18 minutes isn’t even long

I really hope the complexity doesn’t make it a no-go for Lego — honestly this is one of the only times I’d be in support of custom pieces if it makes assembly easier or the machine more durable

I haven’t really engaged with Lego at all since I got into 3D printing, but them going “fuck it we’ll do mechanical computation” would definitely pull me back in. this is exactly the kind of thing that’d be a major pain to do with printed parts, where consistent and durable standardized parts would do a lot better

you can’t just put me at financial risk like this

@self@awful.systems can we ban the grifter?

corbin’s track record both on and off awful.systems indicates they aren’t any kind of grifter

in fact, myself and @dgerard@awful.systems have previously had a conversation about this type of technology (Nightshade and Glaze) where I was initially quite excited about it, but David and others brought up a lot of the same points corbin did here. there were some very solid social points made around the tech too, beyond the licensing and technical points we’ve seen here — should we really be establishing the expectation that artists need to defend their work using this specific proprietary technology? that feels way too close to the bullshit the NFT grifters pulled, where artists could opt out of their work being stolen and sold as an NFT only by following a specific set of steps for each and every NFT market, which doesn’t work. this kind of tech also opens the door for rent-seeking; techniques like Glaze and Nightshade can be broken by changes to generative models, which would keep artists on a treadmill continually paying for the latest versions of these proprietary tools, or else. it feels rather like a protection racket run by whoever has the most access to the models — and that’ll always be the same assholes who run the generative AI.

so I ended up with the strong impression that this technology won’t make things better for artists and other folks who are being exploited by the AI industrial complex; that this might not be something with a purely technical solution. and I think I understand your strong reaction to some of the posts here, because that fucking sucks. there isn’t a clean engineering solution to this problem that my increasingly technofascist industry created, and when you grow up being told (by some of the same techfash fucks who’re now behind some of the worst use of technology I can think of) that all you do is engineering, it’s easy to feel helpless.

but we aren’t helpless. technofascism is structured to produce and exploit that feeling when it’s engaged with on a purely technical level, but the systems established by technofascism (LLMs, generative AI, cryptocurrencies, and others) are plainly ridiculous when viewed through any other lens. the technofascist goal isn’t to win on technical merit (there isn’t any), but to normalize ridiculousness. the only way I know to push back against that is social. on a small scale, that’s part of what sneering is — any asshole pushing this ridiculous shit should feel ridiculous doing it, as a lot of the crypto grifters felt when the public at large started sneering at crypto (thanks to the efforts of David, Amy, Molly, and many others). on a larger scale, we desperately need systemic change. as engineers, we’re constantly told we don’t need unions or solidarity, particularly with folks like artists who we’re told are unimportant. it is very intentional that attitudes like that enable technofascism.

if and when we have those social factors established, a version of these tools with less potential for exploitation might be worth considering. but I see it kind of like the relationship between fediverse software and its community — federation is generally a good thing, but it’s absolutely nothing (and would probably be a net negative) without posters who generally want the fediverse to be a cozy place to make good posts; the polar opposite of the utterly hostile commercialized thing the internet at large has become.

though if you prefer tabletop simulator, it looks like there’s a module that implements all of Nullsignal’s cards. there’s also a couple of modules that try to pull everything from netrunnerDB (where Jinteki gets its card art and metadata) but from the comments it looks like they broke a while ago due to API changes

Jinteki is pretty much purpose-built for online play in the browser — it predates tabletop simulator by a fair bit and has a janky UI, but it works so well that a bunch of tournaments use it, and it has a gigantic card database with special rule implementations that’d be hard to implement elsewhere. it’s also open source which is very cool — you can monitor their progress adding the rules for new cards, or dig into the source to see the exact game logic that’s executing for a given game state. of course you can also host your own, which I haven’t seen anyone do but could have value for in-person tournaments that need to do visualizations or quick rule checks

the Green Level Clearance discord is generally considered the best place to start — tagging @Mentor in #find-online-games will usually net you someone willing to run a tutorial game or two in Jinteki, and you can also tag your own account with which sets and tournaments you’d like to participate in once you’re more comfortable playing

huh, that’s interesting. I know bandwidth and storage costs are a big difficulty in hosting a peertube instance (and this is also a reason why an awful.systems peertube isn’t on the table, unless we somehow get frankly suspicious amounts of money for infra). I should make an account there and fiddle with it — maybe they allocate more quota to older or more popular accounts?

that’s surprisingly close to perfect already, at least to my eye! and the bug with CSS not wanting to load initially is something I’ve seen safari and Firefox do too

by the way, how was the experience of uploading this to peertube? I’ve been meaning to check them out, and I’m really surprised at how quick and smooth watching that video was on my phone

There’s a pervasive idea in the programmer community that it’s impossible to make a modern web browser unless you’re a top 10 tech corporation.

A worrying number of people in engineering don’t seem to think software is worthwhile unless you can expect to compete for majority market share with the incumbents. If “hacker” is to be taken as a title of honour, I think it belongs to the ones who make things without expecting to take over the world.

agreed, I wish hacker culture was more like this instead of the capitalism fan club it actually is

there’s a weird parallel between large software projects like web browser engines being considered impossible to accomplish without a gigantic corporation’s backing and the long-standing (but utterly false) belief that it’s impossible to do semiconductor manufacturing without a gigantic, expensive factory. the motivation for pushing these claims seems fairly obvious — if folks think these core pieces of tech infrastructure can’t be replicated without corporate control, they just won’t try.

oh yeah, Nix is fairly unique in that it’s very easy to combine with whichever language you’re working in. C++ folks might like it cause it’s a much less painful way to do dependencies than what’s usually standard for C++ projects — it’s pretty much the only thing keeping a few of my Python projects glued together

as far as I know Perl is almost entirely gone, but the Nix interpreter is still C++. in the long tradition of functional programming though, the Nix language itself is becoming more powerful as the C++ interpreter becomes more of an implementation detail most folks don’t need to mess with

for what it’s worth, I never have the spoons to deal with C++, so I’m happy to say that all in all my years of screwing with Nix I’ve never had to use anything but the Nix language and bash (and potentially whichever language I’m writing packages for)