There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

> Yes, it's not their fault, that people are using the tool they made in a malicious way.

Yeah! It’s not like they predicted these malicious uses before releasing the tools. And it’s not like they’re making them available to a dysfunctional government in order for them to militarise the technology and… Oh, wait…

> but this is an extremely illiberal take.

I’d appreciate if we stopped this Americanised version of poisonous discourse where everything is reduced to a box in a vague political ideology. By this I don’t mean politics don’t matter—they do—but not everything is black and white, right and left, or needs to be categorised to be discussed.

> It's not the kitchen knife manufacturer's fault that people are using their product for murder, it's not my fault that people are doing crimes over the Tor relay I run.

Always with the kitchen knife. That’s not an argument, it’s a talking point. Explosives are tools too, as are machine guns. No tool is entirely neutral. LLMs are not comparable to kitchen knives. Death is not the only possible bad outcome.

> Tobacco is also different because it is not a neutral tool that can be used for good and bad, but poisonous and will harm you no matter how you use it.

Tobacco is not just cigarettes.

https://leafngrainsociety.com/featured/10-surprising-uses-of...

Americans have exerted control over their society before, of course. It's usually through embarrassment of the people in power, with an implied capacity for violence waiting in the wings.

"So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing with is not just "a tough job market" or "adulthood" or whatever, but our own measure of unnecessary (but politically effective) humiliation, drizzling down from on high.

> And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.

I'm strongly skeptical of this argument, as there's only a few things you can not build a rough version and get something to ideate upon. Even with 3d games you can do design with blocks and buy models to have something to pinpoint the design.

I ran into this wall too. Someone here on HN said their general test is “make a browser only simple rts game with no AI and no multiplayer” What makes a game fun is very different than the engine of a game. My kid asked me to make a game where you brew potions. Okay, done. Adding ingredients, having physics to drop the items rather than “okay they just appear in the pot” (or worse it just says “okay they’re in there!”) Especially for kids there’s a physicality you have to capture to make it both fun and understandable to a seven year old.

Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.

There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”

Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).

The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.

Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.

Yeah I’ve been working on a game just for my kids, it convinced me to upgrade to Codex Pro and I absolutely wouldn’t release it to anyone until I felt 100% it actually was fun to play. It’s easy to get stuck not doing the stuff that can’t be automated. The crazy thing is that making the game pretty good looking (like Nintendo Switch level graphics) is basically trivial now and can be largely automated, maybe with a little Blender cleanup for your most important assets. That doesn’t make a game fun though.