JCAPER's recent activity

  1. Comment on Stellar Blade: The fake outrage in ~games

    JCAPER
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    My experience was mainly on Reddit, but I expect to be the same or worse on others. Tildes is the best social group I joined for the same reason as you mentioned. People here don't assume bad...

    My experience was mainly on Reddit, but I expect to be the same or worse on others.

    Tildes is the best social group I joined for the same reason as you mentioned. People here don't assume bad faith by default. I don't comment as much here but I enjoy reading the conversations

  2. Comment on Stellar Blade: The fake outrage in ~games

    JCAPER
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    I have a personal vendetta against these groups for an admittedly stupid/superficial reason: whenever they lock on onto a game, all discussions about that game become stupid, flametory, tiresome...

    I have a personal vendetta against these groups for an admittedly stupid/superficial reason: whenever they lock on onto a game, all discussions about that game become stupid, flametory, tiresome and frustrating.

    I love to read opinions, I love to talk about games that interest me, I love to talk about what could've been, how great/bad this character is, how the music is great/bad, etc. But in these games, forget it. Saying anything just invites trouble.

    Some examples of these games are Dragon Age Veilguard, The Last of Us 2, Battlefield 5 and, to a certain extent, Witcher 3.

    In Veilguard, there's a huge focus on Taash, the non-binary character. While I also believe they were handled horribly, they are just a part of a wider story that was also badly writen. The focus on Taash is disproportionate, and honestly it doesn't take a genius to know why. But the result is all the same because of those groups, I have to be very careful if I talk about Taash, with all the disclaimers to make sure that other people understand where I'm coming from, because otherwise I will be lumped up with those groups. But I don't want to have all that work, so the result is: I just don't talk about Taash.

    TLOU2 is worse in general. I just checked and sure enough, r/TheLastOfUs2 is still active to this day. 4 years of hating the game and ongoing.

    I blame these guys for the following: I cannot criticize that game. If I say that I didn't like some part of this game offhandedly, like just a small comment, I will invite someone to write long essays on why I am wrong and it's actually great. I'm not exaggerating, it happened to me two times. One when I said that the ending felt off, it didn't make sense when just a few minutes earlier you were blowing up and killing people in brutal ways, and another when I said that the pacing was badly handled.

    To be clear, I'm not complaining about people having different opinions - I'm a big boy, I can handle it - What I'm complaining about is how off handed comments about this game get reactions that other games wouldn't. I think that I made harsher comments about other games that did not invite the same zealousness as those two about TLOU2.

    Then there was BF5... Ugh, saying that the game could've been an Alternative history game, or dieselpunk, somehow was controversial. EA/DICE wanted to make a game with a lot of customization, that's cool I thought, but maybe make it a setting where you have total creative freedom, don't try to make it as an historical game. And the campaigns, missed opportunity to tell stories about women that fought in WW2 in real life.

    But the end result: people thought I was from those groups. A guy pissed off about the woman in the trailer, that can't handle the fairer sex fighting in a war. And once again, I blame those anti-"woke" groups. They poisoned the well and killed off any kind of discussion about the game.

  3. Comment on "Valve are gathering the avengers": we believe Gabe Newell is assembling the ultimate dream team for the one game everyone's been waiting for in ~games

    JCAPER
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    I'm cautiously optimistic that they will/are making another singleplayer game. Might not be the next one - I mean the one after Deadlock - but I'm betting that it's coming. Would love a new Portal...

    I'm cautiously optimistic that they will/are making another singleplayer game. Might not be the next one - I mean the one after Deadlock - but I'm betting that it's coming.

    Would love a new Portal game, or new IP

    4 votes

  4. Comment on "Valve are gathering the avengers": we believe Gabe Newell is assembling the ultimate dream team for the one game everyone's been waiting for in ~games

    JCAPER
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    I (wrongly) assumed that the tweet that these guys used as source would have mentioned who these people were. I checked it a few minutes ago and if I had known, I wouldn't have shared. But I did...

    I (wrongly) assumed that the tweet that these guys used as source would have mentioned who these people were. I checked it a few minutes ago and if I had known, I wouldn't have shared.

