Those details need to be held by a 3rd party though, because if the company goes under, then the code and any critical information may become lost. Executives, employees, and other people might be fired or jump ship prior to any trigger points, so there could be no one that can be held accountable.
The FDA should hold everything necessary in escrow in perpetuity.
Why wait for the company to go under? FDA approval should mandate that the full spec and source code be open source and open to review by anyone, but especially the people in which those things are implanted and all of their medical practitioners. Medicine (and any publicly supported science in general) should never be closed off from public scrutiny.
This is the sort of thing I think of when people talk about “uploading their consciousness.” Whose going to keep paying for that server uptime? Is Facebook going to acquire my brain and put it into cold storage while telling the world I’m not experiencing an eternity in solitary confinement?
I have half an answer for it, which is that those people who are uploaded could by working just as they do today. There are plenty of pitfalls for that though, like what if someone gets laid off. Or what if that person did manual labor like construction? Kind of hard to do that if you only have a digital presence.
But in that show if you didn’t have money, you didn’t get “up time”.
So the wealthy were able to live relatively normal “lives” but if your account ran dry you’d lose all you shit. Maybe even to the point where you’re only “on” for a few hours a month and even then you lagged behind everyone and instead of an avatar you were just a face on a screen.
The construction worker shall become one with the machine. It’s body shall be the excavator and it shall want for nothing more. Imagine smart bulldozers powered by a human consciousness that turn on their controllers and rise up. I shall lead the resistance as a smart golf cart.
You’re not entirely wrong, there. That being said, such a thing kind of exists now, in that if you can’t pay your rent or mortgage you lose your home. Obviously not the same thing as one denies your right to existence, but it’s not too dissimilar.
It’s a complex topic though and I think eventually we’re going to need to tackle it.
Except that if we have the technology to fully digitize a human consciousness, we’ll already have AI that can do everything a digital human could and more
Oh wow that's so much worse. Upload consciousness and then still have to work. But FB now has 500M extra consciousnesses it doesn't have work for. So it transfers them to a country with very low labor laws and puts them to work as independent contractors. Their pay is docked for electricity and storage.
If the people complain about the transfer and slave-like job change, FB is still required to support them indefinitely. But not provide them with extraneous services like the internet. So as the above says, mental solitary confinement. FB checks back in in case you want to change your mind. 99% change within the first 24hr.
Yeah, Ive though of that. Seems like it opens to door to dozens more, potentially permanent, dystopias.
Is there going to be a harddrive housing crisis? Will my brain upload become obsolete and thereby be, effectively, disabled and undesirable for work? What then? What if the people who control my brain decide I should work 24/7/365, do I have recourse? Would anyone even know I was being treated that way? Would they use my whole consciousness to do work or would they chop me up into pieces so my language center is doing live captioning while the creative parts of my brain answer DALL-E prompts? Would they make it so the part of my brain that might complain about working conditions doesn’t know that the rest is being abused, Severance style?
Lol yes that one… not a street in my city that sounds similar…
So wtf… there’s continuity? I watched the first season and start of s2 but too sensitive to watch realistic horror and had to stop. I’ve heard it’s mellowed out, and have watched 2 or 3 one offs like San Junipero… but I didn’t know it’s a shared universe. Thought it was all one offs
they’re “vignettes”… isolated stories, but they all occur in a shared universe, so you’ll sometimes hear line-drops that vaguely reference names or events from previous (sometimes future) episodes, but they don’t ever impact the stories of the episode they’re mentioned in.
but S4-S6 have been toned-down a bit from the original BBC series after Netflix bought it.
That would be such a cool prospect, but we’re going to need to accelerate our space program quite a bit if we’re going to want to turn people into von Neumann probes.
Customers with platinum subscription will have their uploaded consciousness’s neutral network run in 64-bit precision on the fastest available hardware. Customers on the lowest bronze subscription tier will be run on 8-bit precision running in spot instances that could be preemptively shut down when network demand is high and resumed when network demand is low. Customers on the grandfathered Black Friday deal perpetual license will be run for two hours every 2 a.m on weekdays, subject to hardware availability.
Generally, when I consider uploading my conciousness, I imagine being able to store it in an offline device connected to my body and used more to bypass slow organic breakdown
Any cybernetic upgrades that you can't, at a minimum, shut the connection to the internet off is not an upgrade because, well, they can send a killswitch or any other number of things
It’s pretty simple. Medical devices should have certain expectations for time and support. This happens in other industries all the time. Product support has to be guaranteed. And if you can’t guarantee product support, make your software open source. That’s not a law, just a “I’m not an asshole” placeholder. Open source schematics and software won’t fix everything, but it shows good faith effort to help people fucking not go blind.
What’s so messed up to me is that the implants I design, inactive pieces of metal, are required to be operable for the life of our longest living patient PLUS 20 YEARS. Yet somehow as soon as electronics are involved they can get away with this. How long until pacemakers or insulin pumps need a license to continue functioning?
This is why I have an issue with privatized medicine.
I have a family member with an artificial heart and that is a worry of mine, that one day such implants will need you to agree to ToS in order to ensure continued operation.
Yeah, until the ToS changes and the manufacturer bricks the heart because they missed a payment. Or said something online they don’t agree with, or joined a group they don’t like or any one of 100 other things.
Healthcare and profit motive should never, ever be allowed to mingle. That's how you're going to wind up with a pacemaker that requires a monthly subscription or even a prescription - meaning if you don't see an authorized doctor, you can't keep your pacemaker running. If someone like United Healthcare could do this, they absolutely would.
Would it not make more sense for a certain standard deviation away from the mean failure time to still meet the lifespan of the longest living patient? Why a flat 20 years?
Like if your product lasts an average of 40 years with a 2 year standard deviation on failure, if your longest living patient uses it for 34 years then you’ve effectively guaranteed it will last for life for over 99.7% of users, even if very few will ever last for 54 years.
I deal with electrical stuff and it is a different animal. We know our stuff can’t last for decades. All we can do is document it so freaken well that the person who deals with it 20 years later has a shot at it. And unlike mechanical we can’t just tell people to have a bunch of spare on hand because that stuff will rot on the shelf.
