it_wasnt_arson

joined 1 year ago

If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.

I just think we have different definitions of what accountability looks like. Have a good day.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm glad you can get excited at the prospect of a handful of cabinet members getting fined a fraction of the millions they enriched themselves by and getting handed 12-month sentences to be commuted while the people they imprisoned for political gain spend years in concentration camps. Where are the presidents on this list, by the way?

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago

Sadly, I think Epic was always the most serious about making sure that every game made by every studio is part of the same cash shop scheme forever, and the most likely to realize that vision in any practical way. It's the ultimate dream of all the deskilling, destylization, and asset trading built into their engine since UE4, turning the industry standard for games into interchangeable mush made of interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Is it NFTs, or is it what Epic have been aiming for since the peak of metaverse hype, to get the entire industry dependent on an asset store and account system where Epic takes a cut?

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn't really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won't shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 13 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 2 weeks ago

How obsessed can people get with one inconsequential guy for being cringe on the internet?

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 0 points 2 weeks ago

There's actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
  • Segways
  • 3D TVs
  • steam-powered automobiles
  • Lisp machines
  • hovercraft
  • supersonic airliners
[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don't count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn't, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

The USPS just got done ordering a custom-designed vehicle built from the ground up for efficient, safe, and comfortable package delivery. It doesn't look like this.

 
 

A couple months old by now, but I still find this a fascinating case study. A good old-fashioned NFT grift, unmoored from time and washed ashore as a sad, solitary UZDoom pull request in the year of the Common Era two thousand twenty six. The honorable representative of "Next Gen Software UK" seems to have taken the rejection in stride and without comment, seemingly only attempting to upstream the NFT features to promote their own fork, ODOOM.

What's the "O" stand for? Open Advanced Secure Interoperable Scalable-System obviously. That's right, they're not just making a Metaverse like in Snow Crash, they're making the OASIS like in Ready Player One, by putting a shitty social overlay into some FOSS game engines. I'm too tired to come up with a clever torment nexus joke to put here. Anyway, web3 is passé now. Their interoperability layer is web4. Their social layer is web5. Loading a WAD presumably makes it web6, and from there we'll be on pace to hit the web* singularity by 2027. That's right, AI is here too!

Now, as someone astutely pointed out, you might think that tying the ability to mint NFTs to killing enemies in a notoriously moddable game would be bad for the whole artificial scarcity thing, but our friends at Next Gen have a solution: enterprise blockchain holonic braid AI! From what I can tell, this is a delicate prompt caressing technique to write out a bunch of GOFAI symbolic logic in markdown and then get an LLM to pretty please evaluate the fuzzy logic. That's right, the cyberdemons are going to prompt so hard they'll beat you at deathmatch. In a game famous for being played at the pace of an LLM API endpoint. Blockchain-based anticheat is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. One look at their generically titled landing page makes the unimaginative grift clear. You buy a token to play, the tier of token you buy determines how many loot and "quest" reward NFTs you can mint in a week so you can corner the hypothetical market by preordering, and not only are they promising a roadmap, they're so gracious that if you pay for the top tier, they'll let you write the roadmap for them! Only 20 slots left! Buy now!

I know the standard NFT project like this is supposed to prey on people who want to join a fun discord server and/or know they're looking for the next bag holder to cash out, but it still surprises me that these devs think they can get something out of it this late to the party. Did their AI blockchain compliance automation thing fall through in the wake of the Delve scandal? Did they really spend a decade in the mines preparing their get-rich-quick scheme for launch and miss the boat? …Come to think of it, "10+ years" ago is around when the Ready Player One movie was announced. Are they just really, really genuine fans of Ernest Cline's Torment Nexus?

I don't know why I felt the need to write all this, but the economic, social, epistemological, and game design failures of this horseshit, and the amount of work people are willing to put into a Potemkin software project like this never fail to astound me. Twenty-twenty-six, everyone. The best part is, for anyone actually interested in alternating back and forth between playing Doom, Quake, and a bunch of other games connected by a social layer to complete shared tasks, Archipelago already exists and doesn't want you to buy their AI-extruded membership cards. Peace on Earth, gamers.

 
view more: next ›