It’s unquestionably ecological, and the way the game frames it sure makes it feel intentional, but it’s not really a deep level of discourse. Different buildings output different amounts of pollution, which diffuses throughout the world and triggers both biter attacks and evolution (limited to scaling HP/damage/size). Trees will absorb pollution (preventing it from dispersing further), but get sicker and die over time, turning the world into a barren wasteland surrounding an ever-expanding factory. Players have the ability to slot mods into buildings to cut their pollution output by up to 80%, but almost nobody ever does this, because the biters aren’t really a threat except on extreme difficulty levels, and those mods take up slots that could otherwise be used to boost speed/productivity.
This certainly could just be a way to throw some challenge in, but in that case, it’d be much easier to just have the biter attacks happen at semi-random times, maybe modified by how much energy the factory uses over a given period of time. In terms of ramping up the challenge, this would produce results very similar to the actual game, without tracking individual packets of pollution as they diffuse over every square in the game grid and are absorbed by trees, all of which track how much pollution they can absorb individually before they die.
That ecological damage is modeled at all, and that the pollution subsystem is as detailed as it is, certainly suggests to me that showing the player the negative impact of their presence is fully intentional (and it’s always a negative impact). I think there’s too much effort being spent (both in dev time and in per-tick updates) to suggest that it’s just a challenge system; almost nothing else in the game is tracked at the same level of granularity or downstream impact as pollution. Ore patches track how much ore each segment has remaining, but that value doesn’t matter beyond knowing how long a patch will be good for; miners don’t start pulling up less ore per second or harder to process chunks as a patch is depleted. Liquids and gasses in storage/pipelines track their own temperature, but the game doesn’t care about modeling how a tanker full of steam loses temperature over time.
All that said, I think casting Factorio’s gameplay as a criticism of indigenous peoples requires some pretty tortured logic. Biters are far dumber than most animals; their attacks amount to “run in a straight line at wherever that pollution came from”, which is one of the reasons they aren’t a major threat. They are unquestionably demonized; biters are 100% hostile the second they see you even if you’ve never produced any pollution, there’s no way to interact with them in any way but violence, and they’re big gross bugs. But I think this is better viewed through the lens of gameplay and of the ecological commentary. They’re big, ugly, and completely hostile to make it clear to the player that they’re your enemies. And they weaken the ecological commentary intentionally or not; there are no “neutral” animals, just biters, and the player doesn’t kill off anything cute.
Unless you’re willing to put in some kind of response that basically says “I’m not going to respond to that” (and that’s a sure way to break immersion) this is effectively impossible to do well, because the writer has to anticipate every possible thing a player could say and craft a response to it. If you don’t, you’ll end up finding a “nearest fit” that is not at all what the player was trying to say, and the reaction is going to be nonsensical from the player’s perspective
LA Noire is a great example of this, although from the side of the player character: the dialogue was written with the “Doubt” option as “Press” (as in, put pressure on the other party). As a result, a suspect can say something, the player selects “Doubt”, and Phelps goes nuts making wild accusations instead of pointing out an inconsistency.
Except worse, because in this case, the player says something like “Why didn’t you say something to your boss about feeling sick?” and the game interpreted it as “Accuse them of trying to sabotage the business.”
I have a few project ideas, and I thought of reusing the paper from various shop catalogs that I receive in my physical mailbox. I'd like to make it stiffer, something more like cardboard. I read somewhere online that you could use corn starch for this, mixed with water. Would it work? Do you have better ideas?
Depending on your use case, if you want something stiffer you could brush each sheet with slow curing epoxy resin, then layer and press it to create some DIY micarta (yes, micarta technically uses phenolic resin, but epoxy should work fine for most uses).
this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:...
You can also do this in Gmail natively by using a plus sign instead of the hyphen. E.g. myemail+newsletter@gmail.com will deliver, as the plus and everything between it and the @ are ignored. This may work on other platforms too.
Or, as mentioned in another comment, you can do this easily with a domain you own. Although you may get the occasional call from a merchant validating that StoreName@mydomain.com is an actual order.
I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.
Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I’d love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80’s/90’s (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn’t need to be reflected in EVs, but it’s what all the major automakers are doing.
The code contains sections codifying that justices should not allow outside relationships to influence their official conduct or judgment, placing restrictions on justices participating in fundraising and reiterating limits on the accepting of gifts. It also states that justices should not “to any substantial degree” use...
The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice. The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.
So…
Why, if you think the code that applies to all other federal judges is good, did you not simply adopt it?
So the problem is that people think the justices consider them not bound by ethics rules because they don’t have a formal code, not the behaviors of certain justices that have come to light in recent years, got it.