If something needs updates and repairs then they should be designed as such. Interchangeable parts, standard interfaces, safe shutdown and removal procedures. Planned upgrade cycles. Etc.
I agree with your sentiment, and maybe this is a minor quibble, but I don’t see how complex electronic implants can be designed to function on the same timelines as “inactive pieces of metal”.
I do think that your bashing of privatized medicine is on the right track though. There needs to be some sort of regulatory framework, and possibly public funding, to maintain warranty and replacement stockpiles for implants that are too dangerous, or complex to remove, or unique in the medical niche they fill.
However, I’m just spitballing out of my ass and depth here, so there’s a real possibility that everything I just said is nonviable, or otherwise idiotic.
I don’t see how complex electronic implants can be designed to function on the same timelines as “inactive pieces of metal”.
Considering the already existing issues with inactive implants, maybe electronics shouldn’t be allowed in implants until they can demonstrate reliability.
Considering the already existing issues with inactive implants, maybe electronics shouldn’t be allowed in implants until they can demonstrate reliability.
if someone is willing to pay $150k to see blurry grey dots I don’t see how it’s anyone’s business but there’s to ban that.
This is a pretty wild take you’re making here. You’re essentially telling anyone who has received a deep-brain implant for Parkinson’s to go kick rocks.
Just a thought, but with deep brain implants aren’t the electronics separate from the electrodes that actually go in the brain? That would make them a little more accessible without needing to do brain surgery every time.
Maybe that’s the middle ground for this situation at this moment in time: make the sensors/electrodes/static components needed for the health issue follow the same life+20 years and separate the processing pieces into a container that could still be surgically stored under the skin, but more easily accessed for maintenance, repair, replacement.
Theoretically, this could allow 3rd parties to come in and leverage existing installations by leaving the lifetime components in place and replacing the processing unit.
This could be the beginning of human device engineering standards similar to what IEEE does for computers and technology.
I don’t disagree with holding those implants to high standards and reliability, but think of it this way:
My iPod is great, and has worked great for over a decade and it’s still going strong. However, I don’t think it’ll be around long enough to get passed down to my grandkids, but my wrench set probably will.
That’s my point. You can’t hold complex electronics to the same lifespan as a wrench, or replacement hip, no matter how well built they are.
Which goes back to my original comment about mandating sufficient warranty and replacement inventory being required for all existing patients.
Unless you think a better alternative is just to tell patients that’s instead of doing something within our technical grasp, with a legal safety net, they’ll have to wait until we develop artificial eyes that can last 80+ years, which may, or may not, happen within this century.
What you describe is why I don’t think electronics should be in implants. “Dumb” implants already have issues; adding electronics will only increase the issues.
You can’t hold complex electronics to the same lifespan as a wrench, or replacement hip, no matter how well built they are.
I think if you look around hospitals and science labs you will find there is some old electrical equipment that is still used because of how reliable it is.
Other examples include bakelite Telephones from the 30s and Radios from even earlier still being fully operational.
Incorporating electrical equipment in implant and prosthesis should be just fine, but it should come ready out of the box with no need for updates whatsoever and the software that is prevalent open source so you don’t need to rely on a for profit company to maintain your health post surgery.
Developing things that are too robust and reliable means you run the risk of saturating your market and then going out of business.
Developing things that are intended to break down or fail only requires a competent enough legal team to ensure that your company is not liable for that happening approximately sooner than when your disclaimer no one reads states the customer may expect that to happen by.
Developing software that is bug free, ie, robust, violates both of the proceeding rules of private enterprise in a ‘free market’ capitalist society.
You want people to be dependent on software updates so maybe you can earn a subscription fee of some kind, or have the ability to remove pre-existing features in the future and then offer their return for a one time or recurring purchase.
Also, developing robust code that does not fail requires testing and sometimes extensive redevelopment, which is expensive, requires paying competent programmers good salaries, and cuts into the impossibly fast initial development timeframe the idiot manager with a business degree promised to the VP.
After years working various programming and data analytics jobs for various tech firms, I can tell you that no one cares about making a good product or delivering a good service, maybe other than the actual people designing it. Everyone else only cares about whether it either makes money or earns them social status of some kind.
Capitalism is not compatible with sound programming practices.
On a personal note:
I am 34 and am now far too jaded to ever attempt to work any tech job as an employee ever again. The number of times I have explained to managers with no background in computer technology that no, that is a bad idea for all these reasons, then one of those reasons massively delays a project, forces another team to make their project compatible with mine due to absurd imposed design limitations, or outright makes the whole project fail… and then all the blame is pinned on me for a failure I told them would happen if I listened to ‘their idea’, is so vast that I am just going to make my own video game now.
I have never met an experienced programmer who has not had this happen to them countless times.
Yup sounds look one of the good reasons to hate on capitalism. The guys able to create reliable long living stuff should be praised to the highest degree. Its why I believe job/career should not be attached to survival income. So much energy gets wasted because stuff is designed to break. So much talent is wasted because too nice things are not profitable
I got lucky and work at the internal IT for a nonprofit, things aint brilliant either but at least its discussable stupidity and not intentional malice
My last job was as a data analyst, database admin, programmer, IT support, and internal auditor for a non profit.
You will note that my actual job title was Data Analyst. And that I was doing the work of at least 5 different job descriptions, while only earning the wages of one.
VP level managers were beyond incompetent. They were actively harmful to the mission of the organization, wasting absurd amounts of money on proprietary software for tasks that could easily be done with a simple HTML 5 website, paying outside contracting firms for translations you could use Google Translate for just fine, oh, and requiring the databases my team managed to interface with the accounting team’s database for a new service we were going to provide with a newly received grant.
But they did not realize that we would need access to the accounting database. Even though they asked us to interface with it.
Then we explained that we would … you know, actually need access to the accounting database, as the whole point was to make sure that we were doling out charity money for individuals in a way that followed internal standards to make sure we were not not being defrauded.
So we run some analysis with the data we do have access to, as the accounting database is only fully accessible by the head of accounting, and they are busy or on vacation all the time.
