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One of Baldur's Gate 3's pioneering map modders is recreating the opening area of Baldur's Gate 2
  • Yes, but this is an offline game, and I've never seen such a warning without some plausible justification. There's no basis for interfering with an online component here, so what would Larian even say as they sent warnings?

    Using an legally purchased offline game "illegally" would be quite a precedent, no?

    My guess is that it won’t get shut down because WOTC can’t make Larian bully people into shutting it down.

    Yeah. Larian didn't seem very interested in blocking this capability (they left all this stuff in the executable), like they did the absolute minimum they were contractually obligated to do lol.

  • One of Baldur's Gate 3's pioneering map modders is recreating the opening area of Baldur's Gate 2
  • Thanks, this is exactly what I was trying to ask. What "motivation" potential modders have.

    wotc would have to "admit" to doing what the community only suspects (deliberately restricting these tools in the contracts) to harass modders, right? I hope that means they'll turn a blind eye.

  • Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
  • I feel like all the niches I visit Reddit for are being enshittified.

    Small ones are floundering, apparently due to being deprioritized by the engagement algorithms according to mods I've talked to? And even worse, a lot of discussion is moving to Discords and X.

    Big ones are getting more karma farm style posts. I know people have always complained about this, but its never felt this bad in fandoms for shows and such.

  • Trump Promises 'Very Large Faucet' Will Funnel Water from Oregon to Los Angeles
  • This does benefit him if it gets him votes. He wants voters to like him, and he'd absolutely build this crazy pipe and slap his name on it if he could.

    But like you said, he'd drop it like a rock if it's inconvenient.

    Unlike other politicians, Trump accepted there's no real consequence for making fantasies up and almost lying, just like he did in business.

    “Is he saying this because he thinks it benefits him to say it, or because he thinks it benefits him to do it?”

    And anyone who's on the fence about Trump is not thinking critically like this, they are looking at a few things he's saying and pondering if its a good thing and benefits them.

    And again, fact-based news journalism does not have the luxury of assuming "Here's what we think he's saying, and we think he's making that up because it benefits him, so it's probably nonsense."

  • Trump Promises 'Very Large Faucet' Will Funnel Water from Oregon to Los Angeles
  • It's not totally incoherent though, its vague and almost poetic.

    This is kind of Trump's talent. He makes these grand statements that aren't quite lies. The crowd gets exactly what he's trying to say: all this water pouring out of snowy mountains into the ocean is a "waste" when it could just be diverted to LA, so let's fix that. It's worded almost like a dream. It's an attractive fantasy. But it's also vague, not quite enough to be a lie even if the implied facts are straight up wrong.

    What can the news do? If they dig into it, he didn't really make any hard claims to roast. They can veer into opinion talk and say that sounds unpresedential and that his speech should be more clear, but making fun of his speech style at a rally is not supposed to be their job. So they do what they can, guess what he's saying and refute that.

    Again, this was his talent before he got into politics. The Motley Fool did this great podcast on Trump (before Trump was big and political) where he sold massively overvalued real-estate from his private company to his public one, effectively "duping" the market, and it worked because he sold it as a vague fantasy just like this. He got plenty of criticism and it didn't matter, because he threaded the needle and what he's claiming is not hard enough to stick. This is what he does.

  • Trump Promises 'Very Large Faucet' Will Funnel Water from Oregon to Los Angeles
  • The difference is he could be the next president and try to turn whatever he's thinking into national policy, so it's worthwhile to try and dissect what he's saying.

    But those experts are also (somehow, still) not really accustomed to Trump's bombastic language. He was like this long before he got into national politics, hyping real estate and business for the market (where it kind of worked). That's a totally different world, where half lies and crazy sales talk are the norm.

  • Asus Z890 motherboards emerge at a U.S. retailer — pricing starts at $280 and goes over $1,000
  • What are people doing with these super expensive boards now? Like, I know there's always the "top 1% first-person-shooter" niche that wants that last sub-millisecond of latency, playing games that don't really respond to 3D cache, but... what else? That's not a big niche. Modern CPUs have like no overclocking headroom, and even at stock are pushed way too hard.

    I'd only spend that kind of money on an embedded Strix Halo board, or HEDT with tons of PCIe lanes. I just don't see why you'd shell out for Arrow Lake like that when you can get 95% of the performance for a fraction of the price and power usage elsewhere.

  • After all, how far inland could a hurricane go?
  • No kidding, even inland salt is a menace. That + sand destroys stuff outside.