    But I did take it upon myself to try to check who these three devs were. I was unable to identify the Rockstar and Naughty Dogs one, but I was able to track down the id software. It's Timothee Yeramian.

    Because of this, I'm inclined to believe that the other two are also legit, and it's not the first time I had heard that Valve was recruiting people and investing more into game making.

    But yes, the article is trash, sorry about that

    20 votes

  6. Comment on Iran launches missile attack on Israel in ~news

    JCAPER
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    Getting mighty tired of living through historic events… Israel, being bellic as it is, will undoubtedly reply in kind or worse.

    Getting mighty tired of living through historic events…

    Israel, being bellic as it is, will undoubtedly reply in kind or worse.

    10 votes

  7. Comment on Ubisoft needs the next ‘Assassin’s Creed’ to be a hit in ~games

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    And with Ghost of Yotei on the horizon, they better hope they don't launch too close to each other

    And with Ghost of Yotei on the horizon, they better hope they don't launch too close to each other

    11 votes

  9. Comment on The Steam subscriber agreement has dropped its forced arbitration clause, allowing gamers to take legal action against the platform in ~games

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    Reading the article, it seems more like a reaction to arbitration becoming a less good option compared to the alternative, rather than Valve feeling generous all of a sudden. As much as I like...

    Reading the article, it seems more like a reaction to arbitration becoming a less good option compared to the alternative, rather than Valve feeling generous all of a sudden.

    As much as I like Valve, this isn’t unprecedented. For example, the reason that refunds exist was not because they felt like it; it was because the EU, along with other countries, started to breathe down on their neck about it.

    But still, credit where credit is due, Valve is still one of the most consumer friendly companies in gaming

    7 votes

  10. Comment on An in-depth look at Romance in video games in ~games

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    The first hour, absolutely. It's general history about romance in video games, how the Japanese studios embraced it while the Western studios shied away; how it became somewhat expected for a JRPG...

    The first hour, absolutely. It's general history about romance in video games, how the Japanese studios embraced it while the Western studios shied away; how it became somewhat expected for a JRPG to have romance, while western games were criticised for including it; how the stigma in the western market faded away little by little thanks to parody games and LGBT oriented visual novels; etc.

    Eventually, he also talks about how some games included these mechanics. Some, have a linear story and the romance develops, regardless of you (player). Some, how only one character has personality and the other is a blank slate (player), so the character has to be written around a blank protagonist. Some, how mechanic and artificial the romance is, how if you keep giving gifts to a character eventually they sleep with you (and the sex being treated as a prize).

    All in all, I think the first hour is worth it. But I'm biased, I have a soft spot for games with romance in them.

    The rest, I couldn't tell you. I also didn't play any of them except for Katawa Shoujo, but I did play a few Visual Novels and dating sims years ago. I think that they were interesting, but then again, biased.

    If there's at least one section that I would recommend, it's Katawa Shoujo. It's a story of a Visual novel that had everything to go wrong:

    • risky subject (it's about disabled girls)
    • made by 4chan volunteers (you know... Not exactly the embodiment of tactfulness)
    • virtually no budget and marketing

    And it became... A success... Against all odds. It's one of the most mature romance stories I've read in general, not just in VN. It's a story about a protagonist dealing with becoming disabled himself, and learning that these girls are not defined by their disabilities.

    12 votes

  11. Comment on An in-depth look at Romance in video games in ~games

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    He talks about those in the first hour or so. But he wanted to focus on games where the romance is the point of the game, instead of optional content, thus why he deep dives into specific games...

    He talks about those in the first hour or so. But he wanted to focus on games where the romance is the point of the game, instead of optional content, thus why he deep dives into specific games that are dating sims and visual novels

    10 votes

  13. Comment on Kagi is announcing AI Assistant in ~tech

    JCAPER
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    As someone who pays for Perplexity (search engine with AI) and uses Google at the same time, here's my two cents about search engines with AI VS traditional search engines. Usually my searches fit...

    As someone who pays for Perplexity (search engine with AI) and uses Google at the same time, here's my two cents about search engines with AI VS traditional search engines.

