FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
What benefit is derived from believing in ghosts?
Alternatively: "no, you see, the Europeans just have a different understanding of Free Speech."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.
This implies that the publishers themselves are trusted and that the trust people place in them is being maintained. That is not the market I observe from the inside. AAA gaming seems like a dumpster fire at the moment, having arrived at a place similar to the film industry where they're actively generating anti-fandoms collectively rooting for their failure, but without the film industry's institutional moat and diversification to protect them from the consequences. There have been a lot of bombs lately, and studios, even major studios, often don't survive them. Major publishers are frequently loathed by the player-base. The studios and publishers with considerable good will are generally in the indie space or increasingly lonely titans like Rockstar, which is so lonely because those titans can and do die: Blizzard and Bungie, two of the most successful companies the space has ever seen, are arguably toast at this point. Most AAA studios appear incapable of controlling costs to anything resembling a reasonable level, so one bomb kills most of them and a second bomb kills most of the rest. Further, both workers and leadership are, from my perspective, pathologically averse to solutions to any of these problems. They'd rather unionize, blame the audience, virtue signal ideology, retreat into a bubble of toxic positivity, anything other than engage with the fact that their whole segment of the industry is a horror show at the moment.
It seems to me that the success stories follow a pattern: keeping costs low, teams small, find an audience and engage with them heavily, make the game they want as simply and quickly and responsively as possible. Alternatively, make something simple and coherent with a very small team and hope to get lucky, offsetting the risk of the gamble with pure passion. I think this latter class is already pretty large and is just going to keep growing as barriers to entry vanish. I think they're going to saturate the market, and that's going to have cascading effects on the far more leveraged-up end of the industry. Quality will rise to the top, and at some point there's so much of it that the audience dilutes and fragments, and the old business patterns become unsustainable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr ago
I am not very good at code. I have a project I've been working on for a couple weeks or months at a time every year or so; I really wanted to make this game, but going head down on it has always been exhausting, I end up burning two weeks or so tackling some stupid code problem, and then drop the project again when I just can't handle trying to tackle the next obstacle.
I've made more progress in the last two weeks than I have since I started the project, by a wide margin. There are no significant obstacles in sight. Things that would have been completely impractical pipe-dreams are reduced to easy lifts of an evening or so. I'm not sure it will stay like this, perhaps I'll run up against some more significant wall that AI can't handle, but where I'm at now is that I was probably never going to ship this game, and now it certainly looks like I am.
I am one of the dormant creatives you're claiming doesn't exist. I can directly observe the difference in effort. I might be wrong, but I would be very, very surprised.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr ago
What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.
Re: video games, I think you're probably going to see a mass die-off in the next year or two. I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released. I would be very surprised if the current industry business model survives the flood.
Making predictions is always scary, as it should be, but if I'm wrong on this one by all means quote back at me. I'm currently running AI five or six hours a night, trying to make hay while the sun shines; we'll see how it goes.
The Right had plenty of political capital to do this, it just spent it ineffectively.
This critique would be significantly more effective if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit. To date, your argument appears to begin and end with "Pass more laws", in a context where the laws in place have been systematically ignored and subverted for multiple decades without cease. This has been pointed out to you, at length, many times and by many people, and you remain incapable of explaining how passing additional laws will succeed against the opposition's well-established tactic of ignoring or refusing to enforce laws it doesn't like.
These discussions generally tend to come down to a basic question of the nature of the problem the culture war presents to us. A popular answer, once upon a time, was that our procedures needed updating and then the problems would essentially go away. It does not seem to me that this is an argument that can be credibly made, given the last decade's-worth of evidence.
The problem, as I understand it, is that large portions of the population have incompatible values, and consider those holding opposing values to be an existential threat that must be neutralized. Further, even if such a belief is mistaken, once that belief is embraced and acted upon, it is no longer a mistake for the other side to perceive those who have mistakenly embraced conflict to be an actual existential threat. Given that democrats are willing to run on criminalizing significant portions of Reds' way of life, have demonstrated an ability to win elections while arguing that nits make lice, and that their grassroots broadly supports ideological murder as a solution to the present situation, it seems to me that we're a bit past the point where formalism and norm-respecting carries the day.
