arquebus_x

NPR is not free; it’s paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And “not for profit” is not the same as “no cost to the consumer.” In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).

That phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don’t like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.

Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?

Just because it’s a plane, and just because it’s a rich person, doesn’t make it any less of a privacy violation.

I was going to get this game. Now I’m not.

This law doesn’t apply to any of the restaurants you describe. No table service.

Companies absolutely do try to staff fast food as short as possible. If they didn’t, you’d never experience a line.

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

Developers want alternate app stores because they want to make/keep more money. There’s no other reason. Every other reason given just comes back to more money. Is that a more valid argument simply because they’re smaller?

I’m in favor of Apple opening up iOS to alternate stores. I think it’s going to be a privacy and security nightmare, but the horse is pretty much already out of the barn and the barn is burning, so… whatever. But I’m not so naive to think Apple’s going to fully embrace the ideal concept of alternate stores unless somehow it’s a way to beat Google’s or Samsung’s face in, and take their money.

“We’re just not wired to save,” said Brad Klontz

Asshole. Like THAT’s the problem.

Do you not understand how unions work?

The contract would be a combination contract, for performance and AI training. That’s explicitly the thing that’s been agreed to here.

That’s correct, but it’s important to distinguish something explicitly here. The voices may not be copyrightable, but the dialogue is, as long as it’s not also generated by AI (i.e., dynamically generated). Also, the trained model that generates the voice is still proprietary: only its product (and only the sound itself, not the words if the speech is from a script) can be openly used.

It does, yes. And they can also choose to opt out of future uses of their voice in the AI trained model. Which essentially means that their contracts are on a per-project basis, rather than allowing the game developer to force them to contract for the current project and any future use of the model by that game dev.

That’s… what this agreement proposes.

This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.

And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.

Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.

This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).

Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.

It wasn’t awful, it was just hapless. It probably would have gotten its sea legs in a second season.

Sad story: the actress who played the little girl died a day after her honeymoon and 8 days before her 22nd birthday, from a heart attack. (She’d had a heart transplant when she was 15.)

The big problem with “Lost” is that many in the writer’s room (and the showrunners themselves) were raging racist assholes who decided to steer the show toward all the white characters, which meant changing a lot of their early plans.

I just want a Babylon 5 reboot! Goddamnit!

I’m sure there are some “data harvesting” reasons, but honestly, the simplest is likely the truest:

Most people aren’t computer-savvy, and having an app is much easier for most users than going to a website (either directly or through a bookmark that they probably won’t ever be able to find again).

One must remember, always and forever: most people aren’t us/you. Just because something is easy for you to do doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone else.

Is it dumb for me that T-Mobile has an app that just goes to a webview that I could get through my phone browser? Yes. Is it dumb for my parents? Absolutely ten thousand percent no.

The value (in terms of money made/saved/protected) that a company gets from having an app instead of a website only is probably ranked in this order:

1 - ease of use for the majority of customers, reducing tech and customer support calls, angry customers, lost goodwill, bad reputation
2-99 - same as #1
100 - data harvesting

Even if risks are under-reported (plausible, but unlikely, given the amount of scrutiny), it’s definitely the case that the risks from getting COVID are still not fully understood. Long COVID is a major issue that is still under investigation. So by your own metric - “highly reluctant to try the new possibly risky thing” - the vaccine is important. Because “the new possibly risky thing” in this case is getting COVID. You definitely don’t want to “try” that.

“What’s up” is that people are stupid and don’t know things. Popular vote awards (and national elections!) always suffer from lazy ignorance.