AI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.
More accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.
Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
91–100 of 257 posts
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc). Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalti…
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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#93The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#94The argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever” It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not. An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
Money has to do with whether you can make the game. Games are regularly funded by many non-profit options such as co-ops or grants, etc. Developers are free to make games however they want.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues. We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book o…
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Toyota is (was?), all by their lonesome selves, almost 100% bet-the-farm on hydrogen vehicles instead of electric.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#96I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started wit…
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas? Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#981. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once m…
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Good point. Except, the problem is that at AI prices similar to current ones, it would cost someone thousands of dollars to make the game for himself.
Luckily for us China based companies are pushing the price down and bringing it to those who can afford a decent hardware. Which might not be everyone, but enough people to make it matter.
The day AI goes good enough to work in place of a principal engineer, and 10.000 people get fired, is the day when 10.000 new 1-person companies will appear that will make you whatever software you want at a fraction of the cost the big companies want to rent it to you.
Software is becoming a true commodity. Data, Hardware, specialised knowledge, good taste and engineering practices, and connectivity. Those might be key points that might keep people on a certain infrastructure, not just the software.
Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalti…
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Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.