“They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
An under-appreciated AI gripe: professionals can’t discuss it anymore.
Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros
Well, “AI” in games was always behavior, rather than having anything to do with AI. It was just marketing.
And even then, artificial stupidity is usually more accurate than AI. FPS bots could easily headshot you immediately on sight but like, what good is that. It’s literally more work to make them worse at the game.
Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)
At least the cryptographers could fall back on the full name!
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
You don’t get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don’t see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it’s on repeat] unless people do something else.”
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
- They simply don’t think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don’t have the kind of intelligence for it or purposefully don’t dig down into it because they don’t want to think about consequences.
- They expect the “system” (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it’s fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
- They’re aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that’s what’s been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the “system” - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades. Also just look at how Governments the world over sacrificed everybody else to make sure Finance and Asset owners in general came up better of after the 2008 Crash - these people have very good reason to believe that those in power, being very much in their pockets, will use said power to sacrificed the rest in order to deflect away from the Few the consequences of the actions of those very Few.
And if they’s CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewarded with golden parachutes a even failing upwards. From all they’ve seen their whole lives there is no reason for them to expect to ever personally suffer the consequences of their own depredations and pillaging.
In summary, some don’t even realise the problem and as for those who do, given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it’s pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright even if the companies they manage are destroyed.
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
That’s been the mindset of these business “leaders” for a few decades already.
The difference is now they have a tool that promises them that they can eliminate workers at an increasingly rapid rate.
Of course that’s a false promise, but once they realize that, a helluva lot of damage will have been done.
Wasn’t Walmart leaning on the gov to pay their employees medicare because they were paying so little in one state?
Walmart was also telling their employees in some states how to apply to food banks and other social supports, because they refused to pay their workers adequately.
If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?
He’s right, these people have shit the corporate bed.
It’s unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.
For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn’t buy the game they’re buying because they’re already behind on their sewer bill.
Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!
A service for people who don’t read articles.
I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren’t “all in” on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It’s bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it’s all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who’s line goes up 2% more than another company’s line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It’s no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you’re doing everything possible to make everyone’s lives a fucking misery…
Yeah, and it’s all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain’t going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.
Have you tried giving the engine more orphans?
The list of most valuable companies is highly concerning. It’s nearly all AI or AI-adjacent now.
The only ones that aren’t are oil and magic obesity pills.
I just want to add, this is coming from someone who has completed a mathematics PhD, and so has a very very high bar for psychosis (seriously, math departments are fun, but also FUN).
…uh oh. How so?
While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.Another was the uni-bomber.
There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.
If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.
Maybe this implies I’m one of the weirdos, but my experience has been wildly different. My experience has been mathematicians are just people, what they have in common is a passion for math. Sometimes they’re weird, but that’s because they’re people and not because they do math. I never got the impression I was talking with a schizophrenic or a Kaczynski type. They exist, but non-mathatician schizophrenics do too.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math.
I don’t think heard of this and I’m skeptical. Give me a couple names to jostle my memory?
One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
I don’t know this quote but I’d give it a 90% chance it’s Erdös.
Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.
Come on man, this isn’t weird. It’s representation theory, there literally isn’t a transparent description. It’s weird to think having fun with a title isn’t a normal impulse from time-to-time.
7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
This reads as partially random to me, what is “the equation defining structure”?
I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.
The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.
The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.
It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”
You clearly weren’t saying they all are, but what I’m saying is that my impression is that the bar for weirdness isn’t higher at all. There will always be examples of mathematicians behaving weirdly, because there will always be examples of people behaving weirdly. Spending a lot of time thinking about abstract nonsense definitely improves your proficiency at thinking about abstract nonsense, but I can’t see how it could affect the way you process other things any more than frequent practice with sudoku or chess would.
The mental process in math is no more special than any other intellectual hobby. If you invest decades into chess I’m sure you’ll think about chess in a very different way than a beginner, but in my opinion seeing chess differently should have minimal impact on how someone thinks about things unrelated to chess.
I feel like that’s very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.
People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
The more abstract the topic you’re working with, the more accustomed you’ll be to hearing things that don’t make sense at first.Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I’ve met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.
Mostly, we all see the world in unique ways - picture a building of possessed dwarves and you have the average mathematics department.
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
This is why companies should be worker owned cooperatives. Yes, management is a useful skill, and the workers can hire it.
Wishful thinking I know, but so much more sustainable.
“Slowly”
Let’s get something straight. The people at the top are all hired by the CEO and want money. They tell the CEO what a special smart boy he is, the biggest dickus around.
This has been the way of things for decades.
CEOs and higher ups give themselves their own “yes man” psychosis and the higher you go, the more prevalent it is, and it flows down from there.
AI is just socializing the yes man sycophancy psychosis our “corporate leaders” have been experiencing by isolating themselves from society and only surrounding themselves with an echo chamber of paid sycophants.
the real trickle down economics was the psychosis we gained along the way
Just look at our current president. He is the ultimate byproduct of this mentality.
It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand
CEO looks at AI quake: “it’s literally the same thing!”
(for those who don’t know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)That looks suuuper fun to play!
Kinda like “I had a dream I was playing Quake 2”
a fever dream
When Tarn makes big statements, people ought to listen.
Don’t know if I can trust him, since the photo shows he’s playing the graphical version of the game.
He’s probably switched over to the version that he’s making money from, frankly.
As long as the AAA studios are generating shareholder value this will be the future unless the workers push back collectively and hard AF because the average gaming isn’t going to do crap to push back on this.
Developers and workers in general are nothing more than a reoccurring cost account to most businesses, a faceless void where money goes to instead of shareholders and executive compensation.
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game.” well technically that was already the case? Press the “send” button on Slack and an entire team of natural stupidity makes you a game for all of the profit. Sometimes multiple, even.
It’s the age of indie imo. We’re seeing the final chapter of studios with 100s of employees. Replacing with AI is the lazy, catastrophic way of doing through it.
I think my manager has broken out of the psychosis. He was really into it but has seen it’s limits real quickly
He probably got his first bill lmao
“Dwarf Fortress” would be a great name for a band.
The full name of the game is “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress”
So would Elven Underwear and The Hobbit Belly Band
The funny thing is that Dwarf Fortress is a procedurally generated game. It would seem like genAI/LLMs would be a good fit for it. When I first heard about LLM ability to generate coherent text I thought it might be perfect for DFs story telling. And he’s putting out a great, AI based game without any of it.
You can create systems that generate content without resorting to mass plagiarism.
I’m working on a game that will have 10 million unique levels… due entirely to assets I’ve created that interact with each other in a variety of ways. I would never taint that with a system that not only plagiarizes but destroys the Earth to do so.
I’m not saying he should just he could but has managed to make a complex game without it.
There are of course LLM ‘games’ that pretend to create a story in which the player does arbitrary actions. They’re utter dogshit, because a) they can’t keep track of their world for a prolonged time, since LLMs were never made for such cohesive reasoning and keeping track of objects; and b) they just string the player along forever without any particular objectives, since their whole modus operandi is endlessly generating text that seems coherent.
