I have a personal Discord server that I drop links into - fully intending to get them out of Discord and into my notes someday, though let’s just say I’m quite behind on that.

Mostly I find it useful because I can drop a link on from my phone and quickly access it from my PC, or vice versa. There is some organization into channel types (food, music, games, etc) but these days I just use a general channel as a dumping ground and figure I’ll sort later, ha.

This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!

Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

I don’t know anything about GPU design but expandable VRAM is a really interesting idea. Feels too consumer friendly for Nvidia and maybe even AMD though.

I completed all of the shrines before I beat the game, and found it enjoyable. I also really enjoyed running around the depths collecting all the lightroots. I enjoy exploring caves and wells too, so that’s next on my list to complete. Grinding for armor sets is tedious to me so I’m skipping it…

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

So I’m no expert at running local LLMs, but I did download one (the 7B vicuña model recommended by the LocalLLM subreddit wiki) and try my hand at training a LoRA on some structured data I have.

Based on my experience, the VRAM available to you is going to be way more of a bottleneck than PCIe speeds.

I could barely hold a 7B model in 10 GB of VRAM on my 3080, so 8 GB might be impossible or very tight. IMO to get good results with local models you really have large quantities of VRAM and be using 13B or above models.

Additionally, when you’re training a LoRA the model + training data gets loaded into VRAM. My training dataset wasn’t very large, and even so, I kept running into VRAM constraints with training.

In the end I concluded that in the current state, running a local LLM is an interesting exercise but only great on enthusiast level hardware with loads of VRAM (4090s etc).

I appreciate this point of view! My BA is in visual arts, but I’ve also leaned heavily into tech, programming as a hobby, etc.

I think there’s a lot of different topical threads at play when it comes to AI art (classism and fine art, what average viewers vs trained viewers find appealing in a visual medium, etc) – but the economic issue that you point out are really key. Many artists rely on their craft for their literal bodily survival, so AI art is very much a real threat to them.

But, when I first interacted with Midjourney, and seeing my mom (just an average lady) being excited about AI generated art, I can’t help but see it like photography – all of a sudden the average person gets access to a way of visually capturing things that make them happy, that they think look cool, something they saw in a dream but didn’t have the skill to create visually… and that doesn’t sound like an inherently bad thing to me.

That’s helpful; this sounds like a docker issue or qBit issue then. The default qBit location for torrents is /downloads, but you’d need to make sure to point it towards the container volume mapping you’re setting up in docker.

my relevant qBittorrent compose volume mapping is as follows:

    volumes:
      - /volume1/shared/torrents:/data/torrents

Personally, I don’t separate my torrent downloads by type; I use incoming & completed folders. Here’s how I set up my qBittorrent config:

This should just be part of configuring Sonarr/Radarr settings correctly. Do you have a red message in the settings that says a download client is missing, or have you filled out the download clients settings section with your torrent client info? If yes, have you checked the “auto import from client” box? and, have you set your root library folder in the media management section?

There were rumors based on the Steam specs that the game would be always-online, but they moved “broadband internet connection” from Minimum to Recommended specs – so at least on PC, it’s highly likely not online only.

Gunbrella is made by the folks who did Gato Roboto, which is a short and snappy metroidvania - super stoked to see they’re working on a longer game with similar vibes!

Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought the audio mixing was a little sub-par on Stray Gods. I’m left wondering if the full release is going to be like that, or if it’s just that the demo was released before they’d done a polish pass on the audio. Hopefully that’s something reviews talk about!