    Usually my searches fit into these four criteria, it's been like this for years now:

    • find the website that I want to access (basically I'm lazy to type in the url)
    • find solutions to coding problems (python, SQL, etc)
    • find opinions about products, games, etc (usually I check links from reddit)
    • research miscellaneous things that I read online (fact check what some guy said, get more info about an article, etc)

    I don't have a habit of doing any complex queries, at best I use "site:reddit.com" for example, but nothing more.

    Eventually I tried out perplexity, and it changed how I do searches. It has both good and bad sides, which is why I still rely on Google.

    Starting out with the bad:

    - their response quality are highly dependent on the quality of the search results.

    I know, "no shit sherlock", but let me elaborate. AI, no matter what model or what company, has trouble understanding things like jokes, sarcasm and lies. Some deal with it better than others, but it's a common problem.

    I should mention, Google's Gemini is particularly terrible at this, Perplexity (which uses Sonar, Claude and GPT) in my experience doesn't have as many problems as Google's Gemini have.

    So, if among those search results pops up a reddit thread, and there's a comment that says some joke, the AI may take it at face value and insert it in your response. Depending on the rest of the response, you may be inclined to believe it (if the rest looks ok, why would you mistrust one random part in the response?).

    It's why, depending on what I'm looking for, I filter by results that I know that will be relevant. If I'm searching for opinions, I filter by reddit. If I'm searching for more factual results, I filter by academic links. For news, news websites, etc.

    - they tend to treat the search results as the gospel of truth

    This goes hand in hand with the previous point. The AI is instructed to read the sources and pass a summary of it to the user. And the AI will do just that.

    But also, it depends on the model and topic. Claude Sonnet 3.5, the model that I mainly use in Perplexity, will every once in a while clarify nuances about what it said, without referring to any source, especially in more controversial topics. A few days ago I searched about if Pitbulls actually eat their litter mates (obviously not, but I was fact checking a photo), I had Sonnet clarify several times that there is a syndrome that could explain it, but that it's not unique to pitbulls.

    But, in more niche topics, or that aren't controversial, the AI will generally trust what it read. Unfortunately I cannot remember what it was, but several weeks ago I searched about a topic, and the AI read a random comment on reddit and passed it on as if it was true. I didn't believe it and asked it fact check that point, and sure enough, it couldn't, there were no sources that could confirm what that redditor said. (I do remember the AI saying something along the lines "it could still be true", as if it was a prideful kid unwilling to admit they may have said something wrong lol)

    The good:

    - it's great at introducing you to a topic, and summarising it

    Perplexity does not substitute proper deep dives, I still will read the articles if I need more details, but it's great at helping you get started. If you know nothing about a topic, it will give you a general idea of what it is. I found myself getting to know better several topics, which previously I wouldn't have bothered because I would have to deep dive a bit into some pages.

    Some time ago, I found out that the Japanese in WW2 had plans to invade the USSR. Normally, finding out about this would involve searching google, learn about the plan's names, search about the plan, click the links, read about it. With perplexity it was like "Did the japanese plan to invade USSR?", and it answered yes, elaborated on it and provided the sources. Just like that I had everything I needed in one spot after one interaction.

    - it's useful for comparisons, especially in type of products that I'm not familiar with

    At least in the case of perplexity, there's a feature called "Pro Search", which basically turns your prompt into several different search queries and analyses all of them.

    So for example, you want to compare product A with product B, the pro feature will search first about product A, then about product B, and then a final search about people comparing product A and product B, and gives you a final response with all the sources combined.

    And when it's about products I'm not familiar with, I can ask about little details to understand why they matter and what's the difference in practice. E.g. why it matters if headphones are open or closed.

    - because it reads and quotes sources, there's little to no hallucinations

    Hallucinations is when an AI makes stuff up. They tend to happen after long interactions with them, and/or when you start going deep into niche subjects.

    But in this case, it doesn't happen. Or at least, in my experience it never happened.

