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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.

    Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.

    I’d refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it’s effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.

    Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.

    All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn’t just about the price.


  • Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.

    All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.


  • People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.

    It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.



  • The thing is, games have a minimum difficulty to be somewhat generally enjoyable, and the game designers have often built their game around this. The fun is generally in the obstacles providing real resistance that can be overcome by optimizing your strategy. It means that these obstacles need to be mentally picked apart by the player to proceed. They are built like puzzles.

    This design philosophy - anyone who plays these games can tell you - is deeply rewarding if you go through it, because it requires genuine improvement that you can notice and be proud of. Hence why there is often a limit to how much easier you can make games like these without losing that because you forget the obstacle before even realizing it was preventing you from doing something.

    It’s often not as easy as just tweaking numbers. And often these development teams don’t have the time to rebalance a game for those lower difficulties, so they just don’t.

    Honestly, the first wojack could be quite mad too, because often making an easy game harder also misses the point, where the game is just more difficult, but doesn’t actually provide you with that carefully crafted feeling of constant improvement. Instead some easy games can become downright frustrating because obstacles feel “cheap” or “lacking depth” now that you have to spend a lot more time on them.

    But making an easy game harder by just tweaking the numbers is definitely easier on the development team, and gives existing players a chance to re-experience the game, which wouldn’t happen the other way around. But it’s almost certainly not a better option for new players wanting a harder difficulty.

    At the end of the day though, often there are ways to get what you want. Either by cheating, modding, or otherwise using ‘OP’ usables in the game. Do whatever you want to make the game more enjoyable to yourself. But if you make it too easy on yourself you might come out on the other end wondering why other people enjoyed the game so much more than you did.


  • Lets be real - This isn’t going to change on it’s own. The only way for it to change is if everyone collectively took a stand against it. Which simply just won’t happen. The most reasonable thing to do is to focus your energy on collectives that actively reject such practices. Oh hey, you’re already in one: Lemmy, good job. As long as we work together to create a small corner of the internet that remains true to what the internet should be, we can grow it and create a better internet in the long term.


  • PC is typically easier to develop for because of the lack of strict (and frequently silly) platform requirements. Which typically makes game development more expensive and slow than it needs to be when just targeting PC. If that barrier to entry was reduced to that of PC, you’d see a lot more games on there from smaller developers.

    With current gen consoles, pretty much every game starts as a PC game already, because thats where the development and testing happens.

    Rockstar here is the exception in that they are intentionally skipping PC - something that should be well within reach of a company their size while clearly being capable of doing so.

    If another AAA game comes out with only PC support I’ll be right there with you - but most game developers with the capability release for all major platforms now. But not the small console indie studio called Rockstar Games it seems.


  • Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There’s a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody’s expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.


  • First: They did actually end up removing this and making it configurable, check the bottom of the page. In a vacuum, the idea to stop cut-and-clear racists and trolls from using Lemmy is not something that’s too controversial. Sure, they are being hard asses about changing their mind and allowing instance owners to configure it themselves (and I’m glad they changed their mind). But there’s a big overlap between passionate and opinionated people, so they have to be at times to ensure a project doesn’t devolve into something they can’t put your passion into anymore.

    Second: I mean… what do you expect? In the issue above they actively encourage people to make their own fork of Lemmy and run that if they don’t like something from the base version of Lemmy, so I kind of would assume they do as they preach. Instance owners also have the option to block communities without defederation. Lemmy.ml is basically their home instance. If anything this is a reason not to make an account on lemmy.ml, but as long as that doesn’t leak into the source code of Lemmy, who cares?




  • If it’s a fairly inconsequential service (no payment/personal info, nothing lost if it gets hacked), you can just generate a far shorter password. Even randomly generated passwords can be remembered eventually if you have to type it enough times, and that’s still better than the same one.

    If it’s not inconsequential, I’d be questioning if my money is well spent on a sadistic service that makes my life hell trying to have a minimum level of security. I would say that even if it wasn’t a generated password that you have to type over.


  • It’s the choice between trusting one company (or if you self host, trusting yourself) to have their security all in order and properly encrypt the password vault. Using one password for every site you use means that you have to trust each of those sites equally, because if one leaks your password because they have atrocious password policies (eg. storing it in plain text), it’s leaked everywhere and you need to remember every place you used it before.

    Good password managers allow audits, and do at times still get hacked naturally (which isn’t 100% preventable). Yet neither of these should result in passwords being leaked. Why? Because they properly secure your master password so it can’t be reverse engineered to plain text, and without the master password your encrypted password vault is just a bunch of random bytes. And even in the extreme situation it did, you know to switch to a better password manager, and you have a nice big list of all the places where you need to change your password rather than trying to remember them all.

    Human memory is fallible and we want the least amount of effort, because of that we usually make bad passwords. Your average site does not have their password security up to date (There’s almost a 0% chance not one of your passwords can be found here). If you data is encrypted accordingly, it doesn’t matter if it gets leaked in any way or stolen by some rogue employee, so long as they do not have your master password. So yes, I’d say that’s a good idea.



