Posted by from MMO Champion
Warcraft Short Story - "A Whisper of Warning"
Blizzard has released a
short story involving Alleria Windrunner ahead of Patch 10.2.7.
Originally Posted by blizzard
(
Blue Tracker)
Khadgar has dispatched Alleria Windrunner on a dark mission, one that portends an uncertain future for Azeroth. Before she departs, she visits her lost home of Silvermoon on a mission of peace and connection. Much remains unsaid between Alleria and her son, Arator—hindered by fear and misunderstanding—but Alleria would have her son know his mother and her intentions before a new evil threatens Azeroth again.
The afternoon sun filtered through the crimson leaves overhead as Alleria Windrunner walked the path toward Silvermoon City. In times past, happier times, she might have flown or used a portal to appear inside the city walls, but as it was, she approached warily, as if nearing a sleeping beast that did not wake gently. Once, she had defended these walls, these people. But now?
Now, to many, she was the source of danger. Read and download this short story by Delilah S. Dawson.
READ NOW
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: A new breed of audiobook is taking over digital bookshelves -- ones narrated not by professional voice actors, but by artificial intelligence voices. It's an AI audiobook revolution that has been turbo-charged by Amazon. From a report: Since announcing a beta tool last year allowing self-published authors to generate AI "virtual voice" narrations for their ebooks, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform. The eye-popping stat, revealed in a recent Bloomberg report, has many authors celebrating but is also raising red flags for human narrators.
For indie writers wanting to crack the lucrative audiobook market without paying hefty professional voiceover fees, Amazon's free virtual narration tool is a game-changer. One blogger cited in the report claimed converting an ebook to audio using the AI narration took just 52 minutes, bypassing the expensive studio recording route. Others have mixed reactions. Last month, an author named George Steffanos launched an audiobook version of his existing book, posting that while he prefers human-generated works to those generated by AI, "the modest sales of my work were never going to support paying anyone for all those hours of narration."
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said. From a report: Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis. "It's very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties," he said in an interview in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. "It's a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries."
At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year. These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance -- such as the private sector -- is still in question.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the why-should-bad-guys-have-all-the-fun department: An international coalition of police agencies have resurrected the dark web site of the notorious LockBit ransomware gang, which they had seized earlier this year, teasing new revelations about the group. From a report: On Sunday, what was once LockBit's official darknet site reappeared online with new posts that suggest the authorities are planning to release new information about the hackers in the next 24 hours, as of this writing. The posts have titles such as "Who is LockBitSupp?," "What have we learnt," "More LB hackers exposed," and "What have we been doing?"
In February, a law enforcement coalition that included the U.K.'s National Crime Agency, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as forces from Germany, Finland, France, Japan and others announced that they had infiltrated LockBit's official site. The coalition seized the site and replaced information on it with their own press release and other information in a clear attempt to troll and warn the hackers that the authorities were on to them.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Dragonflight Class Tuning with the Weekly Maintenance - May 7, 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
We have continued to closely monitor data on class performance and feedback from players. With scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’ll make the following adjustments to classes that are over- and under-performing in group content and PvP.
Classes
Demon Hunter
Vengeance
Sigil of Silence duration reduced to 4 seconds (was 5 seconds).
Sigil of Silence cooldown increased to 90 seconds (was 60 seconds).
Cycle of Binding now reduces Sigil cooldowns by 2 seconds per trigger (was 3 seconds).
Soul Cleave damage reduced by 8%.
Druid
Balance
Season 4 (2) Set Bonus now increases the damage of your next Wrath or Starfire by 50% (was 30%).
Season 4 (2) Set Bonus new reduces the Astral Power cost of your next Starsurge or Starfall by 30 (was 15) and increases the damage it does by 60% (was 40%).
Monk
Brewmaster
Keg Smash damage reduced by 10%.
Spinning Crane Kick damage reduced by 10%.
Summon White Tiger Statue damage reduced by 30%.
Effectiveness of Stagger against magical attacks increased to 55% (was 45%).
Healing Sphere healing increased by 10%.
Rogue
Assassination
Ability and auto-attack damage increased by 6%. Does not affect PvP combat.
Fixed an issue that caused the Assassination Rogue Season 3/Season 4 bonus to do slightly less damage than intended.
Warlock
Affliction
Doom Blossom damage increased by 10%.
Vile Taint damage increased by 25%.
Soul Flame damage increased by 20%.
Soul Rot damage increased by 5%.
Destruction
Chaos Bolt damage increased by 3%.
Conflagrate damage increased by 5%.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the shape-of-things-to-come department: For the first time since it invested more than $10 billion into OpenAI in exchange for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models, Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI model large enough to compete with state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI itself. The Information: The new model, internally referred to as MAI-1, is being overseen by Mustafa Suleyman, the ex-Google AI leader who most recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft hired the majority of the startup's staff and paid $650 million for the rights to its intellectual property in March. But this is a Microsoft model, not one carried over from Inflection, although it may build on training data and other tech from the startup. It is separate from the Pi models that Inflection previously released, according to two Microsoft employees with knowledge of the effort.
MAI-1 will be far larger than any of the smaller, open source models that Microsoft has previously trained, meaning it will require more computing power and training data and will therefore be more expensive, according to the people. MAI-1 will have roughly 500 billion parameters, or settings that can be adjusted to determine what models learn during training. By comparison, OpenAI's GPT-4 has more than 1 trillion parameters, while smaller open source models released by firms like Meta Platforms and Mistral have 70 billion parameters. That means Microsoft is now pursuing a dual trajectory of sorts in AI, aiming to develop both "small language models" that are inexpensive to build into apps and that could run on mobile devices, alongside larger, state-of-the-art AI models.
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