Stray Gods — the demo did a great job of demonstrating what the gameplay will be like! the art is gorgeous and the voice acting is solid. I just have a few minor critiques: the soundscape of the VO felt weirdly empty and echo-y. I would have loved some additional room tone ambience, additional SFX like fabric swishes when characters turn their heads: imo it needs a little something to make it all feel cohesive. The demo was also structured so that you get a taste of later songs, but without clearly communicating that the new gameplay section was from a new part of the game, which confused me. It also made it harder to care about those choices because I’m missing the context.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood — I can’t believe they let us play for so long in the demo?! I kept thinking ok it’s going to end now but it didn’t! That’s always a nice surprise in a demo. The card design mechanic was enjoyable, and detailed enough to provide room for personalization but not too complex to be overwhelming. The mechanic also appeared in an interlude where I wasn’t expecting it (which also had a later influence on dialogue) - that was a delight, and I think is a good sign of further depth in the full game. I like that the main character has a distinct personality and isn’t a generic character or too self-insert-y. Can’t wait for the full release of the game!

Venba — the demo is short and sweet, but enough to let me know I’ll like the full game. the recipes-as-puzzles is fun, and a neat introduction to the world of Indian cooking. and ofc the art and animation is lovely - I especially loved the menu and options screens.

Saltsea Chronicles — there was clearly a lot of thought and care given to this demo. I really appreciated the initial context they provided around “here’s what’s happened in the story so far”, and the little glossary pop-ups when characters used new words was a great touch. Charming characters and world building. In dialogue choices, it wasn’t clear which character you’re making the dialogue choice for, but as I got further along I think it’s more about the vibe and not picking specific dialogue choices. Keeping my eye on this one for sure!

Slay The Princess — this is an older demo that I hadn’t tried yet. 10/10, this sucked me in for several hours. There are so many interesting options and paths to choose, and the voice acting and art is amazing. I’m very curious where this will go in the full game!

I have secretly been putting off playing Oblivion and Morrowind until the modders release Skyblivion and Skywind, haha.

I did some navmesh work on personal Skyrim mods, so I’d actually be able to help out with that… I can see navmeshing being relaxing while listening to audiobooks or podcasts. If only I didn’t have so many other personal projects! 😵

It was such a huge relief when they revealed that the protagonist for Starfield would be unvoiced, and even more when they showed character backgrounds and traits in the gameplay demo last year.

We don’t have Starfield in our hands just yet, so ofc our hope could be misplaced, but based on the evidence so far, they understand what fans loved about Skyrim and earlier games and where Fallout 4 departed from that. For me, that departure was the main quest that railroaded you into a specific sort of character and the voiced protagonist limiting dialogue to “yes/sarcastic yes/yes, but I need more info/no.” Everything they’ve shown us about Starfield makes it look like we’ll be able to come up with very different characters for each of our playthroughs, and that’s exciting.

I think having one team that works on all the mainline games contributes to BGS games being what they are. I imagine it contributes to cohesion and knowledge transfer among the devs between games, which helps maintain consistency in output over time. In an age of AAA teams churning through devs with burnout and crunch, it seems like BGS keeps a team together that has multiple years of experience collaborating, and that’s a good thing.

Re: the teaser… imo, in the context of the time, people were going to believe TES had been entirely abandoned if they didn’t release that teaser. Since BGS had alternated TES and Fallout to that point, there was the expectation that TES 6 would be the next game after Fallout 4; but instead, in 2018, they announced, “Fallout 76 is next and Starfield after that, and we haven’t forgotten TES, it’s just 3rd in line.” If they’d only announced FO 76 and Starfield, TES fans would have blown up about the franchise being dead.

I honestly don’t understand why anyone is surprised by this, or why it makes them have a negative opinion of Bethesda Game Studios.

I understood when they announced that TES VI was in development that it wasn’t in active development at this time, but that the announcement was to quell the fanbase who thought TES had been entirely abandoned.

Skyrim took 3 years, Fallout 4 took 4 years, Fallout 76 took 3 years (but wasn’t a mainline game), and Starfield took 5 years, which is the longest development time for mainline games by… one year, the horror, and it’s an entirely new IP with space systems that I’m sure took additional time to develop engine-specific features to support. I anticipate TES VI will be a larger and more ambitious game than Skyrim and will be influenced by how they’ve developed Fallout 4 and Starfield, so seeing it release in 2028 with a 5 year dev time vs. Skyrim’s 3 seems entirely reasonable.