self

oh my god, that weird fash fucker is absolutely pulling a NixOS and trying to burn down the Python community over a well-deserved 3 month suspension

and the only reason I know about this shit even though I’m barely involved with Python in any regard is because one of his fans/alts was spamming mastodon with a blog post defending him, and fully half of it by scroll bar position was just fluffing the fucker’s previous achievements, then at almost exactly the halfway point it started describing all the shit he did and hoo boy does he deserve a lot more than a 3 month suspension

it’s fascinating how this is almost exactly the same situation as with what’s-his-face getting suspended from Nix and the project’s older maintainers pulling ranks to get the toxic fucker back

and yet, with zero evidence to support the claim, the paper’s authors are confident that their model can be used to create new game logic and assets:

Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code. GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware. While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images. A small part of this vision, namely creating modifications or novel behaviors for existing games, might be achievable in the shorter term. For example, we might be able to convert a set of frames into a new playable level or create a new character just based on example images, without having to author code.

the objective is, as always, to union-bust an industry that only recently found its voice

yeah, this is weirdly sneerable for a 404 article, and I hope this isn’t an early sign they’ve enshittifying. let’s do what they should have and take a critical look at, ah, GameNGen, a name for their research they surely won’t regret

Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines

wow! it’s a shame that creating this model involved plagiarizing every bit of recorded doom footage that’s ever existed, exploited an uncounted number of laborers from the global south for RLHF, and burned an amount of rainforest in energy that also won’t be counted. but fuck it, sometimes I shop at Walmart so I can’t throw stones and this sounds cool, so let’s grab the source and see how it works!

just kidding, this thing’s hosted on github but there’s no source. it’s just a static marketing page, a selection of videos, and a link to their paper on arXiv, which comes in at a positively ultralight 10 LaTeX-formatted letter-sized pages when you ignore the many unhelpful screenshots and graphs they included

so we can’t play with it, but it’s a model implementing a game engine, right? so the evaluation strategy given in the paper has to involve the innovative input mechanism they’ve discovered that enables the model to simulate a gameplay loop (and therefore a game engine), right? surely that’s what convinced a pool of observers with more-than-random-chance certainty that the model was accurately simulating doom?

Human Evaluation. As another measurement of simulation quality, we provided 10 human raters with 130 random short clips (of lengths 1.6 seconds and 3.2 seconds) of our simulation side by side with the real game. The raters were tasked with recognizing the real game (see Figure 14 in Appendix A.6). The raters only choose the actual game over the simulation in 58% or 60% of the time (for the 1.6 seconds and 3.2 seconds clips, respectively).

of course not. nowhere in this paper is their supposed innovation in input actually evaluated — at no point is this work treated experimentally like a real-time game engine. also, and you pointed this out already — were the human raters drunk? (honestly, I couldn’t blame them — I wouldn’t give a shit either if my mturk was “which of these 1.6 second clips is doom”) the fucking thing doesn’t even simulate doom’s main gameplay loop right; dead possessed marines just turn to a blurry mess, health and armor don’t make sense in any but the loosest sense, it doesn’t seem to think imps exist at all but does randomly place their fireballs where they should be, and sometimes the geometry it’s simulating just casually turns into a visual paradox. chances are this experimental setup was tuned for the result they wanted — they managed to trick 40% of a group of people who absolutely don’t give a fuck that the incredibly short video clip they were looking at was probably a video game. amazing!

if we ever get our hands on the code for this thing, I’m gonna make a prediction: it barely listens to input, if at all. the video clips they’ve released on their site and YouTube are the most coherent this thing gets, and it instantly falls apart the instant you do anything that wasn’t in its training set (aka, the instant you use this real-time game engine to play a game and do something unremarkably weird, like try to ram yourself through a wall)

my mental voice for the DM sender keeps switching between “board game store inhabitant who spent way too much on warhammer shit and noticed you’re 3D printing your miniatures” and “flat earth convention keynote speaker” but it’s Reddit so a cursory investigation might reveal they’re both

1. Only this $25 box of space marines can be used in sanctioned tournaments and therefore you can’t possibly derive enjoyment from your resin miniatures (is that a squad of tiny masters chief?) - fact.
2. You can’t prove that the earth is round because you’ve never seen it curve - fact.
3. What do you mean you’re not here to listen to me talk? I’m not moving so you can play with your masters chief (and is that — are you going to make them fight Gandalf?) - fact.
4. The mere fact that the terrain on the board game table I’m not letting you use is flat and has an edge proves me right - fact.

lisp programmers in shambles as I prompt inject another s-expression

that’s awesome! designing entertaining systems has always been a challenge for me every time I’ve attempted a game project. it’s always a good feeling when things start working though!

that’s a good point! it’s also quite a lot simpler to moderate too. a while ago I had some bad experiences with fascists using Reddit music recommendation threads to get people listening to subtly but definitely fash bands. my expectation is like the stubsack, our off-topic music threads will be mostly regulars. a dedicated music sub will definitely be more likely to break containment, so I’d like to have a dedicated moderator lined up for it who’s better at critical listening and knows more about the music industry in general than me (and I’d hate to start something like this just to have it fall onto @dgerard@awful.systems’s overfull plate, though he’d have exactly the right kind of skills for the role)

I play in a band, Constellation, and we’re sending it to be mastered this week. Kind of throwback to 90’s post-hardcore like Fugazi (yeah, we got cowbell) and Drive Like Jehu. Really excited about it.

fuck yeah! please link this when it’s released in whatever accessible form your band prefers

it really didn’t take long for OpenAI to enter its binance era. just make cryptic non-statements and boost conspiracy theories and watch your stock price go up!

it’s absolutely fucked that the grammar and tone of Google’s response is so casual, and the proposed non-solution is so worthless, the whole post looks like parody — I was convinced @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems must have been paraphrasing til I saw the screenshot of the original post and found out it was just a straight copy and paste

sorry you didn’t like that we implied you’re a child murderer. no takesie-backsies though! fill out this form we won’t read if you’re really sure you didn’t like our fun experiment!

I wonder if giving responses so fucking ridiculous they look like a joke is a tactic on Google’s part to make complaints about the shit they’re doing look ridiculous and overdramatic by association

and here I was about to figure out what’s wrong with our permalinks! (which, there is at least one thing wrong with our permalinks, just not this time around)

this is a late follow-up from the topic in the last stubsack, but I do like the idea of a music sub. for now though, I think doing a variety of casual off-topic music threads in other subs is the right move, until we’ve got a good volume of posts and a cross-section of the types of threads we might want to post in a new sub.

(I’ll post some music recommendations in this thread when I get the chance later)