They aren’t a technical bug, but an UX bug. Or would you claim that an LLM that outputs 100% non-factual hallucinations and no factual information at all is just as desirable as one that doesn’t do that?

Btw, LLMs don’t have any traditional code at all.

Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there’s nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.

Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn’t get from you.

That’s the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn’t be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.

• People who don’t play games because they are too grown-up to have fun aren’t grown-up but sad.
• Catch-up mechanics even the playing field, so that people of different skill levels can have fun together.

It really is.

It’s not anthropomorphizing, its how new terms are created.

Pretty much every new term ever draws on already existing terms.

A car is called car, because that term was first used for streetcars before that, and for passenger train cars before that, and before that it was used for cargo train cars and before that it was used for a charriot and originally it was used for a two-wheeled Celtic war chariot. Not a lot of modern cars have two wheels and a horse.

A plane is called a plane, because it’s short for airplane, which derives from aeroplane, which means the wing of an airplane and that term first denoted the shell casings of a beetle’s wings. And not a lot of modern planes are actually made of beetle wing shell casings.

You can do the same for almost all modern terms. Every term derives from a term that denotes something similar, often in another domain.

Same with AI hallucinations. Nobody with half an education would think that the cause, effect and expression of AI hallucinations is the same as for humans. OpenAI doesn’t feed ChatGTP hallucinogenics. It’s just a technical term that means something vaguely related to what the term originally meant for humans, same as “plane” and “beetle wing shell casing”.

In that case, woosh me. Just wanted to make sure nobody takes that as an actual advice.

Nope. Hallucinations are not a cool thing. They are a bug, not a feature. The term itself is also far from cool or positive. Or would you think it’s cool if humans have hallucinations?

Hallucinations mean something specific in the context of AI. It’s a technical term, same as “putting an app into a sandbox” doesn’t literally mean that you pour sand into your phone.

Human hallucinations and AI hallucinations are very different concepts caused by very different things.

Pokemon games also routinely come close.

That’s what you got emoji for.

Terrible idea for a few reasons.

• The example in the OP does not need anything but the country. GPS coordinates are less efficient than ISO codes
• GPS coordinates don’t map 1:1 to countries or even street addresses. There are infinite different coordinates for each address, and it’s very non-trivial to match one to another. Comparing whether two records with country codes are in the same country is trivial. Doing the same with two GPS coordinates is very difficult.
• GPS coordinates might be more exact than accurate. This is a surprisingly common issue: you start out only needing a country, so you put some arvitrary GPS position (e.g. the center of the country) into the GPS coordinates. Later a new requirement arises that means you now need street addresses. Now all old entries point so some random house in the middle of the country, and there’s no easy way to differentiate these false locations from real ones.

I guess you meant that as a joke, but people are really doing this and it leads to actual problems.

I saw a news report a while ago about something like that being done in a database for people with outstanding debt. If the address of the debtor wasn’t known, they just put “US” in the form, and the program automatically entered the centre of the US as the coordinates.

Sucks for the family that lives there because they constantly get threatening mail and even house visits from angry lenders who want their money back. People even vandalized their house and car because they believed that their debtors lived in that house.

You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn’t actually say.

Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?

Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren’t.

Because fair use isn’t actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, …) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).

That’s the whole point of fair use. It’s even in the name. It’s about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It’s not called “Allowed techniques, don’t care if it’s fair”.

Tbh, this is not a question about scraping at all.

Scraping is just a rather neutral tool that can be used for all sorts of purposes, legal and illegal.

Neither does the technique justify the purpose nor does outlawing the technique fix the actual problem.

Fair use only applies for a certain set of use cases and has a strict set of restrictions applied to it.

The permitted use cases are: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”.

And the two relevant restrictions are:

• “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;”
• “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

(Quoted from 17 U.S.C. § 107)

And here the differences between archive.org and AI become obvious. While archive.org can be abused as some kind of file sharing system or to circumvent paywalls or ads, its intended purpose is for research, and it’s firmly non-profit and doesn’t compete with copyright holders.

AI, on the other hand, is almost always commercial, and its main purpose is to replace human labour, specifically of the copyright owners. It might not be an actual problem for Disney’s bottom line, but it’s a massive problem for smaller artists, stock photographers, translators, and many other professions.

