Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results areā¦ basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual āgameplayā.
TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things arenāt even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer theyāre using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isnāt part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
maybe iām a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there werenāt armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gamingā¦ if you look at this āgameā as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
it reminds me of other āgamesā like Marian Kleinebergās Wave Function Collapse and Bananaftās Yedoma Globula. thereās one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i donāt recall the name
I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. Theyāre trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
They also claim this is āthe first playable AI-generated gameā when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesnāt count if you call it āNeural networkā instead of āAIā.
That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.
For example these two paragraphs from sections āproblem with codeā and āmagic of dataā:
Well, ājust read the dataset broā sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.
What the hell is this even arguing for? Is one module with ten million lines somehow better than 100 modules Ć 100k lines?
yeah, that āmost of the internet will be Al-generatedā nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-youāre-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
Itās dream logic.
Showed this to my wife.
oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model werenāt incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loopā¦ game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.
I think itās fine to have little art games that are only interesting to play for a few minutes. They can still have an impact that stays with you forever. Catacombs of Solaris for instance is one I love and think about all the time.
These AI guys though, god it must be so sad working on this stuff. They canāt be proud of what theyāre making if the goal is to trick people into thinking you can have a real Minecraft game in there. The game is not even relevant, as far as I can tell theyāre only using it to draw attention to their stupid and doomed ASIC business.
goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of āfirst person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visualsā i slapped into every search engine!
but yes, that was the one i was thinking of
Ah awesome! I didnāt think it was because you canāt upload pictures, but maybe you can in the āRevisitedā version!
i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen
Pgc can be a useful tool in the toolbox however. Just look at dwarf fortress for example. But games need more than just that. And with LLMs there could also ve some use (generation of voices I think for example, or some low level of conversational chatter). The problem is the data usage, the anti worker stuff (no voice actor wants their voice stolen for example), and like in this case, the people just promoting their other crap. Like how crypto games are just a shell to promote their crypto bs.
LLMs could have some minor use but with the backlash due to techbros going their usual vc style techbro ways, and steam requiring disclosure I doubt it will be of much use the risk is too great. Which considering the power costs is great.
We also have stuff like DLSS, which is pretty cool and I imagine ends up being more efficient in energy usage. The key thing I believe is itās built as a specific tool for a specific purpose, instead of general purpose slop machines eating humongous databases to excrete absolutely nothing useful for anyone.
See, thereās the mistake. You canāt let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
Iāve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison Iāve seen is calling it āMinecraft with dementiaā.
It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because thatās how long it can keep cohesion for.