If we’re going to be pedantic, you mean that it’s possible for the median to equal the arithmetic mean. The “average” is a number that represents a set of data, and could be the median, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, and several other values.
Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.
This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.
It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.
None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.
But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.
The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.
Thanks for clarifying. There are a lot of misconceptions about how this technology works, and I think it’s worth making sure that everyone in these thorny conversations has the right information.
I completely agree with your larger point about culture; to the best of my knowledge we haven’t seen any real ability to innovate, because the current models are built to replicate the form and structure of what they’ve seen before. They’re getting extremely good at combining those elements, but they can’t really create anything new without a person involved. There’s a risk of significant stagnation if we leave art to the machines, especially since we’re already seeing issues with new models including the output of existing models in their training data. I don’t know how likely that is; I think it’s much more likely that we see these tools used to replace humans for more mundane, “boring” tasks, not really creative work.
And you’re absolutely right that these are not artificial minds; the language models remind me of a quote from David Langford in his short story Answering Machine: “It’s so very hard to realize something that talks is not intelligent.” But we are getting to the point where the question of “how will we know” isn’t purely theoretical anymore.
The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.
Why is that hard to believe? The mega-rich are not notably more intelligent than anyone else, they just started decades ago with inherited wealth and got lucky early.
I have a suspicion that all of the layers of “Elon management” at Tesla and SpaceX have given him the idea that he’s a brilliant innovator; he gives them all his outlandish ideas and they get filtered into (normally) reasonable plans, and they guide him down the path they want him to go down while he thinks the good idea is his. And those companies are both doing well, so clearly his style works, at least in his mind.
But then he bought twitter, which didn’t have anyone devoted to protecting the company from him, and it’s all going to shit.
Turned out amazing. Followed this recipe but swapped the ground ginger for fresh ginger. https://i.imgur.com/oTgSeIN.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/roxrP9W.jpg...
I’ve got several small houseplants in my home office, and I really like having them around. I’m still pretty new to taking care of them altogether, though, and we’ve gotten dozens of tiny house gnats now. I’ve put up sticky traps and tried to use some pest control in the potted soil. But would a small venus fly trap be...
Divine Automation: Factorio and phantasies of mechanization (reincantamentox.substack.com)
A Small Steam Game Shows How LLMs Could Kill the Dialogue Tree (re: Verbal Verdict demo) (www.404media.co)
Excerpts:...
Feral (beehaw.org)
What do you recommend as a solution to harden paper? (libranet.de)
I have a few project ideas, and I thought of reusing the paper from various shop catalogs that I receive in my physical mailbox. I'd like to make it stiffer, something more like cardboard. I read somewhere online that you could use corn starch for this, mixed with water. Would it work? Do you have better ideas?
AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media (www.404media.co)
this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:...
Starbucks accused of manipulating app payments for $900 million profit (www.androidauthority.com)
The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? (www.businessinsider.com)
In dispute over Parthenon sculptures, Greece says Britain showing 'lack of respect' (www.reuters.com)
US Supreme Court announces formal ethics code for justices (www.reuters.com)
The code contains sections codifying that justices should not allow outside relationships to influence their official conduct or judgment, placing restrictions on justices participating in fundraising and reiterating limits on the accepting of gifts. It also states that justices should not “to any substantial degree” use...
“Cis is a heterosexual slur” Tweets Elon Musk, Who Halved Twitter’s Value — Assigned (www.assignedmedia.org)
Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002' (www.windowscentral.com)
Archive link: archive.ph/ajgMB...
How to Support Intersex People on Intersex Awareness Day — And Every Day (www.them.us)
Intersex Awareness Day is October 26. Here's how to show up for the intersex rights movement.
Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? (open.substack.com)
US agency sues Tesla as Black workers report “swastikas, threats, and nooses” (arstechnica.com)
Beehaw lacks community
Apologies for the clickbaity title or for the messy wording to follow. I’m not great at articulating myself....
Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...
RIP Twitter’s iconic bird logo (www.theverge.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of July 23rd
A new week and a new thread....
First time cooking tofu
Turned out amazing. Followed this recipe but swapped the ground ginger for fresh ginger. https://i.imgur.com/oTgSeIN.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/roxrP9W.jpg...
Would a venus fly trap help deal with house gnats?
I’ve got several small houseplants in my home office, and I really like having them around. I’m still pretty new to taking care of them altogether, though, and we’ve gotten dozens of tiny house gnats now. I’ve put up sticky traps and tried to use some pest control in the potted soil. But would a small venus fly trap be...