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They’ve deep-sixed their own product

There’s been much hilarity this week about Google’s Gemini and its allergy to images of white people. They’ve had to pause marketing of the image generator.

Someone asked Gemini to explain how it works and it did. Basically, when you ask Gemini to make a picture, your prompt first goes to the language model, which is instructed to insert words like “diversity” into your phrase before passing it to the image generator.

This is an extremely dumb and crude method of getting the result they thought they wanted. There’s no attempt to distinguish between plausible diversity and historical impossibilities, which leads to hilarious images like a racially diverse Waffen SS. And my personal favorite: a 17th Century English king eating watermelon (Gemini couldn’t recognize the racial stereotype because the model itself had injected race).

I can’t get over how crude this bodge is. The irony is that if they hadn’t messed with it, it looks like they had a pretty good image generator on their hands. They have damaged their product, perhaps fatally.

February 22, 2024 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 8

One word: Ravenholm

Oh my word, people – the Half Life 2 VR mod has just been released in beta and it is a BLAST. I haven’t encountered a bug yet and I’ve got as far as driving down the coast blowing up ant lions.

Well, I mean, I guess ant lions are bugs.

The original is 18 years old (wow! really?) and the textures are a bit jarring in VR, but the gameplay is spectacular. The team promises to release regular tweaks. It’s a fan project and it’s free, which is awesome. And good on Valve for letting them do it.

And thank you to everyone who weighed in on my USB issues. I’ve been reading up on power supplies. One article that said a gaming rig should have a 1000 watt power supply. Mine is 500, so that seems the likely culprit. I mean, it probably doesn’t qualify as a gaming rig in 2022, but it’s still likely underpowered.

Now I have to bull my way through the specs and pick one.

Oh, hey, Windows invited me to install Windows 11 today. First time. Anybody taken the plunge yet? I’m…dubious.

Good weekend, all!

September 23, 2022 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 14

The metaverse is dumb and gay

Zuckerberg got a shellacking this week for proudly posting this selfie. He celebrated one of his VR products expanding into France and Spain with this dead-eyed robot standing in front of two glommy clipart clichés. Who wouldn’t want to live in cyberspace!

Never send a socially abnormal nerd to build your interactive experience.

Meta sank $2.81 billion into this stuff in just the second quarter of 2022 and it’s still this ugly.

Thing is, so many other apps are beautiful. AAA games are an absolute blast in VR. But single person experiences are tightly curated. They can afford high quality 3D models because they control everything in the environment so carefully.

For a social VR application, you’ll have lots of people interacting and everyone needs an individually recognizable avatar. That leads to simple, awful images like the above.

They’re going to need much more processing or much better designers. And that’s just to deal with the ugliness of the metaverse. The uselessness is a whole ‘nother thing.

August 23, 2022 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 10

Ew.

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is – and I cannot stress this enough – ugly.

I’ve been trying to find a way to show you, but (no surprise) you’re not allowed to take screenshots in the normal way. When you take them with your virtual phone, you can only share them with Facebook friends – which, annoyingly, does not include your own self.

So let me describe. The character design of the avatars is poor. Those people in the picture above? It’s worse than that. This isn’t an actual screen shot (their usernames aren’t floating above their heads).

You do not have legs in the Metaverse. You are a floating torso that pootles around like a malfunctioning robot.

The Oculus Quest has multiple cameras to track the position of your head and hands. This means you can look over at people and wave or, like, fake robot dance. But wait! Your hands are also how you control everything. For example, to call up your menu, you raise your left arm and look at your wrist. But it doesn’t pop up unless you catch it just right, so you usually need a few tries.

Yes, that’s right – a whole room of zooming legless robots making gentle wanking motions.

The tracking is so good, it can track individual finger movements (there are some fun-looking games based on this idea). Even better! Imagine if you will an auditorium full of ugly torsos, zooming around waving their arms in the air and wiggling their fingers. Only a man as socially awkward as Zuck could think this would appeal.

One of the reasons the Oculus is so inexpensive compared to most VR rigs is that it can’t handle some of the more sophisticated visuals. But really, that’s no excuse for ugly design. I’ve spent my whole day on this island, which is a masterpiece of a silly VR world the Oculus can handle just fine.

March 16, 2022 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 3

I have no Photoshop, and I must scream

scream

Well, I have Photoshop now. I got it working in the end, but I had to reboot several times to do it. And one in three times I reboot, the computer does its best imitation of a brick. And has taken to freezing up randomly when it does run.

I wasn’t sure I’d be here tonight.

It sounds like a serious hardware problem, but the issues I’ve had with it track every new Windows update. New updates, new slew of misbehavior. Then it settles down for a while.

I’m well overdue for another one. This machine is about eight years old. But I always buy the highest spec machine I can possibly afford, so I’ve been putting it off until I hafta.

