It wasn’t for me, either, but I’m fairly certain the point of Goat Simulator is that there isn’t one.

People don’t hate these companies because they “don’t cater to them”. They love or loved the games, but these companies then turn around and try to screw their own fans out of every cent, nugget of personal data, and free time, that they have. There is no anger like the anger of a true fan.

To get that pissed, you had to have cared quite a lot to begin with.

The rest, are simply indifferent.

That, is why people are upset enough to experience schadenfreude when their stocks and releases fail. Because that is an event that SHOULD be proving to these companies that if they keep pushing the bullshit, they soon won’t be catering to anyone anymore. Hence it’s something that gives fans hope that they will pull their shit together and get back to doing right by their own franchises and talent.

And we are not all in the same boat. Some of us just want good games.

Even when companies like Ubi make good games, they come with a shitload of strings like “but the monetisation is unethical” or “the devs were forced to crunch” or “the company leadership did nothing about a festering company culture of criminal mysogyny”.

Simply by operating as ruthlessly as they do, these companies are slowly convincing the world they are “non-decent” institutions. Such institutions need massive restructuring, when the don’t deserve complete disassembly.

And angering your fans is a process that only goes one way. Every fan you piss off enough to make them swear to never again give you a chance, is one you probably wont ever have as a customer again.

Yeah, some will be malicious enough to cheer at the individuals getting screwed over when megacorps eat shit. But every sane person is cheering because there is now a large pool of talent looking to do something good with their skill, out from under the thumb of managers demanding every mechanic be optimized for monetization, rather than gameplay.

This person isn’t wrong to be disgusted with people who cheer at jobs being lost, but he is also MASSIVELY out of touch with how his own company is operating, and how it is coming to be viewed by the world as a result.

A local place makes a pepperoni pizza with blue cheese and honey added. It’s fucking amazing.

One side of your deskpad may be grippier than the other. I noticed this with my pad when I flipped it once. The keyboard side seems to have become worn and become rough on a visually unnoticeable level, so my mouse now slides way better one end of the pad than the other.

Also, others have suggested teflon replacements for the skates.

You can also get “universal” adhesive glass mouse skates. Once I tried glass skates on a mouse I never wanted to use anything else.

That said I benefit from this most when I use my mouse for gaming. It might be pointless for average use, but the extremely low friction is very comfortable.

Batteries catch fire. Very large ones, or many cells together can mean a very hot, very dangerous fire, with the occasional violence of a cell bursting.

Being in close contact with something like a phone when that happens would cause burns, but they don’t “explode” with very much force. (Relatively speaking. You wouldn’t get lethal fragmentation for example, I don’t think)

The note 7 batteries didn’t really go boom in the way an actual explosive does, though the reaction is a sudden and fast release of thermal energy, its not that much energy in terms of explosive devices.

So no. You can’t “hack” a phone and turn it into a bomb using just the hardware that is already inside. You could start a fire, and that could be deadly, but as an explosive device the battery in most phones is not that potent.

For real. I’ve seen kids years younger than when I started pedaling scurrying around on these, and it instantly clicked why it’s a much better way to learn to stay upright on two wheels.

I wish my first bike had been something like that. Training wheels stop a bike from leaning into turns, so they don’t teach you anything about what it is like to ride without them.

They seem to be getting back into it.

There was Alyx, at first. But today there’s Deadlock, two more rumoured games, and now this?

My argument was and is that neural models don’t produce anything truly new. That they can’t handle things outside what is outlined by the data they were trained on.

Are you not claiming otherwise?

You say it’s possible to guide models into doing new things, and I can see how that’s the case, especially if the model is a very big one, meaning it is more likely that it has relevant structures to apply to the task.

But I’m also pretty damn sure they have insurmountable limits. You can’t “guide” and LLM into doing image generation, except by having it interact with an image generation model.

In a couple sentences? In a way that doesn’t approach, equal or exceed the effort of training the model with that data to begin with?

You insist these models can do new things out of nothing, and you keep saying “all you have to do, is give them something”.

Bloated, as in large and heavy. More expensive, more power hungry, less efficient.

I already brought it up. They can’t deal with something completely new.

