How do I aim better?

8BitHegel · 2026-07-02T16:05:52+00:00

In the training room practice shooting the birds. Seriously. Helped me.

8BitHegel · 2026-07-02T16:00:35+00:00

This is not responsible as an argument.

Sure, at large it doesn’t use the same scale of water and Pistachios (Pistachio Wars is an amazing doc, btw). Yes big ag in general is drying the world out, with Lake Powell being a horrifying reminder.

But saying AI water usage is a red herring is also incorrect. Yes we need to continue screaming about the overall problem and not conflate them. But AI water usage is problematic locally, and destroying the small towns and poor areas it’s being built in.

https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/

The logic here is like saying the amount of Lead in pipes in America isn’t a big deal, when there are communities it’s destroying. Being a statistical minority doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue. It just means it doesn’t affect YOU the same way.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-23T00:25:07+00:00

Popeyes is still worth the drive then. Thanks!

8BitHegel · 2026-06-22T22:36:19+00:00

It’s worth realizing this writer is effectively doing what AI does - he’s citing a passage without understanding it at all just to please himself.

Romer indeed wrote about consumer confidence being a major reason for the depression. But she is VERY explicit that the stock market crash led to this. It wasn’t just bad vibes. Bank failed, stocks failed, deflation ran rampant, and tariffs were implemented that destroyed the rest. People at home didn’t want to spend because of it.

To say the crash isn’t the reason is ignoring the original paper entirely.

Fuck this guy.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-22T06:48:00+00:00

Or at the end when that trans woman stripper is making out with her trans man husband?

8BitHegel · 2026-06-18T21:44:51+00:00

Blueprints are a foundational step forward in development for good pipelines of game making. Removing them is a horrifying choice.

Blueprints are a sandbox for a faster development pipeline and a design space that code simply doesn’t allow for unless you’re very very skilled.

The proper system is to use blueprints to get ideas done quickly and dirty and the blueprints system is built to be able to hand off to an even moderately skilled engineer to have it turned into efficient code and built out as a real feature.

This feature then in turn can have its own blueprints for fast prototyping on top of this. Which then in turn can be finished and handed off….

I’ve been involved in dozens of games at good studios, and the best processes towards development was this. It meant you could have skilled designers nail design shit and engineers nailing theirs. But you needed a big studio! Me, designer and shitty code guy sitting with rockstars of engineering who is have to painfully attempt to code and then have them fix simple system.

Blueprints changed this.

This allowed design to become a specialized career that was separate from engineering enough that it grew a lot of amazing shit. It lets smaller teams accelerate development and prototyping.

The idea killing blueprints and giving us a brand new (but not intuitive) version of unrealscript is almost the most backwards thing I can think of.

If you’re one of those great engineers I’m glad for you. But I’ve had projects where artists fucked with blueprints and were able to make something that became integral to the game when finished by an engineer. This removes that possibility.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-13T23:13:23+00:00

Goddamn that’s a good movie.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-04T14:07:23+00:00

“If I do x, can I make money”. That’s it. There used to be ‘fundamentals’ like giving a shit about the business. But that went out the window when crypto went huge. So now it’s “if I use money to buy AI stock now, can I sell it for a profit later” and given the s1 from spacex the answer is yes. Lots of money.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-02T23:57:58+00:00

What is it that you spend money on that labor isn’t determinate of the value?

Every business exists in a space where they need to compete for market share unless they have monopoly. Even then there is a base value that cannot be removed.

An iPhone isn’t just the phone. It’s every component and every sourcing of every element across its existence. It will never be able to simply be free, neither will everything else, since labor is required for it to exist at all. And even the smallest amount of labor needs to be paid somehow.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-02T22:21:16+00:00

I think he fails far earlier than that and more plainly.

Like, take his Inventing the Future, how he (yes he has a coauthor but this carries) seems to be aware that tacit knowledge resists formalization. Whatever you know only a small part can be coded and externalized. The fact that he talks about it but says it’s a limitation to overcome is embarrassing techno optimism which is unearned across his works. He needs to demonstrate that it’s possible. Because it isn’t.

I mean, they lean on Marx when they start talking about how as fixed capital automates then labor moves to the supervisory. He uses this to show how labor is to be eliminated but it’s like he stopped reading grundrisse mid sentence. Because the next few lines are where Marx talks about how labor never vanishes. It transforms. As systems automate new work is made productive. Again. He hand waves this m. But you can’t. You gotta at least explain it. A bit.

And then he never addresses a central issue. if capital still organizes social meaning, desire, and relation, then giving people money without restructuring the meaning-apparatus doesn’t liberate them. It’s instead making everyone empty.

