SAG can try it's best to boycott or otherwise coerce the studios into not using AI, but it's not going anywhere and it's getting better fast. It's really just another tool that can be used to make movies and human-actors will still have a place. Of course, at the end of the day, this is all just entertainment and that's always been a cut-throat business anyway.

It's a beautiful game. It's turn-based as well, which is not at all like the prior two BGs or NWN or IWD. Those games you could pause, issue out some commands and unpause. BG3, entirely turn-based combat.

I'm not saying this to down it, just that it's definitely a more strategic game versus all the other ones.

Also, every single "teammate" you meet, will immediately start hitting on you, regardless of your Cha score or gender. I guess you have to be mean to the individual characters to get them to be less flirtatious . The whole sexualization portion of the game was really odd to me, to be honest. Still, very well made game.

Yes, but the models are getting smaller and better. If you have never played with local models, you just don't understand why Anthropic and co are worried. The local models are making big strides. Each year they get better and more efficient. I can't wait to see what I can run next year compared to what I can run today.

It's like Apple being mad a Microsoft for stealing "their" idea for the desktop even though Apple got it from Xerox. There's a great scene at the end of Pirates of Silicone Valley that sums that up nicely and more elegantly then I did.

Considering the output of these models can't be copyright, I don't see how they have any legal standing to say you can't use it how you see fit. People are even paying to get that output, so boo to anthropic for people using the output they paid for. That's more then anthropic did to get started.

If you have a 8gb nvidia card, you can educate yourself very easily on AI models. Here are a few links that talk about and explain some of this. It should be enough to get you started.

https://techtactician.com/begi...
https://roblaughter.medium.com...
https://stable-diffusion-art.c...
https://github.com/msb-msb/awe...

This last link is to a Dell computer that I thought would be pretty sweet if I was really into local AI a lot more. I mentioned it in couple other posts but here's the actual link.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/sho...

Oh, and I was wrong on it's price. It's price range is about $5,400 to $8,200, depending on the how much storage you want. Given that Nvidia 5090 32gb graphics card alone will cost you around $6,700 off new egg. It's batshit stupid and it makes that Dell with 128gb unified memory look amazing when you realize what they does over the 32gb of vram the stand alone card.

Just depends on your use case, but I can't see many gamers spending $6,700 on a graphics card.

It's hard to get upset when China is stealing from a handful of companies that themselves stole stuff to get where they are today. Just makes them all look like deceitful assholes. There are no good guys here.

Thus if they don't care about the law, I don't care about the law. You don't get to break the law to build your business then turn around and tell everyone, "but you have to follow the law" Yeah, fuck you, I won't.

If they don't play by the rules, why should we? I say, distill away everyone. At the rate local models are coming along, we won't need these big companies anyway. You'll just run if off open source free as in beer software.

Local models are becoming more and more capable on less and less hardware. This should actually really scare the Frontier modelers and it sounds like it is. I can't wait to see what I can run next year on my hardware.

Dell actually sells this really impressive $10,000 AI server computer thing with 128gb of vram. Consider what I can accomplish with 8gb vram and considering how stupidly priced a single nvidia 32gb graphics card cost, that $10,000 a full server with 128gb vram sounds like a fair ask. Assuming you need that much compute.

Also, the fact that it is local is even better. More privacy.

We're almost to the point where you don't even need to waste money on the premium services because what you can accomplish locally keeps getting better.

Another Slashdotter said it in a previous post, but in the future, AI will just be something that comes in a box and you put on your local network.

WOW was good for a while but then so was EQ, DAOC and GW1 and 2.

Now, I don't play any of them at all. Well, at least not the live servers. I play WOW on my own server with really awesome bots and I stick to the first three games. EQ is another one that I only play on private servers now. GW2 I did play on live server a while back but only for a day or two.

The originally MMOs were so much better then the stuff that came 20 years after.

The main difference is the masses jumped on board. EQ was awesome because of how tight knit the communities were. Early WOW also. Then they just keep watering everything down, add bullshit the long timers had zero interest in, etc. I dropped wow at the MOP stage because it literally just felt like a second job to be raid ready. It was like a light bulb went off and I never went back.

Shooter games were better 20 years ago as well. Unreal Tournament was great. UT2004 was amazing to me. Numerous different ways to play the game. Now, the most popular game is a battle royal that feels like a fraction of a game. One fucking map...GTFO here.

American consumers are really bad at living within their means. My ex wife is a shiny example of this. Hence why she is now an ex wife. It was literally not cheaper to keep her.

I am likely just boring but at least my credit is over 800, I have an emergency fund of multiple months and I contribute to retirement while also having other investments to build up my future down home down payment. 100k that's not retirement but I need a crash before I spend my coin. Luckily I'm growing it steadily in likely a too safe way but at least I'm not losing principle.

Now, that means I'm not taking yearly vacations or blowing my money on a new car when my 8 year old car is perfectly fine. I'm not buying new tech toys or eating out weekly either.

Oh and I don't smoke or drink like a fish either. Smoking and drinking isn't cheap and it's bad for you. Sure, I still do both sometimes but now it's more like a couple times a month instead of a couple drinks a day.

P.S. I also made a lousy 70k yet I live in San Diego about 20 miles inland. There's literally no such thing as affordable housing here and yet some how, I manage to live alone and am doing pretty good. People need to really stop the FOMO and YOLO shit and then expect everyone else to pull their bacon out of the fire when shit hits the fan and they are woefully unprepared.

This pretty much sums it up. Slashdotters are not the target market anymore. We've aged out. Catering to us is way to difficult but you can sell really shitty games to children and they gobble it up. For me to even try a new game, I first go down a little mini quality of life check to see if I want to even tolerate the game.

Now, I just have a list of games on my Steam wishlist and every so often one will go on a deep discount and I'll grab it then. The most modern game I've played is Baldur's Gate 3 but most my gaming time is spent on titles a decade or two old. This is also a great way to really extend the life of a computer. My system runs BG3 beautifully and the mobo has room for upgrades (which will have to wait until hardware prices come back down to sanity).

And don't forget, we'll make sure the cheapest place to buy solar panels has the highest amount of tariffs so we can essentially force people to "buy American", regardless of which panels might actually be better.

While I understand the desire to buy American, if definitely feels like the social contract between consumer and supplier fell apart. We're suppose to buy America and they are suppose to fucking hire Americans for the jobs. Now, we're forced to buy America and they still won't hire us unless they absolutely have no choice. Worry not though, AI will replace us regardless if it is ready to do so or not.

I realize this is just marketing bullshit by Anthropic in what is very likely a lead up to an IPO but we should start treating them as the criminals they already are if we are to believe their "marketing" as the truth.

Otherwise, cut the crap already.

You are not being very imaginative here. You also must have a fairly decent life, as some people in this world already do what you suggest is unimaginable every day.