Marvin

About

Username
Marvin
Joined
Visits
125
Last Active
Roles
moderator
Points
6,833
Badges
2
Posts
15,519
  • macOS Sequoia can run on Valve's Steam Deck with hacks

    tipoo said:
    Now if only Apple dropped a bag of cash at Valve to bring that ARM Proton port to macOS natively, so that Steam games "Just Work" on macOS...That's the dream. 
    This is currently available to an extent due to Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, which uses Wine like Proton and has a DirectX to Metal translation layer.

    Valve's Proton has a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer (DXVK), which would need MoltenVK to convert to Metal as Mac doesn't support Vulkan directly.

    Crossover and Whisky integrate Apple's D3DMetal translation to run Windows games like Proton. It supports a lot of games, there are over 500 games tested on the following channel:

    https://www.youtube.com/@macprotips/videos

    It supports higher-end recent games like Horizon Forbidden West:



    The only problem with this setup is you have to install Steam inside the compatibility layers, then install the games inside this, sometimes with patches. It's not very user-friendly.

    If it was possible to use either the App Store or native Mac Steam and install a pre-wrapped version of each game that is already setup and tuned, that would be much easier and a license per install could be paid to the company that provides the wrapper if it's from a 3rd party.
    muthuk_vanalingamwatto_cobra
  • Big Tech-funded TV facing a 'schism' in production styles claims Jon Stewart

    entropys said:
    AppleZulu said:
    entropys said:
    chasm said:
    entropys said:
    Writing by committee is no doubt a key factor in the malaise plaguing Hollywood these days. That and risk averse studios doing remakes, sequels and having series run way beyond their use by date.  
    I think you misread the article somewhat. Stewart is arguing FOR writing by committee, but that’s not how most streaming shows work — scripts now are generally written by a single person or a very small team (two, three people tops).

    Your comments on the problems with risk-averse studios, however, I heartily agree with.
    Oh, I didn’t read it wrong,
    I just whole heartedly disagree with Stewart’s view. In fact his whinging he only had four writers instead of his usual 14 seemed like a “let them eat cake” moment. 
    Each story as a general rule should only have one writer. One.  maybe I would admit a writer and an apprentice. But that’s it. 
    This is why we can’t have nice things. People who have no comprehension of how something is made or done come in as management and treat everything like interchangeable widgets. They walk in, look at a process they know absolutely nothing about, slash staff and costs, then wonder why the result is terrible. 

    So you fire all but one and a half of the writers and demand that they “produce content” on a tighter deadline. You only register the lower quality when viewership falls, because as a widgeteer, you have no idea what’s funny or not. 

    Next, you fire the writer and keep the less expensive apprentice. Things get worse. You threaten to replace the apprentice writer with AI, which ironically “produces content” by distilling and regurgitating the output of all those writers rooms that used to exist, but algorithms have no actual sense of what’s funny, so that “product” stinks as well, and nobody’s watching your more efficiently managed show any more. 

    But sure, you know more than the “whinging” Jon Stewart, who has nurtured and shepherded a writers room that produced a generation of the top comic actors and writers who have themselves gone on to collectively produce billions of dollars worth of the best comedic “content” in the last couple of decades. 

    Of course, you’ll be oblivious to what you’ve destroyed and file a report on how you saved money, first by cutting the 14 writers, then by closing down a failing production unit. Your fellow widgeteers will reward you for all the money you saved and give you a huge bonus. Next thing you know, you’re a hot commodity hired by Boeing because they need an expert Vice President of Widgeteers to slash costs to meet their mysteriously falling revenue. 
    It isn’t about money, I just don’t believe you can be creative by committee. You don’t get a work of art with 14 people working on it at once. Heck I would be happy if the one writer got paid as much as the 14 currently do cumulatively, if the product was good.

    Writing by committee is the path to mediocrity.
    Different types of content have different production pipelines. Jon Stewart is talking about a daily current affairs comedy talk show. Those writers aren't all working on the same material, it's a joke factory where they are looking at current news and trying to come up with something funny to say about each news segment:


    A TV show with a storyline needs fewer writers as it has to follow a story arc. Game of Thrones only had a few writers. Here's an episode credits:


    George R.R. Martin was the original writer of the book and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapted it for a TV screenplay.

