disregarded stars

Spent some time testing the Google AI studio app and built an agent-based TTRPG for Troika plus the Black Pit setting. It does all the system dice throws correctly, has different agents to operate at campaign and story level, audio narration with selectable voices, and it's enjoyable to play.

I'm particularly proud of my idea to let the player take snapshots of the virtual world on demand, invoking the narrator to describe a scene and the Nano Banana model to draw it, in an appropriate style. This gives more verisimilitude than I expected. Never had to touch a line of code. Amazing.

Return to Office mandates are perhaps the most reliable indicator that you are a dog shit manager who doesn't understand work in the 21st century. Just 100 percent pure cooked-brain culture war at the expense of your own organization.

I have seething contempt for Altman, Musk et al but I'm really tired of "marketing" as a complaint about LLMs. MS Office has been marketed as a panacea for 30 years too but I still know how to use it and when not to. Part of being a functional human is understanding which tools to use where.

Had a copy of the Troika TTRPG lying around forever so I started using it to experiment with having a model act as DM, building off the rules and setting to make choose-your-own-adventure mini games. Troika is such a strong setting I think it drives the text much more than you might think.

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of for the future of gaming with heavy model involvement. Systems of agents can (re) constitute setting and character based on human-written words in a way that really, really amplifies creative ideas and writing. It's both alien and familiar.

The thing about paying for games for me, today, is that it's basically the same decision as donating to a Patreon, I do it because I want to support the devs, very rarely because I need the game. I have had Witcher 3 and No Mans Sky sitting in my backlog for years, I don't need more games.

I genuinely don't know wtf Xbox thinks they are doing here. Nvidia ultimate is cheaper than this! PS Plus premium comes with unlimited streaming! It's like they're either focused on margins over the future of the brand, or else they're trying to kill it without saying that's the plan.

There's a real, positive vision in the work that BlueSky is doing on ATProto - for how technology can help us own our own networks and turn them into shared infrastructure. Unfortunate that so much of their audience is committed to braindead Twitter trolling instead of trying to understand it.

What if my substack was an old school blog was a streaming platform was a podcasting tool was a game? What if all this could be directly tied in to social media but I owned all the server infrastructure myself?

It's now very easy for me to see how the ubiquity of "the models" will lead to new forms and ideas of what art is, just as moving images and computers have. My current best analogy is something like TTRPG writing where the "work" is rules and setting and it's assumed that narrative is collaborative

If you think that TTRPG writing is art, or that someone like Damien Hirst is an artist, or the old Renaissance sculptors for that matter, then you already understand. The mechanical process is not the work, and never has been.

I shouldn't be drawn, but there's a certain social media attitude that wants to pretend to care about serious issues like water rights or health care policy, but in practice only ever wants to endorse memeified "solutions" and is hostile to anyone with the temerity to say "it's complicated".

I think it's hard to communicate to people who don't work with datacenter hardware how insane the pricing and supply situation is - almost every component to power and operate a datacenter costs a multiple of what it did a year ago - could be 5x the cost for delivery a year (or 4!) out

This states a pretty strong, firm conclusion at the start of a thread where the author later states they don't know or won't say how they would even judge this statement to be factual or not. I'm also skeptical of Anthropic's claims but this is straight up vibes based reasoning.

Lol the functions of academic publishing have been defunct for decades and it is immensely frustrating that journal pubs live on while the whole justification for their existence is outmoded by technology. Adding AI to the pile of bullshit rather than rethinking it is perfect.