    Because the AI will be always reading the sources and essentially repeating what they said, it never gets the chance to make stuff up. Obviously the new problem is that the search results have to be good, but assuming that you do a decent job at filtering by sources that are relevant, you will get decent responses.

    - it's good at giving you references in documentations

    I work with looker and lookml. Without going too much into it, it's a dashboard platform, and you need to code to make dashboards. For one reason or another, there isn't a lot of resource material readily available on the internet about lookml. In python you are almost guaranteed to always find someone with a similar problem to yours, in lookml it's rare.

    Because of this, there's the expected consequence: none of the models I tried know a lot about lookml. Back in early 2023, I remember the first iterations of GPT 4 knowing absolutely nothing about lookml. Edit: hallucinations were constant. LLM's don't know that they don't know, so chatGPT would always make up functions that didn't exist

    Thus, there's only the documentation. Thankfully, perplexity saves me a lot of time. Whenever I have a doubt or don't know how to do something, perplexity has been very useful at referencing the docs and telling me where to look at.

    Where I am going with this

    Idk if I'm doing a good job or not - probably not - but what I'm trying to say is that at the end of the day, AI in search engines are still imperfect and they don't substitute the traditional search engines. But they do introduce a new dynamic in searching.

    I consider them a different tool, not a replacement, at the moment at least.

    Whenever I want to find out something really quick, I use Google. For example, stock value, weather, translation of a word, meaning of a word, etc. Google will in all these cases show the information right at the top.

    For a bit bigger/complex topics, I use perplexity. What's the function in lookml that does this, give me more information about this function in python pandas, what's a library that let's me do X, etc.

    This new dynamic has been useful for me, both in my day to day and work, enough that I pay 20 euros a month. If Kagi offers something like this, a traditional search engine and an AI on the side, it's honestly the best of both worlds (that said, for transparency, I never used Kagi, I will research more after posting this comment)

    21 votes

  14. Comment on Man accused of enlisting strangers to rape drugged wife goes on trial in France in ~news

    JCAPER
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    Whenever I feel that I'm desensitised to the things I read on the internet, people find new and ever more crueler ways that make me reevaluate that.

    Whenever I feel that I'm desensitised to the things I read on the internet, people find new and ever more crueler ways that make me reevaluate that.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Disney seeking dismissal of Raglan Road death lawsuit because victim was Disney+ subscriber in ~misc

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    That triggered me, not gonna lie

    That triggered me, not gonna lie

    6 votes

  16. Comment on Google Pixel 9 launch event live coverage: all the news in ~tech

    JCAPER
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think that android phones will have similar functions, I think google assistant (now Gemini) will be capable of working like a good assistant. But I also think that, Google being Google, every...

    I think that android phones will have similar functions, I think google assistant (now Gemini) will be capable of working like a good assistant.

    But I also think that, Google being Google, every single command will go to the cloud. Maybe their phones can have some offline capabilities but for the most part, they’ll rely on the cloud.

    Assuming Apple didn’t over-promise with their presentation of Apple Intelligence, I think they got the right idea of how these Assistants should work. In both technical (rely on local smaller models whenever possible) and on what they should do (they should be useful, not just gimmicks). I mean, let me correct myself a bit, they did make some gimmicks (the emoji generation thingy), but overall they got the right idea: proofreading, being able to reschedule conflicting events in the calendar, notifications priorities, understanding when a notification might be too important and notifies you while in focus mode, understanding context, summarizing content, etc. Yes please, give me all that, those are actually useful.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Disney seeking dismissal of Raglan Road death lawsuit because victim was Disney+ subscriber in ~misc

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    Summary by an AI Essentially, Disney is trying to argue that they can legally kill you just because you agreed to their Disney Plus ToS. Obviously this isn’t going to work in court but it’s insane...

    This article discusses a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Disney by Jeffrey Piccolo, whose wife died after suffering an allergic reaction to food served at a Disney Springs restaurant. Despite her informing the staff of her allergies, she was served food containing allergens, leading to a fatal reaction. Disney is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming Piccolo agreed to mandatory arbitration for all disputes with Disney when he signed up for a Disney+ free trial in 2019. Piccolo's lawyers argue this claim is "preposterous," as it attempts to apply an agreement signed by Piccolo as an individual to a lawsuit filed on behalf of his deceased wife's estate.