  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI rule
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    8 months ago

    Oh yeah, shame on me, spending a part of my day ‘shilling’ for myself and my friends and colleagues. And ‘shilling’ for a better future for us all by dissuading people from weaponizing bad arguments and misunderstandings to defend themselves, because that will not help them one bit. The latter part of you sentence is such utter nonsense that I don’t even need to respond to that.


  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI rule
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    8 months ago

    Oh cool, you think misrepresenting and overly simplifying other people’s points of view and an accurate representation of how certain copyright laws work (even when that’s an inconvenient truth) is ethically justified as long as I can tell my anti AI homies that I stood up for them by ‘dunking’ on a person arguing in good faith for them to fight the right battles, and not cling to false ideas which will lead them to suffer more in the long term and turn people who would support them against them by spouting easily disputed lies.

    But sure, go ahead! I’m sure you’ll change so many minds by immediately disregarding everything they say by putting them in a box of “thiefs” because they said something that didn’t fit very specifically within your “Guidebook to hating anything related to AI”.

    Now back to a serious discussion if you’re up for it. Creative freedom is built on the notion that ideas are the property of nobody, it is a requirement since every artist in existence has derived their work from the work of others. It’s not even controversial, using your definition of stealing means all artists ‘steal’ from each other all the time, and nobody cares. But because a robot does it (despite that robot being in 100% control of the artist using it), it’s suddenly the most outrageous thing.

    I know for sure my ideas have been ‘stolen’ from my publicized works, but I understand I had no sole right to that idea to begin with. I can’t copyright it. And if a ‘thief’ used those ideas in a transformative manner rather than create something that tries to recreate what I made (which would be actual infringement), they have every right to as without that right literally nobody would be allowed to make anything since everything we make is inspired by something that we don’t hold a copyright over. Most of the people actually producing stuff that will be displayed publicly so other people will experience and pull it apart to learn from understand we have no right to those ideas to begin with, except in how we applied those ideas in a specific work.


  • Yup. Used to be it was quite easy to find the games that were worthwhile to play since there was very little for profit games and not too much choice. Nowadays only if I hear from people I trust to have a taste for the games I want to play will I actually get excited. Its just easier to go back to classics because you know you’re going to have a better time than most things you buy new.

    Always on the look out though, gems are still being produced, they just became a lot less findable.


  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI rule
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    8 months ago

    Because AI wasn’t a big thing before 2020, and no such permission in obtained material has been legally necessary so far (lawsuits are pending of course). If something has no incentive to exist it will not be created. There’s plenty of ethical justifications why no such permission is needed as well.


  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI rule
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    8 months ago

    The fact they are not people does not mean they can’t use the same legal justifications that humans use. The law can’t think ahead. The justification is rather simple, the output is transformative. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other works because the ideas that make up such a concept can’t be copyrighted because they can be applied to be transformative. If the human uses that idea to produce something that’s not transformative, it’s also infringement. AI currently falls into that same reasoning.

    You call it a self serving lie, but I could easily say that about your arguments as well that you only have this opinion because you don’t like AI (it seems). That’s not constructive, and since I hope you care about artists as well, I implore you actually engage in good faith debate other than just assuming the other person must be lying because they don’t share your opinion. You are also forgetting that the people that benefit from image generators are people. They are artists too. Most from before AI was a thing, and some because it became a thing.

    Again, sorry to hear your husband feels that way. I feel he is doing himself a disservice to dismiss a new technology, as history has not been kind to those who oppose inevitable change, especially when there are no good non-emotional reasons against this new technology. Most companies have never cared about artists, that fact was true without AI, and that fact will remain true whatever happens. But if they replace their artists with AI they are fools, because the technology isn’t that great on it’s own (currently). You need human intervention to use AI to make high quality output, it’s a tool, not the entire process.

    The Hollywood strikes is a good example of what artists should be doing rather than making certain false claims online. Join a union, get protection for your craft. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you can’t fight for your right to demand specific protections from your employer. But they do not affect laws, they are organizational. It has no ramifications on people not part of the guilds involved. If a company which while protecting their artists, allows them to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and comes out on top against the company that despite their best intentions, made their art department not as profitable anymore, that will also cause them to lose their jobs. Since AI is very likely not to go away completely even in the most optimistic of scenarios, it’s eventually a worse situation than before.

    And lastly, I guess your husband does different work than the digital artists I work with then. You have a ton of generation tools for meshes and textures. I also never equated it directly to AI, but you stated that they use no tools which do all the work for them (such as building a mesh for them), which is false. You wouldn’t use the direct output of AI as well. I implore you to look at “algorithmic art”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art


  • That’s true, but the reason behind that is reasonable. There has been no human intervention, and so like photos taken by animals, they hold no copyright. But that’s not what you should be doing anyways, a tool must be used as part of a process, not as *the process*.