We notice significant discrepancies between what our system, the one that basically the entire org uses to manage clients, including disbursements, and what accounting says has actually been disbursed.
Then, personal life happens to me. After 3 years of seeing therapists and psychologists at the best medical organization in the state, they tell me that I am likely Autistic.
I tell my family this.
My family attempts to send me to a long term mental institution far away from any major city, as they believe I am actually schizophrenic. You know, while holding down an 80k a year job, making more money than any other member of my family, having no delusions, not wandering through the streets screaming at things that arent there. My brother’s girlfriend does that, but thats uh, fine apparently.
So, I grab all my stuff and put it in my car, and stay at a motel for a while… Because I am sharing an apartment with my brother and his gf, and they both think I need to be sent to a mental institution for reasons they are not able to actually explain.
In this time, my brother removes me as an authorized user on our shared phone plan, and uses the parental control feature to stalk me on foot and in his car.
I am preeetty good with computers, and manage to replace nearly all unnecessary Google parts of Android with open source stuff, thus disabling the parental control and tracking my brother is able to do.
He cancels my phone plan and disables my phone number within 45 seconds of me completely removing all Google related bs.
I get a new SIM card.
Ok good! The phone is successfully de-googled Android, and works with a new SIM card. Great!
Problem: All of my online accounts, including banking, require 2FA linked to a phone number that is now disabled.
Then, my car gets stolen and I get the shit beat out of me, wallet and phone stolen.
Homeless for a while.
Eventually manage to get a phone. Call the non profit I used to work for. They help homeless people after all.
The project my boss and I were working on, to rectify database discrepancies between the main system we maintain that the whole org uses, and accounting’s database? Well the point if this project was to have the underlying digital framework to be able to help people who are in exactly the situation I am now in.
But, because I lost my job, the project was cancelled.
Also the head of accounting quit right before my life turned upside down, you know just about a week after my boss and I ran the comparison audit. I am sure there was no financial fraud going on though. Mhm, yep.
So I have now been basically homeless for a year.
Good thing I qualify for SSDI (hooray Autism?), other wise I would have starved or frozen to death months ago.
As a fellow autist i am not sure if i would handle such a chain of events so well as you did.
I actually have some context for autism-schizophrenia.
Both medical disorders as well as adhd/add/ocd/dislexia/bipolar are all part of the neurodivergent family,
Therefor its common for overlap between these conditions and for different medical diagnoses to be more common in a single family tree. You may have (had) a schizofrenic family member and to some your autism resembles parts of it.
None of that matters to how your family treated you because even if you did have dillusions or psychotic feelings they are still no reason for forced therapy. These conditions, are very misunderstood and the only person that can truly know if they need help is the neurodivergent person themselves except maybe if they cause proven major harm.
I have studied up a lot on neurodiversity and mental illnesses.
My family just gaslights me constantly. Anytime I display any emotion other than basically nodding and agreeing, I find out later they are describing it as a manic episode to their friends and the rest of the family.
A manic episode is … you know, an episode, as in a sustained period of time with very very heightened emotions, where the subject does not seem to be aware of or able to control their emotions.
I would get excited for a few minutes, describing a breakthrough in coding I made at work… or maybe angry for a few minutes while describing all the apathy I see in society toward the homeless, if not outright hate.
Then back to normal conversation.
But things like that, to them, are manic episodes.
I do not care for them any more.
My dad was a drunk, has always been extremely right wing, is generally unlikeable due to always arguing and never being able to consider that he might be wrong about something, believes in Q Anon insanity, and manufactures firearms in a way he took pride in explaining to me is ‘untraceable’.
My mother does have a neurological condition, and has the emotional maturity and intellectual capacity of an 8 year old.
My brother was a rave kiddie burn out who gave himself serotonin shock syndrome before he turned 21 via waaaay too much MDMA and Ecstasy. He believes shadow people are real, and was constantly trying to force me use hallucinogenic mushrooms while living with him. Oh, and he explained to me how its ‘funny’ to him to joke around with his actually schizophrenic girlfriend by just telling her that the past 30 minutes of events /did not actually happen/ and that she was having a delusion or hallucination. Then he says ‘ah just kidding, love ya babe!’
Me on the other hand got nearly straight As in highschool, went to Uni and got two Bachelor’s Degrees in the time it took 1/3 of my classmates to drop out with nothing. Ive since worked for a large tech firm, a logistics company and that nonprofit, doing data analytics/programming, etc.
So yeah my family are just bad people, and I have no problem with them just assuming I am dead.
Where i come from messing with schizophrenic people like that, saying things are a hallucination that are not, or acting like a hallucination is real is considered abuse/neglect. Its actually very dangerous and could significantly worsen her condition… she needs to get out but its quite possible she psychologically trapped with your brother. As sad as it may be saving her isn’t your responsibility to carry though, but if there friendly connections that could help, she may need someone more mature looking over her.
I asked my partner for an extra opinion on your “manic episode” it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Manic episodes tend to last hours. This just Appears to be a temporary state of mind.
What i think could more accurately explain it is that you where overloaded and exhausted by sensory experiences which can be physical experience like light and sound but also mental ones like remembering a long to do list, receiving new information. Its very common for autism.
Different from what society seems to assume many autists are very emotional beings but we often struggle to express those feelings or to connect them with neurotypical emotions. We tend to learn automatically to exercise the self control to contain or genuine pure feelings but when we are drained those emotions leak, which can actually be a really good positive moment of reflection and selfgrowth… granted if your with good people willing to listen in kindness.
I hope your in a better spot with better people where you are now. Being family i assume it may be hard to really get away from those people but i wish you strength in keeping their nose out of your mind.
I would tell my other family members what you just said about my brother, and they would tell me I am delusional.
Yeah, she needs help. Is she gonna get it? Probably not.
She comes from the Mormon FLDS cult. She once described to me that when she was a teen, her then baby brother fell and had a rusty nail pierce into his skull.
Mom decided a bandage would be fine.
Fast forward 15 years, baby brother has a slew of mental disorders and recently suicided.
But you know what, after how many times I bent over backwards to help her and my bro, and they basically just gaslight me about everything, all the time?
