The strong law of small numbers strikes again!

why would I want to use it?

You wouldn’t, but that’s fine with Match Group: JP Morgan^[1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they’re monetizing human relationships.

I heard about it before release… albeit I heard from a friend that I play XIV with, so that’s certainly a selection bias.

That was a fun watch, thanks! Now what about TotK… 🤔

In FFXIV, I’m in the post-Shadowbringers DLC content. I’ve taken a bit of a break from the MSQ to get the Nier-themed alliance raids

Are you me? I’m just a bit into the post-ShB patches, and I just finished unlocking all three Nier raids. They’re really fun (although I agree: challenging). If you happen to be on Crystal DC and want to party up for some raids or something, lmk!

Think I might try a healer class next, just not sure which one

As someone who is very much a non-healer main, I quite like Sage. My first healer to 90 was actually Scholar, but a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was really into Summoner for a while: when I’m going to heal I usually hop on Sage.

I’ve put a few hours in and I agree, it’s just a fun little game that slowly pushes you bit by bit into slightly more challenging stuff. I really like how well the game meshes the diving and sushi restaurant aspects, too. (Plus, I’m a scuba diver – still pretty new to it – and I’m a bit on the larger side, so it’s a nice bit of representation.)

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! It’s a really good visual-novel-style game, but with the added element that you craft your own tarot-style divination deck and then draw cards from it during some conversations, and which cards you draw influence what kinds of readings you can give for people. It is established early on that since you were a kid your readings have never been wrong, and fittingly the game warns you early and repeatedly that your answers will affect your fate, dramatically. Well, no kidding! When I was playing yesterday I had a choice that I’d made hours earlier come back and bite me in the ass, hard. Almost made me want to quit and start over, but I’ve decided to see this play-through through and if by the end I still feel like I need to fix my mistakes I’ll maybe play it a second time.

tl;dr if you like beautiful pixel art, enigmatic beings from outside of space and time, witches, tarot, and/or choices that actually matter in your games, do give this one a go! I’m not done with it yet but I’d already love to chat with someone else who’s played it!

Yesterday was very productive and then I got to spend the evening gaming with friends, so that was nice! Today I have jury duty, and potentially for most of the rest of the week… It’s fine, but my fingers are still crossed that I end up getting dismissed and can go back to my sorely neglected research tasks!

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

Yeah, cryptobiotic crust! I’ve seen it in the Sonoran desert. It doesn’t look like much, I think if I hadn’t been warned ahead of time not to step on it I might have just done it without thinking. Given that just footprints can take on the order of decades to heal I think a dune buggy ban makes sense in areas where it grows.

I’m still surprised to learn about the microbes in the Atacama: it’s the driest place on earth, and I would have expected the salt deposits to make it even harder for anything to live there. Yknow what they say I guess: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

Some pretty interesting ideas. I was unaware that anything was living in the Atacama salt deposits, which certainly lends some credence to the idea that something could be pulling moisture out of the air on Mars, thin as it is.

That’s great news, and fantastic timing! Good luck on the interview, though I’m sure you’ve got this.

That’s a real mood, yeah.

I just recently decided to stick with mine. I was having a lot of doubts: feeling like I wasn’t making and progress, like I wouldn’t actually be able to finish the projects I started, impostor syndrome shit, etc. I’m happy I decided to stick with it. I just cleared some big milestones and I’m in the middle of a nice long vacation now, and I’m feeling excited again about my work.

On the other side of things, I’ve got a friend who decided to leave his PhD program with a masters a few years ago. He’s now heading up product development for a robotics startup, doing quite well for himself.

I don’t think there’re any wrong answers here. Do what will make you happiest. Maybe you just need a vacation, maybe you’re ready to move on. And remember that education is never wasted: even if you decide not to finish out the PhD, you’ve still learned a lot and that’s valuable with or without the piece of paper and title.

Best wishes, friend, whichever way you decide to go ♥

It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.

Well I hear what you’re saying, although I don’t much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I’m no lawyer. I’d be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it’ll have a chance. As I said, we’ll see.

Yeah I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there’s no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn’t be subject to the same laws. We’ll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.

I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.

Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose