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urbnspacecowboy

Re:Game Developers Conference – Royalty Free Sound Effects on Saturday August 15, 2026 @01:50AM (#49308019)
In addition to those from the above link, Sonniss released another sound effects pack in 2026:

https://gdc.sonniss.com/

> Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks.

I don't expect you to blab publicly about your private benchmark, but what sorts of reasoning does it require?

Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".
Re:Elevators on Friday July 31, 2026 @02:39PM (#49127017)
And there's still no adequate explanation for what "Korean lunch mode" is!
> I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account.

Service provider lesson #1: Never ever ever enable auto-pay! The convenience (and even the savings, if applicable) aren't worth the risk of the service provider autonomously slurping up all your money.

Re:My burner email blocklist blocked me on Friday July 10, 2026 @12:46PM (#48862347)
In which case the Gmail user knows to mark mail without any dots in the address as spam.
Re:Microsoft Fire IdTech Team at Id Software on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @04:28PM (#48823258)
Different people want different things, because they are different.
Re:Microsoft Fire IdTech Team at Id Software on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @04:25PM (#48823213)
Almost! The common term is "glass cliff":

> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

Re:Resetting Xbox on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @05:04AM (#48815263)
Some specifics from George Broussard: https://x.com/georgebsocial/status/2074282537946386833

> I've seen comments like "the MS layoffs weren't so bad".

> re: id software.

> Reports are that 50% (95ish of 200) of the studio was laid off. Here are some quotes on other details:

> “Tools, programming (except a couple), Quake Champions team, testing team. All gone.”

> “Yeah seems like all they left was leadership and art/design. I think Xbox forgot quakecon is next month.”

> It really does sound as if id is now a support team for Bethesda/others. Rip idTech, which was amazing. Maybe Machine Games will carry it on or maybe it will be dropped for future games?

> But the read is that id is essentially dead. At least for the time being. Yes, the studio wasn't closed and half still have their jobs. That's great.

> re: the studios set free by MS to be sold or mgmt returned. One view is this is great. For MS they get decent PR for being "good guys". But the truth is that in at least one case (and maybe others), retaining the IP in such a case was written into the original contract when MS purchased them. Second, these studios now are out of the MS lifeboat, on their own, and will have short time to find new deals or funding and they will make it or not. Never mind they sold to MS originally to avoid this grind and be 'safe'. Yes they have a second chance but more layoffs may simply be deferred and outside the current umbrella of today's layoff round, so MS doesn't really get the bad PR of simply shutting studios down. This means continual worry by the employees and stress for mgmt.

> re: Arkane. Same as the above but timing and process is different due to French labor laws, etc.

> The layoffs are still happening. A substantial portion of Obsidian was let go today (near 1/3). Worries that they now don't have the staff to complete current projects. Deep layoffs at Zenimax Online. Even Bethesda or Activision studios were hit (with a minor round and numbers that are small enough that it reads more like "everyone has to take a hit, even the star studios"). More details will emerge, but it's a lot of people.

> So it's bad. Real bad. Good luck to all affected.

Please, pretty please, link some pre-generated examples.
Re:Resetting Xbox on Monday July 06, 2026 @11:27PM (#48813370)
Entire post text:

> This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.

> Allocate one magic number for "start line with space" another for "start line with asterisk" then any other number means this many of the current character and then swap character.

The galaxy brain move would be to always arbitrarily start with one character, replace the two special numbers with a single "don't output any characters, just swap" number, and then... congratulations, you just reinvented CompuServe RLE!

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=CompuServ...

Re:Leaking YouTube creators' private videos on Saturday July 04, 2026 @08:26PM (#48790251)
Software defects are the #3 cause of medical device failures, and growing: <https://meddeviceguide.com/blog/medical-device-recall-trends...>

ETA: Admittedly the above is getting off-topic from YouTube, but I can easily imagine a scenario where an instructional video was deleted due to a spurious copyright strike or some other stupidity.

> They're venting their anger on social media apps

"Heh. Gotcha." < https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ >

Re:An American Privacy Emergency on Thursday July 02, 2026 @10:00PM (#48769821)
"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".
Re:Kids Act Would Require Age Checks to Get Online on Sunday June 28, 2026 @06:51PM (#48712580)
Here's my working and cheap alternative that respects privacy: Don't do it!

Seriously now, if you give in to demanding people, they will just demand more. Appeasement does not work.

Not OP but I suspect the answer is "I didn't stop it, eventually I moved out on my own."
Seems to me Carmack's saying that Romero had a better grasp of visuals than Sandy Petersen, and that Petersen was needlessly disparaged for this.
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.

Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.

Re:Never Give Them Your Face on Monday June 22, 2026 @04:40PM (#48635864)
> It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative...

Is it really, though? As commenters on JWZ's blog pointed out (once you get around his HN link blocker, hah), the project contains very questionable LLM work.

Re:Show HN: Are You in the Weights? on Thursday June 18, 2026 @07:30PM (#48593005)
1. No way in heaven or earth I'm using my real name with this.

2. Alfred E. Neuman < https://www.intheweights.com/p/alfred-e~2e~-neuman > is either "Mad magazine mascot" (11 responses), or "German-American writer, novelist, and playwright" (1 response, from Llama 3.2 1B, classed as a hallucination). Maybe the odd one out means the German writer Alfred Neumann? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Neumann_(writer) >

3. Tamamo-no-Mae < https://www.intheweights.com/p/tamamo~2d~no~2d~mae > is either a "Caster-class Servant in Type-Moon's Fate franchise, based on the mythological fox spirit" (3 responses), or the "Legendary nine-tailed fox spirit" (12 responses, the vast majority, but all classed as hallucinations)!

4. Thank goodness for Firefox's "mute tab" toggle; the thumping and keyclick sounds get real old, real fast.

Re:Has W Social switched to closed source? on Thursday June 18, 2026 @06:31PM (#48592522)
> Which decentralised instance?

any of them

all of them

> Hmm nah, I'm thinking beyond that, like a full wipe and reset back to primordial ooze stage.

That's ecofascism, yes.

Re:GLM 5.2 Is Out on Saturday June 13, 2026 @05:17PM (#48521571)
GLM 5 and 5.1 models were released openly, so there's a good chance 5.2 will be eventually. Complaining about censorship isn't very constructive with models that can be self-hosted (and tuned, and de-censored).
Another day, another Warner Bros. acquisition! Will the next person to come through the revolving door be more competent than David "tax write-off" Zaslav? Hope springs eternal.
> people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory,

and true in practice too. what you get out of an ai demuxer isn't an exact match for what went into the mix. it's a plausible approximation, much like ai upscalers, upsamplers, colorizers, and such.

Paper: "AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises" https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14740

Code and full results: https://github.com/kennethpayne01/project_kahn_public

> Can anyone help me understand why this particular issue is any different than...

Questions like this are basically whataboutism, in effect even if not intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The question essentially assumes the premise that nobody complained about Anthropic's previous actions. In case you can't tell, I strongly reject this premise. People have been criticizing "safety" rhetoric from Anthropic and other LLM providers practically since the start. Remember Goody-2, the parody of excessively safety-tuned LLMs that refuses to do anything ever? That was released in February 2024, two years ago! (And it's still running, amazing. https://www.goody2.ai/chat )

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