We’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!

If you figure out how to fake literally every graphical style, as one example-driven shader, without AI… let me know.

Hey, hey next you can make people buy individual games, maybe at full price. You could kill this round of the mainframe fantasy in record time.

Remote computing almost never works because whatever you’re connecting from is probably capable all on its own. Obviously it’s networked at modern speeds. Even dumb video streaming demands some fairly new chips for efficient codecs. The Xbox Whatever This One’s Called had that little shoebox version that was priced like a Wii and it worked fine for all the games that can push a 5090. Everything scales down pretty well. Shooters get phone ports that are just the normal game, with worse controls. RE Requiem on Switch 2 still puts shit in your pants.

Even the damn PS3 ran MGS V. You could count the polygons and the frames, but it ran, and if you wanted it on PS Now you had to buy a PS4. That failure is our constant relief from this stupid future. Executives lean in and go ‘but what if… more money?,’ and you can’t use the gizmo you already fucking have. The money you’d pay them every month is not real if they can imagine a larger number.

The appropriate use of this technology would be to make rendering dirt cheap and then apply style transfer as a constant overhead. But really, it should be something the game does. Like if you develop on some 500 FPS relic of an engine, but train with offline renders of whatever you want it to look like. Full global illumination, true subsurface scattering, flawless hair sims. all that fancy shit. Spend an hour path-tracing each frame. That’s the look you’ll fake on top of a fullbright Source g-buffer.

‘I agree that nothing is neutral, but finding that ideological complication in a simple hammer doesn’t make it more than a hammer.’

‘Okay but what if I invent a hypothetical hammer that’s even more ideologically complicated; is that neutral?’

Mu.

Anyway: there will come vegan models. There will be LLMs and diffusers trained entirely on public-domain and licensed data. They will have the exact same effect on users, for the same reasons that a tungsten conflict hammer still makes you think about misusing a screw. For better and for worse, it does the thing it’s for. That’s what tools are. Solving any ethical concerns with how they’re made will not address this particular discussion.

I disagree with this framing. All tools are this way, and they are still “just a tool.” An inert lump of metal on a stick, used to whack other bits of metal into bits of wood, shapes how people think when they use it. That doesn’t make it anything more than metal on a stick. Other tools can be more opinionated, in the limited scope of what they make trivial. A gun that’s not lethally dangerous isn’t really a gun. It has no other function. But in debating where it’s used, and why - or even where it exists with the mere potential to be used - it is still just a tool. You have ideological implications, dude. It came free with your hippocampus.

LLMs are just a tool, in that the loudest complaints about using them also apply to other tools, but the people complaining have not critically examined the tools they consider normal. I’ve coded with and without a compiler. It changes your habits, and what you consider feasible. It changes how much time you spend thinking about different aspects of the project. I’ve also coded with bad compilers, and that diverts significant attention toward thinking about how the tool might betray you. And yet: it beats coding without a compiler.

C is kind of a shit language, permanently joining the lingua franca of programming to how PDP-11s worked in 1978. But it has survived and spread because it sufficiently represents the low-level concerns of what computers do and why you want them to do it. It’s harmful insofar as Ghidra and Mythos can trivially spot buffer overruns and undefined values in, frankly, far too many programs. Yet it remains immensely useful for abstracting the architecture of any processor. Open-source software had little trouble shifting from x86 to ARM to RISC-V, even though RISC-V is a loose confederation of suggested instructions. And LLMs understand C well enough to translate to much safer languages… while also rearranging enough underlying details that we have to bicker about re-licensing.

No tool is neutral, but they are still just tools. What a person can use them for is a concern, but all moral judgement should focus on what a person does use them for.

The shorthand in English is “sour grapes.”

Band-aid over an intolerable abuse.

No computer needs personally identifying information just to boot. You are an object, do as you’re told. There is no legitimate government interest that justifies this demand.

I’m not sure humans can do anything continuously without learning. It’s just a question of what your brain is filtering down to habit and experience. If your enemy is the compiler saying ‘error on line 314’ and line 314 is blank, you know to take a deep breath and start checking semicolons and braces. If your enemy is Copilot emitting ‘assert true’ tests, you know to grumble and move down a level in the specificity of your instructions.

At the end of the day - does the project work?

but then it should be limited to operating systems actually preinstalled on devices.

Even that is missing the point. There is no legitimate government interest in a computer knowing who is using it. You don’t get to demand personally identifying information just to boot.

Band-aid that props up an intolerable abuse.

A computer doesn’t need to know shit about its user. You are an object, do as you’re told.

Like seeing a terminal window pop open and disappear.

Not with the conviction that I would have done any differently.

This isn’t exactly a defense contractor asking about tracking targets under three feet tall. It’s a video card monopolist looking to buy your website which hosts a couple thousand public files for free. The only solvent company in this obvious bubble is going to pay someone for a copy of your server infrastructure… which again, is freely available. The worst-case scenario for users is scattering and scrambling to re-upload all the content they’ve already mirrored.

A lot of people who’d rail against accepting a check with three commas would be morally offended by hosting this particular site to begin with.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

I can’t exactly fault any rando for accepting a dump truck full of money… but god dammit, Clem.

Ban advertising entirely.

And people would rather demand change just because they say so, versus changing any of the incentives involved.

We could just make these companies share their scans. Then it would only affect one (1) copy of every published work. There are no ongoing commercial concerns for a book that’s been out-of-print for thirty years.

You mean like ripping a CD to MP3s? Which is obviously legal?

Or backing up a DVD to VHS, which is supposed to be explicitly protected, and created a legal argument for DeCSS defeating anti-copying measures?

Copywriting means you work in advertising. Copyright is a different thing.

Ah, you’re the sort who thinks everyone else has an accent.

The fuck do you think you’ve been yapping about?

Legal relevance: nil.