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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 27th, 2023
  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoInternet is Beautiful@lemm.ee•The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme
    2·
    3 days ago

    “The Birth and Death of JavaScript” predicted the future

    The first time I watched that talk, I was very drunk, and forgot about the framing device halfway through. I went looking for Metal as if it was an actual project. It was not far-off from what I expected to be possible, having longed for a way to weld an emulator to Wine and run small Windows programs in Android. My shorthand was Turing completion. The man says any computer could run any program, and I wanted could to become can.

    Now there’s a whole class of “usermode emulators” and you can play Crysis on your phone. The original, unmodified, full-fat Crysis.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoFuturology@futurology.today•The AI Bubble may be about to burst. LLMs have reached the point of diminishing returns, and there's no sign of scaling leading to independent reasoning, needed for the first steps to AGI.English
    6·
    6 days ago

    Remember: the dot-com bubble didn’t end the internet.

    This tech has cool uses, outside of venture-capitalist cult obsession. Mostly porn. I mean, Jesus Christ, so much porn.

    But the general idea of image-to-image transformers, based on natural-language descriptions, is here, and it is witchcraft. Generating new images from scratch is a stupid demo gone feral. The real applications will be all-purpose “CGI” as an idiot-proof Photoshop filter. Select tin can on string, type “spaceship,” get decently plausible results for your no-budget sci-fi show. No roto, no modeling, no lighting. The machine makes excellent guesses. And if you disagree, well, run it again. If you want it to be a specific kind of spaceship, either build a little toy or drag a PNG across the screen, and the machine will try to fix the aspects which make that look stupid.

    The applications that money-robots want will be what destroys their industry. Animators don’t want to type in “cartoon rabbit walking” and get a finished product the machine spat out - but they’d love to have their drawings tweened. They’re all busy mocking this “framerate upscaling” nonsense, and missing that it means they can put in an on-eights previs and have it come out as smooth or as choppy as they want. And then they can doodle over whichever parts they don’t like, and have a different model turn those sketches into on-model drawings. The ultimate outcome of which can look like any Pixar movie even if your process is entirely 2D. Or… it can look like live action. Starring real actors, living or dead. Or starring literal nobodies, as made-up as any animated character, but as plausible as any person on film.

    We’re gonna see a repeat of the webcomic boom… for movies and shows. It simply will not cost one billion dollars to make a whole-ass media franchise. Expect this to completely surprise the lumbering giants who keep trying to get rid of the little people who made up the stories and the characters.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoGames@sh.itjust.works•Atari acquires Transport Tycoon IPEnglish
    8·
    12 days ago

    For anyone going “Atari still exists?” - it’s complicated. And stupid. It is equal parts complicated and stupid.

    Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976 when they were still “that Pong company.” The home-gizmo division was sold to Jack Tramiel shortly after the crash of '83.

    The remaining arcade division took a journey. Tramiel had bought the name Atari, and also most of the staff and facilities and licensing rights, so Warner was left with a generic video-game husk which they spun off as AT Games, AKA Tengen. For some reason Namco owned most of it. Uuuntil Time Warner bought them back, and renamed them Time Warner Interactive, and then very shortly sold them to Midway, under Bally. Under Williams. That pinball conglomerate situation restored the proper Atari Games name, and then very shortly rebranded everything as Midway. This Atari did pretty well as Midway West until arcades stopped existing and they went bankrupt. And then Warner bought them again. They still own them, even though all Warner wanted was the Mortal Kombat IP.

    Meanwhile.

    The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers that do not matter in the slightest. Everything after the 2600 was a complete footnote. Their final lineup of the Lynx, the Falcon, and the Jaguar are only interesting to engineering ultranerds. Obviously they went bankrupt. Hasbro bought their remains, then spun them off into Mattel Interactive, which also went bankrupt. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought their remains (for some reason?) and did the smartest thing anyone has ever done with Atari: nothing.

    Infogrames screwed that up by buying JTS simply the acquire the Atari brand, which they proceeded to wear like a dead skin mask. They made a few admirable titles like Gauntlet Legends before entering a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent. It didn’t work. They went bankrupt. Some oil-adjacent venture-capital robot bought their remains, spent a decade hawking vaporware, released a weird PC nobody bought, and then also went bankrupt. A different clique of venture capitalists gave them more money, for some reason, and started reacquiring old franchises from all eras. They’re the Atari that re-released the 2600 last year, as if it’d be a big deal instead of a curiosity. I have obvious predictions for where this all goes, and yet, I cannot imagine that’s where it ends.

    That logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. Sensible companies see it laying there, and talk themselves into putting it on, and oh no everything went wrong somehow.