I hope that you never find yourself opposite an asshole cop who doesn’t care whether you actually pose any danger to them.

Thanks for your comment. I feel like I learned a lot from it. I didn’t know about the Hukou system, for example.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad you exist.

One of the things that bolsters my resolve is seeing how much more politically engaged the youth of today are (though given that I’m one of the youngest Millennials and I’m 29, I’m not sure that Gen Z count as “the youth” any more). Some of it is a bit concerning, in that some of them are becoming politically engaged with right wing reactionary though, but the vast majority of what I’ve seen has been much more positive.

I was talking to a teen the other month who tried using they/them pronouns for a little while, to see how it felt, because there were a few non binary people in his year, which made him feel curious. That blew my mind and made me feel hopeful.

I’m disabled, so I’m not really able to attend protests easily, but there have been a few times where I have given people lifts to protests. I like being people’s protest mom. It makes me feel nice to be able to act as a steward for the younger generation. In my experience, they’re unable to comprehend that what we’re living under isn’t normal, because for them, it is. However, this seems to just strengthen their enthusiasm for radical change. All they know is that what they’re currently experiencing is intolerable for them, and so they have no choice but to resist. It’s sad, but admirable to see. In resisting, they also find that building solidarity and community also helps bolster their individual resilience, as well as their movement’s

Wow, I feel incredibly seen by this meme. Hot damn, the system works

I’m glad to hear that things are going better for you now. I’m on the recovery from burnout path myself, so I know how hard it is.

I’d be interested to hear it you would share something specific that has given you peace or joy recently. I always find that hearing about little nice things bolsters my resolve.

Something that recently gave me joy was when I was spending Christmas with my found family, and we were having in-depth discussions about things we have read that had most shaped our political thought. I liked it because it was intense and tiring in a good way; I’ve come to realise that what is restful for me would probably look like work to most other people. That’s one of the things that made recovering from burnout so hard — at first, I tried to rest in a more conventional manner, and it took me a while to realise that what I needed was to carve out some time and energy where I can work at fulfilling things.

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.

What a G.

I get what point you’re making in distinguishing between pedophile and ephebophile, but personally I don’t find the distinction particularly relevant. As an adult, the level of grossed out I feel at the prospect of sexual interactions with a young teenager Vs a literal child is approximately equal, because it’s not their physical attributes that cause ick, but rather the exploitation and power dynamics involved.

Edit: I guess what I’m arguing is that in practice, we see the term “pedophilia” used as an umbrella term that encompasses pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia, and I think that is a reasonable use of the term. It does muddy the waters a tad, given that pedophilia does still have its more specific use of referring to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, but I don’t think that an issue in the majority of contexts. When it comes to the law, an adult having sex with a child is equally illegal as an adult having sex with a 15 year old. Sure, we can split this hair and distinguish between the terms, but we don’t need to

The slightly different ID is REAL ID, not just REAL compliant. It looks like it’s similar to how, in my country, driving licenses are coloured differently depending on whether you’ve passed your driving test; A learner’s provision driving license is green, and when you pass your test, you get a pink one.

I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years’ worth of stuff now, but AI isn’t going away any time soon, so it would mean that there’d be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna’s archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn’t be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.

It seems they’ve opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna’s archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible

Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI

I’m not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.

For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I’d use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn’t consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.

A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go “hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]”. This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).

You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t used in the development process though in at least some cases. I’ll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.

For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime

Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there’s certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).

Machine learning certainly wouldn’t be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

Thank you. The comic was already funny before I knew this context, but it’s extra funny now.

I wish that jobs like this were higher paid.

I’m disabled, and thus sometimes when I order food in this way, it’s because it’s literally the only way for me to access food. That means that in a sense, delivery workers are important components of the complex network of social care infrastructure, and that makes me all the more angry at how exploited these workers are.

I tip generously when I’m able to, but often that’s not something I can afford. There’s not very much that an individual can do to improve the working conditions for exploited workers, and that’s true regardless of whether the person ordering the food is disabled or has some other need for delivery or someone who is just doing it for the convenience. It is possible for people to be able to order food for delivery at relatively affordable prices, and for the delivery workers to be sufficiently compensated for their labour, but that will require political change to counter the systems of oppression. Systemic problems can’t be solved through individual action

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.

I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.

An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery

I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too

Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).

Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.

I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure

I did the latter a lot when I moved from Yorkshire to a posh university down South

I often wonder whether Starmer has even one sincerely held political beliefs or value. I’d love to put him in a zone of Truth (D&D spell) and just ask him what he actually believes.

It’s weird, because it means that I sort of respect the Tories more. They believed many abhorrent things, such as that a cripple like me is at best, an inconvenient drain on the country’s resources, and at worst, someone who is making it all up to escape having to work — but at least they sincerely believe that.