bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Back in the day they let you nuke a self-styled god-emperor's fascist resource extraction empire of genocidal death cultist twice, but nowadays you can't even spare one little warhead for a16z?

Ok maybe this sneer is a little edgy even for my own tastes. Up it goes anyway.

Ok.

The usual lifecycle of an anime fan looks something like this: they are introduced to the format with great IP – the Attack on Titan anime or the One Piece live action show or one of the miHoYo games.

I don't know how things are in Japan, but I'll be damned if I ever meet someone who gateway series into anime was a live action adaptation of One Piece.

AI companions, an evolution of classic visual novels, are the most popular for anime characters and IP.

The most popular what for anime characters and IP?

Anime studios are adopting new AI technologies to create content faster and more cost effectively, but they are also iterating on new core loops with AI-native character interactions.

Some of them probably are. Screw them.

VTubing has transformed the way millions of anime fans interact with their favorite characters in new social and parasocial relationships by allowing any fan to roleplay as the characters themselves.

You can't just casually throw "social and parasocial" in there and then describe a purely parasocial relationship. Apologize to Shannon Strucci.

Also this is like saying television has allowed us to roleplay our favorite Radio announcers. They seem to be under the impression that the vtuber phenomenon is about people digitally cosplaying their favorite anime character together when it's more like an actor putting on a performance as an original character. And for the big ones, a bunch of Japanese style idol industry bullshit layered on top.

While audience inteeaction is usually a part of it, the nature of the medium remains highly asymmetric.

Ready to dive in? Let’s jam.

Keep Cowboy Bebop's name out of your filthy mouth.

Anime entered the mainstream in the 2000s with popular shounen anime like Naruto, One Piece, and now Attack on Titan.

I might be behind the times but even I don't think AoT is new. At least say Jujutsu Kaisen or something.

This affinity has led to one of the most popular use cases of AI recently – AI waifus and husbandos.

May all your subculture in-jokes die a dignified death before a VC firm references them in a blog post.

Waifu / husbando culture derives from visual novels, and AI companions are the logical extension of these animated storybook games.

"Mai waifu" was originally a funny engrish quote from Azumanga Daioh and was used to refer to any favorite character. The non tongue en cheek relationship simulation aspect merged with the meme later on.

Originally, visual novels were serialized books with anime-styled pictures in between.

This doesn't seem to be what the linked Medium article is saying and seems like they're just mixing up light novels and visual novels.

While there are many practical use cases for AI-simulated human interactions – AI as therapist, as teacher, as assistant, etc.

Practical, huh?

For instance, character.ai’s top characters are all from Genshin Impact; Raiden, Yae Miko, and Hu Tao take some of the top spots at 390M, 202M, and 113M messages respectively as of the time of this blog, compared to Elon Musk at a mere 40M messages.

To be fair I'd rather take almost anyone, gacha game character or not, other than Elon Musk as my conversation partner, whether simulated or real.

The majority of top anime games and visual novels are role playing games that feature a romance mechanic, and so it’s natural for fans to want to deepen their connection to their favorite IP and characters through active interactions.

Factually dubious claim aside, how hard is it to write "series" or at least "anime" like a real human being with feelings instead of "IP".

I've watched some anime series and felt things about them. I've never given a shit about an anime IP. Why would I, never owned one.

UGC Democratizes Creation for Anime Fans Anime is the new playground for content creation. Fans often engage with anime IP by creating their own versions of art, novels, and games, and innovation is happening across the stack.

Pixiv has existed for ages. Even before that was doujinshi, and people have made art, original and derivative, since before the beginning of civilization. Your idea of modding custom animu avatars for shovelware Love Plus sequels is not new.

There are a few notable reasons for the popularity of these games. The first is that there’s clear player demand against a shortage of high quality anime IP games; one example is Palworld’s recent success as the “Pokemon with guns” game, selling over 25M copies in a month across Steam and Xbox Game Pass.

Palworld is evidence of a lack of high quality anime games much like all nonblack nonravens are evidence of a lack of nonblack ravens.

The second reason is that the anime IP licensing landscape is notoriously difficult to navigate for developers, creating a potential undersupply of games.

It's actually incredibly easy to create and publish media based on anime and get away with it. You just can't do it too professionally. If you love democratizing art so much, go to Comiket.

