• 1 Post
  • 522 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

    Now Twitter is gone anyway, its public APIs have shut down,

    Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay.

    There’s still the Fediverse.

    I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…



  • YouTube desperately needs to fix the recommendations for music.

    I mean, I guess if someone has a YouTube account, there’s nothing wrong with using YouTube as a music recommendations system, but it isn’t really the first thing I’d think of. I mean, music isn’t really what it was designed for.

    And YouTube doesn’t know what a user would listen to offline, so unless all their music-listening is from YouTube tracks…I’m not sure how representative the listening data would be of what a user would listen to.

    I don’t use them, because I don’t really want to hand them a profile of me, but if I wanted to get music recommendations, I’d probably use something like Audioscrobbler, which was designed for building a profile on someone’s music-listening habits and then handing them recommendations based on that.


  • This Popsie Funk channel is upfront, that the music is AI generated.

    goes looking

    Yeah, the description reads:

    Popsie Funk is a fictitious creation. The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.

    I am adding this disclaimer due to repeated questions about the genuine authenticity of Popsie Funk and his music.

    I don’t think that the artist in question is faking this.

    All that being said, while this particular case isn’t, I suppose one could imagine such a “trying to pretend to be human” artist existing. That is, if you think about all the websites out there with AI-generated questions and answers that do try to appear human-generated, you gotta figure that someone is thinking about doing the same with musicians…and at mass scale, not manually doing one or two.



  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGaming@beehaw.orgShmup suggestions
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    5 days ago

    Do you have any examples of shumups that you like and any you dislike? That might help give a better idea of what you like.

    I mean, if you just want “good shmups”, it’s easy to go to Steam, search for games with the “Shoot 'em Up” tag, and sort by user reviews.

    But if you’re looking for something in particular, a list like that might help.


  • It sounds like both parties made derivative works.

    The initial design was from Bungie, then someone else made a derivative work from it. Bungie didn’t go after them for it.

    Then some artist at Bungie made a derivative work from that work, and the fan artist complained.

    Technically, neither party can legally go out and make and distribute derivative works. Probably both were in the wrong there.

    The fact that Bungie left the fan art alone, didn’t send lawyers after them initially, doesn’t mean that Bungie has rights to go make and distribute a work based on the fan art.

    So, from a purely-legal standpoint, they’ve probably both got grounds for a copyright complaint against the other; Bungie could theoretically have the fan art distribution blocked and the fan artist could block distribution of Bungie’s derived pistol (though not the original, pure-Bungie pistol).




  • Do you have uBlock or some similar ad blocker installed?

    EDIT: I went and looked myself. I do have an ad-blocker installed. I don’t see the ad. But I do see more noise than OP (desktop, Firefox):

    • There’s a set of steps at the top left telling me to download and install the software, which is what OP was complaining about.

    • At the top right, there’s a large, blue button with a link that guesses incorrectly that I want to know about Logitech Unifying Receiver Pairing, and just sends me to another Bing search.

    • Beneath that, there are a list of several questions that Microsoft incorrectly thinks I might be wanting to task and their answers.

    • Then there are two “Explore more” links linking me to pages describing how to pair with the software. One appears to link to “logi.com” with apparently is a Logitech business support page that links to the software, albeit only the Mac version, which I’d guess isn’t what OP wanted.

    • Back on the left, I have what appears to be an AI spam question-answer site at thewindowsclub.com and another page on “how to unify” at robots.net.

    • Beneath that, I have a link to the Logitech download section. So it’s in my top results and on my laptop, visible on the first screen of results, though beneath some not-really-desirable stuff.


  • Another problem with everyone doing a search engine is that they can have a widely-disparate featureset, and I’m very unlikely to spend enough time on any one site to familiarize myself with a given featureset. Maybe one or two sites, like github.com. But if I’m just looking for a download of software for a given product? Nah.

    Maybe if everyone used local Search Engine X – like Harvest or something. Or if everyone agreed on a search syntax to support.