That way, it clearly doesn’t apply to the use cases for fair use while violating the restrictions.

And for that, it doesn’t matter if the training data is acquired using scraping (without permission) or some other way (without permission to use it for AI training).

because all games on PC are free if you want them to be

If you include piracy, that’s available on the Switch too. Worst case you have to chip in €10 for a mod chip, but that’s it.

Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?

Yeah, find me a deal to get Mario Kart for the steam deck legally.

Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…

You want to use a steam deck as a laptop? Do you really have no self respect?

That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.

That was exactly my point. Steam Decks/PCs and consoles are used differently by different people, and in the end a Steam Deck is not cheaper than a console, even if you never pay a cent for a game (but then again, why are you buying a Steam Deck?)

But if we keep going

I get the feeling you don’t actually want to discuss or talk about the topic, you just want to win. So yeah, no point in continuing the discussion.

If it’s too much for you, then don’t pay it. It’s not like there are no alternatives.

I usually just buy games years later for a fraction of the price. Or wait until a platform becomes abandonware and I can’t buy a game in retail any more (meaning the publisher doesn’t want to take my money), and then I pirate it.

There are a couple hundred of thousands of great games, I don’t need the flashiest, newest thing.

I’m just saying that the €80 pricing isn’t that crazy, it’s just inflation adjustment. In fact, the €60 price point for full-price games has been around since at least 2005. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around €100 in today’s money.

In fact, SNES games even cost up to €80 in 1993, which would be ~€180 in today’s money, and even the cheapest titles back then (akin to our current low-budget indie titles) started from €40 (~€90 today).

So, the price is really not that bad. And, as I said, you can just wait for the sale and get it cheaper anyway. Full price is only for people who need exactly this game exactly right now.

Price of the middle version of the Steam Deck: €569

Price of the middle version of the Switch 1: €284

So we got a price difference of €285 here.

€50 for the bundled Mario Kart upgrade plus 3 other full price titles, leaves us €55 to spend on another 5 indie titles, and then you got the average total cost of ownership for a switch for just about the price of the Steam Deck with a whopping 0 games on it.

The difference becomes starker if you go for the top-spec version: €679 for the Steam Deck, vs €329 for the Switch, a whopping €350 difference. For that difference you can afford Mario Kart plus 4 full-price titles and have another €60 remaining for a few indie titles.

You are fighting windmills, capische?

You made up an argument that I never made and now you are fighting against it.

Well done, Don Quijote, the windmill is destroyed and you can go home claiming you defended the land from evil giants.

That is true, of course. But that’s a vulnerability from Nintendo’s perspective, not from a customer’s perspective. As in, if this exploit gets improved on, it might lead to people running unlicensed or pirated software on the switch, thus potentially hurting Nintendo.

It’s not something that might lead to people getting their Nintendo-accounts hacked or stolen or something like that.

On a Steam Deck, the former concept doesn’t even exist. There’s no Steam Deck vulnerability that might lead to people running non-steam software on the Steam Deck, because it’s allowed usage.

What I’m trying to say is that vulnerability is not negative for the user or indicative of bad platform security for the user.

Never heard of a steam backlog? PC is the number one piracy platform, but it’s also the only platform where people buy whole bundles of games in a sale or where you get at least one game for free every week.

Have a look at Nintendos sales figures: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html

Take for example the switch: 152 mio devices sold, vs 1391 mio units of software sold. That’s roughly 9 titles per device since 2017, or roughly one game per year.

Compare that to your 435 titles over 12 years, which equals roughly 36 titles per year.

You are a heavy buyer of games, in the order of 36x of what’s the average for a switch user. You just proved my point.

Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.

Let me rephrase that:

I mean, especially as a parent do I want to waste hours setting up the system, fixing misconfigurations and trying to keep my elementary school kid from watching porn or heavy violence on the system?

€80 is a lot, but not nearly as much as the time you spend on the device if you factor in your hourly rate.

And for most non-techy parents the choice doesn’t even exist. They don’t even know how they’d setup parental controls or fix issues on a PC.

Also: if you put €60 from 2017 into an inflation calculator and convert that to 2025 money, you get €82. Yes, it sucks that everything gets more expensive, but that’s just how inflation works.

My grandma also always complained that when she was young she could get a whole bar of chocolate for 0.50 Schilling (€~0.04).