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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • While the result from generating an image through AI is not meant to be “factually” accurate, its seeking to be as accurate as possible when it comes to matching the prompt that is provided. And the prompt “1943 German Soldier” or “US Senator from the 1800” or “Emperor of China” has some implications in what kind of images would be expected and which kinds wouldn’t. Just like how you wouldn’t expect a lightsaber when asking for “medieval swords”.

    I’m not convinced that attempting to “balance a biased training dataset” in the way that this is apparently being done is really attainable or worthwhile.

    An AI can only work based on biases, and it’s impossible to correct/balance the dataset without just introducing a different bias. Because the model is just a collection of biases that discriminate between how different descriptions relate to pictures. If there was no bias for the AI to rely on, they would not be able to pick anything to show.

    For example, the AI does not know whether the word “Soldier” really corresponds to someone dressed like in the picture, it’s just biased to expect that. It can’t tell whether an actual soldier might just be wearing pajamas or whether someone dressed in those uniforms might not be an actual soldier.

    Describing a picture is, on itself, an exercise of assumptions, biases, appearances that are just based on pre-conceived notions of what are our expectations when comparing the picture to our own reality. So the AI needs to show whatever corresponds to those biases in order to match as accuratelly as possible our biased expectations for what those descriptions mean.

    If the dataset is complete enough, and yet it’s biased to show predominantly a particular gender or ethnicity when asking for “1943 German Soldier” because that happens to be the most common image of what a “1943 German Soldier” is, but you want a different ethnicity or gender, then add that ethnicity/gender to the prompt (like you said in the first point), instead supporting the idea of having the developers force diversity into the results in a direction that contradicts the dataset just because the results aren’t politically correct. …it would be more honest to add a disclaimer and still show the result as it is, instead of manipulating it in a direction that activelly pushes the IA to hallucinate.

    Alternativelly: expand your dataset with more valuable data in a direction that does not contradict reality (eg. introduce more pictures of soldiers of different ethnics from situations that actually are found in our reality). You’ll be altering the data, but you would be doing it without distorting the bias unrealistically, since they would be examples grounded in reality.



  • Ferk@kbin.socialtoProgramming@programming.devApple Wants To Kill PWAs
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    4 months ago

    It’s also not that uncommon of an acronym in web tech, all the first results when searching “PWA” are consistent and it’s a very common way to refer to that technology. The term PWA has made the news in tech channels a few times before (like when Firefox discontinued support for PWA on desktop).

    Even if they said “Progressive Web Apps” it would not have been immediatelly clear what that means for anyone who is not familiar with what PWA is. It’s also not the only acronym they use in the article without explaining it (eg. “API”, or “iOS” which is also an acronym on itself), it just so happens that it’s likely not a well known one in this particular lemmy community where the article was posted. The author advertises himself as a writer dedicated to web technologies (PWA and Web Component in particular), so it would be silly if he has to explain what those are on every of his posts.


  • Ferk@kbin.socialtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devWhitespace
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    5 months ago

    But C syntax clearly hints to int *p being the expected format.

    Otherwise you would only need to do int* p, q to declare two pointers… however doing that only declares p as pointer. You are actually required to type * in front of each variable name intended to hold a pointer in the declaration: int *p, *q;


  • I feel it’s a balance. Each operation has a purpose.

    Rebasing makes sense when you are working in a feature branch together with other people so you rebase your own commits to keep the feature branch lean before you finally merge it into the main branch, instead of polluting the history with a hard to follow mess of sub branches for each person. Or when you yourself ended up needing to rewrite (or squash) some commits to clean up / reorganize related changes for the same feature. Or when you already committed something locally without realizing you were not on sync with the latest version of a remote branch you are working on and you don’t wanna have it as a 1-single-commit branch that has to be merged.

    Squashing with git merge --squash is also very situational… ideally you wouldn’t need it if your commits are not messy/tiny/redundant enough that combining them together makes it better.




  • it’s even ISO standardized

    Not only are there other ones that are also ISO standards when it comes to software layouts, but funny enough, when it comes to physical layouts, US keyboards normally follow an ANSI standard (not an ISO one), whereas many non-US keyboards typically follow a physical key layout known as “ISO Keyboard”, so one could argue those are more of an “ISO” standard.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Physical_keyboard_layouts_comparison_ANSI_ISO_KS_ABNT_JIS.png

    right ctrl + left shift + 9 will do?

    No keyboard layout uses ctrl like that… in fact, I don’t think you ever really need to press more than one modifier in any standard non-US keyboard. Unless you have a very advanced custom layout with fancy extra glyphs… but definitelly not for the typical programming symbols.

    ISO keyboards actually have one more key and one more modifier (“AltGr”, which is different from “Alt”) than the ANSI keyboards.

    In fact, depending on the symbol it might be easier in some cases. No need to press “shift” or anything for a # or a + in a German QWERTZ keyboard, unlike in the US one. Though of course for some other ones (like = or \) you might need to press 1 modifier… but never more than 1, so it isn’t any harder than doing a ) or a _ in the US layout.




  • Ferk@kbin.socialtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devifn't
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    5 months ago

    Yes… how is “reducing exclamation marks” a good thing when you do it by adding a ' (not to be confused with , ´,or’` …which are all different characters).

    Does this rely on the assumption that everyone uses a US QWERTY keyboard where ! happens to be slightly more inconvenient than typing '?


  • I’m not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I’m sure it’s much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped… but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I’m not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

    Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I’m convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing “yet another one” in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

    Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics… but I don’t believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I’d argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy…


  • Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you’ll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products… without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

    Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
    Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I’d argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
    Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.



  • Apparently, this article is talking about the “Legacy CS:GO Version” that was available (even after the CS2 launch) for devices that were unable to run CS2. It seems that was less than 1% of CS:GO players, so they are ending support for it, even though they claim it should still be available with reduced compatibility.

    I think anyone can switch to this version in the “Beta” tab of the properties window for CS2 by selecting “csgo_legacy”.

    What is the legacy version of CS:GO?

    The legacy version of CS:GO is a frozen build of CS:GO. It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking.

    What will happen after the end of support for the legacy version of CS:GO?

    After January 1, 2024 the game will still be available, but certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail.



  • Many hosts allow you to set rules to protect branches from getting their commits removed in the remote (in fact, I think that’s the default for gitlab main branches) or to prevent people from pushing their commits to them directly.
    I expect even “the main branch has to stay more or less in sync with origin/main” can be automated… though it might not be what you always want, depending how you work.