If you were playing late yesterday, you may have seen your newer save files become temporarily unavailable, thanks to Larian Studios rolling back a hotfix that was crashing the game for some players. Well, it’s just re-updated — with a promise from Larian to do fuller QA testing next time — and my saves will load again. I’m guessing yours will too.
The deal follows an early defeat for the Archive in a copyright lawsuit with publishers this spring, and a judge will need to settle a dispute over its exact scope. But it’s a potential short-term resolution while the Internet Archive pursues an appeal. As the Archive explains:
We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but the full scope of those changes is a question pending with the district court. We will provide an update on those changes once the district court decision is final.
Our fight is far from over — We remain steadfast in our belief that libraries should be able to own, preserve, and lend digital books outside of the confines of temporary licensed access. We believe that the judge made errors of law and fact in the decision, and we will appeal.
There are lots of reasons platforms remove features, so I can’t confirm writer Karawynn Long’s conclusions about why lending service OverDrive nixed one of her favorite buttons. But it’s a good exploration of why the private equity-owned OverDrive’s concentrated power in the library ebook space feels so risky, especially as publishers are trying to definitively ban library-run alternatives:
[F]or libraries in a resource-sharing ‘consortium’ — which seems to be most small and mid-sized public libraries, as well as some large ones — the new system is functionally useless. It’s no longer clear which titles were requested by their own patrons, as opposed to the patrons of another library in the same consortium.
In order to get that information — which until May was freely available — each library now has to pay a separate fee for an “Advantage” account.
[karawynn.substack.com]
I cannot get sucked into Baldur’s Gate 3. I will not stack 45 crates in a video game for any reason that you care to name. And yet this clip has me alarmingly close to giving Ash’s BG3 beginner’s guide a try.
Is covering a printer’s USB port with a sticker to push people into wireless printing the worst thing HP does with its hardware? Not remotely. Is it still pretty funny to watch someone just take off the sticker and plug their printer in? I think so.
AI Weirdness’ gently surrealist designs are always delightful, and its AI-generated slogans for baby onesies are no exception. But it’s particularly fascinating to watch author Janelle Shane struggle against the stultifying blandness of modern LLMs, to the point where she now gets the best results by asking AI tools to imitate her own blog’s style:
In my opinion, the most interesting creative use of large language models is to generate text that’s nothing like a human would have written. [...] In that sense, BLOOM, with its less-perfect retrieval of human output, is better at this task than GPT-4.
It is creepy to me however that the only reason this method gets BLOOM to generate weird designs is because I spent years seeding internet training data with lists of weird AI-generated text.
[AI Weirdness]
I just got back from vacation and this has been stuck in my head the past few days of it. Polygon has more context if you need it, but they had me at “women are my favorite guy.”
