So first off, let me set this straight.

I actually like GenAI music. It offers me a way to er... "create" tracks that resonate with a particular moment in my life. It's more personal and relevant than anything most artists produce. But that's where it ends - I don't want to hear GenAI mass market slop. Heck, I don't want to hear MOST folk's AI Generated stuff. That's for them. The music I generate is for me.

Moving on from that - I primarily use Spotify currently for music discovery, and up until a few months ago it's been the most reliable way to find new Artists that might interest me. Their algorithm, while not perfect, generally hooked me up with artists that were in the ballpark of what I like and were REAL.

Today, about half of my "Release Radar" is AI generated slop. Some of it is published under their own names and labels which is fine, but others are transparently attempting to dupe listeners by imitating or outright impersonating known bands. However, even in the "nice" case of well labeled and non-impersonating AI tunes, it's significantly getting in the way of finding new stuff.

I think I'm done with Spotify, recent statements from the CEO has me thinking that they don't consider this to be a problem. They aren't looking to fix this issue, and aren't even pretending to.

But the problem is, none of the other music streaming services are in a better situation. None have sought to deal with the artist impersonation problem or general labeling of AI generated music.

I feel like I have to go back to CD's and word-of-mouth like back in the "old days" - at least if I'm to be sure that the music was actually made by a human. But how long would it be before we start getting CD's with AI generated music on them? My hope is that the fad is too "low effort" to bother with pressing vinyl or burning CD's.

How are you discovering new (human) music in this rapidly changing landscape?

As in title, my father is an American nomad, and he just recently got a spot with good internet signal for a few months.

He hasn't really played in years, and the last game he really enjoyed was Warface and Novalogic's Joint Operations: Combined Arms.

There is a bit of a twist though, his vision certainly isn't what it used to be, so whatever game I suggest needs accessibility options galore.

I found a really good "singleplayer only" experience in Ravenfield and the style lends itself very well to my father's limited vision.

Is there something like Ravenfield but with a well supported online component? Perhaps Battlebit: Remastered is pretty close?

EDIT: I suppose the genre is better described a "mil-sim" than "tactical shooter".

UPDATE: Someone recommended the latest Insurgency game. After realizing my father had over 1K hours in the previous Insurgency game I realized that this was the game to get. Turns out it was a good choice! That's where most of my father's online buddies ended up! Thanks all! Feel free to keep recommending things, but we already seem to have a winner!

Obviously this is still a Pixel issue - but at least I can connect to my home Wifi again.

I previously posted saying that Wifi was broken in general, but I mistook my ongoing Xfinity outage as being unable to connect to any wifi. Thus I removed the post.

When the outage ended, I could connect to some other networks and couldn't figure out why.

It wasn't until after a painful factory reset process that I tried going from WPA3/WPA2 mode to just WPA2 on both of my APs and suddenly everything is able to connect again.

It seems that the recent OTA update borked WPA3-Personal in a way that doesn't allow it to navigate the "compatibility mode" of WPA3/WPA2 either.

Edit - Looks like this might even be something Verizon specific - UQ1A-20231205.015.A1

Edit2 - Also mine is a Pixel 7 Pro - a Pixel 6 Pro user reports no such issue - YMMV.

Other Arch Flavors I've tried (some are no longer with us) include:

• ArchBang
• EndeavourOS
• Manjaro
• Chakra

So with that out of the way, I've found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin' clue how to maintain an actual distribution.

It's basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.

Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I've ever used, by multiple miles. I'm not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)

I'd normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.

The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it's definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.

Perhaps I'm not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn't perform like this?

To be completely and utterly clear - I'm an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed "just use a different distro" but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.

A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

Not much to say quite yet, but the book is REALLY nice and compliments the offset print version of Stars Without Number quite nicely.

Hi All,

For those of you using FoundryVTT, here's the latest pre-release of my fork of PepjinMC's FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator.

For those who haven't heard of it, it's a neat module that allows users in your FoundryVTT instance to get quick descriptions of characters, items, and actions with a single button click. Initially it only supported the D&D system, but my fork extends it to work with any system, provided you know the mappings.

For D&D mappings see the settings on my merge-back branch - https://github.com/th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator/blob/dnd-mergeback/scripts/settings.js

For other mappings, you'll likely need to poke around the data yourself and update things manually. If you do this, please send me your system and mappings so I can begin to create a library for less technical folks.

Hope it's useful to some GM's out there! I use it almost every session!

Look, we can debate the proper and private way to do Captchas all day, but if we remove the existing implementation we will be plunged into a world of hurt.

I run tucson.social - a tiny instance with barely any users and I find myself really ticked off at other Admin's abdication of duty when it comes to engaging with the developers.

For all the Fediverse discussion on this, where are the github issue comments? Where is our attempt to convince the devs in this.

No, seriously WHERE ARE THEY?

Oh, you think that just because an "Issue" exists to bring back Captchas is the best you can do?

NO it is not the best we can do, we need to be applying some pressure to the developers here and that requires EVERYONE to do their part.

The Devs can't make Lemmy an awesome place for us if us admins refuse to meaningfully engage with the project and provide feedback on crucial things like this.

So are you an admin? If so, we need more comments here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200

We need to make it VERY clear that Captcha is required before v0.18's release. Not after when we'll all be scrambling...

EDIT: To be clear I'm talking to all instance admins, not just Beehaw's.

UPDATE: Our voices were heard! https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757

The important part was that this was a decision to re-implement the old (if imperfect) solution in time for the upcoming release. mCaptcha and better techs are indeed the better solution, but at least we won't make ourselves more vulnerable at this critical juncture.

Damn it! Now I have to move all my domains.