So, it sounds like the perfect day to change my cellphone provider, yes?

[gentle sobbing]

November 15, 2017 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 21

Feh!

plugs

I rolled out of bed this morning, made a cup of joe, sat down and switched on my computer monitor and…watched the screen fade to white. Like, totally white.

I did the usual cable-rattling, multi-booting and Googling without much luck (looks like a common problem with laptops, though).

As demonstrated by this crappy photo I stole off the net, my graphics card’s main plug is the one in the middle, the DVI. It doesn’t have the top one, the old VGA, but it does have several variations on HDMI. My monitor has VGA and DVI. BUT! I have an HDMI to VGA adapter thingie (huh! Wonder how that happened). Trust me: this paragraph made sense.

So I’ve got my monitor plugged into the HDMI-to-VGA. It works. Everything looks wrong and shit, but it works. (Hence probably no shiny new monitor for weasel, boo!).

So! Is the HDMI cable screwed? Is the HDMI port on the card screwed, or the one on the monitor? Do I just need to take it all apart, give it a good shake and a clean, and put it together again? Who cares? I’ve brought a shit-ton of work home this weekend and I don’t have time to mess with it!

Hope yours goes better…see you after the weekend.

July 21, 2017 — 9:12 pm
Comments: 18

insert thread pun

threads

Eh. I stayed late at work to meet a client who never turned up. I don’t have much to show for myself today.

This guy recreates old master fragments using round frames and a single spool of thread. The text says he usually does computer art and I’m sure he devised a program to work out how to cross over from what angles to get the dark spots just right make the picture. Still cool.

Speaking in my capacity as somebody who went to art school and later dropped out, we need a word for works that are extremely cool but ultimately pointless and emotionally sterile. I don’t have a suggestion, I’m just pointing out the need.

Yes, yes…I am reduced to trawling Bored Panda tonight. Now I’m’a go to Skyrim and shoot more arrows into my horse.

November 3, 2016 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 8

Sad weasel

witcher

I don’t mean to name-drop, but our new Home Secretary is the MP for nearby Hastings and Rye and, somewhere out there, there’s a picture of me standing next to her.

She’s a squishy, warmenist cow. *spit*

To celebrate my awesome new video card, I bought the last expansion to the Witcher 3, Blood and Wine. I haven’t played that game since February. Is it sad that I was really pleased and happy to see Geralt again?

Yes, that is definitely sad.

July 14, 2016 — 9:30 pm
Comments: 10

The old card with the new card in his arms

cards

By gum, that’s a big-ass video card. It fit in the case, just. For an awful moment, I thought I didn’t have the right power connector — the old one had two banks of six pins, and this one had a bank of six and a bank of eight — but I found that my old power supply had an extra two pin connector zip-tied to the cable for just such an eventuality.

‘Scuse me, I’m off to play the Witcher Wild Hunt, with that last bit of new DLC.

Oh, by the way, I haven’t disabled the rating system, it’s just not working somehow. I started to hunt down the problem and fix it, but I’m kind of torn. On the one hand, I really liked being able to rate comments, but on the other hand I didn’t think this particular widget was very good. Sometimes I had to refresh the page before my vote would take, and the rating thingie popped up at unwanted times sometimes.

Did y’all have problems with it, too?

July 13, 2016 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 9

This has large megawotsits and many cyberdoodahs

graphicscard

I got up this morning, hopped on my bike and…dead as a doornail. The battery was fine — showing four bars out of five charge — Thursday afternoon and a brick on Friday morning. It won’t take a charge at all, so it’s the battery, not something mechanical. More fun!

I had to walk to work. I had forgotten how much that sucks.

I’m not complaining (much). If all my bad news involves computers and bicycles (instead of, say, biopsies and blood work), I’m not going to poke the fates with a stick.

Anyhow, I was home and footsore and sitting in front of my jittering computer screen feeling sorry for myself, when I suddenly thought, “hol’ up, hol’ up, modern motherboards have a built-in VGA, don’t they?” Yeah, they do. I just pulled the dead card, plugged the monitor into the back of the machine and…it’s surprisingly good, really. It’s running Photoshop and everything.

I imagine it would shatter into a squillion pieces if I asked it to play The Witcher, though.

It’s surprisingly hard to pick the best card for doing 3D modeling and rendering. I mean, at the consumer level. That’s because every program is different — some lean on the CPU, some lean on memory, some lean on the GPU or the graphics card’s memory. I know what programs I’m using now, but who knows if I’ll be using the same ones a year or two hence? Anyway, I think I’m going for the one in the picture. Not cheap, not expensive, best all-rounder.

Unfortunately, I have to go to work for a while tomorrow, Saturday that it is. And I have to do it on a bike with no motor assist. Pity me.

July 8, 2016 — 9:29 pm
Comments: 17