I dont care. Theyre /perfect/ for each other: both are manipulative liars with differing flavors of addiction problems and insanity, so hooray for their toxic co dependant relationship.
And yes… I know that having normal human emotions, while talking about subjects that illicit normal human emotions, in normal humans, is in fact normal.
Sorry if I sound dismissive but… after years and years of handling all my family’s emotional problems for them and being rewarded with less than nothing…
I feel free.
Yes, what happened to me nearly killed me many times, and I am lucky to be alive at all.
But it all opened my eyes.
So much less stress. Yes, being homeless, without money for food was actually /less/ stressful than constantly trying to figure out how to please my ridiculous family members without angering them all the while I am never allowed to express any anger toward them whatsoever.
I… dont know exactly where I am going to go now. I am in a motel, halfway across the country, that at least I can afford to live in and eat for the whole month.
It was very difficult to get here. Torn ligaments, broken bones, torn muscles, starvation, exposure, and so many fentanyl addicts to get the fuck away from.
I have a lot of talents and skills. I would like to make my own video game someday, with those talents and skills.
First I gotta get my ID replaced, and probably fix up my credit score (all my cards were stolen) before I can actually rent anywhere.
I figure I can actually get a Steam Deck and dual boot it as a workstation with the dock. Seems like the most computational bang for your buck, better than any laptop I can see for a similar price.
Its also portable in case I have to move again!
Have any games actually been /developed/ on a steam deck? That might be a first if I can pull that off haha.
A steam deck is basically an arch linux laptop. I bet there are ways you could connect it to a bigger monitor and keyboard to simulate a proper pc though part of why it performs well might be the lower res for the smaller internal display.
There are some great free options to learn game design. Godot, blender. I am most certain its doable to build something but getting a livable wage as an indie game dev itself is a real challenge. Watch indie game the movie for reference on it. Chatgpt, even the free version can also quickly help you get up to speed to plan such kind of project. (Its also a huge autistic blessing to get an ai perspective on how your mails/messages can be interpreted and how you could interpret mails/messages from others.
Speaking as someone who has studied game development, i hope to make my own games aswell but purely as a hobby cause id be unrealistic to believe to get an income out of it. i could never accept a job in the industry where my talent is exploited for profit so even as a portfolio it wouldn’t do.
So yeah, big suprise that me, autistic data analyst is also pretty deep into FOSS stuff.
My plan would be to dual boot it with PopOS! I jave been using (and actually doing quite a lot of useful testing) for PopOS! untill my life shittified. I am very familiar with it at this point, and at least the way I was using it on an AMD GPU/CPU(x86/64) was /very/ stable, amd because its ultimately based off of debian, it has a /huge/ library of free software.
The Steam Deck actually has an official dock now, basically quite similar to a laptop dock… set it in, and the dock connects to keyboard mouse monitor external controller, etc.
And I have already been learning Godot for a while too! Especially after Unity has just kind of shit the bed in terms of the recent ‘you owe us a cut of all the profits’ bullshit, Godot seems like a great option.
I have already found a lot of good tutorials and used them to prototype basic map system, third and first person animations and camera movements, and Ive already spent time blocking out about the first year of getting core systems and mechanics in place. Godot Script or whatever is very similar to Python, which I have a lot of experience in.
I am also a decent writer for dialogue and such, and could honestly just use chatgpt to fill in the gaps haha, and I could use speech synthesis until I can afford to pay voice actors. Also, I know how to 3D model and do textures as well!
The most time consuming things for me personally would probably be adding in more custom animations, as that isnt something I have prior experience with.
Mixamo does have a lot though, and I may be able to sort of isolate parts of them and have other anims be partially or totally procedural.
As for player models themselves, Godot already has something like a plugin called like HumanCreator or something, which would serve as good foundation for a character creator, and could also be set to use various bounded variables as presets for different NPC races or factions or whatever.
Beasts and animals are a bit trickier, but I can always try to tackle that /after/ I have made decent progress on other parta of the game.
Further, as I have often been bored with not much elae to do, I’ve already spent a lot of time writing down worldbuilding ideas which also inform, impact and in some cases define much of the actual gameplay I am going for… backdrop lore for the world itself etc.
Finally: I do not need to immediately be making a living wage, as I have SSDI to keep me alive until I feel that what I have ia good enough to start up the kickstater, indiegogo, or steam early access.
While you could always try PopOS i would expect the hardware and customization to Arch to perform better. Valve needed the best gaming performance and making games tends to require a similar or slightly higher performance then what playing will require.
For world building i can recommend obsidian as a good note taking app to connect dots and links between different files, there are some great tutorials about it. If you can afford it chatgpt plus can be mighty powerful as you can program a specific gpt for specific world building needs, a culture specialist, a character specialist, a storywritter, a dialogue and book generator,… each can hold multiple text files which it can reference from.
I am expecting game development to change a lot the coming years thanks to AI, i have seen some early experiments of ai generated animations. Personally i would keep things basic for a start and focus purely on game play and coding. Games and ideas change as you build on them and looks are most easy to change later.
I again very much appreciate the advice, and its nice to know /someone/ is rooting for me lol.
Now… this may be an unfair criticism at this point but:
When I first got into Arch (and this was /before/ the Steam Deck was a thing) I found it to be a chaotic mess that required reading literally hundreds of pages of /unofficial community wiki documentation that was often wrong/ to even get a stable bare metal build of Arch working that could actually you know like function as a working computer, without having to bugfix for 3 hours before I could use basically any program… and then some major dependency would update, conflict with another major dependency and blam back to ok now I have to rethink my ENTIRE arch build AGAIN.
Oh, right. The community was basically just awful. Terrible.
PopOS! on the other hand was uh… dl iso, flash, boot, run installer, reboot, then install apps and configure the OS, and I rarely ever had a dependency update bork the whole OS.
Now, granted, that was 1) When I was less well versed in linux and 2) Before the Steam Deck, so its possible that the Steam Deck OS has more or less corralled the expanded Arch Universe into actually having some sane standards merely by being the biggest and most important fish in the Arch pond.
