Fair warning, the PC port is awful right now. Crazy memory leaks.

The game is apparently the best Ace Combat ever for about 5 minutes, and then it’s a stuttering mess.

Plus one for this suggestion. The Divinity games are some of the best co-op games ever made.

I believe you can also play Baldur’s Gate 3 co-op as well (same developer for anyone who didn’t know).

Meta does have some very specific issues with their corporate governance in that regard. Mark’s contact basically makes him impossible to fire as CEO. It’s an unusual situation that should have set off alarm bells for investors years ago.

While anime as a medium has a long history of being really, really shit at dark skinned characters, that doesn’t excuse the fact that these models are completely fucking incapable of creating a darker skinned character as a result

Yes, it’s a direct result of how skewed their training data is, but that just calls out how fundamentally flawed the whole process is. A good artist is capable of adopting an anime style while still creating things that are unusual within that style. Just look at the Avatar series. Korra, Kotara and Sokka can all be darker skinned characters that look amazing in a show that still has a distinctly anime look to it.

Characters in anime are not required to be light skinned. That’s a flaw, not a thing to be preserved as if it’s a requirement of the style. Even in actual anime we’re finally starting to see this change for the better. But LLMs cannot produce things that are new or unusual, they can only regress to the mean.

Well, not exactly like. Zendaya’s appearance has been noticeably altered in one quite specific way.

I suspect the answer, in this case, is more likely to be “There just isn’t a lot of market for watching a four hour long documentary in a movie theatre.”

Like, I love Hbomberguy and Folding Ideas, y’know? I am the actual target audience for four hour long documentaries. But if you told me that I could go watch HBomb’s latest in a theatre instead of at home, I’d think you were fucking insane.

Is it impossible there was foul play? No, of course not. But I think this is a pretty good application for Occam’s razor.

Let’s see what happens when it hits streaming. That’s where the real market will be.

Oh, I never specifically claimed this was a Hegseth problem. Notice I said “American” arrogance. This problem has been going on much, much longer than the current electoral cycle.

In all fairness to Raytheon, Patriot is incredibly good at what it does. The problem isn’t the platform, the problem is that what it does is shoot down $80m combat aircraft. When that’s your target, $1-5M a shot is cheap. And Patriot is deadly accurate. Ukraine has used it to basically neutralize the Russian airforce.

The fault here is with US Military command, who point blank refused to take drones seriously while everyone else was working overtime to adapt to them. Ukraine actually offered to partner with the US on training and technology specifically to intercept shahed drones and the US turned them down.

Now, we can only speculate as to why that is, and it’s certainly possible that arms industry lobbyists wanted to avoid Ukrainian defence companies gaining any share of the US market. But that would only be speculation. I suspect it has far more to do with American arrogance; “What can little Ukraine teach us about war?”

In the interest of being factual I have to point out that it’s not quite that bad. You’re quoting the export price, but the US Military gets them for closer to $1M per because they funded the development of the system and have ongoing contracts for delivery.

Still not great when you’re spending a million a shot to intercept $20,000 dollar drones.

The bigger issue though is production capacity. Raytheon can’t just magically quadruple their output overnight. Patriot is an extremely complex device that requires skilled personnel and complex tooling to manufacture, as well as a LOT of safety procedures (it is a missile after all), in addition to the rare earth requirements you noted. Even if the US offers to start buying them at export price Raytheon can’t just make that production capacity appear out of nowhere. And in order for them to scale up capacity they’re going to want guarantees of ongoing purchases so that they don’t just do a bunch of capex to meet a short term need.

Check out Owlcat’s new Expanse game, Osiris Reborn. It’s an obvious love letter to everything about the Mass Effect series, while also being the best looking video game adaptation of the Expanse yet.

Incredible game

Three of the dead were no-hook privates. Literally just starting their careers.

The scary part is that this was just a grass fire. Those happen all the time in training areas. You’re firing tracers, explosives, etc. It’s very, very easy to start a fire. They happen at least once a week during routine training like this. You call it in, range control takes care of it. They had no reason to expect this would be any different.

Then the wind changed and suddenly the fire was moving towards them at 100km/h.

Fucking cowards

Except no one is putting wells down in the middle of a 600km^2 army training area.

Like, that’s something I really need to stress here. CFB Wainwright is absolutely massive. None of this was taking place anywhere near established oil and gas infrastructure.

Remember, in CAF parlance, “live fire” includes artillery, missiles, and 2000lb bombs. Sandbags aren’t gonna do much against those.

Edit to add: Which isn’t really the point, because you don’t put live fire within kilometers of anything like that on purpose. This was either a major fuck up or - more likely - something that wasn’t known about, like a naturally occurring gas pocket that was ignited by an explosive round.

I’m going to “suggest” that the latter is far, far more likely to have been the case in this particular instance.

Edit 2: We have the full story now. No gas, no infrastructure. It was literally just a grass fire. These happen all the time on training grounds. Live munitions start fires very easily, especially tracer rounds. The difference was the 100km/h wind gusts which whipped up the fire and caused it to move extremely quickly, much faster than normal safety protocols anticipate.

BBC also reporting on it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr86z0w4lxdxo

According to Global’s coverage, this was a live fire exercise gone wrong;

The explosion was caused by a live-fire training exercise hitting a gas line or gas well on the base around 4 p.m. MT, multiple Canadian Armed Forces sources told Global News.

You’re not wrong exactly, but I think you’re perhaps assuming an unnecessarily absolutist approach. If there are legacy systems that need windows, keep windows for those legacy systems. What you’re describing are exceptions, not the norm. The vast, vast majority of public service computers could just as easily be running Linux.

As for who the Federal government sues, that’s why you go with an enterprise release like Red Had or Ubuntu. You find a company that you’re happy to work with, you pay them maybe 25% of what you’re paying MS right now, and in return you get a full support plan with clearly defined SLAs.

This isn’t so much “Nothing’s impossible” as it is “It’s really not that hard.” These are solved problems. Plenty of governments have already switched over to open source.

Now that people are shunting easier requests to local models and sending the harder problems out, the hyper scalers have less income, so they have to charge more.

While you’re 100% correct about the fact that this is happening, and it is a serious problem for the hyper-scalers, it’s really, really important to note that even before this started happening, LLMs were already hilariously unprofitable, both on the software and the hardware side. For the AI companies, there is simply no way to charge people what the models actually cost to run and still turn a profit. On the data-centre side, the turnover on burned out GPUs is going to annihilate any hope of profitability. They’re treating as capex what is essentially a consumable and their business models simply do not account for this reality.

The behaviour you’re identifying here is basically just a swift kick in the guts to someone who was already bleeding to death from several bullet wounds. Seriously unhelpful, but not remotely the impending cause of death.

Basically, yes.

This comes back to the basic problem with LLMs as a business proposition; any digital service can either be cheap and frivolous, or expensive and necessary. You can even, if you do things right, be cheap and necessary. But you cannot ever be expensive and frivolous.

LLMs were supposed to be expensive and necessary, but it turns out they’re just so unreliable that they simply cannot perform an essential role. They must always be disposable; fun, or useful, but never essential.

Which leaves only cheap and frivolous as an option. And they’re just not cheap, nor does it seem likely that they ever will be.

So you get Character.ai filling chapter 11, because people simply will not ever pay what it actually costs to run these models just so that they can have a computer program pretend to be Lois Griffin for them.

I’m going to be completely real with you, I’m really not sure how many developers have the Gentoo user base that high on their list of priorities.