noduerme

In the United States, individual bank accounts are insured by the government to $250k per account. The overall risk profile is extremely low, regardless of whether a bank collapses or is subject to a security breach. The general assumption is that it would require the US government to collapse for your checking account to vanish, in which case you'd probably have larger problems to worry about.

If you live in Argentina, I sympathize and I take your point.

Not the poster you responded to... Your Singleton hack was clever. In some ways it brings game design back into the equation, in that it mirrors the special cases that most game code has to deal with. You alluded to something in the docs that I was curious about, which is state. From reading it, I gathered that both agents interpret the direction of the Pac Man based on the position of its mouth in the previous frame. And one of your graphics seems to imply that the Doom state of where you are and which direction you're facing is magically grokked by the agent reading the map in the corner. Is that so? In that case, I wanted to ask, in pong or breakout, what is it using to figure out the direction and velocity of the ball? Faded prior shadows in other cells, maybe?

I don't see how. It's not an electoral matter; it's not a political system. It's not ICE coming for my neighbors, or a broken healthcare system. It's the epistemological apocalypse. It's the supernova where meaning collapses and the howling noise of madness overwhelms the signal of reason. Perhaps you could shut it down in one country, by law, but Pandora's box has been opened. The Tower of Babel. Open models will soon be good enough to create a phoney version of anything, anywhere, close enough to seeming true that by the time you discover it's not, a million more clones will be out there. Lies have always spread faster than truth, but never with such a force multiplier. The truth ain't dying in darkness, it's dying in blasting white noise, diffusion, ironic that turned out to be the approach. Or maybe not. What's this land rush to claim latent space but the attempt to expropriate, forever, the human ability to discover it?

The Leonard Cohen line keeps coming back to me: The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.

Sorry, but... I scoff at the idea that collective action can do a damn thing about it. There isn't even a collective idea of what to do instead of it. Collective action also has heavy connotations of communism, under which, people like me were also not permitted to write games and reap the economic and social benefits of doing what we enjoy. But at least one could say that, for the communist bloc, the collective action finally came against communism. So there's that, and maybe there's some sort of small-creative-capitalist-producer collective action that could be taken here...

but who are we kidding! I just had dinner with a friend who's a VP at [major motion picture studio] who described the situation in the movie business as "apocalyptic", and they have the ability to organize and a history of organizing far more than whichever random cross-section of white collar knowledge workers and engineers loses their livelihood in the next six months, or the six months after that.

No, my friend, I think this is a war where no shots needed to be fired, because we were all so dazzled by the bright lights that no one realized we were being steamrolled until it was too late. It's already over.

How, specifically? If I derive meaning in my life, economic prosperity, and social appreciation from creating games out of my imagination and bringing them to life for people, and they can now be reverse engineered and slop-copied instantly with no credit of any sort, what am I going to do about it? Make games and never show them to anyone? Stop doing what I love? Spend the rest of my life in pointless and wasteful battles over it?

No, I'm probably just going to say fuck 'em all, I feel sorry for everyone. Go to a bar and drink while the world burns.

There's nothing to do about it.

Thanks! I don't know what occasioned the compliment, but I'll take it!

Us smokers will still have to unplug and step outside. Maybe it'll turn out to be the healthier option after all.

I think that's a good take about horror and punk and pulp fiction.

"Permission to suck" made me think of something even more fundamental that's relevant to the AI art conversation, and often forgotten; that the best art, the most creative work, comes when you're working around constraints. Those could be the constraints of a medium, if you're chiseling in stone and need to make certain trade-offs; or they could be monetary constraints (you can't afford a cast of 40,000 extras for a war movie, so you turn your focus on the intense local experience of a few characters). In a "necessity is the mother of invention" kind of way, having limitations forces you to think more carefully about every move, and that kind of thought is what can make something a small masterpiece instead of a large sloppy shitshow.

Given an unlimited budget, most directors will lose their heads and do terrible things, even with a good script. Having no limits brings out the worst impulses in any creative endeavor. If "AI filmmaking" comes to stand in for "unlimited budget", then I think the trend in the future will be toward smaller, more human-scale art, because artists will find constraints to work within as a means to focus.

Maybe I'm not saying this as well as I could.

I'd dispute the premise that the richness of the Marvel and DC universes needs to be flattened into standard action movies. I think it's disproven by the outliers (more often DC, like the Watchmen HBO series, or the Penguin series).

Marvel and DC are the modern versions of ancient Greek mythology, with a huge cast of mortals and demigods. The origin stories of the characters are all morality tales. In the comics, flying around, using superpowers and blowing stuff up was sugarcoating for the real stories, which revolved around the internal conflicts of the characters.

You wouldn't necessarily look for deep meaning or personal growth in a standard action movie, obviously, but somehow I feel like even "Die Hard" delivered more humanity per beat than anything Marvel has made in ages. I don't know why we need to set the bar so low.

Sure, give evidence and examples.

It's quite scary, if it were also wiped from archival sites. You might have proof in some file on an old hard drive, but that would be it.

We've been living in a world of videogame-like FX movie slop for at least 20 years now, without the help of AI. Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.

It turns out, some people like that. A lot of people like it, presumably because it's fast and stimulating, and everyone's a sucker for wowing FX even as movie FX have gotten worse and more or less converged with video games.

What's lacking in these movies isn't so much plot, it's character and thoughtfulness. They tell us nothing about ourselves.

From an art history class, long ago, I remember the explanation of how classical Greek culture degraded into depictions if "pathos", visible in changes in the sculpture, and how that heralded more or less the decline of the civilization. It seems obvious to me that we've undergone a similar transition. And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art. It's the lack of thought on the part of the creators and the audience.

Interesting.

Been a long time since I wrote "realtime" code in PHP, but... the docs here say

>>>What a "real-time PHP app" used to require

nginx for reverse proxy and static files. php-fpm to run PHP. Node.js for a Socket.IO server"

PHP has socket_create, socket_bind, socket_listen (also the lovely socket_set_nonblock), all available to write a pretty simple daemon that listens, spawns worker processes (which can listen on their own sockets) and orchestrates the streams back to the client in pure PHP. I don't see any reason you'd need to run Node.js to manage socket communication if you wanted your architecture to be PHP.

That is a fun fact.

I guess freedom means different things to different people. Do people in China just roll their eyes at that?

And are we perfectly free in America? No. But we can say whatever we want about the government or the corporations, provided we're nonviolent. And we're not commanded how many children we can or can't have, or what religion to practice or not, or forced to show loyalty to a political party.

Plus we can smoke weed, buy guns, vote the bums out every four years, and most importantly make money without having to pay off some party official.