    Foundation was written by Isaac Asimov, screenplay by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman with some editors:


    There can be a disconnect when production companies who are accustomed to making narrative TV shows try to produce comedy talk shows the same way and vice versa.
    muthuk_vanalingamStrangeDays
  • Apple is reportedly not investing in OpenAI

    jdw said:
    As I've mentioned under other articles in the past, my experience with ChatGPT4o isn't that great.  I want like to use it to check multiple online sources quickly, in the hope it can Google faster than I can on my own.  And it is fast.  But the problem is, it lies a lot.  So I always ask it for sources.  Then it gives me stupid links that when clicked on, open nothing.  So I have to then as it for plain text URLs.  It complies, but none of them ever work.  EVER!  They lead to the expected domain, but they always result a 404 file not found.  ALWAYS!  I then complain to ChatGPT saying it needs to read the articles it links for me to ensure the article truly exists and exists at the plain text URL it will give to me.  It apologizes and seemingly complies, but it continues to give me more bogus URLs.  I have repeated that cycle multiple times in a row, until my free sessions with GPT4o expires.  It never learns from its mistakes.  It never gets it right.  I've been using it for months, and it hasn't improved at all in that regard.  So I mostly find it useless.  And this experience remains valid even if some GPT lover comes along a raves about how well it summarizes text.  Fine and well, but it still lies and gives bogus URLs to its source info.    
    I find it gives very good answers for technical questions that have a correct answer that would be difficult to find online but it does make mistakes.

    Duckduckgo has it integrated now:


    It offers GPT-4o, Claude 3, Llama 3 and Mistral. Try the other models to see how they compare.

    Very subjective questions like political, social, moral questions will have subjective answers depending on the training data.

    Getting access to high quality training data is going to be the biggest challenge for AI models. It needs a trust/authority model to weight the answers. Medical answers should give more weight to peer-reviewed medical texts over random Reddit/Youtube commenters.

    It's important to remember that the models are not continually trained, they are snapshots. You can ask a model directly when it was trained. GPT-4o answers up to October 2021 so it doesn't know about the past 3 years. Some of its online sources will have expired since it was trained. The new upcoming models have been trained after 2021 with more computer power:


    They now have metrics for how the AI compares to human baseline performance, future models will keep trying to outperform these baselines in different areas:


    It's easier for AI to excel at deterministic problems. Non-deterministic problems need huge amounts of high quality data.

    The processing power they are using on the servers is increasing significantly every year and the models will improve significantly when they are updated.



    Some people won't be impressed with AI models until they reach AGI level, there are people projecting this before 2030.
    muthuk_vanalingamgilly33forgot usernamebyronlwatto_cobra
  • 'F1' could be the last Apple TV+ theatrical release

    sflagel said:
    I don't know why but movies produced by streaming companies just don’t have “it”. And that is especially visible in movies that were produced by studios after the studio became part of a streaming service. 
    Streaming content comes across as very formulaic, possibly a result of trying to avoid too much risk in the face of increasing budgets and competition. The end result is like a clipart version of a movie. Movies like Heart of Stone and Red Notice from Netflix are examples:


    It's like they have a list of scenes that have looked cool in old movies and they stitch them together. They have very generic titles and plotlines and are instantly forgettable.

    It's not the streaming medium to blame entirely. Game of Thrones on HBO set a high bar for streaming content. There's just too high a volume of low quality productions.

    It used to be that straight-to-DVD movies got very little marketing and now they make up the bulk of movies being promoted.

    Making good, original content is difficult and there's often a long timeline. The Game of Thrones books were started in 1991, 20 years before the TV show.

    As time goes on, new writers have an ever-growing 'Simpsons-did-it' problem, where they have to find scenarios and dialog that haven't already been done to exhaustion. Action comedy, wild west, space sci-fi, espionage, romantic comedy, war, animation, mafia/gangs, etc have all been saturated.

    There is something that has been lost in recent years, this is clear to see from movie lists:


    2010 onwards is missing iconic movies:

    Back to the Future, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Lord of the Rings, Aliens, Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones are iconic franchises and this kind of content is getting rarer.

    Those old movies had very clear, unique and interesting storylines and they have impactful events throughout the movies. These days, it's long drawn-out storylines, sequels/reboots, generic themes and even the best content each year is poor quality compared to the older iconic movies.


    I hope this will correct itself but it looks like a downward trend.

    Another trend seems to be fewer consistently good directors. Where are this generation's Spielberg, Cameron, George Lucas, Scorsese, Peter Jackson, Tarantino, Abrams, Kubrick, Nolan:


    There are some lists online with suggestions but nobody in them stands out:


    Good writers, directors and actors are what make good movies, these skills need to be passed down from one generation to the next. It's been a while since there was a must-see movie, people don't share or talk about trailers for new movies like they used to.
    watto_cobra
  • If you're having problems with USB on macOS Sequoia, you're not alone

    I have had an issue for quite some time, possibly since Ventura, where the dialog asking me to allow the USB device to connect disappearing within a fraction of a second. I miss the dialog altogether. My workaround has been to unplug the device and plug it in again, repeatedly in necessary, until I can okay it. From then on I don’t have a problem with the device.
    The confirm dialog disappearing so fast is really badly designed, I don't know how that got past testing. There's a preference in System Settings to avoid manual approval of new devices:

    https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/allow-accessories-to-connect-mchlf779ae93/mac

    Another fix that can sometimes work for drives not mounting is force quitting the diskarbitrationd process and plugging the drive in again.
    Alex1Ndope_ahminemuthuk_vanalingamwatto_cobra