It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.

But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”

So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”

That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

There’s a nuke underwater somewhere off Tybee Island, GA.

Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar’s Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

It’s been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the “glue” language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.

I think about that a lot.

I agree with this. It’s the artists, not necessarily the “style” itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what’s hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.

Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:

• Piotr Jabłoński’s art for the Dishonored series
• Laurel Austin and Wei Wang’s art that created the modern Blizzard look.
• Disney Studios’ Nine Old Men.
• Craig Mullins the “grandfather” of digital painting.
• Traditional painters like Arthur Gain, Richard Schmid, Ruo Li, Mark Boedges, and on and on.

When I was in elementary school I entered the bathroom and some other boy was standing with his back against the wall, facing the urinals, with his pants down and his dick out. When he saw me he said, “No wait! I can make it!”

He then started to piss. He apparently was pissing as forcefully as he could, trying to “make it”. As his stream started it went all over the floor in front of him, then crept up the wall, splashing all over the pipes and the bottom of the urinal. Finally he got, at best, one drop of piss into the urinal at which point his stream retreated and he re-sprayed everything a second time.

“YEAH!” he said. “YEAH!”, in victory. Then he left.

It’s been like forty years and I still remember this. I have five memories from elementary school and this is one of them.

Not a huge fan of snakes. It’s not to phobia levels, but I get a huge adrenaline rush when I see one, even if a fraction of a second later my forebrain identifies it as harmless. I love being in nature, so it’s just something I have to deal with.

I’ve had several rattlesnake encounters and it’s at least one guaranteed nightmare every time. The dream is always the same: I’m standing somewhere at dusk, often barefoot. Under a nearby, low object I see a rattlesnake. Then I see another to the side. Then another behind me. Then I realize they are everywhere.

I really hate ticks, so I appreciate their rodent killing service. But if we never ran into each other again that would suit me fine.

Agreed, and there’s a good chance that log is full of one thing spamming over and over, and the devs would love to know what it is.

Thank you for the encouragement. I’ve been thinking about it.

At AAA studios you can pour your heart and craft into creating something beautiful along with hundreds of other wonderful colleagues, for years, only to have it ruined by management who literally doesn’t give af. Not only do they not play games, or even like games, they are proud of this fact in a sort of, “sell me this pen” type of way. These people always existed but the “financialization” of the industry means they are everywhere now. Even one of these people in the wrong place can be poison, and they are everywhere. This mutated organelle has made the entire studio system too neoplastic to perform its primary function.

It’s like training for years as a chef, slaving away in a hot kitchen for the big opening, then having the owner (who hasn’t cooked in decades) insist you serve your food in the toilet because “hey it’s porcelain, it’s the same as fine china”. Then when the restaurant bombs you get fired and he gets a huge bonus because he’s a genius cost cutter and you couldn’t sell his vision. Nobody cares that you made the best bisque of your life when its served in a toilet. How many times can that happen before you say, “fuck it”?

Well for me it was ten years. Not laid off, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I could probably get another job with my resume, but I just can’t bring myself to apply again. Through a little planning and extremely good luck I’m not really under any pressure. Makes me feel like a fool because a lot of people work worse jobs, but then I remember how sad and angry I was all the time. When I look at job postings those feelings return. The problem is I still like it and want to do it. I feel forced out because I care about making good stuff instead of just “line go up”. I would take a huge pay cut to work on a team that had the “magic” again.

Yeah this is an extremely thin wrapper on GPT4All, literally just feeding in the above prompt. I’m not knocking the author for trying/sharing this but you’d probably be better off just installing GPT4All. That said, do you think this would have kept Ted out of prison?

You: The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Model: Honestly, I think the whole Industrial Revolution thing has just been a total mess for humanity as a whole. Like, what was supposed to be some kind of progress or advancement ended up causing way more problems than it solved. And don’t even get me started on all the environmental and social issues that came with it… ugh, it’s like we took two steps forward but then tripped over our own feet and fell back a few paces.

The low men.

It’s annoying when the vacuum system has a small leak so, over that long road trip, the car is always slooooowly losing speed. It’s such a nightmare to diagnose, at least as a DIYer.

I watched a program about Tangier Island, Maryland. The main street frequently has ankle deep water now. They are all Trumpers and are convinced it’s just erosion, but want the government to step in and fix it somehow.

So there you go. People can literally be standing in water and not believe it’s happening.

I would add Grist to that list for climate focused reporting.