Currently studying CS and some other stuff. Best known for previously being top 50 (OCE) in LoL, expert RoN modder, and creator of RoN:EE’s community patch (CBP). He/him.
(header photo by Brian Maffitt)
Really wish they published the whole dataset. They don’t specify on the page or in the paper what the full set was like, and the GitHub repo only has one of the easy-to-read ones. If >=10% of the set is comprised of clock faces designed not to be readable then fair enough.
The human level accuracy is less than 90%!?
The loss brainrot has taken another victim 😔
the kbin.social domain expires in a few days, on 10 September
Looks like someone might’ve bought the domain?
Poor proton-Earth, barely mentioned at all :'(
I actually thought it looked pretty good because of Return to Monkey Island (which has never been bundled before and the ATL price of which is ~half the bundle’s cost). The average OpenCritic score (if that’s what you meant?) for the games excluding the Destiny 2 bundle is high 70s, and the average Steam review score is 83% positive. Seems fine to me but ymmv depending on personal preference I guess.
Anecdotally, quite a lot of users vote “selfishly” and don’t care that downvoting reduces visibility. all and local feeds also fall victim to people voting as if these are their own personal curated feeds.
And I hate it 🫠
“We’re going to collect as much data about you as we can to sell to advertisers”
That’s a rather pessimistic interpretation of a privacy policy that starts with this:
The spirit of the policy remains the same: we aren’t here to exploit you or your info. We just want to bring you great new videos and creators to enjoy, and the systems we build to do that will sometimes require stuff like cookies.
and which in section 10 (Notice for Nevada Residents) says:
We do not “sell” personal information to third parties for monetary consideration [as defined in Nevada law] […] Nevada law defines “sale” to mean the exchange of certain types of personal information for monetary consideration to another person. We do not currently sell personal information as defined in the Nevada law.
So yes, I suppose they may be selling personal information by some other definition (I don’t know the Nevada law in question). But it feels extremely aggressive to label it a “shithole” that “collect[s] as much data about you as we can to sell to advertisers” based on the text of the privacy policy as provided.
I guess perspective here depends on your anchoring point. I’m anchoring mostly on the existing platform (YouTube), and Nebula’s policy here looks better (subjectively much better) than what runs as normal in big tech. If your anchor is your local PeerTube instance with a privacy policy that wasn’t written by lawyers, I can see how you’d not be a fan.
However beyond being in legalese I’m not sure what part of it you find so bad as to describe it as a shithole. Even compared to e.g., lemmy.world’s privacy policy Nebula’s looks “good enough” to me. They collect slightly more device information than I wish they did and are more open to having/using advertising partners than I had expected (from what I know of the service as someone who has never actually used it) but that’s like… pretty tame compared what most of the big platforms have.
Nebula is a shithole, just have a glance at their privacy policy.
It looks pretty run of the mill to me?
Can access fine (with reduced functionality) on my end with JS disabled - maybe you have something else tripping it up or something?
I used to believe in this (and to a degree still do), but the idea of increasing the attack surface of unreasonable people (who seem to have become increasingly common in the last 10 years) who will do insane things like SWAT you, or doxx your personal details (like home address), or even just follow you around online to harass you has made me have second thoughts about the tradeoffs involved in this approach 🫠
I honestly don’t think any of this matters anymore. SSD in general is just good for gaming
As the article shows, in some games it does matter enough to be probably something where you can “feel” the difference between a SATA vs NVMe SSD. There’s no need to guess or speculate here, the article has several measurements with differences that I’d consider a non-trivial between SATA and NVMe SSD speeds:
In several of these, the SATA SSD has performance similar to the hard drives, not to the NVMe SSDs. Of course, there are also many results where just having an SSD – regardless of what type – seems to be enough. Is it enough to justify upgrading an existing SATA SSD just for performance reasons? For most people, probably not - but it’s worth knowing what real difference there can be in real-world situations. It’s certainly nice to save a few minutes of cumulative load time every week if you play some of these types of games regularly though. (And for those with NVMe SSDs already, yeah, even in the above cases there seems to be only a trivial difference.)
I assume there will be some non-zero number of new releases making good use of DirectStorage, so if for anyone who tends to play new releases then it may matter increasingly more too, though it of course depends on what a person plays.
Nobody linking it!? https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/road-redemption-ce16fb
I’m sure everyone is for better treatment of developers but in the context of the movement they’re not important.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise. If developers with good work conditions had their say over whether games were killed or preserved, I think most would choose the latter. The two issues are perhaps not as insular as we wished they were for the sake of a clean and simple “message” for SKG.
Yes, it actually spends the majority of its word count on the Stop Killing Games movement as-is, then notes in a single section at the end that industry practices for developers are also killing games (since developers make the games). Thus if you support Stop Killing Games uppercase because you want the industry to stop killing games lowercase, reforming that part is important too.
I enjoyed it, reading it as lighthearted commentarial satire :(
I actually think this video is doing a pretty bad job of summarizing the practical-comparison part of the paper.
If you go here you can get a GitHub link which in turn has a OneDrive link with a dataset of images and textures which they used. (This doesn’t include some of the images shown in the paper - not sure why and don’t really want to dig into it because spending an hour writing one comment as-is is already a suspicious use of my time.)
Using the example with an explicit file size mentioned in the video which I’ll re-encode with Paint.NET trying to match the ~160KB file size:
Hadriscus has the right idea suggesting that JPEG is the wrong comparison, but this type of low-detail image at low bit rates is actually where AVIF rather than JPEG XL shines. The latter (for this specific image) looks a lot worse at the above settings, and WebP is generally just worse than AVIF or JPEG XL for compression efficiency since it’s much older. This type of image is also where I would guess this type of compression / reconstruction technique also does comparatively well.
But honestly, the technique as described by the paper doesn’t seem to be trying to directly compete against JPEG which is another reason I don’t like that the video put a spotlight on that comparison; quoting the paper:
Most image compression formats (with AVIF being a possible exception) aren’t tailored for “ultra-low bitrates”. Nevertheless, here’s another comparison with the flamingo photo in the dataset where I’ll try to match the 0.061 bpp low-side bit rate target (if I’ve got my math right that’s 255,860.544 bits):
(Ideally I would now compare this image at some of the other, higher bpp targets but I am le tired.)
It looks like interesting research for low bit rate / low bpp compression techniques and is probably also more exciting for anyone in the “AI compression” scene, but I’m not convinced about “Intel Just Changed Computer Graphics Forever!” as the video title.
As an aside, every image in the supplied dataset looks weird to me (even the ones marked as photos), as though it were AI-generated or AI-enhanced or something - not sure if the authors are trying to pull a fast one or if misuse of generative AI has eroded my ability to discern reality 🤔
edit: to save you from JPEG XL hell, here’s the JPEG XL image which you probably can’t view, but losslessly re-encoded to a PNG: https://files.catbox.moe/8ar1px.png