Also there are tons of licensed games based on anime what the hell are you talking about?

Some startups like Kasagi Labo, Layer, and Story Protocol are tackling this issue to make IP more democratized and easier to access.

Misspelled "plutocratized" there. Also had a double take checking out the third one: "Story is the World’s IP Blockchain, onramping Programmable IP to power the next generation of AI, DeFi, and consumer applications."

Beyond UGC platforms, AI models and tools are enabling first-time creators to make compelling anime content that previously would only have been possible with a team of professionals.

I'm sure I will continue to be as thrilled as I have been up to now to see more art made by people who can't make art and filling the gap with statistical average of all art ever.

On the other side of the spectrum, professional game studios are leading the charge for high production-value consumer experiences that build on or create new IP. Anime games are some of the highest grossing in the games industry, accounting for 20% of spend on the mobile app store despite only having usage penetration of <3%.

Sounds great (not), but I heard someone say there was a lack of high quality anime IP games. Surely you can't both be right?

There are two ways that anime game studios broaden the horizon for players. First, they usually create the highest quality games of the most popular IPs like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, or Dragon Quest.

Consistency, what's that? Maybe invest in a bigger context window so you can remember what you generated a few paragraphs ago.

For now, we’ve been covering mostly free-to-play (F2P) mobile games. However, there are several successful PC/console anime games as well: Doki Doki Literature Club, the Persona series, the Final Fantasy series, the Fire Emblem series, and Phoenix Wright, just to name a few.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a fully original freeware pay-what-you-want indie game that became a viral sleeper hit. You're comparing it to Final fucking Fantasy? From a business perspective? Hell, despite the art style it's not even Japanese! The only connecting thread between these games is that they have vaguely anime style art in them.

Anime is also leading the way for digital play, turning previously passive consumption of linear media into a new dynamic form of entertainment.

It's really not.

Yea, I'm glad a nuclear plant is being restored but it sucks that it's because of fucking plagi-o-matic.

And then… suddenly just as I Elon kissed me passionately. Elon climbed on top of me and we started to make out keenly against a cybertruk. He took of my $8 and I took of his 🤔. I even took of my punk. Then he put his splurp juis into my astro-ape and we did it for the first time.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! " I screamed. I was beginning to get an lamborgasm. We started to pump n dump everywhere and my pale body became all warm. And then….

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!"

It was….Peter Thiel!

Yes, I want petty tyrants spying on me every minute of my life so they can punish me for any choice that might be unprofitable to them. That's called being a libertarian!

I know I won't be secretly happy if they do this.

There are tradeoffs to higher and higher grades of redundancy and the appropriate level depends on the situation. Across VMs you just need to know how to set up HA for the system. Across physical hosts requires procuring a second server and more precious Us on a rack. Across racks/aisles might sometimes require renting a whole second rack. Across fire door separated rooms requires a DC with such a feature. Across DCs might require more advanced networking, SDN fabrics, VPNs, BGP and the like. Across sites in different regions you might have latency issues, you might have to hire people in multiple locations or deal with multiple colo providers or ISPs, maybe even set up entire fiber lines. Across states or countries you might have to deal with regulatory compliance in multiple jurisdictions. Especially in 2001 none of this was as easy as selecting a different Availability Zone from a dropdown.

Running a business always involves accepting some level of risk. It seem reasonable for some companies to decide that if someone does a 9/11 to them, they have bigger problems than IT redundancy.

At a previous job a colleague and I used to take on most of the physical data center work. Many of the onprem customers were moving to public cloud, so a good portion of the work was removing hardware during decommissioning.

We wanted to optimize out use of the rack space, so the senior people decided we would move one of our storage clusters to the adjacent rack during a service break night. The box was built for redundancy, with dual PSUs and network ports, so we considered doing the move with the device live, with at least one half of the device connected at all times. We settled on a more conventional approach and one of the senior specialists live migrated the data on another appliance before the move.

Down in the DC the other senior showed us what to move and where and we started to carefully unplug the first box. He came to check on us just after we had taken out the first box.

Now I knew what a storage cluster appliance looked like, having carried our old one out of the DC not too long ago. You have your storage controller, with the CPU and OS and networking bits on it, possibly a bunch of disk slots too, and then you had a number of disk shelves connected to that. This one was quite a bit smaller, but that's just hardware advancement for you. From four shelves of LFF SAS drives to some SSDs. Also the capacity requirements were trending downwards what with customers moving to pubcloud.