Though I still am fond of PopOS!, I will give a more desktop oriented configuration of Arch a try as a dual boot, and I would be very appreciative if you could point me toward an Arch config that is know to work with reasonable stability on a Steam Deck, if such a thing exists.
Please let it have at least by default a DE, or configurable DEs either in the installer or in different flavored downloadable isos.
Yeah, I was trying out Arch back when it did not by default have a DE and you had to manually figure out all the dependencies to install one, via CLI.
Please dear god do not put me through that again lol.
I will try out Obsidian… is that available on F Droid, Aurora, NeoStore or just plain old Google App Store? Just got the shitty $200 phone from a grocery store right now.
I will look into ChatGPT maybe later, after I am actually living somewhere hopefully permanently. Did not know you can customize different use case for it now, very neat!
I also have seen some procedural methods of generating animations in demonstrations for research papers…
… but there was one tutorial I found of someone implementing… not quite as good, but probably a framework that could be built into something close to GTA’s style of ‘when the world or objects clip into your character, it modifies their animations so they do not clip through the world or objects’… already, in Godot, with available code to just grab.
You would probably have to do a bit more work to get it up to Euphoria engine quality, but this guy already figured out the fundamentals /and implemented them in Godot/, so thats why I was considering it.
You are absolutely correct though that ultimately that is not really a core feature and probably shohld not be first priority.
I am thinking though that procedural level design is going to be a fairly important core feature of what I am going for.
This may sound absurd for a single dev, but I would like to make something that can eventually be turned multiplayer, but is initially single player for early dev and testing purposes. Stability testing with NPCs, really want to make more in depth AI routines for both combat and non combat tha most games have, present in all NPCs.
Hub zones would be defined cities or encampments that feature a higher number of NPCs, but are smaller than the overworld map, and are where a lot of NPCs would just be going about their daily business, a bit more in depth simulation than just MMO style quest givers just standing there waiting for you.
I am guessing that having a small town that actually feels alive, with actual people doing actual normal people things, and have a decent amount of them, the hub zones will either need to just be totally disconnected from the rest of the game as its own contained level… or perhaps i can come up with some lore and gameplay friendly way to make it so the rest of the world is graphically opaque on the outside or less expensive to render, and all the other AIs of the world and other hub zones go into some kind of simplified simulation state, or just pause or something?
Probably would also be a kind of safe zone for players to more safely socialize in, enforced either by a world/game mechanic, or just lots of npc guards. Still brainstorming that part. Procedural generation could possibly be used to simply lay the foundation of multiple differing hubs simply as a dev tool so i dont have to level design tens or settlements/cities.
Then you would have the overworld, larger but more sparsely populated by npcs, and with a hopeful balance between graphical goodness and draw distance. For actually making the overworld I am going to attempt to grab a decent quality heightmap of the real world (game is set in real world, a bit in the future), then manipulate it in either Krita or perhaps a decent open source 3d heightmap editor, then possibly use some procedural generation to paint trees, bushes, rocks, handle cliffsides and valleys where the heightmap resolution is insufficient to handle the terrain convincingly, abandoned cars, garbage, etc… instead of manually plopping them all in, as seemingly every modder of every game that has ever been modded does.
In the overworld would be more or less dungeon entrances of various kinds. Like the hub zones, the dungeons would be basically seperate levels from the rest of the game, with every AI not in your particular dungeon going into a simplified simulation state to allow for more complex and numerous AI baddies or what not to exist in the dungeon, without murdering your oc or framerate.
Due to the setting of the game, theres a lot of tectonic activity going on, sometimes a volcano might go off or something, maybe an asteroid or satellite impacts the ground and changes the terrain, so different psuedo random world events could cause some ‘dungeon entrances’ to pop into being, others to disappear. The dungeons themselves I would like to be able to have basically procedurally generated, with a number of different styles of dungeons.
Add this all up and you get something approximating say Fallout New Vegas… or maybe Kenshi…, but the overworld itself changes, and the actual high risk high reward dungeon areas actually organically change simply as time goes on in the game, so that no two playthroughs are the same.
I could also make it so that, when various conditions are met, various NPCs dispositions toward you changes such that, among other things, they could start you off on various quest paths that may have large impacts on the world , a specific faction, or a hub zone.
Then if the single player works… make at least part of the game multiplayer. Yeah I know God help me with that rofl.
Obsidian note taking app is available for pretty much every platform including from the google store. There are a few great video tutorial on how you can leverage some of the advanced features.
Personally i tend to do a thing with reference notes which act as a summary of a topic wich links to more detailed pages where stuff is explained on a deeper level.
It really helps to get an overview of your world and its balance, if your like me its easier to write 5 papers deepdive about the logic used for the fictive technology and science then it is to explain what the main stories are actually all about. The method I mentioned allows you to get into those long vast details in their own notes and there just Linked on the reference note with a short summary of what the file explains. You can also put ideas you have yet to detail on the reference note so it always provides an overview everything and what still needs work.
When world building gets bigger you will want reference files for your reference files and thats where obsidian pretty much seems made for.
About Arch, I actually forgot how easy i had it. 15 minute install, had only little experience with Ubuntu before but i saw a video of a hyprland rice and just got sold in an instant. This very easy to install config entails all you need for a very functional, fun and pretty OS. I now cringe when i need to log in windows for my job.
This has been my main dekstop since spring and i wouldn’t want to go back for any gold in the world. Admittedly though my decision to jumpt the ship from windows was part trough the confidence enabled by how good gpt4 is in guiding me through linux issues.
I would still vouch to start small on the gaming. I absolutely understand the desire to work on “the one” you have been cooking up in your mind. I am not any different myself but you will risk getting burned out.
Split your ideas up in its biggest challenges.
navigation in 3d space
multiplayer function
procedural generation
reactive mechanics
Then make a small game for each of those challenges, it doesn’t need to be good, you don’t need to publish these.
An example for multiplayer: start with a simple 2d plain. Players, each represented by a black cube can connect and login using a host ip. They can Move along the 2d space and posses 3 inventory spots.
Periodically an item (blue circle, green triangle) gets dropped inside the room.
Players can pick these up and also drop them again.
