netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
32m ago
did not develop it
Are…are you suggesting that white people should only make games about their own race? Is this bait? Forget historical or fantasy shit, Call of Duty is going to suck if they can only shoot up rural towns.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
40m ago
“Removing gameplay” probably peaked with the QTE craze, but it was never as clear-cut as the OP suggests. Sometimes games which wanted to blow the budget on set pieces and titty physics chose to “remove gameplay” as a consequence.
“Easy modes” are definitely more prevalent now, and unlike the former, people will show up to defend them on ideological grounds. Equity and inclusion, you know? But games are still a product. If adding easy mode generates 5% more sales at the cost of “degrading” that guy’s “achievements,” well…
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
57m ago
Kratos kind of had that meth-head look for a while. I swear he looked older before he got into dad mode.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
59m ago
Or ‘cause of the uncanny valley.
2010 games had enough power to make models detailed but not enough to light and animate them consistently, IMO. The best-looking characters had to be more stylized.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1hr ago
Well, there’s Miriam from Bloodstained.
But this is a series which has dabbled in horny witches and bishounen vampires for decades. Nothingburger.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1hr ago
Hypothesis 4: defenders like the games and project that fondness even if a part is weaker. You know, the halo effect.
Hypothesis 5: defenders could take or leave the characters, but would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got. This is the standard operating mode of Twitter, a site where there’s no such thing as good publicity.
Disclaimer: I couldn’t tell if the protagonist was a girl and I couldn’t care less. This drama is dumb.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
21hr ago
Isn't it reasonable to distinguish positive from negative action?
If we held everyone accountable for every potential intervention not taken, we'd still be in Afghanistan.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
22hr ago
I'm not saying you're picking a fight with the orange man.
But the fact is, when you say some public figure is retarded, evil, literally Hitler, whatever: you're flipping the bird to people who disagree with you. Disagreement is fine; you should try to be less inflammatory about it.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5d ago
Be polite.
As a significant fraction of your comments appear to be picking fights, one day ban.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
Any recommendations for neat stuff around Toronto? We’re already going to see the falls.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
10d ago
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but
it’s the same threat we face from other nation-states
No! It only converges on the same threat if the AI commander is roughly as capable as a human!
Right now we’re around the Saddam Hussein level. AI is too expensive and incompetent to replace a real military leader. The competence barely matters; to paraphrase a philosopher, I have yet to meet one who could outsmart JDAM. But that first one is the real problem.
If AI gets cheap enough to replace trained losses, modern decapitation tactics fall apart. America can no longer bomb any Iranian who knows how to plan a missile strike. Ukrainians can no longer hollow out Russia’s entire officer corps. Competence becomes materiel.
I can’t decide if this favors any particular strategies other than decapitation. I do think it turns a lot of winnable fights unwinnable.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
I remember looking into this at the time. I think it was overstated in the headlines. The same source Wikipedia gives for “70-90% comes from this mine” also says
Spruce Pine quartz isn’t quite an irreplaceable linchpin in semiconductor manufacturing. But alternatives are all some combination of not yet developed, not quite as good, and not quite as cheap. Cutting off the supply of Spruce Pine quartz probably wouldn’t choke off the supply of semiconductors completely, but it would mean yields going down and costs going up.
Substack as a credible source. What’s the world coming to?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
To be fair, massive volcanic eruptions also have nasty effects on nearby lungs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
I’ve been reading about the pivot to war production here in America and I’m less and less sure we could do that again.
If Nicolae Carpathia topples the French government tomorrow, half the U.S. calls him based and the other half says it’s a Russian psyop. No changes to consumer goods production, but prices still spike, leading outlets to argue over whether or not it counts as inflation. The DoW puts in an order for 12 new battleships, due in 2035. One and a half will be built. The fraction of GDP allocated to data center construction continues to climb.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe none of the struggles of the past decades have been enough to demand political unity. We certainly did something after 9/11, even if it didn’t last in any sense.
