Thrashy

Thrashy, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

You’ve already had a recommondation for most of what I would suggest to you, but I will happily second the suggestions for the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine, and the Imperial Raadch/Ancillary series by Ann Leckie. All have excellent worldbuilding and tell stories that depend heavily upon how their characters interface with the worlds they inhabit.

A little pulpier in tone, but still very well put together, I’d suggest as well the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, and especially the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. The latter is a bit more fantastic space opera as opposed to some of the harder sci-fi you’ve mentioned, but Muir knows how to write a setting that is absolutely dripping in gothic horror, and still take you on an emotional roller coaster fully of highs, lows, and humor as you read it. It seems to be a bit of a love-it-or-hate-it series from the other conversations I’ve had about it, but I love it and I’d be remiss not to suggest it.

I’d also suggest, if you’re not averse, dipping your toe into the fantasy genre as well. There’s a broad range of authors there who have done excellent work building fantasy worlds that are structurally deep and compelling, and have many science-fictional qualities. Along these lines I’d suggest Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders trilogy, or N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy – though, fair warning, both of these broke me in the end emotionally. Worth it, though!

Thrashy, 4 months ago

For China specifically and at the present time this is true, but China is investing heavily into solar and other renewables that will shift its energy mix dramatically in the coming years. Not to mention that even now, it’s still a net benefit to centralize that fossil fuel consumption into plants that can burn it more efficiently and with better pollution controls than are feasible on cars.

Thrashy, 7 months ago

It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

Thrashy, 7 months ago

McCarthy needed Dem votes to maintain a hold on the speakership, but the concessions he would have needed to make in order to get them would have meant making himself incredibly vulnerable to a career-ending primary challenge. The political incentives don’t line up.

Thrashy, 7 months ago

Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.

Thrashy, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

Energy is only “available” when there is a region of higher energy density and a region of lower energy density, that you can extract work from by allowing that energy to flow from the former to the latter until they are equalized, at which point no further energy can be extracted from that system.

In the case of air conditioning, you can make heat flow “uphill”, so to speak, by applying additional energy from outside of the inside air / outside air system, usually in the form of electricity generated at a power plant. In the very large picture, though, it’s all just moving energy around from other regions of higher and lower densities, a losing usable energy with each transfer. That’s what entropy means.

Veritasium did a really good video on this idea a couple months ago, if you’re interested: youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=bru50t1VYEKXKmKX

Thrashy, 8 months ago

You trying to start a war, or what?

Thrashy, 8 months ago

W/r/t Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t think the bottleneck is the GPU. Act 3 is incredibly ambitious in terms of NPC density, and AI is one of those things that’s still very hard to parallelize.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

I know demakes are all the rage, but I don’t know if this counts. It’s just… the game, but on console hardware from a decade before Portal. That’s really impressive, especially given just how restrictive some of the limits of the N64 are.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.

Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

He’s on the Kansas side, which for all its own foibles is at least not Missouri.

Thrashy, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

In Florida, the alternative is a (very expensive) state-funded program that acts as an insurer of last resort. With so many insurance firms cutting their losses and leaving the market, though, I suspect that program is about to be severely overloaded, while many Floridians also find their homes suddenly unaffordable. If there’s going to be a solution, it’s going to have to come from the state, but given that the party in power there is still firmly committed to pretending climate change is a hoax, I wouldn’t hold my breath. My guess is that there’s going to be a lot of migration away from Florida and other Republican-dominated coastal states as issues with cost and availability of insurance force homeowners to make some hard financial decisions.

Thrashy, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Priorities will always shift as we move though the different seasons of life, and for sure the launch of a big marquee title that I’m interested in doesn’t have the same drama it did, now that I’ve lived though a couple-few decades of them. I have to say, though, that I still love the experience of being transported to a fantasy setting, or exploring a strange new world with friends, or testing my skill against other players. I’m looking forward to when I can introduce the hobby to my kid, and share that joy with him.

Thrashy, 8 months ago

If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

We’ll need some major spin to control the PR fallout of this leek!

Thrashy, 9 months ago

I hit a difficulty wall in the Wrecker’s Cave and never picked the game back up. So far BG3 has been more forgiving, but Larian games don’t suffer fools gladly.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

I’ve noticed this a lot in comparisons claiming to show that graphics quality has regressed (either over time, or from an earlier demo reel of the same game), where the person trying to make the point cherry-picks drastically different lighting or atmospheric scenarios that put the later image in a bad light. Like, no crap Lara looks better in the 2013 image, she’s lit from an angle that highlights her facial features and inexplicably wearing makeup while in the midst of a jungle adventure. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider image, by comparison, is of a dirty-faced Lara pulling a face while being lit from an unflattering angle by campfire. Compositionally, of course the first image is prettier – but as you point out, the lack of effective subsurface scattering in the Tomb Raider 2013 skin shader is painfully apparent versus SofTR. The newer image is more realistic, even if it’s not as flattering.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

There’s a certain kind of reactionary-left personality that I think is more common in parts of the west that used to be colonial powers, where if you’re far enough along the political spectrum that the mainstream parties all look like different variations on corporatist-fascists, you’re particularly vulnerable to messaging from geopolitical enemies of your own country for the simple reason that they’re opposed to the political structure you’re also opposed to. Here in the US I’ve run into a few such people, and it’s also clear that Russia’s soft-power operations have made efforts to cultivate relationships with the American left wing (people like Jill Stein and others in the Green Party). It’s pretty obvious, though, that they’ve had less success than they have on the right. It takes a particular kind of useful idiot to think, as a anti-colonial socialist or communist, that an oligarchic and socially-repressive right-wing autocracy is actually in your political corner.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

Yeah, you guys have the Winter War and Continuation War relatively fresh in cultural memory, which probably limits the reach of Russian propaganda. Over here, we remember the Soviet Union primarily as our Cold War rival, and neither side of that conflict came out of it with clean hands. For a certain kind of person, the sins of the American CIA and State Department during the Cold War don’t just reflect badly on our government; they somehow also make the Soviet Union, and therefore Russia as its successor state, the Good Guys of the last century of global geopolitics.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

When I read her thread, the first thing that came to mind was that in addition to whatever labor rights claims she could have, there’s a clear potential claim of promissory estoppel with regard to her move back to Canada and some of the statements made about how LMG would support her independent efforts.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

At the moment, the voting-age American public seems to be split into pretty even thirds, with one third being slavering fascists, one third being generally opposed to the first third, and a final third who are either totally apathetic or steadfastly refuse to acknowledge any difference between the other two thirds.

Thrashy, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, I’m not optimistic that a KBI under the leadership of Kris “K” Kobach is going to be in much hurry to investigate small town police corruption at the behest of a fundraiser for another MAGA nutjob.

Thigh who knows, maybe ol’ Kris is too busy virtue signaling his blood-and-soil, anti-immigrant values to the xenophobes that make up his primary constituency to actually dirty his hands with the work of being attorney-general. Wouldn’t be the first time he was too busy trying to get on TV to do his job.

Thrashy, 9 months ago

About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.