For Reds, there is no livable future where we go back to letting Blues run society with a blank check and zero accountability. Coordinating a legitimacy crisis for the current regime is the single most valuable use of political capital available to us, and if you cannot see that, it seems to me that you are going to continue to find reality a very surprising place for the foreseeable future.
It's always fun to hypothesise about all the things you could build after cutting down a (Schelling/Chesterton) fence, but the thing with a fence is that it holds back people on both sides. Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that will blow once "strip citizenship from someone on the enemy team" is on the political menu?
The fence has not held back people on the other side. But it's okay, because when we have successfully done whatever we consider necessary, if the other side tries to do things back in response, you will definitely deploy this argument against them, and it will definitely work, right?
I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to keep mentioning it because it seems inescapably necessary: For more than a decade, I have seen moderates deploy arguments in the form of "you shouldn't do this thing, because if you do, how will the other side respond?", have that advice ignored, and then when my side side moves to respond, the moderates tell them "you shouldn't do this thing, because if you do, how will the other side respond?".
It seems to me that such arguments are fundamentally self-defeating. If you are going to argue that the other side should get protections of a principle that it has clearly violated, then either you are willing to do the same for my side, in which case your arguments can be safely ignored, or you are not willing to do the same for my side, in which case you are my enemy. In neither case does this moderate argument hold water. Even in the first round, before the results were known, this flaw should have been clearly anticipated. Now, after repeated iterations, there is no excuse.
More generally, I find it kind of fascinating to see this enthusiasm, time and time again, of oppressed political fringe groups that briefly get within swinging range of power to make their first move be "empower the state to move against my opponents in unprecedented ways"; when the tide recedes, it always winds up being used against them, to much pikachu-facing and gnashing of teeth.
You appear to be claiming that there is a causal link here, that the oppressed political fringe groups are in a worse situation specifically because they attempted to use political power to secure their interests. I think it is self-evident that using political power to secure one's interests can in fact result in bad consequences in at least some cases. I do not think it is a supportable argument that using political power inevitably does so, or that using political power in this way is obviously or necessarily a worse alternative to the status quo.
In particular, I would like to see how this analysis applies to the civil rights era, which has entirely consisted of "oppressed" political fringe groups getting within swinging range of power, empowering the state to move against their opponents in unprecedented ways, and then reaping massive economic, political and social benefits from this exercise for multiple generations running with essentially zero negative consequences of any kind, with the clear expectation even from the moderate center that this is totally fine and should be maintained indefinitely.
With a track record like that, why should I and mine not emulate their model, adapted as necessary to our own circumstances?
And if that doesn't work, there are always further escalations available. After all, haven't you heard? Political violence is solely the responsibility of the individuals committing it, it's not like broad movements are in any way accountable for the actions of their partisan fringes.
...Speaking as plainly as possible, you should consider the idea that the situation is sufficiently fucked that these sorts of arguments don't really work any more.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Hope the soldiers are respecting the place (lol.)
The Captain's tastes were simple but his methods were complex
We found him with five partners each of a different world and sex
the shore police were on the way, we had no second chance
We beamed him out in the nick of time in the remnants of his pants
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shore-leave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us any more
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
and the actual forensic science has longstanding, real concerns about accuracy in certain not-uncommon uses (bite marks, splatter patterns)
Arson analysis, psychological profiling, gun ID from casings and bullets...
Why did the state of MA write such a ridiculous law? Why didn't they consult psychiatrists for the needed expertise to avoid writing such a ridiculous law? Have MA psychiatrists previously complained that this law is ridiculous?
Or is this a runaround, where the actual problem is always some other place than the place it genuinely appears to be?
Can you point to an example in the last decade or two of someone's professional reputation actually being damaged by being wrong in a call like this one?
What does "stake his reputation professionally" mean in this context. What future event could possibly compromise his reputation, in your view?
You know the story about GURPS Cyberpunk and the Secret Service, right?
Sadly, I lost my copy of Vehicles (2nd edition) on a Canadian bus trip in the early 2000s, so I'm stuck getting Claude to write me something similar by trial and error. Things Claude has argued are true:
- With the projectile and powder charge held constant, shortening a cannon barrel increases chamber pressure.
- Shell walls need to be extra thick to survive, unsupported, max chamber pressure being applied to them, or they'll deform laterally.
