MudMan

Never been on Reddit. I tried Masto as a Twitter alternative, figured Masto is a bad Twitter alternative but found this. It doesn’t feel much like Reddit, but it does feel like old 90s forums, which I consider a feature, not a bug.

It has tons of emotes (or things that can double as emotes) and multiplayer. In a world where making game characters expressive was not a thing, much less at the player’s command, they felt like puppets.

I’ve always hated it and eight. I can only remember the ones that are familiar at a glance from the reverse table and to this day I sometimes just sum up and down from those “anchor” references. They’re so weird and slippery.

Hah. As a kid I used to just hang out or make up stories in Lucasarts games, like Monkey Island and especially Maniac Mansion. I know I wasn’t alone, because there were multipe contemporary games built around that idea, including form Lucas, even before The Sims came out. Toe Jam and Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron was also a good, weird roleplaying avenue.

And I did engage in some amount of “let’s make my house in this map editor” back when games came with map editors. We all did, I think.

Oh, and some games I’d play just to listen to the music. It’s hard to argue this was unintended, though, given how many games had sound test modes. I remember I’d fire up Panzer Dragoon just to gawk at the intro, which I realize seems silly if you look at it now.

Well, yeah, but if the final store price is 750 instead of 450 the number of consoles allocated to the US market, let alone sold through, may be much lower.

Given that tariffs could be lifted at random, just like they were set, not even scalpers would want to buy tech that could drop in price dramatically any day.

You misunderstood, I said it’s Vietnamese/Chinese because that’s where a lot of the components are manufactured and why the tariffs are a problem for US distribution in particular but not for other regions.

You can enter a text prompt and they spit out a texture based on it, which sure seems to just be a good old image generation model. They do generate mesh from images, which probably has some ML involved, although it’s harder to tell how much is just good old photogrammetry, and they do face and body animation from video source. I think that’s all part of the Unreal Engine 5 metahuman package, which I’m pretty sure does use some machine learning. Oh, and I am pretty sure a bunch of the writing and character AI has been machine-created, be it in real time or baked offline.

Part of the problem is that people aren’t super clear on what “AI” is supposed to mean, so it’s hard to know what they’re supposed to be angry about. The texture generation thing at least is clearly in the GenAI danger zone.

That’s what’s fascinating about how it does language in general.

The article is interesting in both the ways in which things are similar and the ways they’re different. The rough approximation thing isn’t that weird, but obviously any human would have self-awareness of how they did it and not accidentally lie about the method, especially when both methods yield the same result. It’s a weirdly effective, if accidental example of human-like reasoning versus human-like intelligence.

And, incidentally, of why AGI and/or ASI are probably much further away than the shills keep claiming.

OK, I’ve been willing to just let the examples roll even though most people are just describing how they’d do the calculation, not a process of gradual approximation, which was supposed to be the point of the way the LLM does it…

…but this one got me.

Seriously, you think 70x5 is easier to compute than 70x3? Not only is that a harder one to get to for me in the notoriously unfriendly 7 times table, but it’s also further away from the correct answer and past the intuitive upper limit of 1000.

Yeah, this would be the “lacking any agency or responsibility” part of the bafflement about Americans’ views.

Get a few million people out on the streets (and/or refusing to work) and it turns out it is remarkably hard to run a country at all.

Americans think of protesting as a small circle of people in front of some building chanting corny slogans. It is not. Look at France. Look at Serbia. Look at Turkey right now, FFS.

I’m not saying go be a weirdo chanting in a circle, I’m saying block the streets with masses of people, shut down the country, close down the shops, picket official buildings, cordon off vulnerable targets, blot out the goddamn sun.

You have done nothing as a country yet. The dumbass MAGA morons did more direct political action on Jan 6th than anybody else in the US since, what? BLM? I am astounded at the sense of dejection and powerlessness in the face of fascist ascendancy paired with some weird ritualistic economic self-immolation. You guys are SO. WEIRD. I don’t get it.

Carts and console could very much change. Some estimates say up to 50% up.

Given that digital games will not this could make the Switch a de facto digital-only thing in the US.

I mean, assuming Trump isn’t beaten with a stick into submission in the next couple of weeks. We’ll see.

In the US. Key part there is “in the US”. You guys deal with this nonsense. I intend to be playing my MSRP Vietnamese/Chinese console at launch, thankyouverymuch.

Hell, I’ll take whatever stock you don’t, maybe we can get a tenner or two shaved off the price. I’m sure the “let’s sneak in the exchange rate and pretend it’s VAT” thing is starting to look less appealing right about now.

Is that a weird method of doing math?

I mean, if you give me something borderline nontrivial like, say 72 times 13, I will definitely do some similar stuff. “Well it’s more than 700 for sure, but it looks like less than a thousand. Three times seven is 21, so two hundred and ten, so it’s probably in the 900s. Two times 13 is 26, so if you add that to the 910 it’s probably 936, but I should check that in a calculator.”

Do you guys not do that? Is that a me thing?

I’m not in the US. I haven’t done an Easter egg hunt in my life. “Easter eggs” have always been a chocolate treat. The thing I remember most from Easter as a child was the big fair that set up camp in town, and by extension the food I remember the most are caramel apples and candy floss. My grandma would make meringue pies and yes, there were some chocolate eggs and bunnies changing hands when other relatives came over.

And lots of pork.

How is it based on UGC if the game wasn’t out when they implemented the GenAI? As far as I can tell they’re using a whole bunch of ML-based tools built on Unreal tech for animation and model creation and what seems to be run of the mill Gen AI for textures. I could be wrong, but hey, I’ll hold you to that being cool when EA or Ubisoft show up with their version of the same thing.

Yeah, I grew up in an area of survival agriculture, removed from actual famine by say twenty, thirty years, depending on how you count it ending. Living memory in any case. To this day people here will pester you to take food when they have a fruit tree yielding, or when they are picking potatoes. People get together to go pick grapes across all of their small properties and then roughly split the yield based on plot size, even if the yields were somewhat uneven. Friends would show up with fish when they went fishing and you’d do the same.

You want to prep for the apocalypse, start giving away food and insisting that neighbors come over to visit, then force feed them aggressively, even under protest. Then do that to such an extent it becomes deeply culturally ingrained.

Will you have a culture where your adult children can’t bear to throw anything away and will perpetually eat leftovers but never stop overcooking? Yes, you will. But you will have learned to survive scarcity.

But in the meantime, holy shit, get out of the house and start protesting. Have you seen what your government is doing? At least have the decency to lose whatever conflict leads into the apocalyse instead of just sitting there complaining about it on social media.

You go to tech news sites? Did you time travel from the 2000s? Can you bring me back with you?

I am screaming into a pillow at the image of Americans prepping for the apocalypse while doing zero things to avoid it.

Look, I’ve said this a bunch of times around here this week and it seems like I’m trolling, but I’m not. I’ve been spooked for years at finding out that my US friends were absolutely unwilling to engage in any political action but were also consistently sure that a violent revolution or uprising was both inevitable and imminent. The idea that this is a widespread societal thing and that not only has it not been altered by another wave of trumpism but has in fact been reinforced is absolutely wild.

I don’t know who convinced Americans that they are simultaneously the sole main characters of life but also absolutely absent of any agency or responsibility over what happens, but holy crap, they did an amazing job.

That is extremely cute but also the exact reason people just buy the chocolate ones these days.

Given how many features use generative AI to build user-generated content I would say mark this moment. There is a future of slop-centric Roblox stuff everywhere and this may well be where it starts.

I’m not as mad about that as most will be, but… yeah, I’ve mentioned a couple of times around here how weird it is that nobody is really bringing it up so far.