PostiveNoise

I assume the root problem is a near complete lack of money to make Friendica polished, or user friendly, or full of great features, or well-known. If it’s a tiny team who may have other jobs, then it’s hard to imagine it getting better.

Almost all of the activities in game apart from gradually upgrading your ship and multi-tool are optional, and mainly ‘for fun’. So, focus on learning more about what upgrading your ship would actually entail, and the same for the multi-tool. Overall the game is fairly easy, so enjoy the ride rather than seeking out ‘end game’ or serious challenge. I think of it kind of like a fantasy of american Car Culture combined with a focus on exploring a bit of many cool looking worlds. You find a really badass car/ship you love, and tweak it out until it’s amazing. You also do other stuff if you want to, maybe coming up with your own RPG style story that you invent just to give yourself other goals. You will probably get rich before long, so then you maybe collect more ships and pimp them out and build a cool base (or 5), or get into the Mayor thing, or some of the other game activities. Or just wander until you have had enough of checking out cool planets around the galaxy.

This was my career. Seeing popular sci-fi/fantasy movies maybe 1-2 times a year (especially on opening day…woot!) seemed fun and to boost morale a bunch. The studio was large enough so that several times we could rent out the theater to ourselves and be extra raucous, which was also fun. I don’t think people complained, since this was during office hours and not after hours or on a weekend. Otherwise, I think ‘if your going to give me free time then let me go home’.

I think longer ‘field trips’ might have sucked, even if they related to a game we were making. Sticking to sci-fi and fantasy films with cool fx was close enough.

Spain is kind of nice, based on your list. I’ve been considering it.

Good chicken! What a pretty and fancy chicken…

Sure. I worked in the game industry and sometimes AI can mean ‘pick a random number if X occurs’ or something equally simple, so I’m just used to the term used a few different ways.

Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don’t think he does any advanced programming himself. That’s why it’s really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI…he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.

I’ve come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I’m trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it’s hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.

Either the article editing was horrible, or Eno is wildly uniformed about the world. Creation of AIs is NOT the same as social media. You can’t blame a hammer for some evil person using it to hit someone in the head, and there is more to ‘hammers’ than just assaulting people.

Totally right that there are already very impressive open source AI projects.

But Eno doesn’t control diddly, and it’s odd that you think he does. And I assume he is decently well off, but I doubt he is super rich by most people’s standards.

Massive ongoing improvements in AI, and hopefully less massive but still impressive improvements in humanoid robots. Both of these will actually happen, unlike a lot of stuff that I and many others would LIKE to have happen.

Similar to the early Blizzard approach in some ways. A focus on delivering a vibe done to a very high level of quality and visual coolness, while leaving risky innovation in game mechanics to others.

Agreed. History is full of unintended consequences, partially because so many things were more complicated than individuals and societies realized. There are not tons of really simple tradeoffs along the lines of ‘freedom vs safety’. I don’t think people could have imagined the future world they would bring about when they started planting crops instead of just hunting and gathering, for example.

Mud Pies incoming!

When they pass you in the hall at work, it’s like you are invisible to them. Never any eye contact or acknowledgement that you exist, except for them not actually walking right into you.

I had a coworker who did this to me (and a fair amount of other people at work). She was young and pretty and had this approach to any guys a fair amount older than her. I wasn’t trying to date her or even interact with her in any personal way…she just seemed to preemptively turn on her ‘you are invisible’ field to the many people she was not interested in. It was a bit odd, but effective.

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I’d give a separate extra upvote for the cat participating, if I could!

People do talk about this. At least, they do in the game industry. It’s well known that when an independent studio gets bought (usually by a publisher they have been working for), this often results in the studio closing down a number of years later unless they crank out hit-after-hit. Of course, sometimes that doesn’t happen and the studio gets more stability and more financial support, now that they are part of a larger company.

In regards to the people who sell their studio (founders), it’s important to keep in mind that for most of these people, selling their studio while the studio is fairly popular results in life-changing wealth. Maybe selling the studio and becoming rich by doing so was not their original goal, but it should be no surprise that studio founders can be very tempted to sell the studio (at the right price). Owning an independent studio can be a gigantic amount of stress, and a huge financial reward that also allows the founder to simply get rid of all the headaches and stress is nothing to sneeze at.

Everyone who works at an independent studio knows the risks involved (to their own job eventually, if the studio is sold), and they often have mixed thoughts on what the founders are doing, but they don’t all demonize the studio owners, since they would be tempted by the same potential rewards if they owned the studio.