Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 0 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: January 12th, 2024
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•They don't want people to pirate, but this is the service they want people to pay for.English
    27·
    12 days ago

    I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoGaming@beehaw.org•Let's discuss: Donkey Kong
    2·
    2 months ago

    I remember being completely entranced by it and being unable to put it down (even though it was very difficult for me at the time).

    That’s something I find great on so many old games: they were hard, and yet they encouraged you to keep on trying.

    found it [DKC2] to difficult and didn’t really like the new protagonist as much

    Playing with Dixie is easier, so perhaps both things are related.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoGaming@beehaw.org•Let's discuss: Donkey Kong
    10·
    2 months ago

    Donkey Kong Country was my favourite childhood game series.

    The first game was a blast: fun gameplay, full of secrets and things to collect, good music, gorgeous graphics even for 2025 standards, the difficulty was just right. (A bit too hard for me back then, too easy nowadays.)

    I remember when DKC3 was released in '98, I’d go to the cartridge rental shop once a week to ask the guy if they had it already. (He was extremely patient with me. That guy was a bro.) Once I finally got to play it, it didn’t disappoint me at all, I loved those puzzles and it was amazing to explore the map freely. Kiddy was a bit odd, but really fun to play with, and I loved how Dixie throwing Kiddy had different mechanics than Kiddy throwing Dixie.

    But by far my favourite was DKC2. Everything was perfect - they picked the formula from DKC1 and expanded it: more collectibles! Better music! Better looks! The bonuses now aren’t just “find all bonuses in the level for +1%”, now you got something to find in them! I can literally play the first level of that game with a blindfold, it’s itched in my brain. (Fuck Bramble Blast, though. I had a hard time finding one bonus and the DK coin there. And by then my English was a bit too awful to get what Cranky said.)

    Then… well, DK64. It killed the series for me. I didn’t get why it wasn’t fun, but nowadays I see what happened - early 3D games had clunky controls and camera, plus the whole “gotta remake the whole thing five times to get to 100%” was meh.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoGaming@beehaw.org•The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East
    13·
    2 months ago

    And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.

    You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.

    In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. “This shit isn’t fun, I’m reworking it” here, “wow this mechanic actually works! I’ll expand it further” there.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoGaming@beehaw.org•The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East
    64·
    2 months ago

    as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]

    • The older games are not “overperforming”. The newer games are underperforming.
    • Large studios are “struggling to drive sales” because customers take cost and benefit into account.
    • The success of those solo devs and small teams is not “outsized”, it’s deserved because they get it right.

    What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.

    More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.

    Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.

    Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor

    And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.

    And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.

    As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]

    Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”

    Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.

    Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.

    My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.

    Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyztoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Can Software Piracy Be Justified?English
    28·
    6 months ago
    1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
    2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

    Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

    • If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
    • If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
    • If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).