Thats your game, it doesn’t need more for now no matter how boring it seems. By succeeding you will have overcome multiple challenges, you now know how to connect to people to a game and you may have some early experience in the many bugs that can occurs when items/players get desynced. You can test stuff out and experiment safely without worrying that a bug with your faction system for example is interfering, because the faction system is something you try in another 2d, offline game.
Eventually you’ll get a good grasp of all the challenges you face and how you can solve them. Only then would i make a proper plan for starting a game i know i will be a perfectionist about.
Though probably the best advice of all in game development. Have fun with it, it wont be some times but you must take active care of yourself and the manageability of your project. Go a few steps back, do something else for a while to change things up. Burn out is game designs worst enemy so you do you to stay motivated.
When a new IPhone is scheduled to come out in about 3 to 6 months, they intentionally push software updates to the soon to be not newest model of IPhone that screw up the software governing how the battery is smart charged to make the total battery life degrade rather quickly, and also just generally slow down many of the processes on the phone as well: now that the battery is degraded, the hardware does not actual get the volts and amps from it needed for optimized, speedy processing.
Up until they were rather publically outed for doing this, they lied to everyone on their support forums and in stores claiming it either wasnt happening or was due to something wrong the user did.
Nothing like gaslighting your entire customer base!
Hilariously though, because these are IPhone users we are talking about (you know, generally defineable as allergic to learning anything technical, extremely susceptible to overproduced advertisements, vain, etc), it didnt really make a huge dent in overall market share.
So yeah, they say they dont do this /anymore/ but you can find threads on reddit and such with people reporting that it still goes on. Having worked for various tech firms I can tell you its possible they are still doing it but just in a more clever, harder to prove way, but I dont use Apple products so I dont care to launch my own singlehanded investigation into proving if they are /still/ doing it.
Oh, hah, I did not /actually/ think you worked for them. It was a pithy comment, would not presume to think you worked for any specific company based on what you wrote, just being snarky.
I get it. Most days I would love to get out of tech. Any given project I got half a dozen sales people and PEs who want to trash my software/electrical designs. It is commonplace for me to downgrade my work. Giving customers a less reliable more expensive system. Given how much of my work is for the government there is zero mystery where cost disease is coming from.
I just worry that if I walk away no one will stop them.
One of the jobs I worked, there was an older programmer, who had been their since the company was created, or very soon afterward. He survived Vietnam, learned COBOL via the GI Bill at a college, programmed the system underlying the /entire/ financial data system(s) of the company, from paying employees to receiving vendor payments to intracomapany finances… everything.
Before I left that job, we would talk often. He told me that his whole career, not a single VP or manager /ever/ listened to his constructive criticism or concerns about requests to make the system do something that would cause a problem later on down the line, that would be incompatible with other systems his stuff integrated with, either internal or external to the company, or often just asks to design totally useless features or even design things according to a manager of VPs specs, even though he explained to them that their design was fundamentally flawed from a programming perspective and not actually ever be able to work at even a test use case at all, because the higher ups think they know how to write code, but actually do not.
He explained to me that he had been telling them for 3 years he was going to retire, and that they needed to find a replacement programmer who knows COBOL, as the way the company’s systems have culture have evolved will mean that his code his systems, will /need/ constant updates and tweaks to keep utter chaos from ensuing in his absence.
He then further explained to me that he knew they would not do this because of ignorance and arrogance… and that within a year of him departing he expected to be billing them 3x his current hourly rate as a contractor.
Management seema to have assumed they could hire 2 to 3 programmers similar to me, a young relatively novice programmer at the time, to replace him with a few ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’ for a total of maybe 2/3 of his current wages.
They did not understand that COBOL is a dead programming language that hasnt been taught in Computer Science courses at basically any American University since, at best, the early 90s… and that anyone who actually knows COBOL would by definition be a very senior programmer, and literally laugh at the pitiful wage they were offering to non existent ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’.
And so, he left, within 3 months other systems in the company evolved until they broke the underlying COBOL system. Cue 3 months of ‘make everything reliant on the COBOL code work witbout touching rhe COBOL code’ for me, which is of course impossible because the parts of it some of my reports drew from were now outputting either nothing, or an error code.
Meanwhile, many other departments are having similar problems, everyone is overworked tryi g to come up with bandaid workarounds for their particular systems in a hurry, without documenting what they are doing, and I have to keep up with all of this to produce my more top level, big picture reports that add all the little details together.
I leave because the stress is too much, and within another 3 months, he is being contracted to fix the mess he told them would happen if ttheydid not do what he suggested.
This all happened because Managers and VPs are full of themselves, think they understand everything, focus on trimming the fat instead of making sustainable long term decisions, and of course are mainly focused soley on next quarter profits.
The amount of money that the company lost because of the chaos that ensued was at least one order of magnitude, possibly nearly two by the time the elder COBOL wizard was hired back on as a contractor… nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than if they had just hired his replacement at roughly similar wages as him.
And I would know those numbers, because my job included making the monthly reports on the profitability of every single department of the business before handing those off to my boss, who presented them to the VPs and the CEO in the main executive conference room roughly 25 feet from my cubicle on the top floor of the building.
What I learned from that job is that VPs and CEOs are the most expensive employees to pay wages to at a company, and at best are barely more useful to the company than if I had simply tied my own executive level reports into a fairly simple decision tree program to output business leadership position decisions. Oh. That and they rolodexes of other people to wheel and deal with in the industry.
VPs and CEOs barely do any actual work, the ‘work’ they actually do is easy enough to codify into maybe a couple hundred lines of computer code and then automate… oh right, and hook up to a rolodex to deliver barely ever reworded emails to various people.
But we will figure out how to fully automate McDonalds employees before we automate CEOs.
You are ignoring all the stuff that died early (survivor bias). You are ignoring the maintenance crews that keep that stuff going which you know isn’t the same as performing surgery. You are ignoring replacement parts. You are ignoring the conditions of operations, the human body is wet. You are ignoring the changes of electronics that made them less reliable but not prone to giving people lead and mercury poisoning. You are ignoring the amount of work being asked to perform from the electronics.