    Summary by an AI

    Essentially, Disney is trying to argue that they can legally kill you just because you agreed to their Disney Plus ToS. Obviously this isn’t going to work in court but it’s insane that they’re even trying, so insane that I had to share

    95 votes

  19. Comment on Google Pixel 9 launch event live coverage: all the news in ~tech

    JCAPER
    Link Parent
    ThrowdoBaggins made an excellent comment and hit the nail on the head, the problem with Siri specifically is how inorganic it is. You need to think of a command in a literal way before you say it,...

    ThrowdoBaggins made an excellent comment and hit the nail on the head, the problem with Siri specifically is how inorganic it is. You need to think of a command in a literal way before you say it, then say it.

    Everything you asked, yes technically Siri can do it. But it can be very inconvenient.

    For reminders, you say something like “Hey Siri, remind me (what you want to be reminded about) in 20 minutes”. Or instead of “in 20 minutes” you can also say “when I arrive home”, “at 20:00” or “tomorrow”. It will ask you to confirm the reminder then you just say yes.

    For simple reminders, this works just fine. But now imagine that inside the reminder you say something like “ask my brother about what’s he doing later at night”, Siri might confuse this “later at night” as if it’s the timer that you’re setting for your reminder, if you’re not fast enough to finish what you’re saying.

    Or imagine that you ask “hey siri, remind me to go to the grocery store at 19:00”. But you forgot to mention what you’re buying, so… You’re SooL. Siri can make small basic edits to a reminder that you created, but only after you created the reminder, during the confirmation process (when she asks you to confirm). After that, you can just create a new reminder, Siri has no context awareness.

    Which leads me to the general problem of Siri, it has no idea of what you were talking about before. Every time you talk to her, it’s a new instance. So although you technically could program your entire day by setting alarms, reminders, events in the calendar, etc, you would have to execute several “commands”, and be literal with each and every one of them.

    You couldn’t, for example, do something like this “Hey Siri, after I’m done with training, set an alarm to go home”. It has no idea what you are talking about, even if you created a calendar event for this training beforehand.

    Then, there’s also the most limiting factor for me, which is you have to speak perfect english. Sucks to be you if you need a second to think about what you’re going to say next and if you have an accent. Stop for just a bit, Siri interprets it as if you finished talking, even if you were still mid sentence. And say a word “wrong”, Siri won’t try to understand the context of your phrase and notice that you probably didn’t say X, you said Y. This relates to what I said in the beginning, you have to think about what you’re going to say before you talk to Siri, and then say it as “correctly” as possible.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on Google Pixel 9 launch event live coverage: all the news in ~tech

    JCAPER
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    I haven’t checked out the event yet, but if there’s a place where our current AI’s make sense, it’s in our phones and PCs at OS level. It’s the place where it can have access to most context about...

    I haven’t checked out the event yet, but if there’s a place where our current AI’s make sense, it’s in our phones and PCs at OS level. It’s the place where it can have access to most context about you and reply/take actions that can help you better. AI pin and rabbit failed because… A lot of reasons, but one of them was also that at the end of the day, it was a device that didn’t and couldn’t know a lot about you, so it was just a portable chatGPT device at the end of the day.

    But I say this with a big caveat: I’m thinking of smaller models that run locally, akin to what Apple is doing but without the cloud part. Models specialized at certain tasks, that can do them well, all on device. I’m imagining Siri that no longer needs me to say word by word what I want it to do, and can understand nuances/implications, and my previous prompts. It doesn’t need to be smart enough to carry out conversations.

    E.g. A lot of times I ask it to set a reminder while I’m driving, and usually I say “when I get home, when I get to work, in 20 minutes”, etc. In other words, I ask it to remind me of something when I stop driving. It would be great if I could say “remind me of this”, and it understood that I’m driving, therefore I want it to remind me when it notices that I stopped.

    It’s in little QoL things like this that I can see these AIs becoming a game changer for personal assistants

    15 votes