I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

I’ve deleted and redrafted this several times now… but am I unreasonable for being weirded out and a bit offended by how out of touch rich-and-powerful-people journalism is? Canada, like Australia, is soaked in blood. This is just public image laundry for a country with the same genocide cops and resource extraction monstrosities as all the other colonies, and I’m guessing most of the people reading a niche link aggregator aren’t really the target audience.

If things like this are going to try and memory hole the crimes of a state, we should conscientiously memory hole crappy fluff pieces like this. Who’s moving to Canada? Who has the ability to initiate infrastructure projects or run funding requests up the political ladder?

If nothing else, just as a personal request. I just spent a long time trying to stay calm and articulate (or relative to my original state upon reading this) because this really made my blood boil.

Game budgets are too big.

Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security

Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you’re exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly “better” winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don’t).

Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.

Yasumi Matsuno’s career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.

I write a lot of spreadsheets for games I play, so adapting them into more sophisticated software is always something I chip away at. Good opportunity to learn how to implement concepts in new languages too. Right now I’m writing a Warframe simulator in Racket.

Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they’re neuron-like. Saying they’re mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that’s a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They’re both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.

Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as “resources” and “consumers” are privileged.

Not better and cheaper, but cheaper faster and worse. And that’s what a lot of dodgy business care about.

Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I’m biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I’d rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I’ve thought about a problem right.

Not just the US, Australia has slavery* for disabled people and the long-term unemployed, as well as private prison slave labour. Guess which group keeps getting sent to prison for no reason too.

(*legally distinct from slavery, as determined by the courts)

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I post memes on company time.”

Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.

Would be nice if there were some kind of open source, cross-platform, low-level graphics API, maybe overseen by some kind of pan-industry group (or “consortium” if you’re feeling fancy). Just spitballing but you could call it “Cape” or “Hephaestos” or something.

Would be great too if there were one or two open-source, MIT- or dual-licensed game engines that target this API. Maybe even some runtimes so you could target PC and the big three console platforms.

I dunno, maybe this is all a pipe dream.

I hope not, because I’d say that’s pretty unfair to all the cultures that understand that humans are just another part of the ecosystem around them.

I might have misunderstood what you’re trying to imply, but unfortunately the bulk of people going to be displaced and killed by this “fever” are not the ones causing it.

Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.

re: transphobia:

Yoshi-P is a very talented speaker, I’ll give him that. But you have to look at what he’s actually saying. There’s a very pretty preamble about “I’m sad that society, is this way, so my hands are tied…” which is a technique known as impersonation. Whether or not Yoshi-P himself is a transphobe, I guess I can’t say, but the entire speech itself is just straight up transphobia. He then provides a single sad vignette as if to say that can somehow be generalised across all of society, and not just a particular minority view. The ultimate thrust of things is that the small amount of transphobes in the audience are more important than making trans people feel comfortable or welcome.

After I stopped playing XIV, it got much more obvious in context. If I contrast the freedom of presentation in PSO2, which lets you have control over how masculine or feminine your bone structure is, what sex characteristics your character has, and whether you have a masculine or feminine face and to what extent. Beyond that, there’s also a diverse wardrobe for both “Type 1” and “Type 2” in the game’s parlance (which in itself is super cool) to facilitate how you want to present, even if you don’t want to change your body type.

In FFXIV, I was largely stuck using mods to make sure the clothes I wanted were possible. When the game started official porting previously male clothes to female models, they did so with the caveat that your character absolutely must have prominent breasts. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all the previously-female gear was really revealing and I think meant to be more funny than serious. Bad luck if you wanted to present femme and not just dress up in obvious drag. This might be better now though, I haven’t played in a year and a half.

re: NFTs

I can’t find where he’s spoken against NFTs in general. “NFTs won’t be in FFXIV” is not a general statement of opposition to them. The most I’ve seen is “making a fun game around cryptocurrency would be difficult”, but no actual firm statement of opposition. If Square Enix is as democratic as they say they are, and given Yoshida is on the board of directors, I don’t think the Square Enix push to NFTs is just unilaterally Matsuda.

I think of it like this: my own personal boycotts do nothing individually, but I am doing a very small something by refusing to be a bridge to grossly evil companies into my communities, and raising the ethical concerns with egregiously bad corporate cultures and business models. And for my own personal comfort, I just can’t engage with products that fill me with disgust due to the taint of who will ultimately profit from my purchase.

On that, when my personal attachment to a creator, studio, or individual game supercedes my disgust or frustration with a publisher’s business models or revenue streams, I try and keep that in the conversation. I play a lot of Warframe, which has some mildly manipulative monetisation like algorithmic discounts and crippleware elements; and PSO2 which is published by a corporation with a large gambling revenue stream, and the game itself has gambling elements in it, albeit surprisingly low on the evil anti-player scale.

And that’s the thing, sometimes I love something enough that I can’t bear to part with it. I find Yoshi-P’s transphobia and support of NFTs to be sufficiently revolting that I can’t play FFXIV anymore, nor will I ever buy anything or even positively talk about anything associated with him ever again; but I’m still subscribed to FFXI. I still plan to buy new mainline Dragon Quest games despite the fact that Square-Enix treats its customers with absolute contempt and has committed to a path of ecological violence against the Pacific.

That said, I think it is a good mental exercise to get in the habit of thinking about who you’re giving your patronage to. Do they have good working conditions? Where do they make their money? Are the leaders shitheads? These things become part of a disposition, and you become part of a cultural conversation, one that’s clearly starting to engage more and more people. Start talking about good developers and especially workers’ coops like KO_OP (handily named) and Motion Twin; or studios with excellent working conditions like Supergiant, Hello Games, or Monolith Soft.

That said, this is all still part of the infamously ineffectual practice of lifestylism. At the end of the day I believe it’s about cultivating a particular set of values and trying to broach them to as many people as possible, and learning to effectively and respectfully communicate them. If you ever do get in the industry or can support people in the industry, that’s when you can actually do something material.

Finally, it’s Plan 9’s time to shine!

From a design perspective, I think you could safely pick anything from V to XII and say it’s the best one, honestly. VI and Chrono Trigger really stand out as the most refined in terms of game design and systems from that particular era.

Without spoiling anything, the episodic storytelling style is taken to its limit in the game’s “part II”, and it allows for some really clever writing. VI is one of those games that kept me thinking long after I finished it.