brucethemoose
@brucethemoose@lemmy.world
- Comment on How solar panels generate electricity 12 hours ago:
Yeah.
At some point mounting them statically becomes the more cost-effective than the sun-tracking mount, I guess.
- Comment on How solar panels generate electricity 14 hours ago:
Just like modded Minecraft.
- Comment on How solar panels generate electricity 14 hours ago:
It would make sense.
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
- Comment on Can I use your shower? 20 hours ago:
And scrambled eggs?
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
…*Yeah. That’s a bit extreme.
You can sit back and let this stuff collapse under its own weight, you know.
TBH a violent reaction feels like it’s just going to help politicize this LLM mania (and therefore present an excuse to cement the enshittification). It can be awful and annoying all by itself.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
because anyone who knows even a scrap of how LLM/GANs work knows that the data needs to train a model would be far beyond the reach of a company of Larian’s scale
If it’s a media model, they could start with existing open weights. There are tons of them already.
If it’s not, and something really niche, and doesn’t already exist to their satisfaction, it probably doesn’t need to be that big. A lot of weird stuff like sketch -> 3D models are trained on university student project time + money budgets.
We don’t need defenders coming in here trying to pretend that the CEO hasn’t just clarified that they are using AI for preproduction, we know this and it’s not up for debate now.
No. We don’t.
And frankly, why do I need to play their game when I could just AI generate my own slop and save the 70 bucks
I dunno what you’re on about, that has nothing to do with tools used in preproduction. How do you know they’ll even use text models? Much less that a single would ever be shipped in the final game? And how are you equating LLM slop to a Larian RPG?
hit, it seems like they’ve forgotten about the community that got them to where they are today in favor of some AAA gaming nonsense.
Except literally every word that comes out of interviews is care for their developers, and their community, which they continue to support.
Frankly, there are plenty of games that people judge from the outset. There’s a reason why we have the saying “First impressions matter”. They’ve left a bad taste in anyone who dares question the ethics of AI use, but thankfully there might be an audience of people out there who like slop more than I dislike it so they could be ok. No skin off my nose.
Read that again; pretend it’s not about AI.
It sounds like language gamergate followers use as excuses to hate something they’ve never even played, when they’ve read some headline they don’t like.
…Look, if Divinity comes out and it has any slop in it, it can burn in hell. If it comes out that they partnered with OpenAI or whomever extensively, it deserves to get shunned and raked over coals.
But I do not like this zealous hate for something that hasn’t even come out, that we know little about. It reminds me of the most toxic parts of Reddit and other cesspools of the internet, and frankly I hope it stops spreading here.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
That’s an awfully early point to judge a game, with basically zero knowledge of what they’re actually doing/using?
What if it’s a home grown model to assist with mocap?
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
That’s extreme, and put abrasively.
…But not entirely wrong.
And it’s not a small minority anymore, which is understandable given how pervasive chatbot enshittification is becoming. Maybe the ‘made with AI’ label isn’t enough to deter everyone, but it’s enough to kill social media momentum, which is largely how games sell these days.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
like the recent Warlock game announcement.
That’s a very… abstract trailer.
Yeah, I’m suspicious too.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works?
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.
Image/video diffusion is a tiny subset of genAI.
I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.
See above. And in many spaces, there are a sea of models to choose from, and an easy ability to tune them to whatever style you want.
And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.
Thier tools can be totally in house, disconnected from the outside web, if they wish. They might just be a part of the pipelione on their graphics workstations.
It’s important to draw a distinction between “some machine learning in our production workflows” and “a partnership with OpenAI.” Those are totally different things, and it sounds like Larian is talking about the former.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 day ago:
Yeah, this is ridiculous. This doesn’t mean they’re enforcing a CoPilot quota or vibe coding the game, it could be simple autocompletion or (say) a component that makes the mocap pipeline easier.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
Well again, it depends.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something useful, but get immense, unwarranted backlash for it because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML.
AI is not bad. Tech Bros, and the virus they spread among executives, is.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
That sounds excellent.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around their dev’s and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
This is a fair point. When I made the original comment, I didn’t realize their in house engine went so far back:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Engine
If they can shoehorn in something like KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their workflows, that’d be perfect.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
Depends how much they “redo”.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the low level legwork for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 day ago:
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
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Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
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Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
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Starfield
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Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
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A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release.
Now let’s look at some others:
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KCD2: CryEngine
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Expedition 33: Unreal
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Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
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Stray: Unreal
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As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are a lot of things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
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- Comment on Education is important. 2 days ago:
I mean, some of both curve up to Spain.
They usually peter out before then, but this is placed before they fizzle out.
- Comment on Education is important. 2 days ago:
Ehhhh, except that hurricanes sometimes curl up that way.
- Comment on Lol, lmao even. 2 days ago:
“Scam the rich,” perhaps?
- Comment on Is audiophile bullshit cheating? 2 days ago:
Literally.
And for those songs with too much dynamic range for a car, well, that’s what the volume knob is for!
- Comment on Lol, lmao even. 2 days ago:
They also talk about evolution when they keep deploying the same tweaked architecture.
They’re also talking about data centers in space, while being too cheap to use anything but evaporative cooling + gas generators on Earth.
I did some math on, say, launch costs for an Earth-data center sized installation, or the area needed to radiatively cool it, and it is fun. Those space construction startups know what they’re doing. They’re playing billionaires for fools; and it’s working.
- Comment on Roundup of Roundup 3 days ago:
He is an antivax icon, he married Elle McPherson, he does podcasts and documentaries, speaking engagements, etc. he is paid far more than many doctors with none of the stress and liability.
Similarly the Monsanto and Coca Cola ghost writing research, everything involved in tobacco, Purdue and OxyContin addiction, etc. the last one was treated as a civil matter but are these not criminal? Countless lives were destroyed.
Attention is all you need.
Philosophical questions of liability don’t matter anymore; optics do. Wakefield didn’t just win that game; he blew it away. Monsanto, big tobacco, even Purdue drug their public sentiment battles on long enough not to win, but not to lose.
I mean no offense, but I keep seeing scientists ask “why is all this happening?” on Twitter, as they presumably pass mobs of folks glued to algorithms and influencers gaming them on thier phones, and politicians now emulating thier behavior.
Hence I hate to sound so cynical, but I think your question:
What’s a viable consequence for these people? Life in prison?
Is pointless.
Science and journalism aren’t front-and-center anymore. To quote AOC, “everything feels increasingly like a scam.” And pondering what these massively wealthy entities deserve is a waste of energy until that festering problem is addressed.
- Comment on How Wikipedia Got Captured: Leftist Editors & Foreign Influence On Internet's Biggest Source of Info 3 days ago:
…I try to give videos the benefit of the doubt. As shady as that cited website is, I do.
But a recommendation for Grokipedia is an article instant block for me.
- Comment on 2025 Game Awards Results Discussion 5 days ago:
Wuthering Waves
I have nothing against beautiful animesque games, but… does it have to be rail-thin women in schoolgirl skirts and stockings?
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 6 days ago:
BG3 turned out well, though?
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 6 days ago:
Yeah, please no Starfield. I love space opera, I love Oblivion and Fallout, but that was so boring.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 6 days ago:
Oh that’s awesome. Yeah, I see the rumors now:
videogameschronicle.com/…/the-mystery-behind-the-…
Selfishly, I hope their other half’a working on a sci fi game. Or a cyberpunk one?
Shadowrun? Gods, that IP would be perfect for Larian.
- Comment on The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? 6 days ago:
I suspect Larian will take their sweet time.
Bioshock sounds like it’s in development hell; I’d be suspicious of that.