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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general

    That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing.

    For example, “Marey” is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically.

    Another is Adobe Firefly, where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar.

    StabilityAI is also doing something similar with Stable Audio 2.0, where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc…

    I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least.

    One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry.

    Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this.

    I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits.

    I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.



  • I literally just put Dead Cells down before opening up Lemmy. Just now I died to a javelin attack (thanks to having just opened a cursed chest) in the Fractured Shrines.

    I’m not especially good at it; I’ve only finished one run. I think that run was a Survival run using Frost Blast and the Nutcracker. That was on my phone (using a Backbone gamepad, not touch controls), oddly enough, even though I have it on my Steam Deck and on the Switch and have way more playtime and way more unlocked on both of those.

    Which Retroid do you have?


  • Depends on your e-reader! If you have a Kindle, Kobo, or Nook, yes, that’s true. However:

    Boox has e-readers that run Android and you can install Hoopla. The Palma 2 is phone sized which is great. The Page, Leaf2, and Go 7 are all in the 7” form factor, plus they have 6” versions. And they have tablet sizes, too. They have both traditional black&white and color e-ink displays.

    I have the Boox Air 3C and the original Palma and both are great. I’ll likely get a Boox as my next standard sized e-reader, too (whenever I replace my Kindle Oasis). Though unless the technology drastically improves before then, it’ll be one with a black and white screen. (The color is nice in the tablet sizes, though, especially for comics from Hoopla.)

    Some other options that I’m less familiar with include:

    • Bigme has Android 7” color e-readers, as well as tablets and e-ink smartphones.
    • Meebook has e-readers that run Android (and Android e-ink tablets)
    • The MuSnap Aura C is a 10” Android e-ink tablet
    • XPPen has an 11” Android e-ink tablet


  • But do nontechnical users care about the “missing” features? A lot of nontechnical users prefer simpler apps.

    There is a version of Blender that was made for Android. It’s quite old, though. But if you’re competent enough with Blender that you’ve memorized all its keyboard shortcuts and workflows, you’re likely technical enough to get it working via Termux. But if not, Nomad Sculpt (on both iOS and Android), SpaceDraw (Android only), and several other apps can serve the same purposes.

    Not sure why you listed video editing software and two different specific video editors, but Android and iOS both have Lumafusion. I’m sure there are other decent editors but I haven’t used them because Lumafusion is great. iPads do have DaVinci Resolve, though, for what that’s worth. If you care about using a FOSS video editor then you should care enough to install it via Termux. But let’s be real, most nontechnical users are probably happy using CapCut.

    DJ software - Cross DJ is free. There are other alternatives. And there are web based DJ software apps like YouDJ.




  • The products currently on the marketplace have architectures that are far more sophisticated than just an LLM. Even something as simple as “Deep Research,” which both Anthropic and Claude have available, is using multiple interconnected systems to provide a single response.

    Consider Agentic AI, like Claude Code, where they’re using tools, analyzing the results of those tools, iterating, possibly calling out to MCP servers to do other things, etc… The tools allow them to do things like read or modify files in the working directory, execute programs (i.e., your linter, installing dependencies, running your app), querying against your app itself, and so on.

    And of course note that the single “Claude” box in that diagram has an architecture that’s more sophisticated than just being an LLM. At minimum, consumer facing LLMs generally have a supervisor that censors problematic inputs and outputs; this doesn’t make the system more competent but the same concept can be applied to any other sort of transparent wrapper.

    It seems to me that we already have consumer systems that are doing what you described, and we’re already working on enhancing their architectures further.


  • OnlyOffice is available on Android already.

    “any linux app” - I don’t think any nontechnical users want GParted on their Android phones, and it wouldn’t work anyway.

    Android has its own games, same as iOS. Nontechnical users are way more likely to want Windows games than Linux games anyway.

    Wine used to be developed natively for Android but they stopped a few years back. You can still download it at winehq though. I think Box64 with wine is a decent option?

    Overall the thing I’m confused about is why you think Google or any major Android phone manufacturer have a motivation to make native Linux apps more accessible. Google certainly doesn’t want to make it easier for you to use the better versions of their competitors’ apps. Google is moving further away from Linux, not closer. Providing a usable, good enough desktop experience that’s still Android underneath makes far more sense for them.

    Fortunately, like I said earlier, there are workarounds to get access to those Linux apps.

    The thing that is more likely to change is for the creators of Android apps to build apps that function better when used in a phone-as-desktop format. And even if they don’t, there are enough competent web apps out there that just being able to use your browser full screen on a monitor solves 90% of people’s actual use cases - and probably over 95% when you include the other apps that have decent desktop experiences that can be run alongside them.

    The Steam Deck approach is much closer to what you seem to want. The Steam Deck is an actually competent Linux machine that has a Valve-supported compatibility layer in Proton for running non-Linux games. It plugs into a USB-C hub connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard just fine, can install any Linux app, etc… It’s completely usable handheld as well. But it isn’t a phone, and even though it’s quite portable, it’s not “stick into your pocket” portable.

    I don’t expect a major manufacturer to make a Linux phone any time soon, and I don’t think the Linux phones that are out already have - or will have in the next 5 years - a smooth enough experience to convince any nontechnical user to switch.



  • What are the gaps in functionality for nontechnical people? And “apps that exist on Linux but not Android” doesn’t count, because such people are unlikely to have ever even used a Linux desktop in the first place. The improvement that matters won’t be Linux apps; it’ll be Android apps that are more usable in desktop mode.

    That said, what are the issues with the apps that are currently available?

    If a user installed Chrome, an office suite (whether that be Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, the Microsoft equivalent, or something else), an email client, and other commonly available apps, what tasks would they be unable to complete, if any?

    Are these, or other commonly used apps, substantially less usable than on desktop? If so, how so?






  • A big part of the reason that Republicans are more able to pass legislation is that smaller states have a larger impact than they should, based on their populations.

    Each state has a number of members in the House of Representatives in proportion to their population - 52 for California. Each state has two members in the Senate, so CA has the same amount of power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has a population of under 600k to CA’s 39 million.

    Beyond the impact on Congress, the sum of those counts determines the number of electoral votes a state has in presidential elections. So California has 54 electoral college votes.

    If California split up into 12 different states, each would end up with 6 electoral votes. The total count in the House would decrease from 52 to 48, and some other state would get the remaining 4 (though even that could be avoided by just having some sub-states be large enough to get 5 Representatives) but the total count of Senators would increase from 2 to 24 and the total electoral vote count would increase from 54 to 72.

    Many of the smallest US states are firmly red, which means Republicans don’t need as much popular support to make policy changes. This would help reverse that. Heck, if California went all the way and split into 65 states, each with the population of Wyoming, they’d end up with 195 electoral college votes.

    I feel like the US would take over California again if that was the case.

    I’m not sure how you think the US would take over CA again, or what the impact would be, if it continued to be part of the US and just split into several different states. Could you elaborate?