But I suspect public opinion can no longer survive in a filtered, hyperreactive media environment. There is always an angle. The more obvious a mainstream position, the more tempting it gets to countersignal. Don’t worry, the filter bubble will find like-minded people. As many as it can without breaking the illusion of a defiant minority. Rebels. Frontiersmen out of time.
All we have to do is wait.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
“…unlike the rest of humanity, who can definitely be trusted to rank apocalyptic AI risk ahead of their own sexual practices?”
Unless you can show a nexus between the practices and the handling of risk, ad hominem arguments are symmetric. Disqualify everyone who thinks more about pussy than x-risk and you’ll be left only with the scheming eunuchs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
I mean, I don’t do that either.
But if I had to make the case, I’d say that the Sims AI is transparent enough to leave no room for consciousness. Someone designed it, someone implemented it as a series of instructions. It might take some work but those are comprehensible.
Frontier AI is on the wrong side of that boundary. We are extending the frontier faster than we can explore the area between the two. We’re doing so specifically by mimicking human responses and then obscuring the inner workings.
I can’t say I find the AI torture chamber existentially horrifying. I think our barely-incomprehensible models are probably not that far from the comprehensible ones. What bothers me about this is the idea that if it were possible to upload a torture chamber, people would want to do it.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
11d ago
so much heat (from the woke left)
Now that the two minutes’ hate is out of the way, on to the real subject.
Scott is generally very good at avoiding the excluded-middle fallacy. There’s AI doom, and there’s AI utopia, and there’s nothing-ever-happens, but in between is a vast surface of something-kinda-happens. Outside of Scott’s actual fiction, I’ve never gotten the impression that he ignores this region, especially not for rhetorical effect.
It must be quite frustrating for him to read this tripe from Pinker.
This is the third or fourth exchange where Pinker has ignored everything Scott writes in favor of making half-assed claims on social media. I understand that’s very popular these days. It still sucks, and I can’t blame Scott for getting a bit tetchy. Even then, he has that really nice turn in the middle where he talks about Pinker as an inspiration. I hope the guy reads it.
seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker
This forum sees a lot of calls to take things “seriously, not literally.” Humor is usually the opposite. I don’t think invoking historical dueling culture is a particularly serious stance.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
Oh, I’ve been! First time was back when they had the Pavia tapestries exhibit. Great museum all around.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
It was a family visit this previous weekend.
When we went to lunch, the restaurant had a sign warning not to use the neighboring lot, which apparently belonged to a couple other businesses. There was a garage under apartments across the street, but the entrance controls made me think it was only for the apartments. We ended up parking in a random free spot on the far side of that building. Easy enough, though I'd have been annoyed if the rain had picked up.
What made me curious was the juxtaposition of completely free and completely restricted parking options.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
No, I'll have to check it out!
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
13d ago
The Control of Nature, John McPhee. I was expecting an essay about the New Orleans levees, but it actually covers the Old River Control System upstream. This is designed to keep the Mississippi from changing course, which is way cooler than just mitigating floods.
I’ve written before about McPhee’s talent for English and I have not yet been disappointed. Still, there haven’t been any lines as quotable as Levels of the Game or Rising From the Plains…yet.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Ah, this is why your refrigerator is running.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Even in smaller towns? There should be a marginal plot where the land is currently undervalued, but not by enough to justify a rebuild. Maybe those situations are rare?
I think there’s a coordination problem here where some businesses really benefit from subsidized parking. It’s still a distortion, but that’s the kind of distortion which breeds opposition to a reform.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
14d ago
Inspired by last month’s guest post and my own trip to Fort Worth this weekend: what does a land value tax do to parking?
In the long run, of course, it’s going to push for more productive developments than a flat slab of asphalt. I’m interested in the short run. Whoever owns the lot loses their subsidy, raises parking prices accordingly, and/or sells to someone with the capital for an improvement. A business which currently relies on the cheap lot down the street is not likely to enjoy that process. I suspect a lot of small American operations rely on such setups. Does this give them a reason to oppose LVT?
I bet it could be done. Xitter really, really rewards playing up a stereotype like that.
But I am very much not willing to wade in and check.
More options
Context Copy link