    Florida has the added bonus of being a swampy jungle, which you don't really understand until you try to live there. Your landscaping, weeds, anything that grows, grows like crazy. Your pets will get all sorts of infections and parasites from the ground, even with all the pesticide they spray through sheer necessity. Mosquitos are even bigger than in Texas, and they never leave. And I saw a big alligator tear up our neighbor's porch trying to run/hide from us, in a very suburban area.

  • California governor vetoes bill to create first-in-nation AI safety measures.
  • Good.

    All this bill would have done is given OpenAI/Anthropic and such an effective monopoly (and probably destroy the planet with their insane scaling schemes) by destroying the open model ecosystem. I think fediverse vs. corporate social media is a good analogy, and this is kinda like sniping the Fediverse because it's "too dangerous" if it gets too big, without actually being specific on how to deal with that, but actually sniping it because its a competitive threat.

    And yes, OpenAI opposed this, but that was lip service. Don't believe a word that comes out of Altman's mouth.

  • After all, how far inland could a hurricane go?
  • If its our area (Flordia coast)... that's not a problem.

    Buyers don't care. They don't know squat about flooding or hurricanes, they just come in from out of state and get dazzled by the realtor and the weather and everything and buy.

    Our housing market was so crazy houses were being auctioned left and right. Market value just keeps going up, even on the coast.

    TL;DR if the area is superficially attractive enough, home buyers are idiots. I realize this is probably not the case in Georgia mountains, but it his here, and its enabling a vicious cycle where builders keep building homes in obvious flood zones, where they absolutely shouldn't.

  • Qwen2.5: A Party of Foundation Models!
    qwenlm.github.io Qwen2.5: A Party of Foundation Models!

    GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DEMO DISCORD Introduction In the past three months since Qwen2’s release, numerous developers have built new models on the Qwen2 language models, providing us with valuable feedback. During this period, we have focused on creating smarter and more knowledgeable languag...

    https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-66e81a666513e518adb90d9e

    Qwen 2.5 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, and 72B just came out, with some variants in some sizes just for math or coding, and base models too.

    All Apache licensed, all 128K context, and the 128K seems legit (unlike Mistral).

    And it's pretty sick, with a tokenizer that's more efficient than Mistral's or Cohere's and benchmark scores even better than llama 3.1 or mistral in similar sizes, especially with newer metrics like MMLU-Pro and GPQA.

    I am running 34B locally, and it seems super smart!

    As long as the benchmarks aren't straight up lies/trained, this is massive, and just made a whole bunch of models obsolete.

    Get usable quants here:

    GGUF: https://huggingface.co/bartowski?search_models=qwen2.5

    EXL2: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=exl2+qwen2.5

    0
    How does Lemmy feel about "open source" machine learning, akin to the Fediverse vs Social Media?

    Obviously there's not a lot of love for OpenAI and other corporate API generative AI here, but how does the community feel about self hosted models? Especially stuff like the Linux Foundation's Open Model Initiative?

    I feel like a lot of people just don't know there are Apache/CC-BY-NC licensed "AI" they can run on sane desktops, right now, that are incredible. I'm thinking of the most recent Command-R, specifically. I can run it on one GPU, and it blows expensive API models away, and it's mine to use.

    And there are efforts to kill the power cost of inference and training with stuff like matrix-multiplication free models, open source and legally licensed datasets, cheap training... and OpenAI and such want to shut down all of this because it breaks their monopoly, where they can just outspend everyone scaling , stealiing data and destroying the planet. And it's actually a threat to them.

    Again, I feel like corporate social media vs fediverse is a good anology, where one is kinda destroying the planet and the other, while still niche, problematic and a WIP, kills a lot of the downsides.

    62
    Cohere Drops Command-R 35B 08-2024 Update, Just About a Perfect Local LLM for 24GB GPUs.
    huggingface.co CohereForAI/c4ai-command-r-08-2024 · Hugging Face

    We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

    CohereForAI/c4ai-command-r-08-2024 · Hugging Face

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19242887

    > I can run the full 131K context with a 3.75bpw quantization, and still a very long one at 4bpw. And it should barely be fine-tunable in unsloth as well. > > > It's pretty much perfect! Unlike the last iteration, they're using very aggressive GQA, which makes the context small, and it feels really smart at long context stuff like storytelling, RAG, document analysis and things like that (whereas Gemma 27B and Mistral Code 22B are probably better suited to short chats/code).