- The best way to simulate shell fragmentation is to build from scratch a geometric model of the shell casing, rederived from the shell and filler mass values.
Fixing any of these is fraught, as the code is still triggering classifier safety lockdowns when I try to load it into context. Fixing that and further debugging the shell/gun stat calculators is my current goal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Can you post (or DM, if you prefer) some of the text that's been tripping it up?
DM sent with a link for a bunch of the scripts!
And yeah, I love making this stuff. Did the guy who was going to do writing for HighSpace ever get any writing done? Because I started writing up my own ideas for a version of it based on setting stuff you'd mentioned, plus some stellar megastructure ideas. Come to think of it, I'm wasting Midjourney credits at the moment, I should try burning some to illustrate that idea...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
If technology increases individual power per individual symmetrically, then the relative power of the individual to society and to other individuals will not change.
Building is hard, destruction is easy. Order is hard, chaos is easy. "The flying bullet down the pass / that whistles clear 'all flesh is grass'". Order must be maintained, sustained, disorder is (largely though not infinitely) self-sustaining. If individuals can cheaply and easily build their own nukes, then society as we know it is obviously impossible to maintain. This holds true for things other than nukes too, and there's probably a point where society's half-like drops into the order of months or years rather than decades without being immediately obvious.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
This last week has been mostly AI work, setting up shell mechanics for my tank project.
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Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating, and combined with the AI's verbosity in commenting code resulted in a situation where the AI effectively poisoned itself, writing a bunch of files individually which, when loaded into context simultaneously, dropped the safety locks like a guillotine. I think I've cleaned up most of it, but it's still a pain. Projectile and armor mechanics look good, and I've got a start on internal component damage; still need fires and ammo rack explosions.
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I've upgraded my bespoke-GURPS-Vehicles-2nd-Edition weapons and ammo pipeline, and I'm working on implementing various weapons and turrets; the next goal is a loadout menu where you pick weapons, equipment and components to take into battle. AI enemies, improved gun/explosion effects, and a light-baking/environment pass are in the hopper.
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The social situation is dire. I'm making vastly better progress than I have in years, with a level of effort that feels entirely sustainable... But discussing classifier woes and the HE shell breakthrough with one friend led to him deploying snark, quitting the group chat, and a 24-hour communications blackout. Another friend was like "hey, cool stuff, but maybe don't show this to anyone in the (other) groupchat, they hate AI and anyone that uses it." The latter reaction is hardly unexpected, since I've lurked long enough to know that this was the firm group consensus and there's zero point challenging it, but... At some point, it would be nice to have some form of human connection outside my immediate family not rigorously policed for conformity to alien dogma. The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest, but goddamn will they crucify you if you cross them on it in any way.
Technology increases individual power. Power <=> threat. Unless the world we live in is strictly invulnerable, which it pretty clearly is not, increasing technology at some point climbs past the point where complex society is viable.
...alternatively, there's some tech that changes the power <=> threat equation, but it's very hard to imagine how that could happen. Dispersion doesn't solve the problem, stronger defenses don't seem to be a thing even theoretically...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Is there author commentary somewhere? My read was that
What were the other five things? I really ought to read it again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and
Seeing the Wales discussion, I was going to mention Metropolitan Man. Quite possibly my favorite Rationalist story, not least because it's one of a handful of well-made art pieces that I love for very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with. It's simultaneously the best argument for and against Rationalism that I've seen.
Because I am fascinated with the nature and exercise of power, reject much of contemporary consensus morality, am a conflict theorist, and neither practice nor encourage courageous behavior.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
I haven't really noticed much difference between the versions. I've been working with it daily for over a decade, but most of that time I was working almost exclusively on the art end, and only dipping into unity to integrate assets, and on that end it hasn't really changed much. I'm currently trying to learn more about the systems, and overall it seems pretty great!
The scare awhile back where the CEO floated screwing with the licensing terms sucked hard and I considered switching engines, but I still use this one for work and all my old projects are on it, so for now I'm soldiering on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Unity3d version 6-something, Blender for modelling, photoshop for image editing, Claude for coding. unity code is written in c# (what I used before AI) and blender uses python.
yup, sorry, here ya go
for bright particles generally, check out additive, screen and multiply shader effects. not sure how your engine handles or names those, but it ought to have some analog for them, and they're essential for doing bright effects like explosions, fire and sparks.