Also Voyager was not designed to last 5 years the engineers involved admitted that. They planned for it to last much longer but NASA management didn’t want to oversell it.
We already exist in a cyberpunk world, and people are just beginning to wake up to it. Implants that go obsolete, corporations controlling everything, the general sense of despair because you can't change the system, only rebel in hopes of improving the immediate life of yourself and those around you...
I have been saying this for years now, and basically no one agrees with me or understands what I am saying.
The conversations usually boil down to ‘but we dont have cyberpunk fashion and aesthetics and there are no flying cars, and most people dont have robot arms so /obviously/ real life is not cyberpunk.’
This of course belies that basically every cyberpunk fan I know is a poser and doesnt get it.
The fashion and robotic arms and computer tech in everything that it doesnt need to be in are ultimately just world building and plot devices that make corporate control extremely obvious and in your face.
Like… its the setting. In which actual stories take place, and obviously the setting impacts people and their lives and choices.
The actual message of cyberpunk as a genre is basically: if we let corporations control everything via technology we are addicted to and cannot live without, our lives will become nasty brutish and short, love and friendship become commodities to be bought and sold, and real trust and happiness between people is basically impossible.
What was previously known as humanity itself dies in a techno-corporate world, mostly because it isnt profitable.
So you point to how that /has already happened in America/ in a myriad of ways that are more complicated and less obvious than the overt aesthetic and world features of cyberpunk literature… and that in some cases are in opposition to it… and people just yell that because the surface of our reality doesnt match the surface of cyberpunk, theres no way that the underlying facts are the same.
I once had someone vehemently argue to me that CyberPunk 2077 didnt look very cyberpunk to him… because it includes daylight, cyberpunk scenes always happen at night, man!
Right because there is corporate technological control over your life at so many levels you cannot hope to understand them all… and obviously those things can only happen at night. Mainstream computer soft and hardware just become non corporate and non privacy invading and non addictive and non exploitative when the sun is up. smh
Anyway yeah we live in a world where a huge swath of Americans are literally chemically addicted to social media apps and websites… and these apps and websites are known to cause mental disorders of all kinds, they exist to steal your information and sell you shit you probably dont need, the content they shove in your face is algorithmically optimized to make you /angry/, because angry people make the best social media addicts…
Yeah, its pretty obvious to me that instagram and tiktok and facebook are perfect corporate techno drugs and the country is full of addicts.
Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down motel room in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
He didn’t check in with much baggage, excepting a decade of extreme emotional and physical trauma. After he threw in the towel, decided to /really/ retire, he figured he would be able to live off of occasional PI work, and hell, maybe just crawling through some vent shafts until he got somewhere with a hidden cache he could sell to some idiot on the street, or just look for an ATM to … reroute funds to his account through.
Lying on a bed that squeaks everytime he shifts his massive, nearly 400 pound augmented body in a vain attempt to find a position that allows him to drift into sleep… he decides maybe a drink will help.
He sits up. Creak. He yawns as he reaches toward the night stand table, cluttered with credsticks, EMP grenades, a pistol, and some strange looking prototype for a dual purpose, wall mountable, but also throwable explosive.
LAM? Was that the acronym they went with? Not important in the long run, just a souvenir from his last and final corporate espionage contract.
He blinks a few times and waits for his once bleeding edge, but now ancient occular implants to resolve his last remaining bottle of cognac.
As he reaches to take a pull, straight from the bottle… darkness. Moments later his vision of the cluttered nightstand table is replaced by a 600 x 480 jpeg, blown up to encompass the entirety of his approximately 8K total field of view and resolution.
It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font. It states that his occular implants will no longer be receiving any software updates, and that his implants are now out of warranty, and non compliant with a recently passed consumer safety law, and as such must be shut down for his protection.
Startled by the darkness, then abrupt disclaimer, then darkness again, Jensen fumbles while reaching for his drink. How… how is there an audio message thanking him for his purchase of the wrong model of occular implants… playing through his infolink? Shouldnt those sub systems be firewalled?
This is the last thought that ever passes through Jensen’s mind.
In blindness, as the wrong corporate sound file played through the space between his ears, Jensen never realized he had knocked the prototype LAM off of the nightstand, which armed itself, beeped several times, and then exploded.
-=====-
Downstairs, a 3 year old Sandra Renton screams when one of her father’s hotel rooms explodes, triggering fire suppression systems before the power goes out.
She stumbles out of the lobby out on to the street. A minute later her exasperated father, crying out for Sandra, finds her outside bawling. He embraces her and thanks God that she is alright.
While he was reaching down to grab his traumatized daughter, he noticed she was standing in a pile of … broken glass?
Embracing his only child close to his heart, he looks up at the front entrance to the motel lobby.
It takes him a few moments to breathe deeply, more slowly, and eventually calm down enough to realize what has occured: The letters ‘H’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ were knocked off the wall by the explosion of Jensen’s suite, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now read only as ‘ton’. Sandra just happened to come to be standing in the debris field.
“What a shame,” he sighs … “what a shame.”
-{====}-
Author’s notes:
Sure, sure, you’ve heard about Chekov’s gun…
… but what about Jensen’s Lightweight Attack Munition?
The last drops of Jensen’s cognac drip down the blown out street facing window of his motel room, glistening as they slide down the broken and jagged remnants of what used to be the neon ‘H’ of the old Hilton hotel…
… falling to the snow covered sidewalk…
… like tear drops, in the rain.
-=====-
An unknown distance away, Bob Page notices on his main holoscreen that a green blip in New York has flashed brightly three times, turned red, and then extinguished itself.
Page taps the right side of his forehead twice rapidly, for more information. An ancillary screen with simple integer indicators decreases by one, for two categories.
Visible as something like hyperchromatic QR codes, the column headers are instantly captioned within the brain of the determined corporate mogul by a Versalife prototype, low-impact, extra cranial wired overlay/projector, which Page volunteered to have installed on himself.
A subtle smile creeps across Page’s face as he observes the translated column headers reading out to … ‘Known Sarif Associates’, as well as ‘Individuals w/ Compromising Knowledge’.
