netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
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User ID: 647
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1hr ago
The flyers I get on the regular suggest that would probably earn more Republican votes.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1hr ago
Linked under a discussion about Scott’s AI messaging: Politics is not interior design. Don’t feel bad about skimming the first half, which can be summed up as
Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech.
The part I wanted to share comes near the end, when he asks why this keeps happening. Selection bias, sure, but also:
It is gratifying to see yourself as a subtle navigator of opinion dynamics, and less gratifying to admit that you are mostly guessing. "This would be counterproductive" is often the most prestigious available way to avoid saying something costly.
Our society really likes countersignaling. Fashion, politics, Internet debate clubs. Historical conspiracy theories. I think a lot of contrarian, edgy statements can be discounted because of this dynamic. Especially when it comes to social media.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5hr ago
Hmm, I guessed that was the girl from Deathloop.
But hasn’t she been in that series since the beginning? Does giving her hair make that much of a difference? It’s not even blue!
Compare Overwatch, a game which I would put on the forefront of DEI technology. Every new character draws flak for being too gay, disabled, Japanese, whatever. Why? Surely they know what game they’re playing by this point.
I think nomenym is being melodramatic. Launching new franchises with inclusion bait is not the same thing as adding inclusion bait into existing ones.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
5hr ago
Man, this sounds…batshit. I want to take that bet. I want to promise you that we’re not getting a one-party state in this election or the next, and probably not in our lifetimes.
It feels obvious to me that the negative feedback (in the electronics sense) which has kept each party from winning a third term since Bush I will continue to whip back and forth. I remember watching the 2012 results come in and thinking, naively, that the modern Republican Party was over, that they were going to have ditch the obstructionism and the conspiracy theories and play nice. Instead we got the Trump train. That should be proof that institutional interests and social opprobrium can’t keep the backlash out of politics.
I don’t know. What would it take to convince you that the Democrats aren’t going to seize power, Weimar style?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6hr ago
Rust, the game, or Rust, the programming language?
The latter makes more intuitive sense, but I could believe either.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
7hr ago
The PS4 and XBOne released in November 2013, so Tomb Raider definitely had more horsepower to work with.
I’d count Bayonetta as stylized, but I see your point. There are plenty of good- to great-looking characters from the period.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that lighting and animation for everyday scenarios (like close-up conversations) were really hard up until that next generation?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
9hr ago
Almost every time, huh? Sure, I haven’t been keeping up with the latest in bro-shooters, but which ones do you have in mind?
Also, that’s not what he asked.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
I bet it could be done. Xitter really, really rewards playing up a stereotype like that.
But I am very much not willing to wade in and check.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
did not develop it
Are…are you suggesting that white people should only make games about their own race? Is this bait? Forget historical or fantasy shit, Call of Duty is going to suck if they can only shoot up rural towns.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
“Removing gameplay” probably peaked with the QTE craze, but it was never as clear-cut as the OP suggests. Sometimes games which wanted to blow the budget on set pieces and titty physics chose to “remove gameplay” as a consequence.
“Easy modes” are definitely more prevalent now, and unlike the former, people will show up to defend them on ideological grounds. Equity and inclusion, you know? But games are still a product. If adding easy mode generates 5% more sales at the cost of “degrading” that guy’s “achievements,” well…
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Kratos kind of had that meth-head look for a while. I swear he looked older before he got into dad mode.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Or ‘cause of the uncanny valley.
2010 games had enough power to make models detailed but not enough to light and animate them consistently, IMO. The best-looking characters had to be more stylized.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Well, there’s Miriam from Bloodstained.
But this is a series which has dabbled in horny witches and bishounen vampires for decades. Nothingburger.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
1d ago
Hypothesis 4: defenders like the games and project that fondness even if a part is weaker. You know, the halo effect.
Hypothesis 5: defenders could take or leave the characters, but would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got. This is the standard operating mode of Twitter, a site where there’s no such thing as good publicity.
