The Witcher and Cyberpunk I’ll give you, but Mass Effect definitely fades to black before getting to actual sex, the other two are mods. I wasn’t saying sex in games doesn’t exist, but if we’ve gotta go back several decades for a handful examples, that doesn’t feel like something that’s “common.”

Accurate, but one series does not make something common.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

Is “common” referring to cringey low budget Steam games? I don’t think I’ve seen any sort of on screen simulated sex in a game, ever. Granted I tend to only play well publicized indie games and larger releases. But how common is this? Am I out of the loop?

Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.

I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.

Same! I’m downright terrified about the impossibility of determining what should be legal/illegal because our politics move at a glacial pace and rarely involve experts in the field. Some bad actors can AND WILL really fuck things up here. I do think that the possibilities are a net positive. If I were in charge, I would pump the brakes until we could better ascertain what the fallout will be.

I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren’t always correct).

Maybe my current scenario is in some Venn diagram of the perfect situation, but I’ve been having the opposite experience. I’m a game designer changing from about a decade of Unreal (and another decade and a half of various proprietary engines) to learning Unity. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, I’ve just got no clue how to do it. I’ve been using a combination of GPT-4o and co-pilot to figure things out and it’s been great! GPT has been a combination of pair programming and Google replacement. I’ll tell it what I’m trying to do and it not only spits out a code example, but it describes what each section is doing. Occasionally it’ll tackle problems from the wrong end, like yesterday it was placing a UI element and then clamping it to ensure it was drawn on screen instead of figuring out the proper screen space scale first and properly converting world space to that specific space/scale. But if you’re familiar with the methodology and need help with the syntax/structure, it’s kind of amazing. Co-pilot is SO FAST! I’ve got no idea where a property I’m looking for is being stored and that shit auto-completes (almost always) exactly what I’m looking for, purely based on context or comments. Some times it hallucinates properties that don’t exist, but the IDE calls my attention to that pretty quickly and co-pilot usually sets me on the right path.

It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.

In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:

1. Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
2. More efficient batteries
3. A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.

I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.

They’re not making a choice. They’re anti-choice.

Having just turned 43, I can tell you that I don’t think I became an adult until my early/mid 30s.

Pasting the same thing I commented last time this was posted:

After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.

I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.

This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.

Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.

Taking your initial post and this comment into consideration, you may be in a situation I find myself in (or I may be projecting, who knows). I started out with some regular ass depression and threw in what was originally some recreational weed consumption. After a while I found myself as a daily weed smoker. My partner seems to have a much different experience as a daily smoker than I do. For me it manifests itself as you are describing, just a lack of excitement about life. I feel like my weed hangover isn’t like an alcohol one, but rather it saps my motivation to do anything productive that I’m not being held accountable for. If I was also unemployed and unable to find a job, I’m sure it would be worse for me. At the moment, I’ve cut back on my consumption and am making it a point to only partake on weedkends. Pairing that with more exercise has worked well for me in the past, but I find it difficult to get in the exercise habit with that low level of motivated energy. Finding a form of exercise where you don’t notice the work you’re doing is also helpful. I don’t much like basketball, but a friend of mine invited me out to fuck around and shoot hoops with them. Probably the easiest time I had getting in some cardio without realizing it. Nowadays, I’ve got a rowing machine that I use while I watch streaming shows. I usually find my lust for life returning when I’ve put in the maintenance on the machine that is my body. It’s a lot easier to feel alive when you feel alive.

You may just be listening to it too fast.

https://youtu.be/doz1QJ7LwjA

There’s a dodge meter now that shows you how many dodges each character has left

So the assumption is that they took the game down for almost a year, changed nothing, and are putting it back up?

The fact that it is gonna be live action is what concerns me the most. I hope it’s live action in the style of the Netflix One Piece series and not the Bob Hoskin’s Super Mario Bros film.

Ahhhh, the old “If you love that inanimate object so much, why don’t you marry it?” response. This playground reaction tracks pretty well with my understanding of major party politics. Goddamn, I miss the days when the masks were still on and policies on both sides of the aisle still had some redeeming qualities.

I realize this isn’t actually going to happen, but I’m just trying to wrap my head around this dude’s train of thought.

It seems like “You want to protest the killing of these people? How about you go live in the area where the killings are happening!”

Does he think that will change their minds? Like, upon arriving in Gaza, these protesters will realize the errors of their ways and agree that genocide is the best option?

Is he trying to get the protestors killed by the very thing they’re protesting? That’ll teach them!

Does he not think that there is anything happening in Gaza and he wants to show them that it is actually a safe and lovely place?

Ignoring the logistics of the proposal, and accepting that this lawmaker has the viewpoint that the protesters should not be protesting, I still fail to understand what the desired outcome is and why this person thinks this is a fitting response. Like, this dude went through the trouble of writing this up and talking to people about it. Does he realize this makes no sense and he just wants to get his name in circulation by proposing nonsense?

At this point, why would you want that double height step when walking to the bathroom from the hallway?

You’re both right. The reason the ABC/XYZ thing matters, and is tied to the presidency, is because the money came from campaign contributions and the ABC/XYZ are things you’re allowed to spend campaign funds on and things you aren’t.

Knowledge bomb time!

This is Robert Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania politician who committed suicide during a live press conference in 1987. This photo is from that press conference, the trombone has been photoshopped over the gun he used.

For the 90s musical connection, this incident was the inspiration for Filter’s song “Hey Man Nice Shot.”