    0
    Pressure grows as "last chance" negotiations for Gaza deal resume

    > Senior U.S., Qatari, Egyptian and Israeli officials will meet on Thursday under intense pressure to reach a breakthrough on the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.

    > he heads of the Israeli security and intelligence services told Netanyahu at the meeting on Wednesday that time is running out to reach a deal and emphasized that delay and insistence on certain positions in the negotiations could cost the lives of hostages, a senior Israeli official said.

    6
    Alleged AMD Strix Halo APU Appears in Benchmark

    HP is apparently testing these upcoming APUs in a single, 8-core configuration.

    The Geekbench 5 ST score is around 2100, which is crazy... but not what I really care about. Strix Halo will have a 256 -bit memory bus and 40 CUs, which will make it a monster for local LLM inference.

    I am praying AMD sells these things in embedded motherboards with a 128GB+ memory config. Especially in an 8-core config, as I'd rather not burn money and TDP on a 16 core version.

    2
    Paramount Acquisition Deal Falls Through

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16629163

    > Supposedly for petty personal reasons: > > > The woman who controls the company, Shari Redstone, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week as she scuttled a planned merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media. > > > Redstone had spent six months negotiating a complicated deal that would have given control of Paramount to Ellison and RedBird Capital, only to call it off as it neared the finish line. > > > The chief reason for her decision: Her reluctance to let go of a family heirloom she fought very hard to get.

    I cross posted this from c/Avatar, but I am a Trekkie too and don't like this one bit.

    FYI previous articles seemed to imply the Sony deal is dead.

    6
    Paramount Acquisition Deal Falls Through

    Supposedly for petty personal reasons:

    > The woman who controls the company, Shari Redstone, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week as she scuttled a planned merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media.

    > Redstone had spent six months negotiating a complicated deal that would have given control of Paramount to Ellison and RedBird Capital, only to call it off as it neared the finish line.

    > The chief reason for her decision: Her reluctance to let go of a family heirloom she fought very hard to get.

    The fandom doesn't want to talk about it, but the Avatar franchise is in trouble.

    5
    Paramount Sony Deal Not Looking Like A Bid For Whole Company Anymore
    deadline.com Sony & Paramount Sign Non-Disclosure Agreement Allowing Deal Talks To Start, But It’s Not Looking Like A $26 Billion Bid For Whole Company Anymore

    Sony signed a non-disclosure agreement with Paramount allowing deal talks to begin but they'll not be focused on a $26 billion bid for whole company.

    Sony & Paramount Sign Non-Disclosure Agreement Allowing Deal Talks To Start, But It’s Not Looking Like A $26 Billion Bid For Whole Company Anymore

    Avatar Studios seems to be part of Paramount Media, aka the "pay television channels" that I assume Sony is not interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Global

    And in light of this article: https://deadline.com/2024/05/paramount-sale-hollywood-studio-takeover-history-lessons-1235910245/

    That doesn't look good for Avatar Studios. If they are left behind in a Sony sale, it seems the probability of them getting shut down (or just going down with whatever is left of Paramount) is very high.

    0
    Paramount (Avatar IP owner) sale reopens, as Sony-Apollo swoops in

    The article is a very fast read because it's Axios, but in a nutshell, either:

    • Skydance gets Paramount intact, but possibly with financial trouble and selling some IP.

    • Sony gets Paramount, but restructures the company and also possibly sells some parts.

    • Nothing happens... and Paramount continues its downward spiral, probably accelerated by a failed sale.

    The can of worms opened today, as now Paramount is officially open to a buyout from sony.

    I don't like this at all. Avatar is a high budget IP, animesque fantasy, and not historically, proveably profitable like Star Trek/Spongebob. Avatar Studios is a real candidate to be chopped off.

    3
    How do y'all watch Avatar? What screen? What source?

    As the title says. This includes any visual media, including all 7 Books and other stuff.

    What kind screen do you watch it on? What sound setup? What source?

    Screen poll: https://strawpoll.com/e6Z28M9aqnN

    Source poll: https://strawpoll.com/Q0ZpRmzaVnM

    I'm asking this because:

    A: I'm curious how this fandom generally consumes the shows

    B: I theorize this may have an impact on the experience. Avatar is an audiovisual feast, and I find I get caught up in the art/music more than many viewers seem to. LoK in particular is like a totally different show with high-bitrate HD vs. a bad stream.

    4
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BR
    brucethemoose @lemmy.world
    Posts 11
    Comments 520