When you discuss what you want with a human artist or programmer or whatever, there is a back and forth process where both parties explain and ask until comprehension is achieved, and this improves the result. The creativity on display is the kind that can unfold and realize a complex idea based on simple explanations even when it is completely novel.

It doesn’t matter if the programmer has played games with regenerating health before, one can comprehend and implement the concept based on just a couple sentences.

Now how would you do the same with a “general” model that didn’t have any games that work like that in the training data?

My point is that “general” models aren’t a thing. Not really. We can make models that are really, really big, but they remain very bad at filling in gaps in reality that weren’t in the training data. They don’t start magically putting two and two together and comprehending all the rest.

You are completely missing what I’m saying.

I know the input doesn’t alter the model, that’s not what I mean.

And “general” models are only “general” in the sense that they are massively bloated and still crap at dealing with shit that they weren’t trained on.

And no, “comprehending” new concepts by palette swapping something and smashing two existing things together isn’t the kind of creativity I’m saying these systems are incapable of.

Obviously.

But at what point does that guidance just become the dataset you removed from the training data?

To get it to run Doom, they used Doom.

To realize a new genre, you’ll “just” have to make that game the old fashion way, first.

Ok.

Try to get an image generator to create an image of a tennis racket, with all racket-like objects or relevant sport data removed from the training data.

Explain the concept to it with words alone, accurately enough to get something that looks exactly like the real thing. Maybe you can give it pictures, but one won’t really be enough, you’ll basically have to give it that chunk of training data you removed.

That’s the problem you’ll run into the second you want to realize a new game genre.

“The potential here is absurd,” wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. “Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?”

“Can it run Doom?”

“Sure, do you have a spare datacenter or two full of GPUs, and perhaps a nuclear powerplant for a PSU?”

What the fuck are these people smoking. Apparently it can manage 20 fps on one “TPU” but to get there it was trained on shitload of footage of Doom. So just play Doom?!

The researchers speculate that with the technique, new video games might be created “via textual descriptions or examples images” rather than programming, and people may be able to convert a set of still images into a new playable level or character for an existing game based solely on examples rather than relying on coding skill.

It keeps coming back to this, the assumption that these models, if you just feed them enough stuff will somehow become able to “create” something completely new, as if they don’t fall apart the second you ask for something that wasn’t somewhere in the training data. Not to mention that this type of “gaming engine” will never be as efficient as an actual one.

Haha. It’s definitely got a unique control scheme, but levels are also designed around that.

I suspect a lot of the platforming would turn trivial with a more responsive control system, but the camera can certainly be improved.

Hide no longer works. The only thing it does is stop them from showing up in the comments of videos you post.

I kept seeing a commenter in a genre of video I watch, and wanted to get rid of them, but there is no way to block or hide a user except to remove them from the comments on your channel.

K

I once made my mom go quiet, and then apologize to me, defeating this point.

I was telling her that she could be really cruel with her words sometimes, and that I’d like to her to be less so. She told me I shouldn’t take it so seriously, grow a thicker skin, that they’re just words.

But she’s my mother, and what she thinks of me and what she says will always weigh ten times more in my mind than the words of almost anyone else. Ignoring what strangers think of me is easy, but with her, it’s literally impossible. I was telling her off because I knew she doesn’t mean the worst of what she says, and that despite that, coming from her every word hits like a freight train. That it takes enormous effort to think through and discount the parts she doesn’t mean. I told her that.

At the time I felt really clever for making that point. Getting her to actually go quiet and say sorry felt amazing, so it stayed with me.

I later realized it probably landed so hard because of how her parents treated/treat her.

The point is that if that weren’t true, the good ones should be dealing with the bad ones. And sometimes they do.

But that isn’t the case in some places.

The phrase is intended to call attention to the fact that in some places things have gotten so bad the police is no longer capable of policing itself. It’s not that they’re all the worst, it’s that they’re all just bad enough to not lift a finger against “their own” when they should.

When a system can no longer hold itself to its own standards, the whole thing is no longer fit for purpose.

Second time I’m bringing it up in this thread, but in response to exactly that kind of thinking is why I’ve adopted “the universe doesn’t care, so we have to” as a phrase I try to live by.

There are so many popular ways of thinking that absolve humans and humanity of various kinds of responsibility.

It’s not good.