    Google also used to, in their early days, sell a search appliance that companies could use locally to provide searching. I’d guess that that probably contains enough trade secrets and stuff now that they don’t want to hand it out any more.


  • Given the “unfortunately”, I assume that you’re talking about search engines becoming worse rather than product manufacturer sites getting better.

    I use Kagi; they’re commercial and don’t do ads, so they don’t have the malware ad stuff. They do have some generative AI feature to try to answer questions directly, but I don’t think that generative AIs are nearly at the point where they’re better than looking at search results, and I can turn that off.

    If I weren’t using Kagi…I don’t personally want to create an account with a search engine that doesn’t have a no-log policy. But some people don’t care, and sometimes with an account, you can turn off some features. So for some search engines, I bet that that gets the AI-generated answers out of the way. Google has a lot of hard-to-find parameters that you can insert into your search URL to toggle search functionality without needing an account – in Firefox, by editing your quick search bookmark, and while I don’t know if that includes stuff like AI-generated answers and “featured snippets”, which appears to be the latest thing, I’d guess that Google might have a way to toggle things.

    There’s spam – maybe a year back, when I was using Google more, I remember Google really melting under a shit-ton of AI-generated spam sites. I mean, a significant proportion of my searches included not-very-useful-and-sometimes-wrong AI-generated text sites in the top results. Was the first time in a long time that Google was starting to lose to the spammer crowd. I haven’t been using Google much since, but the few times I’ve hit it, I haven’t seen that, so my impression is that they’ve managed to push the spammers back.

    In some cases – and I realize that a lot of people just aren’t going to bother with this – the GreaseMonkey addon permits pages to be mutated, and people often write scripts to hide unwanted content.

    On the company website side of things getting better, which I assume isn’t what you mean…

    Well, the world does appear to have adopted some conventions for navigation. I don’t like all of them, but at least it makes various sites somewhat more predictable.

    To find software associated with a product, it’s almost always possible to go to the support section, maybe select your region of the world. Then sometimes you choose a product category, sometimes just search the product catalog directly. For very small companies, sometimes there’s no search, just a list of products. Sometimes the search can be very obnoxious, like requiring one to look up a model number, but that’s in a minority of cases. That will take one to the product page, and then there’s usually some sort of links to firmware and manuals and such. It’s not common these days to require registration to get access to them.

    Another downside is that it’s very common for companies to want to have large promotional images and sometimes video on their main page and sometimes product pages. That’s obnoxious if I’m on a slow cell link at the time.

    So…it’s not terrible. But a search engine can generally get me to the relevant page in the top results, without needing to traverse the rest of the website.

    Finally, while it’s not an issue with Logitech, it’s not always obvious where a company lives. For the US, yeah, it’s usually companyname.com. But that’s not always true. For the UK – and sometimes I buy products from abroad – it’s often in .co.uk. In the US, due to an infamous trademark fight, “nissan.com” is owned by a small auto company who the much-larger auto manufacturer tried to take the domain from. After an acrimonious fight, the small company is now determined that Nissan Motors is never getting the domain, so Nissan Motors is at nissanusa.com. Sometimes companies spin things off or sell divisions; Thinkpad used to be an IBM product line, until it was sold to the Chinese Lenovo. And one of the more-convenient ways to find a company’s domain name is, well…to hit a search engine. Yeah, I know some domains off the top of my head – kernel.org, microsoft.com, apple.com. But for most manufacturers of most products, I don’t. The domain name is still useful, helps me validate that this is an official site. But it’s not necessarily the ideal way to get there. So if you’re potentially already going to hit a search engine to find the company domain, you might as well just jump directly to the product support page.




  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldProgrammatic access to discord
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    I get that.

    Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.

    I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.

    Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.

    There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.

    But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.

    I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.

    kagis

    https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/t417q1/can_someone_please_explain_discord_to_me_like_im/

    It’s just modern day IRC with video.

    Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.

    Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).

    Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.

    Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.

    But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.