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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Most people don’t actually understand how copyright works. And the actual right that’s restricted is quite ridiculous but it is how it is…

    Copyright is not a right given to the copyright holder, unlike every other right in law. Copyright is a exclusion placed on every other human being on earth from reproducing what you did (except few countries that didn’t sign it but practically no one lives there or is a territory that effectively works under another sovereignty which does). This distinction is very important. That is, everytime something is created, every other human now has less freedom since they could do that thing before but no longer can. So if I create an original bunny like character, that is copyrighted to me. But I could always depict that and so could you–had you thought of it. But now you no longer can.

    This means that virtually every thing made in relation to that original copyright becomes illegal unless you get permission from the copyright holder. There are exceptions such as transformative, parody, fair use, etc but I’ll not get into that for now.

    In other words specific to this case, every game footage on earth is illegal. But they only continue to exist by the grace of the companies not telling them to take it down. Some companies actually write into their EULA/terms that fan content, etc may be allowed, but again, those are the exceptions. The rule of law is that everything is illegal to start. And that only the copyright holder and its agents be able to request a punishment for breaking the law.

    It’s a system where it makes every normal human beings into a law breaking entity first and by doing so, it allows the copyright holder to punish anyone they see fit.

    This is not a frivolous DMCA. And even if it was, there has been no case where that was ever punished. Even outright perjury for DMCA–which I’ve dealt with thousands of times doesn’t actually get punished in practise.








  • I don’t know if steam does this since I have no experience selling on steam, but generally when you sell anything anywhere the sales channels will often demand that you give them the lowest retail price. Most commonly done by ones that give the most exposure since they have that much more power. Failure to do so will result in some penalty (Amazon prevents your offer from being in buy box) or just outright refusal to take your product (such as Walmart).

    Additionally, customers complain too when you sell at two different pricing elsewhere. If you’re a company that gives virtually no support (like you sell pickles or whatever), you prob don’t care. But for things like games, you’ll get bombarded with demands that they got ripped off by buying from one place and ask for difference in pricing or submit a refund request. Refunds are more expensive to sellers than not selling at all since you still have to pay transaction/refund fees by payment processors. Or if physical product, cost of shipping as well.

    Different sales channels having different pricing isn’t really an option. It’s not really worth it. You’ll get problems left and right.





  • There are many different niches of ML. 99% of hobbyist would use consumer grade hardware. It’s quite frankly more than good enough.

    Even in commercial usage, consumer GPUs provide better value unless you need to do something that very specifically require a huge vram pool. Like connecting multiple A100 GPUs to have hundreds or tens of thousands of gigabyte vram. Those use cases only come up if you’re making base models for general purpose.

    If you’re using it for single person use case, something like 4090 is actually the best hardware. Enough ram to run almost anything and it’s higher clock speed than enterprise GPU means your results come back faster.

    Even training doesn’t require that much vram. Chat models are generally more vram heavy but if you’re doing specific image training like stable diffusion for how to render your face, or some specific fetish porn, you only really need like 12GB of vram to do it. There are ways to even do it at lower like 8GB but 12 is sweet value spot where even 3060 or 4060ti can do. Consumer GPUs will get that trained in like 30min to 24hrs depending on settings and model.


  • I relate with the The Inner Light episode so much it hurts. I had a phase where I had dreams where I lived an entire life from childhood, getting married, having kids, to playing with my grandkids and eventually facing my death of old age. And then I’d wake up completely drenched in sweat from exhaustion. Knowing that none of these people I deeply cared about and loved are real; that they’re mere figment of my imagination completely devastated me. Though I didn’t suddenly learn to play a flute, I can’t help but feel that each of these dreams permanently changed me in some way. Even decades after having these dreams, I still feel and it still affects me. I salute to the writer of this episode who probably has had a similar experience as I did.