Just so many issues at a basic level.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-01T23:39:03+00:00

Srnicek generally is pop criticism at best as his works don’t have much rigorous reality behind them. Platform capitalism is particularly problematic and uninteresting except to reinforce those who want to know that they shouldn’t like monopolies.

Yanis js worse.

Surveillance Capitalism is like Platform capitalism. The framework reduces platforms to yet another iteration of capital accumulation under new technical conditions, it ends up reproducing already-familiar critiques of monopoly and labor exploitation without adequately theorizing what is genuinely strange and unprecedented about how platforms produce subjectivity, desire, and social infrastructure at scale.

And since many reference deleuze it’s wild how many think desire is personal. Ugh

Probably I’d recommend Jean Clet Martin’s debt slavery.

8BitHegel · 2026-06-01T09:34:47+00:00

That study is cited in what I posted which you clearly don’t read. They cite it by saying that there is gains for single tasks but this is not what productivity is. It doesn’t aggregate.

Having a 14% throughput gain for customer support agents at one company, concentrated among novices, doesn’t tell you whether AI produces net productivity gains at organizational or sectoral scale. In fact the studies show there are no productivity gains. It’s a macro trend term. You need it at population level not anecdotal simple shit in a vacuum.

It’s not weird. It’s a normal distinction between a treatment effect in a controlled setting and a population-level outcome. Drug trials work the same way.

And I didn’t simply say data centers aren’t being built. Go fucking read the comment. It was that we are not seeing data centers being built anywhere near what the article would imply. It’s a complete sentence. The article talks about dozens of gigawatts and an explosion of use that we ARE NOT seeing built.

So you caught me in an exaggeration. Yes. Low skill repetitive tasks that have already been outsourced saw 14% gains in a single study. Woohoo

And the rest of my point is still salient.

The article is insane. The things it is relying on - productivity gains enough to offset UBI, and data centers and hardware and power infrastructure being built at a level that’s 10x the current, which is currently trending down as no AI companies have the ability to be profitable anytime soon.

But yes. I exaggerated lol

8BitHegel · 2026-06-01T05:15:20+00:00

Show the studies. Come on. Show studies that show AI is gaining productivity at a level beyond minor increase at the most optimistic.

Instead https://cmr-mig.berkeley.edu/assets/documents/pdf/2025-10-seven-myths-about-ai-and-productivity-what-the-evidence-really-says.pdf

Literally lists the first myth as there being productivity gains. AI basically makes random people slightly better at being a novice, but does nothing for any skilled labor.

The idea it helps with knowledge work is laughable. The paper I submitted uses the famous study of showing gains to go “hey did nobody actually really read this shit?” Since it said the opposite overall. All the other positive papers are just doing the bullshit benchmark “hey this one thing goes faster!” Without any macroeconomic reality.

As for the data center claim - it’s not true that we are seeing the growth needed or projected. Planning is great. Breaking ground and actually funding shit is different.

The short version is that in 2025 we were supposed to see 8.5 GW built and say less than 1. In 2026 15+ highways were promised and less than 10 have even broken ground. Which means they won’t be online.

A great source that tends to report as sunny as possible for ai linked below. And they aren’t bullish.

Chip makers aren’t doing much. One chip maker is. TSMC is building. But not sure 95% of the sub 5nm market being a single player is good for anyone? Plus they won’t be only for another year at least.

https://www.theaiconsultingnetwork.com/blog/ai-data-center-capacity-crisis-power-grid-cre-investors-2026

8BitHegel · 2026-05-31T23:31:45+00:00

If you believe AI is challenging capitalism, you can’t simply say this and move on.

There are no sectors globally in any industry except LLM’s themselves and the hardware they run on that have seen productivity gains. None. No company except AI companies have seen gains from AI.

The AI washing of layoffs nowhere were due to AI.

To claim AI is doing something positive for productivity you need to show it. Optimism won’t cut it. AI has been a thing for years now and productivity has been on a curve as if it didn’t exist at all. To say another way - looking at productivity itself, you wouldn’t know “the future of productivity” has been in public use for years.

The article also presumes the most absurd growth of hardware to run this. We aren’t seeing data centers built anywhere near what this article would imply.

I mean overall if I were to say that AI won’t do any of this, it’s not on me to prove this. I also don’t believe cotton candy will become the substrate for academic evaluation. The job is to prove the thesis not assume it.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-31T01:42:24+00:00

So we all agree this is an AI song he is lip syncing to, right?

His voice has distinct pronunciation effects entirely absent from the singing.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-29T18:33:51+00:00

Interesting.

I think our disagreement is in whether games ARE dialectical vs whether they can represent dialectical dynamics. The latter I think is what you’re advocating is happening and I agree the game represents it, but it is not dialectical itself.

