• 3 Posts
  • 331 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • We can’t afford to make any of this. We don’t have the money for the compute required or to pay for the lawyers to make the law work for us

    I don’t think this is entirely true; yeah, large foundational models have training costs that are beyond the reach of individuals, but plenty can be done that is not, or can be done by a relatively small organization. I can’t find a direct price estimate for Apertus, and it looks like they used their own hardware, but it’s mentioned they used ten million gpu hours, and GH200 gpus; I found a source online claiming a rental cost of $1.50 per hour for that hardware, so I think the cost of training this could be loosely estimated to be something around 20 million dollars.

    That is a lot of money if you are one person, but it’s an order of magnitude smaller than the settlements of billions of dollars being paid so far by the biggest AI companies for their hasty unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. It’s easy to see how copyright and legal costs could potentially be the bottleneck here preventing smaller actors from participating.

    It should benefit the people, so it needs to change. It needs to be “expanded” (I wouldn’t call it that, rather “modified” but I’ll use your word) in that it currently only protects the wealthy and binds the poor. It should be the opposite.

    How would that even work though? Yes, copyright currently favors the wealthy, but that’s because the whole concept of applying property rights to ideas inherently favors the wealthy. I can’t imagine how it could be the opposite even in theory, but in practice, it seems clear that any legislation codifying limitations on use and compensation for AI training will be drafted by lobbyists of large corporate rightsholders, at the obvious expense of everyone with an interest in free public ownership and use of AI technology.











  • and there’s a well-defined mission in each zone

    It’s been a long time but I remember there being missions with scripted events and objectives and stuff, but then also areas where the main thing to do was simply travel through it to get to other places. My favorite moment from the game was when I worked out that you could skip a portion of the normal progression by getting to a higher level area early to buy more powerful equipment, but actually getting there was a real challenge due to being underleveled and the difficulty of getting past enemies without killing them. I got a group to make the attempt (which took some explaining and persuasion because it wasn’t the normal next thing to do) and we spent hours on it and got to the last leg of the journey, but ultimately had to give up because our death penalties were stacked too high to get through that last bit. I was able to make it on a later attempt with a different group using character loadouts more specialized for the task.

    Something I think GW1 did really well was doing various things like this to build up a sense of location and meaningful travel, which does a lot of work to compensate for the gameplay itself happening in isolated instances and making the world of the game feel expansive and epic.





  • I don’t watch his other content but in that one video he was absolutely doing exactly what a typical user would do in his situation. He was trying to follow a tutorial, he ran into the sort of warning message Windows users are conditioned to breeze past, and followed the onscreen instructions without trying to understand the confusing stuff. They changed how it worked after that incident, as they should if mass adoption is at all desirable.



  • What about a way to donate (held in reserve for that purpose?) money after the fact for specific commits, and then have a way to indicate which things you’d be most likely to donate to going forward if they are completed? This would mean less reliable payments since there wouldn’t be a guarantee any given contribution would result in a payout, but there wouldn’t be any disincentive to work on things and there would be a general idea of what donators want. Plus doing it that way would eliminate the need for a manual escrow process.