Disclaimer: I couldn’t tell if the protagonist was a girl and I couldn’t care less. This drama is dumb.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
2d ago
Isn't it reasonable to distinguish positive from negative action?
If we held everyone accountable for every potential intervention not taken, we'd still be in Afghanistan.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
2d ago
I'm not saying you're picking a fight with the orange man.
But the fact is, when you say some public figure is retarded, evil, literally Hitler, whatever: you're flipping the bird to people who disagree with you. Disagreement is fine; you should try to be less inflammatory about it.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
6d ago
Be polite.
As a significant fraction of your comments appear to be picking fights, one day ban.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
7d ago
Any recommendations for neat stuff around Toronto? We’re already going to see the falls.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but
it’s the same threat we face from other nation-states
No! It only converges on the same threat if the AI commander is roughly as capable as a human!
Right now we’re around the Saddam Hussein level. AI is too expensive and incompetent to replace a real military leader. The competence barely matters; to paraphrase a philosopher, I have yet to meet one who could outsmart JDAM. But that first one is the real problem.
If AI gets cheap enough to replace trained losses, modern decapitation tactics fall apart. America can no longer bomb any Iranian who knows how to plan a missile strike. Ukrainians can no longer hollow out Russia’s entire officer corps. Competence becomes materiel.
I can’t decide if this favors any particular strategies other than decapitation. I do think it turns a lot of winnable fights unwinnable.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
I remember looking into this at the time. I think it was overstated in the headlines. The same source Wikipedia gives for “70-90% comes from this mine” also says
Spruce Pine quartz isn’t quite an irreplaceable linchpin in semiconductor manufacturing. But alternatives are all some combination of not yet developed, not quite as good, and not quite as cheap. Cutting off the supply of Spruce Pine quartz probably wouldn’t choke off the supply of semiconductors completely, but it would mean yields going down and costs going up.
Substack as a credible source. What’s the world coming to?
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
To be fair, massive volcanic eruptions also have nasty effects on nearby lungs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
I’ve been reading about the pivot to war production here in America and I’m less and less sure we could do that again.
If Nicolae Carpathia topples the French government tomorrow, half the U.S. calls him based and the other half says it’s a Russian psyop. No changes to consumer goods production, but prices still spike, leading outlets to argue over whether or not it counts as inflation. The DoW puts in an order for 12 new battleships, due in 2035. One and a half will be built. The fraction of GDP allocated to data center construction continues to climb.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe none of the struggles of the past decades have been enough to demand political unity. We certainly did something after 9/11, even if it didn’t last in any sense.
But I suspect public opinion can no longer survive in a filtered, hyperreactive media environment. There is always an angle. The more obvious a mainstream position, the more tempting it gets to countersignal. Don’t worry, the filter bubble will find like-minded people. As many as it can without breaking the illusion of a defiant minority. Rebels. Frontiersmen out of time.
All we have to do is wait.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
“…unlike the rest of humanity, who can definitely be trusted to rank apocalyptic AI risk ahead of their own sexual practices?”
Unless you can show a nexus between the practices and the handling of risk, ad hominem arguments are symmetric. Disqualify everyone who thinks more about pussy than x-risk and you’ll be left only with the scheming eunuchs.
netstack
Royalty is a continuous selling-out motion
12d ago
I mean, I don’t do that either.
But if I had to make the case, I’d say that the Sims AI is transparent enough to leave no room for consciousness. Someone designed it, someone implemented it as a series of instructions. It might take some work but those are comprehensible.
Frontier AI is on the wrong side of that boundary. We are extending the frontier faster than we can explore the area between the two. We’re doing so specifically by mimicking human responses and then obscuring the inner workings.
I can’t say I find the AI torture chamber existentially horrifying. I think our barely-incomprehensible models are probably not that far from the comprehensible ones. What bothers me about this is the idea that if it were possible to upload a torture chamber, people would want to do it.
Correlation, causation.
The people taking a Homestuck community survey in 2025 are clearly selected for a willingness to hold socially ostracized beliefs.
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