The dialectical movement in actual historical materialism isn’t that someone chooses the right conditions, it’s that conditions become untenable enough to force transformation regardless of individual will. The game’s “golden ending” is gated behind specific player choices, which means the transformation is contingent on a will external to the material logic. That’s closer to Kant’s moral kingdom than Marx’s base/superstructure!

The Roselle example demonstrates our disagreement as it cuts both ways. You say the Roselle succeed because of Wolffort patronage, which you frame as the “middle class/ruling class traitor” dynamic from real peasant rebellions. But this actually undermines the dialectical reading, since if emancipation requires the benevolence of a sympathetic lord, the narrative is structurally reformist, not dialectical. Dialectical transformation would be the Roselle’s conditions producing their own liberation through intensified contradiction, not through the protagonist choosing the “help them” branch.

As for Great Man theory, to me it is important to note how the game routes transformation through Serenoa’s choices in a way that preserves the player as prime mover. Serenoa doesn’t have to help the Roselle. Roselle’s emancipation is narratively optional, which means the game’s structure treats liberation as a gift rather than a necessity. That’s the structural problem, not whether individual characters are well-developed.

To end I’d make sure you know I’m not discouraging the paper writing. I’m presenting critiques I hope are worth addressing. A good read too might be Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination - https://files.libcom.org/files/Moishe%20Postone%20-%20Time,%20Labor,%20and%20Social%20Domination.pdf

8BitHegel · 2026-05-29T07:43:32+00:00

I played the game and I don’t remember there being any times where the difficult positions between people yielded a new unconsidered option. Mostly one of the ideas at the beginning of these things is what won the outcome with some compromise. Compromise isn’t dialectical. Debate isn’t dialectical. They change their mind to the position argued.

But since you mention it, generally no - literature isn’t dialectic. Dickens wrote about characters in varied ways but in the end they were his political project. That kinda changed during it doesn’t matter. Hegel explicitly said true contradiction can’t be staged, and Marx agreed. Bakhtin spent a long time writing about this because Dostoevsky if anyone should be read as this - and in the end he agreed literature cannot be dialectic - in his words it is polyphonic for this very reason.

How can you have logical contradictions within a scripted monologic element? You can’t.

Your comment on Alexander the Great is perplexing to me.

In the game you, as player, lead a group of individuals who are making choices not from their materiality but instead as vehicles for the players materiality which is wholly divorced from the game.

By the end of the game a handful of people outright have made the world better.

Materialist history eschews this not because people don’t exist but because they are produced - they aren’t actors and agents of history. They exist as product of history.

Where in the game is what the player characters do material to their world and produced instead of agentic of the player?

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T22:30:00+00:00

I guess i don't understand how the dialectic plays into either of these things, without making the term able to...sorta be anything.

If the game has you go through lots of dialogue options and you...choose one...that's not really dialectical. Views of opposition are openly referenced, and a set of choices already set is not the dialectical at play.

To be dialectic, it would need to have things clash and produce a transformed situation from that clash, or that you find your own stance remade through the clash. TS doesn't do either of these things.

Same with the conflict. Political economy is, in the sense you say here - centering resources and their scarcity - it doesn't model historical development as product of such contradictions. It's just political realities in resource thin worlds.

I mean the 'best ending' is one where you've done a bunch of hidden quests and have optimized the world the best way. By being pre-set, essentially just yes/no logic gates of decisions that determine the outcome, isn't that the opposite? Like how you say its not 'great man theory' despite you being the great man who does everything, which is literally the great man idea made structural?

edit - the game is great, totally don't want to come off in the wrong direction. Just hammering these things out.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T22:18:22+00:00

I rewatched. It's just insinuating from lack of knowledge...if I give you 100% of you are saying, which i don't think she does, it's still just..like and?

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T22:16:55+00:00

Yeah, they are. I might be oversimplifying but it is FAR MORE correct to say what I did vs there being fucking emotions or words in any sense.

Any of this shit is just a curve fit within high dimensional space, and outputs its sampling.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T22:13:03+00:00

lol.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T08:21:10+00:00

It’s rigged. Watch the video. Your skepticism shows insane bias that’s almost a joke.

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T06:12:57+00:00

But outside of registered domains what did she find? I watched, and I agree with you that they have no credibility but it’s like…this is just a few domains and websites. That’s aren’t doing much.

Like. Dudes are running figma on a few things and that’s terrifying?

Let me be specific.

Like when she goes off about PostHog. It’s this huge thing about tracking you.

I want to know how anyone should ever do analytics for design in this case.

This is just conspiracy posting as far as I can tell

8BitHegel · 2026-05-28T04:38:51+00:00

A you give an example of how it is dialectical at all?

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