So we put the storage controller to its new home and started to remove the disk shelf from under it. There was a 2U gap between the controller and the shelf, so we decided to ask if that was on purpose and if we should leave a gap in the new rack as well.

"What disk shelf?"

Turns out the new storage appliance was even smaller than I had thought. Just one 2U box, which contained two entire independent storage controllers, not just redundant power and network. The thing we removed was not a part of the cluster we were moving, it was the second cluster, which was currently also handling the duties of the appliance we were actually supposed to move. Or would have, if we hadn't just unplugged it and taken it out.

We re-racked the box in a hurry and then spent the rest of the very long night rebooting hundreds of VMs that had gone read only. Called in another specialist, told the on-duty admin to ignore the exploding alarm feed and keep the customers informed, and so on. Next day we had a very serious talk with the senior guy and my boss. I wrote a postmortem in excruciating detail. Another specialist awarded me a Netflix Chaos Monkey sticker.

The funny thing is that there was quite reasonable redundancy in place and so many opportunities to avert the incident, but Murphy's law struck hard:

1. We had decomm'd the old cluster not a long ago, reinforcing my expectation of a bigger system.
2. The original plan of moving the system live would have left both appliances reachable at all times. Even if we made a mistake, it would have only broken one cluster's worth of stuff.
3. Unlike most of the hardware in the DC, the storage appliances were unlabeled.
4. The senior guy went back to his desk right before we started to unwittingly unplug the other system
5. The other guy I was working with was a bit unsure about removing the second box, but thought I knew better and trusted that.

You can totally hack a plane using a buffer overflow. C airlines don't check how many tickets they sell on a single flight. Usually if you overbook a flight, they will simply reallocate some of their buffer into business class. However, if you buy a bunch of tickets to one flight at once, you can craft a scenario where you overwrite the pilot.

Yea a plane hijacking is totally like a buffer overflow.

Bleeding is also a bit like a buffer overflow, since blood goes in a place it's not supposed to. Hurricanes are another example of a buffer overflow. Accidentally wearing a shirt inside out? Buffer overflow. Unskippable ads are buffer overflow. War is buffer overflow. I had my buffer overflown by some guy claiming to be a wallet inspector. Aliens are a type of buffer overflow. I sometimes have buffer overflow with my girlfriend. Buffer overflow was an inside job. I put too much shine paste in my polishing machine and you better believe that was a buffer overflow.

When a train crashes into a station building, that's not a buffer overflow, though. That's a buffer overrun.

Easy with finnishbrain

Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?

Fuck it, we're going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.

Now that is leaving your mark in history as an academic.

Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

I'll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

Basilisks commuting

https://xcancel.com/equine__dentist/status/1832568341740851266

Oh and you have to hang out with other Ape Holders. Oh and also may get your retinas sunburned from unsafe UV lights.

Ouch, that sounds painful. Can't I just get the retina burn without the having to hang out with Ape Holders part?

Not with multiple slurp juices!

I'll let you figure out the value of Ape if one Ape equals multiple Apes.

AWS is only tolerated because product managers ask for it, not because engineers like it; AWS is shit.

Yes, but the competition is hardly much better. Well, maybe Google is, I didn't touch it much back when I still did public cloud stuff. Azure leads with "look, our VPS offering is called 'Virtual Machines' instead of 'EC2', isn't that simple?" and then proceeds to make everything even clunkier and more complicated than AWS. And don't get me started on the difference in technical and customer support from the two.

There is no moat.

You keep reiterating this, but I still need you to explain the implications. Ok sure, you can run a model on a home computer. Nonwithstanding that those models still amount to overhyped novelty toys, home computers are also capable of running servers, databases, APIs, office suites, you name it. Still, corporations and even consumers are renting these as SaaS and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

The AI fad is highly hype driven, so there's still incentive to be the one who trains the latest, biggest and shiniest model, and that still takes datacenters' worth of specialized compute and training data. LLM-based AI is an industry built on FOMO. How long until that shiny new LLM torrent you got from 4chan is so last season?

And the OP is correct. Llama is not open source. "The neighbors" only took it from Meta in the same sense warez sites have taken software forever. Only in this case the developer was the one committing the copyright infringement.