So is the example with the dogs/wolves and the example in the OP.

As to how hard to resolve, the dog/wolves one might be quite difficult, but for the example in the OP, it wouldn’t be hard to feed in all images (during training) with randomly chosen backgrounds to remove the model’s ability to draw any conclusions based on background.

However this would probably unearth the next issue. The one where the human graders, who were probably used to create the original training dataset, have their own biases based on race, gender, appearance, etc. This doesn’t even necessarily mean that they were racist/sexist/etc, just that they struggle to detect certain emotions in certain groups of people. The model would then replicate those issues.

I’m sorry, I think you mean “blasting the pyramids with photons.”

I can only speak for myself. For me it felt really great being able to explore the world having absolutely zero idea of what is what, how much game is left, etc. It is reminiscent of a time when I was a kid and playing a game was exactly like that.

I even got quite sad when my friend “accidentally” told me

I totally agree with you. I was just clearing up why people bring up Spore beyond just the first stage being similar.

Eh, nothing I did was “figuring out which loophole [they] use”. I’d think most people in this thread talking about the mathematics that could make it a true statement are fully aware that the companies are not using any loophole and just say “above average” to save face. It’s simply a nice brain teaser to some people (myself included) to figure out under which circumstances the statement could be always true.

Also if you wanna be really pedantic, the math is not about the companies, but a debunking of the original Tweet which confidently yet incorrectly says that this statement couldn’t be always true.

People mention Spore because the official FAQ mentions Spore.

Thrive is never gonna be “from puddle to space adventures”-type of game.

People also mention Spore because this is exactly what the devs are envisioning. To quote the FAQ:

Gameplay is split into seven stages – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space.

It’s even simpler. A strictly increasing series will always have element n be higher than the average between any element<n and element n.

Or in other words, if the number of calls is increasing every day, it will always be above average no matter the window used. If you use slightly larger windows you can even have some local decreases and have it still be true, as long as the overall trend is increasing (which you’ve demonstrated the extreme case of).

so the names of the ai characters HAVE to be stored in game…

Some games also generate names oh the fly based on rules. For example, KSP stitches names together based on a pre- and suffix and then rejects a few unfortunate possible combinations such as Dildo, prompting a reroll.

I suspect with your game, they just fed it a dictionary of common words though without properly vetting it.

I initially read it as the patients needing insurance to receive those abortions. Or in other words, them not getting medically required abortions if uninsured.

Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.

What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.

Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.

I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?

Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?

On my Android I can scan the wrong finger a few times and it’ll ask for my pin instead. I’m pretty sure rebooting would do the same but I’m too lazy to try that right now.

However, please make sure you try this yourself for your specific phone and Android version before relying on it.

If House has taught me anything, it’s D, but then E.

I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.

Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.

You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas.

I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.

It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.

Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.

Because it’s a cat.

Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.

There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.

We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.

Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.

Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.

I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.

Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.

I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.

What really rubbed me the wrong way with ffxiv’s monetization past the regular subscription was the additional retainer service.

I know it’s not a large benefit to have, even if one’s main focus is on crafting/AH gameplay, but it still annoys me to no end that I could be more efficient by forking over an extra 2USD up to 6 times (iirc) PER MONTH. This means to max out one’s efficiency, one has to nearly double their monthly sub. Ultimately this was one of the many small frustrations with that game that lead to me dropping it, despite overall liking it.