• 1 Post
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle



  • Right so WhatsApp and messenger are gatekeepers and they must allow interoperation with who anyone who wants to ie me running my own signal instance?

    There are several stipulations on interoperability in the new regulation (Ctrl+F “interop”). To my understanding it is stipulated that they have to make interoperability possible for certain third parties, but how to go about this is not exactly specified on a technical level - meaning the specific way to implement this is left to the gatekeeper. So your Signal server may or may not be able to depending on how exactly they go about this.

    They also need to interoperate with signal hence if a works with b and c works with a why wouldn’t b work with c?

    No they need to enable interoperability period. Says nothing about Signal (the software) per se. Meta has announced they plan on implementing it based on the Signal protocol (not Signal messenger software, not Signal server software).

    Cos if thats hoe it works or if im not allowed to interoperate with WhatsApp or messenger in the first place then this juat seems like its handing the monopoly away from the companies to the government and giving the people fuck all.

    To my knowledge the aim of the regulation is exactly that, to allow anybody interoperability with these “core platform services”. The status quo is that the regulations has been announced by the EU, it has gone into effect, and Meta has announced how they will implement interoperability to comply. Once the implementation is available and then found lacking in regard to the regulation it would be up to the affected third party to sue Meta over it.






  • That’s not really contrary to the point, but orthogonal to it.

    What? According to the article based on which we are discussing this news that is the point (allegedly). And it is unrelated to your point yes. I’m not entirely sure where you even came up with your point to be honest.

    Your argument is the same kind of “consumer rights” argument that I’ve seen everywhere on the internet, because you are implying that there is material harm to the people of Vietnam caused by Steam’s banning. Which is a fairly specious argument. It’s the loss of a luxury item. No one is materially harmed by it.

    I guess the consumers, i.e. the people of Vietnam in possession of this luxury item, would disagree with that assessment. Especially if they have sunk significant finances and/or time into their Steam account.

    It’s not like Vietnam banned insulin.

    Nobody said it is?

    And while you may not use the same language, you are effectively saying that every consumer on the planet should have free access to the best products available for whatever “thing” they want. In this case, video games.

    Again, what? I’m saying people will want to keep access to something they already paid for, their games on Steam and the according metadata like savegames, multiplayer access, and such. Not sure how you managed to pull this interpretation out of what I said, but be assured it’s incorrect.

    It’s a de facto argument for free market economic policies.

    Since the whole logic chain that led you to this conclusion was already riddled with errors from the very beginning this is simply a non sequitur.


  • But if the Vietnamese video game industry is actively harmed by Steam, an American company, using its vast resources to outcompete Vietnamese publishers, then what is your opposition to this that doesn’t encompass a de facto defense of free market capitalism?

    Not GP but the article didn’t say that Steam outcompeted local developers by “using its vast resources”. On the contrary, it alleged that local developers cannot compete on Steam with international developers, because those do not have to apply the local regulations:

    Citing it as “an injustice to domestic publishers”, Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development “will die” if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games.

    A somewhat shaky argument considering that the same is true for many other countries applying their own local regulations, which Vietnamese developers do not have to follow.

    But anyway, what is my opposition that doesn’t encompass a de facto defence of free market capitalism? The damage to the users. What about all the Vietnamese people losing access to Steam’s online features, which are arguably necessary nowadays for many games, especially multiplayer ones. And for what? To benefit Vietnamese businesses? Not very socialist of you comrade Vietnam. *smh*

    In any case, this is all pure speculation at this point, since both parties have yet to make a statement about the situation:

    At the time of writing, there’s been no formal word from Vietnamese authorities or Steam about the “ban”, […]

    That said, my current head cannon goes something like this:

    Vietnamese devs: Dude, these regulations on games are killing us. We can’t compete on Steam with games like these.
    The Party: Okay we hear you. *bans Steam*
    Vietnamese devs: Wait, what? (← we are here)

    Edit: formatting




  • If you rise anywhere above lever 5 or so, the difficulty ratchets up so much it makes the main quest nearly impossible to complete.

    Didn’t Oblivion already have the difficulty slider? You could just adjust that, no?

    I know level scaling is a big topic in the industry, but for me, the way it’s implemented nearly ruins what is otherwise a mostly great game.

