need for a handle-like bump (those are so you can leverage both hands on the controller at once using your palm).

The only other form factor I’d consider for a split controller is… the Wii-mote.

The Wii-mote was cool and did the thing I need it to do. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with a symmetrical dual stick config, so it’s not very practical. The Joycon are more plausible as a modern controller replacement.

In the meantime I just use the least offensive PS3-layout controllers I can find for 3D games (with lots of braces and frequent pauses) and a leverless controller for 2D games.

Ergonomics. It adds the option of my broken old wrists to not have to hold themselves at whatever arbitrary angle the probably younger and certainly healthier designer decided wasn’t causing immediate pain to them.

So yeah, having specific accessibility needs can suck and for my specific brand of those the joycon are an amazing option.

Also, playing a game with your hands by your sides or under a blanket or whatever adds a TON to the sense of immersion.

If the split controller works screw waiting for the Steam Controller, I’ve been waiting for a good PC joycon set.

This has some of the same issues as the Legion Go, in that it’s too chunky to play split. Also the superfluous touchpads that make it be too large (I’ll be taking no questions on this issue at this point).

But I do really want something like this for PC commercially.