Also, I meant the second explosion. third one would look cool if you can get a lightning effect stacked on it.
I'm doing the hundred bucks a month level. Tooling... pretty much none. I had Claude itself set up the project, and implemented a couple simple rules for handling Git. Workflow is that I describe what I want it to do and it does it, generally pretty well, occasionally with some bugs that need to be teased out.
...I feel like this is not a very useful answer, but it's how it's been going. I've used it to build a ballistics bench that calculates/extrapolates gun and shell stats from a few minimal initial parameters, set up a pipeline to store the data in spreadsheets, import the data back into the bench, and auto-generate prefabs based on the data. I'd previously coded raycast-based hit detection for shells, but it's expanded that to allow sequential penetrations, penetration based on shell velocity, velocity loss when penetrating, spalling/fragmentation, HE shells and fragmentation (this is the point that seems to be tripping its safeties), simple damage visualization to crew and components, armor values stored as textures, and Blender tooling to make building assets easier. It's helping me set up a breath-of-the-wild-style grass shader. I'm hoping it can handle the back-end of UI setup and enemy AI as well.
I haven't used git copilot. I might at some point, but Claude's monopolizing my time currently.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Can shaders handle flipbook animation? That second explosion effect is a huge improvement, but flipbooks allow much higher fidelity. Here's a bunch Unity published for free.
If you are sticking specifically with procedural shaders and image-based flipbooks are out, there should be a bunch of ways to add fidelity to the effect. it looks kinda like a gradient scrolling outward from a polar coordinate + Perlin clouds to add detail, + alpha on a gradient or curve for the dissipation effect?
- clustering smaller particles on top of your big one should be a cheap, easy way to add detail. color-shift them to simulate smoke or debris?
- the big explosion looks a bit weird, because it dissipates from the center a bit early and very strongly, and the overall duration of the blast seems a bit short for its size, and the explosion expansion seems linear rather than a sharp spike and then longer tail falloff as it dissipates.
Here's a random example, note how the explosion happens in two frames, and then the dissipation happens in three? Initial blast should be violent, and then the fadeout should be slower.
For the dissipation, look up how dissolve shaders work, and I think that's the sort of effect you want: your image turns transparent, starting with the darker pixels, and moving up to the lighter pixels; it works really well with Perlin noise to give more organic fadeout.
It is not clear to me that your model of "alienating the normies" is accurate. Certainly what alienates normies does not follow any sort of rational model, or that there is a way to take effective action sufficient to the situation that we can know in advance will "alienate normies" less. It is now established to a high degree of probability that Blues ran an illegal project to engineer novel plagues in secret, leaked their work-product, caused a global pandemic, killed thirty-two million people, wrecked the global economy and significantly and pointlessly reduced the quality of life of, to a first approximation, every human being on the planet. All of this is now strongly indicated by publicly available evidence, and somehow none of it has "alienated the normies" to any significant degree. If you are going to claim that normie-alienation is an important part of your model, I'd be interested in how your model accounts for that sequence of events.
It appears to me that Normies are alienated by, essentially, hostile propaganda, and the biggest gains we've made in reducing normie alienation are by direct conflict with the Blue knowledge-production apparatus, not by allowing it an uncontested veto. This is not to say that my side cannot make mistakes or be genuinely unpopular, but rather to note that most of the mechanisms offering granular control over what is popular are controlled by enemies, and to the extent that this is less true over time, it has become less true through an open-ended acceptance of conflict and escalation in the face of highly effective propaganda.
One way to never lose an election again would be to vote for Blues exclusively. Unfortunately, the point of elections is to secure power to coordinate the pursuit of good things; if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies, the former is clearly preferable. Any level of immigration restriction beyond de facto open borders would not be a viable policy without "alienating the normies". Having police is not a viable policy without "alienating the normies".
We will definitely make mistakes, and we will definitely lose elections. When this happens, the proper course of action is to escalate. Procedural outcomes exist to be manipulated, and it is my side that should be manipulating them to secure positive outcomes. The hope is that we will be able to secure those outcomes before the escalation becomes uncontrollably self-sustaining, but the alternative is also acceptable.
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