    Two of the first RPGs I played were Gothic and Gothic II which released approximately alongside Morrowind and Oblivion, and they just had no dynamic level scaling at all, so I don’t really see the appeal either. A tiny Mole Rat being roughly the same challenge as a big bad Orc just breaks immersion. If you were to meet the latter in early game it would just curb stomp you, which provided an immersive way of gating content and a real sense of achievement when you came back later with better armour and weapons to finally defeat the enemy who gave you so many problems earlier. Basically the same experience you had with Death Claws in Fallout New Vegas when compared to Fallout 3 - they aren’t just a set piece, they are a real challenge.

    The games had their own problems, for example the fighting system sucked, and I’m told the English translation was so bad the games just flopped in the Anglosphere, putting them squarely in the Eurojank category of games. But creating a real sense of progression and an immersive world were certainly not amongst their weaknesses.



  • a neural network with a series of layers (W in this case would be a single layer)

    I understood this differently. W is a whole model, not a single layer of a model. W is a layer of the Transformer architecture, not of a model. So it is a single feed forward or attention model, which is a layer in the Transformer. As the paper says, a LoRA:

    injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture

    It basically learns shifting the output of each Transformer layer. But the original Transformer stays intact, which is the whole point, as it lets you quickly train a LoRA when you need this extra bias, and you can switch to another for a different task easily, without re-training your Transformer. So if the source of the bias you want to get rid off is already in these original models in the Transformer, you are just fighting fire with fire.

    Which is a good approach for specific situations, but not for general ones. In the context of OP you would need one LoRA for fighting it sexualising Asian women, then you would need another one for the next bias you find, and before you know it you have hundreds and your output quality has degraded irrecoverably.


  • Yeah but that’s my point, right?

    That

    1. you do not “replace data until your desired objective”.
    2. the original model stays intact (the W in the picture you embedded).

    Meaning that when you change or remove the LoRA (A and B), the same types of biases will just resurface from the original model (W). Hence “less biased” W being the preferable solution, where possible.

    Don’t get me wrong, LoRAs seem quite interesting, they just don’t seem like a good general approach to fighting model bias.


  • First, there is no thing as a “de-biased” training set, only sets with whatever target series of biases you define for them to reflect.

    Yes, I obviously meant “de-biased” by definition of whoever makes the set. Didn’t think it worth mentioning, as it seems self evident. But again, in concrete terms regarding the OP this just means not having your dataset skewed towards sexualised depictions of certain groups.

    1. either you replace data until your desired objective, which will reduce the model’s quality for any of the alternatives

    […]
    For reference, LoRAs are a sledgehammer approach to apply the first way.

    The paper introducing LoRA seems to disagree (emphasis mine):

    We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks.

    There is no data replaced, the model is not changed at all. In fact if I’m not misunderstanding it adds an additional neural network on top of the pre-trained one, i.e. it’s adding data instead of replacing any. Fighting bias with bias if you will.

    And I think this is relevant to a discussion of all models, as reproduction of training set biases is something common to all neural networks.


  • “Inclusive models” would need to be larger.

    [citation needed]

    To my understanding the problem is that the models reproduce biases in the training material, not model size. Alignment is currently a manual process after the initial unsupervised learning phase, often done by click-workers (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), and aimed at coaxing the model towards more “politically correct” outputs; But ultimately at that time the damage is already done since the bias is encoded in the model weights and will resurface in the outputs just randomly or if you “jailbreak” enough.

    In the context of the OP, if your training material has a high volume of sexualised depictions of Asian women the model will reproduce that in its outputs. Which is also the argument the article makes. So what you need for more inclusive models is essentially a de-biased training set designed with that specific purpose in mind.

    I’m glad to be corrected here, especially if you have any sources to look at.



  • All true, and maybe I have been understating my negative estimation of the whole ordeal a bit, but we are like five levels of escalation deep at this point, and all I’m saying is it’s getting harder and harder to gain a nuanced understanding of the situation. Which is important.

    Anyway, given the totality of what I have seen so far LTT has either always been or just devolved into an entirely toxic work environment. Their reaction so far doesn’t inspire any confidence in the slightest. On the contrary, it reinforces all of the accusations.


  • This isn’t “something”. This is a “we’re sorry (not really)” video. If you watch it in the context of “I have no favorites in this game” and look it it pretty objectively, it feels like just a bait to try to stop the bleeding.

    Yeah that’s what I meant with “Southpark-y ‘I’m sorry’ vibes”. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

    P.S.: And that’s… “something”.

    A week? To refine all the processes in that size of a company?

    No, a week without videos to get started with reviewing processes. I agree with you in general though, if it stops there it’s nothing more than PR. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but the allegations by that former employee are certainly a dampener on an optimistic view of the situation.