Playing it with my friends was one of the things that kept me sane during lockdown. It’s an incredible game. Decently fun single player too, but it really shines when playing with other people.

I really liked mining and foraging, so I’d go out and build super barebones outposts in various biomes, occasionally bringing back a heckton of ore for new weapons and tools. I also liked being the first one to get dibs on a new pickaxe when the new tier of tools was unlocked

I’m the same. I was telling a friend the other day that despite how grim modern tech often is, I feel hopeful when I see how many people are taking solace in making cool things for them and their community, as well as doing valuable infrastructure work to try and make tech a useful tool for liberation.

A good example of the latter thing is this encrypted messaging app that works via a Bluetooth mesh network, providing a way for Palestinians to stay in contact even when the internet and cell service are turned off. The UK is closer than I would like to needing to use tech like this, so it bolsters my resolve to be able of such efforts to resist.

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

So many features like this have gotten so much worse over the years. Google assistant is the big stand out one for me. I first switched to Android in 2014ish, and I got heavily into tinkering and automating stuff. I could say “Okay Google, make a coffee”, or “pop a coffee on please”, and Google assistant would hear this, parse it and understand that this wasn’t a command it knew. This would lead to that input being passed over to Tasker, the app I used for automating stuff, and that would then do the behind the scenes magic of turning on the coffee brewer as I was on my way home (It was very funny, because I didn’t have a fancy smart coffee pot or anything — I just used a ball bearing on a track to hit the on button)

Nowadays, I say something simple like “Okay Google, make a note” and it will say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that” more often than not. The speech recognition used to be so good, especially after training it on your voice for a while. Now it’s just shit.

It makes me disproportionately sad. Like, enshittification is everywhere, but this is something distinct, even if it is linked to enshittification. If they were gating better voice recognition behind paywalls, I’d be annoyed, but much less sad, because at least that functionality still exists. Modern software, especially that produced by the tech giants, has gotten so complex that I wonder whether even the most proficient engineers in Google understand their software nowadays.

Windows update will frequently reenable OneDrive. Microsoft systematically undermines people ability to understand and control their own device.

You’re right, it was the .se one I used and I misremembered when writing my comment. Though this mistake highlights why adding sites like this to your bookmarks is important. Opportunistic scams are always common when a big domain goes down, and mistakes are easy to make

They already had a big target on their back. Sure, scraping Spotify made that larger, but given that their aims are explicitly political, I think there’s a lot of value in not being overly cautious and using takedowns as a way to bolster the resiliency of your service.

Domain takedowns are inevitable, even if they’d just continued with their existing archival efforts. That’s why, when I found I wasn’t able to access the .org domain over the weekend, I just went to https://annas-archive.se/ instead.

Edit: wrote one of the old domains (.gs) because I just use what’s bookmarked and got mixed up. It was .se that I used

Toum is so good

Apologetics for past US imperialism does not seem a productive strategy for criticizing present imperialist actions, nor preventing future imperialism.

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.

What a G.

I get what point you’re making in distinguishing between pedophile and ephebophile, but personally I don’t find the distinction particularly relevant. As an adult, the level of grossed out I feel at the prospect of sexual interactions with a young teenager Vs a literal child is approximately equal, because it’s not their physical attributes that cause ick, but rather the exploitation and power dynamics involved.

Edit: I guess what I’m arguing is that in practice, we see the term “pedophilia” used as an umbrella term that encompasses pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia, and I think that is a reasonable use of the term. It does muddy the waters a tad, given that pedophilia does still have its more specific use of referring to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, but I don’t think that an issue in the majority of contexts. When it comes to the law, an adult having sex with a child is equally illegal as an adult having sex with a 15 year old. Sure, we can split this hair and distinguish between the terms, but we don’t need to

I want this on a t-shirt

I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years’ worth of stuff now, but AI isn’t going away any time soon, so it would mean that there’d be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna’s archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn’t be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.

It seems they’ve opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna’s archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible

Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI

I’m not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.

For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I’d use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn’t consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.

A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go “hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]”. This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).

You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t used in the development process though in at least some cases. I’ll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.

For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime

Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there’s certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).

Machine learning certainly wouldn’t be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.

I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.

An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery

I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too

Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).

Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.

I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure