Talk about anything: Page 56 - Godot Community Forums

Talk about anything

fire7side

The trouble with all those things is the cure is worse than the disease. The government will do something to make sure deep fakes can't be done at everyone's expense. The reason the stock market is so bizarre right now is because we created the federal reserve to stop the market from crashing. We've built up the biggest bubble in history and we're 23 trillion in debt. We're just on the edge of having the worst inflation in history. All thanks to the federal reserve trying to protect us from market downturns. They actually managed to convince everyone that deficits don't matter by their manipulations, which was our only hope of a permanent fix. We'll learn how to deal with AI as long as we are allowed to do it or the government will step in and create another monster, just like companies came together and created standards in computing. What it will be I have no idea, but having government take care of it is what scares me.

Bimbam

See stuff like this is amazing and will totally change the game. It will eventually make mocap redundant and fully realistic 3D kinematic motion accessible to indie devs (I hope):

cybereality

Some stuff like that has been used in games. Like Natural Motion in GTA 4 (though I think it was used as a replacement or add-on to rag-doll physics, not as an entire animation system).

But we had that back in 2008. I think some other games used it like Star Wars Force Unleashed. But I'm surprised it didn't get more popular, because it works well.

Kojack

@duane said:

@some_lame_kid said: Trying to read these books in middle school is what made me realise how much I don't like high fantasy. It wasn't because the books were bad, I just couldn't read them without getting bored. Sci-fi however, I love sci-fi. But mostly the grounded stuff.

I feel you. I never could make it through the Shannara books, the Foundation series, or even Dune. I did manage to force my way through the Silmarillion. (It was painful, but I'm a Tolkien fan.)

The first novel I ever read was A Princess of Mars (with the Frazetta cover -- you can see why it appealed to a youngster), and I still think of that as more sci-fi than fantasy. I actually got started on "high" fantasy in middle school, when we were told to read The Hobbit in english class. Best assignment I ever got.

I think the most realistic stuff I've read were alien invasion stories, like Footfall and Worldwar. I loved the Project Orion spaceship in Footfall.

And, speaking of books made into movies, I've been waiting for forty years for a movie/tv adaptation of Ringworld. Niven is my all-time favorite author, and I've read nearly all of his Known Space books. At one point, the sci-fi channel was talking about adapting it -- the thought still makes me cringe. Does anyone remember the ham-handed movie they made of Riverworld?

My favorite series, which spoiled most fantasy series for me, was The Chronicles Of An Age Of Darkness by Hugh Cook. Amazing 10 book series that started off as typical fantasy in book 1 (a group of wizards and warriors go on a quest), then as more of the world's lore got revealed it all went crazy. One book is pirates adventuring through magic portals, one is internal politics of bank workers (plus werewolves), one gets into virtual reality space combat, one book is a quest to find the previous book. But most of the 10 books roughly take place at the same time, with all the storylines crossing over but from different points of view. The villain of one book could be the hero of the next book, telling his side of the story. They were sarcastic, violent, offensive and I loved them.

I'm still surprised nobody has made a movie/tv series based on The Magician. I'd have thought a series about an orphan boy becoming an apprentice mage (then a massive war breaks out with him at the centre) would go down well with current audiences.

cybereality

I really love Neal Stephenson, but I'm not sure Snow Crash was his best work (though it was a great book). My favorite was Diamond Age. Though his books are really unnecessarily long, and I'm afraid to start reading some of the newer ones.

Kojack

I did like a lot of Diamond Age, but the whole live voice over thing seemed odd. Imagine if every Google Home / Alexa was really streaming a live actor reading a script. The home replicator/recycler thing was cool though. I think I preferred Snow Crash overall. Both great books.

Audiobellum

I noticed that people were talking about cancel culture, so I'll express what I think about it. Even though I dislike cancel culture, I can't deny that there is always going to be something like it no matter what. What I dislike about it, is just how random and chaotic it is; anyone can get cancelled anytime over anything and the justifications can sometimes be post hoc; the standards are always changing. I know the justice system isn't perfect in most places but, I doubt it's ever this chaotic. If cancel culture is going to exist, the people who participate in it needed to be acknowledged as occupying a position of power and held to a standard in that regard; they should also face consequences for taking things too far. Again, I'm not entirely against cancel culture( though I would like to be) but, there needs to be some mechanism to prevent it from being abused.

duane

@Kojack said: My favorite series, which spoiled most fantasy series for me, was The Chronicles Of An Age Of Darkness by Hugh Cook.

I've been reading the discworld books again, though I mostly like the nightwatch books. The author never seemed to think he did a good job on them, but I disagree.

cybereality

I don't like it at all. It's total anarchy and a mob mentality. And, most of the time, people don't know what they are talking about. They make some assumption, based on the headline of an article (they didn't even read), and then attack someone with no actual proof or any sort of due diligence. And they can destroy someone's life or credibility with impunity. It's not really a good system. I understand people are upset about things, and you are entitled to your opinion or your feelings, sure. But honestly, these people that are doing it have nothing worthwhile going on with their life. They're losers.

And instead of facing up to the mistakes they made in their life, or trying to learn, or improve, they take that aggression out on other people and try to "take them down". It's a form of projection. Because they can't face their own failure, and accept they lost at the game of life, they want others to lose too and feel their pain. Part of it is jealously. Like they look at someone rich and successful and think "Why don't I have that. They don't deserve that." But the truth is too hard to face. Maybe they flunked out of college. Never read any books, so they are uneducated. Made poor life decisions, got into bad relationships, or never tried to do anything with their life. But that's too hard to accept. So they attack other people.

fire7side

@Audiobellum said: I noticed that people were talking about cancel culture, so I'll express what I think about it. Even though I dislike cancel culture, I can't deny that there is always going to be something like it no matter what. What I dislike about it, is just how random and chaotic it is; anyone can get cancelled anytime over anything and the justifications can sometimes be post hoc; the standards are always changing. I know the justice system isn't perfect in most places but, I doubt it's ever this chaotic. If cancel culture is going to exist, the people who participate in it needed to be acknowledged as occupying a position of power and held to a standard in that regard; they should also face consequences for taking things too far. Again, I'm not entirely against cancel culture( though I would like to be) but, there needs to be some mechanism to prevent it from being abused.

I think it's sick. It's humanity at it's worst, pretending to be righteous and doing the abominable. You make a mistake and you are wiped from the face of the earth. It's like reading the Salem witch trials over and over in a different context. It makes me ashamed to be part of the human race. Like a while back, there was this little old lady that told this black guy he didn't belong in this neighborhood. She was immediately fired from her job at his word for it and one of his buddies. It was some poor neighborhood and she was some waitress or something probably barely earning enough to live. She couldn't give an apology or anything. She had to be made an example by throwing her out in the street. Why? because the business is afraid of the publicity. That's what we do.
Will Smith right now. His popularity is down 30 percent. Article after article. He just lost it. The Acadamy? or whatever they call themselves said they coudn't allow any violence! Practically every movie glorifies violence and excuses it because someone got hurt and has to take revenge. Could you be more hypocritical? He gave an apology. The guy he slapped didn't even break stride. He's embarrassed. Just let it go. He didn't press charges.

duane

@Kojack said: I did like a lot of Diamond Age, but the whole live voice over thing seemed odd.

The premise was that no one had ever managed to create computer intelligence, so you had to have people acting the characters to make them seem real. Computers could perform incredibly complex tasks, but they still couldn't think.

And it's distinctly possible that humans will never create real intelligence, except the old-fashioned way. Every decade or so, some researcher raises the estimate of the complexity of the human brain by an order of magnitude when she discovers some new facet of how it works.

duane

The first computer game I ever played.

Actually, mine was an earlier version. I had to type it in from the text of a computer magazine, in Compucolor Basic (pretty much standard Basic). It didn't have the fancy castle outline you see in the video, just a grid of question marks. :)

[In my day, we didn't have graphics, we had text, and we liked it.]

Incidentally, the character stats and combat system were suspiciously similar to a microgame I owned called Melee. Microgames were an amazing concept back then. Most board games cost $10 or more (imagine)! Microgames were a small booklet of rules with a paper board and a sheet of thin, cardboard counters for $3. They changed my life.

fire7side

I used to have a color computer from Radio Shack and they called it color basic. Typed it in every time from a magazine till I hooked up a cassete tape player and could save. 32k of memory. I never really cared to save the game because typing it in seemed more fun.

duane

@fire7side said: I never really cared to save the game because typing it in seemed more fun.

When the programs started to get bigger, my favorite magazines began printing them in decimal numbers, converted from binary. Long lists that looked like this:

29, 182, 91, 204, 65, 190, 86, 21, 194, 100, 211, 127, 3, 66, 165, 62, 96, 71, 230, 234, 102, 206, 82, 47, 71, 121, 139, 224, 237, 133, 109, 120, 208, 66, 235, 253, 184, 34, 102, 2,

After spending a couple of days typing on the number pad until my hand cramped, I didn't want to retype it. :)

cybereality

Humans are really not as special as we think. It came out recently that trees and plants can talk to one another and have some form of awareness. Crows are really smart and have their own language. We think we are so special, but we are not. Machines can probably already think and may already be alive. We just have to get over ourselves.

DaveTheCoder

Re: cancel culture

This is another novelty of technology.

Publishing information used to be difficult and expensive. That imposed a natural filter that eliminated most of the garbage. Now anyone with fingers can instantly publish information to the world.

Audiobellum

@fire7side said:

Will Smith right now. His popularity is down 30 percent. Article after article. He just lost it. The Acadamy? or whatever they call themselves said they couldn't allow any violence! Practically every movie glorifies violence and excuses it because someone got hurt and has to take revenge. Could you be more hypocritical? He gave an apology. The guy he slapped didn't even break stride. He's embarrassed. Just let it go. He didn't press charges.

I think the reason why people were so hard on Will was because it appeared that he wasn't even going to suffer any consequences for his actions( as he got an award later on that night) and the were few people that defended him used rhetoric that fed into the culture war. Everyone saw the slap as being part of a bigger political conversation, about what violence is and therefore what constitute self-defense; the whole situation got exacerbated by the fact that it was about a comedian who couldn't fight back. Of course, he did end up facing consequences and now the whole thing just feels like a drawn out distraction; Chris Rock even had a few successful shows afterwards. I suspect that if the slap took place in simpler times, most people won't care about it that much; everyone is on edge now. If you want to see how vitriolic people can get about the slap, you should have seen on Tony Rock reacted to the situation. I'd usually link a video to it but, it's incredibly explicit. The entire situation does sadden me as it involves actors I grown up watching such as Will Smith, Chris Rock and even Tony Rock( he started in a Sitcom created by Will Smith called "All Of Us").

fire7side

@DaveTheCoder said: Re: cancel culture

This is another novelty of technology.

Publishing information used to be difficult and expensive. That imposed a natural filter that eliminated most of the garbage. Now anyone with fingers can instantly publish information to the world.

I think it's a lot more than that. When people are just automatically fired from their job. You don't know that person's situation. You don't know anything about them but some 30 second clip you saw. For a business, they have no choice but to instantly fire that person or suffer losses. There's hardly one instance I've seen where an apology wouldn't have sufficed. It's one sided. It's out of context. It's some tweet someone made when they were drunk and then retracted. It's something they dug up on a person they said when they were a teenager.
And social media has changed because we don't even know our neighbors anymore. A lot of people, that's the only relationships they have. My family and old friends are spread out all over. It's the only way I have of keeping contact.
And a good deal of it, whether you agree or not, is still free speech. Yeah, we need some boundaries, but when you have to agree with universal drug prescriptions or be silenced, that's a little weird. Social media is really trying I think. It's the coldness and irrationality of the population I don't like. They like it, and that's creepy.

cybereality

Well yes, in most cases, the people have not done anything illegal or broken the law. At least in America, it's still a free country (as far as the government is concerned). It's not actually illegal to be a racists or a bigot. Yes, it can be offensive, and it's not cool, but it's not breaking the law. But now we have a new law system, with people taking it upon themselves to dole out "justice", whatever "justice" they believe in. And companies, whatever side they want to take, don't want the negative PR, so they cave in. Joe Rogan did a good podcast on this, the one with Antonio Garcia Martinez, and I think I agree with what was said. It's just out of control. Also, Chris Rock deserved to be slapped, they should have left it at that.

cybereality

This was the first video game I played on my Commodore 64. I think I was like 4 years old.

My uncle would send me a box of 5.25" floppy disks every month with like 15 or 20 bootleg games he downloaded somehow. I didn't even know what bootleg was, but I liked getting infinite free games. My favorite game was this one I can't remember the name of. It was like Gauntlet, but a knock-off version. It was so cool. I would play as the girl that could do magic and navigate these dungeons, the levels were huge. It was so much fun.

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