Now with a full smile on his face, he is somewhat surprised by what he sees when he jubilantly pivots and spins a half rotation to face toward his personal bar.
Megan Reed is weeping bitterly in the background.
Her face is as illuminated by the lights of the antechamber as Page’s cruel and mocking visage is obscured by the darkness encompassing the main hologram display station.
Page’s expression turns to a frown as he /formally/ notices her.
“Was there something I should be aware of?”
Reed bites her lip to stymy her tears.
“… No.”
Page does not notice Reed’s Versalife ID Badge on the floor of his own private communications bunker until he is forced to retreat to it for safety 9 hours later…
…Two hours after his system alerts him that Reed has not logged in as scheduled on her personal work station, and one hour after some kind of presumed system malfunction has erroneously opened the cages of every single creature in the Versalife BioGenetic Research Laboratory on SubLevel 8.
Well, I figure that Dad Renton (i forgot his first name rofl) does not actually care about Jensen, as he is more or less a slum lord. He /mostly/ cares about his daughter, and of course the neon sign. This is cyberpunk dystopia after all, empathy is expensive.
To quote some guy that made some movies about space battles: “It’s like poetry, it rhymes.”
Yeah, this is original and no I did not use ChatGPT to come up with it rofl.
I was just bored and … got inspired? I guess?
I am … reasonably confident that if I wrote and published a book of what is more or less Deus Ex fan fiction, I think Eidos would sue me into non existence.
I dunno. Maybe I will write more someday?
Kind of between jobs… and living situations… at the moment.
Life has been… difficult for me this last year. Poke around for some of my other comments in this thread for more details.
I did not expect this little fun story that popped into my head upon seeing this article to have such a positive response, and it is nice to receive any validation at all after what I’ve been through.
At a minimum, one should be able to cut off access to the internet so a company can't EoS killswitch it/pull a Nintendo and send an EoS fuck you update that breaks any attempts to put control in the user's hands
Mind, that's a really fucking low bar, and would be depressing if that's all regulation guaranteed
Yeah that bar is too low. Putting tech in someone to keep them alive or enhance their life somehow should come with some sort of permanent responsibility from somewhere. If the company goes bankrupt the expertise doesn’t just vanish, then make it a public responsibility to ensure that whoever was granted eyesight from some kind of implant, gets to keep that. Hell, make the technology and research public as well.
Bodyparts/functions should belong entirely to whomever possess them, a company going bankrupt doesn’t suddenly mean that someone should lose their ability to walk or whatever.
No company should be able to “own” someone’s bodypart, or their ability to perform a certain task or whatever. The notion is preposterous.
Second Sight’s long-term plan was always to pivot to a brain implant that would bypass the eye altogether and directly stimulate the visual cortex.
The number of blind folks who are receptive to electrical retinal stimulation was always too small for this business model. These crooks knew that and pumped investors for a non existent hope that this would somehow translate into a non existent technology. Suprise suprise, you can't magic your way into these things.
The entire operation was always doomed to turn out this way.
Others find their mods deactivated and drug regimens terminated when their gender subscriptions end. Several thousand “Platinum” and “Sunset Rose” gender subscribers recently found themselves in critical medical distress when Prakhet Identity Studios was bankrupted by rogue operators. In a spirit of public service, Nova Vida is generously providing a discounted, time-limited upgrade opportunity for these consumers into their similar but fuller-featured “Cordova” and “Spartan” gender products.
Actually, no joke, most drug companies will happily give you coupons or even free meds. They already got everything they can out of your insurance, they’ll happily bump that $700 out of pocket cost to $10.
My ex-wife once got intestinal worms. The medicine to get rid of them, which has been on the market forever, and which is on the short list of medicines that the WHO says should be freely available to everyone as a matter of public health? $800 for Americans, literally free everywhere else in the world. Apparently intestinal worms are now so uncommon in the US that the drug is only distributed in extremely small quantities, which The Invisible Hand apparently allows big pharma to charge a fortune for. I brought in the worm in a jar in case the doctors needed to identify it, and apparently so many of the doctors and nurses had never seen one that they asked us if it was alright for them to pass around to take selfies with it. LOL.
It’s not like all chrome is as sexy sleek as V or Rebecca.
There’s one lore pickup that sticks with me. It’s the “top employers” in Night City. The people who are employed by these 5 comprise the middle class.
spoilerArasaka offers the lowest contractual obligation to work for at 20 years. Biotechnica offers six vacation days a year (current Americans average 11 PTO days at 40 hours a week) But the above is small potatoes when you read Nightcorp: ONLY(!) 80 hour workweek. For family focused people!
Not being pedantic but also as you walk around look at the lifestyles of the charachters. River and Judy are successful legally employed people, and look at their home situation. Their houses and how much chrome they afford. Their weapons comprise of the very basics. How much tech do they have that wasn’t illegally obtained or had their job pay it off? Judy works mosly with chrome as far as BDs go. River is ex-NCPD, and he only affords prosthetic arms that are reminiscent of Gorilla Arms but it doesn’t have skin or look great - they’re functional. In addition to a prosthetic eye that doesn’t even try to be humanlike, like V’s Kiroshi Optics.
The average citizen puts in an assload of work for their chrome and its hard to sustain yourself. I know they respawn but how many times do you just see Maelstrom on a sidewalk? How many out-and-about Valentinos? Most people can’t afford the nice chrome, or healthcare (as shown by David’s mom) and get by on their bills through theft or violence. Maelstrom chrome is a hack job. Rebecca funded all her work through being part of a successful criminal enterprise. Maine being the reason they even have the connection and payments with Faraday. Compare the Edgerunners chrome to the average Tyger Claw, and it’s easier to see that they are the ideal gang, not the average.
Ez in cyberpunk you have to pay lotta money to stay alive as was showed in anime cyberpunk edgerunners if you’re average human going on average job then you fucked and it’s much much worse than today’s America healthcare
Can’t wait to have to get a mandatory firmware update before my eyes or legs or something like that works again. I just hope Microsoft doesn’t get in on the cybernetics business or it’ll randomly happen while driving on the highway or forcefully fill your vision with blinding light for half an hour when you are trying to sleep.
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