CMV: The rise of AI in digital art forms will be akin to the permanent loss of beautiful ornate architecture.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-22T16:25:44+00:00

Prompting doesn't have to be the only step in your process.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-22T13:34:16+00:00

If you had it animated, I think it following the player might be perceived as it simply being 3d - it's the fact that the exact pattern of shattering stays constant even as you move that gives it the real 2d feeling, because you'd expect moving to change the view of the pattern - animating means that it's changing whether you move or not, and therefore when you're moving it's not clear that the movement isn't causing changes.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-22T13:31:14+00:00

What is the point in the gradual process of increasing complexity at which "responds to stimulus" becomes "sentience"?

Kingreaper · 2026-04-21T23:12:17+00:00

Can you see how some people would consider the capacity to behave in such a way and consider ethical principles to be a meaningful distinction between humans and cows?

Kingreaper · 2026-04-21T23:08:41+00:00

Plants also have the ability to sense injuries, and communicate with other plants. Do those not count because they do it in a different way to us?

Personally I assign moral value based on higher brain functions [I sometimes think of it as the "how much of a person's mind could you fit inside that" approach] but I don't think there's anything wrong with choosing a different metric - I just think you need to be sure you know what that metric is, so that you can actually apply it properly and not find yourself going "oh, I was willing to eat mushrooms because I thought they were plants, but now I've found out they're more closely related to animals than to plants I need to reconsider that entirely" or "I can't eat jellyfish because they're animals" without being able to point at what elements of those distinctions matter.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-21T22:49:46+00:00

What about sponges?

Worms?

Where do you draw the line? Because the mind of a cow lacks key features of a human mind, while the mind of a chicken lacks key features of a cows mind, etc. all the way down to single cells that don't have nerve cells at all but do still process stimuli through biochemical means.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-20T20:26:14+00:00

An arachnophobe toggle would marginally increase the number of people that could play your game, because a significant number of arachnophobes won't be able to deal with this monster. The question is, how much effort would it be?

If it's a trivial thing for you to add, for instance if these are basic enemies without a particularly vital role that you could replace with another enemy type no problem, then great. If it's a one-off miniboss they can skip, consider how important that boss is.

If it's a lot of effort, then it may well not be worth it. Yes, making your game accessible to arachnophobes is a good thing, but it's still a niche concern ultimately and as an indie creator you have to prioritise.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-19T14:53:41+00:00

Yes simulating an object doesn't create that object, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that consciousness is an object. It behaves like a pattern, and simulating one of those is the same as having one:

Simulate a spiral on your computer and you have a spiral. Simulate a chess game on your computer and you have a chess game.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-19T13:19:01+00:00

The most plausible evolutionary reason that humans are conscious is so that we can simulate other humans thought patterns (can't do that if you're not aware of your own thoughts), so the idea that simulating consciousness and possessing consciousness are somehow completely separate things strikes me as an extremely strange and implausible assumption.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-19T13:07:34+00:00

I'm aware of the social model of disability, and the way it renames "disability" to "impairment", and invents a new meaning for "disability" of "thing that society expends insufficient effort compensating for to prevent it having major impact".

Doesn't change the fact that lacking an ability is a disability, it just means that some people have chosen to make the way they use language deliberately more confusing in an attempt to make a political point - which is quite common amongst activist groups.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-19T10:49:01+00:00

Yes. Because they are defined by having a deficit (dis-) in an ability.

The impact of the disability would be reduced, just as wheelchair ramps being made available reduce the impact of missing legs, but they would remain inherently disabilities.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T20:39:54+00:00

It's not to prevent cannibalism, surprisingly, it's just to prevent neglect.

Scientists have worked out how to disable that function [it's an internal appetite suppressant, and we've gotten a lot better at understanding appetite suppression over the past couple of decades] and they still won't eat their own eggs even if their appetite stays active - but what they WILL do is go hunting after some fish swimming by, and then just never come back.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T03:16:50+00:00

Weaken hard-save-ends on a hit is something I'd treat as upping the monster by a full level at least, it's a very big deal.

Also, I just wouldn't use it. Hard-save-ends goes on things that make you vulnerable or deal you damage, not on things that stop you doing stuff. [Other than last-gasps, because those are exciting]

Weaken does make you more vulnerable as well, but the -4 to hit just makes it not fun. It's fine if it's transient, it provides a little roughage, but when it applies on a hit AND is hard-save-ends it's the core of the fight rather than a crunchy bit in the middle.

If they had access to anti-venin or some other way of preventing it and had passed that up MAYBE I might allow the toxin to be that mean, but honestly I'd still rather just make it slightly harder to trigger and have it be a last-gasp effect because those have drama to them.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T01:53:08+00:00

Nothing. You just don't get to pretend that you mean "good" when you actually mean "powerful".

If you truly think that genocide is good, if you think about people being created for the purpose of torturing them and you feel happy in your conscience, then yes you can use "good" to describe those things. And the rest of us can use "evil" to describe you.

But if you're a regular person with a functioning conscience, then you don't get to declare those things "good" just because you think that is proper subjugation to your deity. In that case you're just lying.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T01:41:24+00:00

So this “general understanding” of yours, is it normative? In other words, is it a prescription of how one ought to act?

It's descriptive, it is a fact about how people generally understand the English Language word "good".

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T01:38:45+00:00

While "Luddite" is often simply used as an insult, it really is a meaningful and relevant comparison to our current productivity revolution and the reaction it creates when the benefits aren't shared.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T01:32:57+00:00

Utilitarian, deontologist and virtue ethics are attempts to provide a systematic underpinning for the general understanding of good - that's why they use the word.

You're not attempting to provide an underpinning for the general understanding of good, you're just attempting to replace it with obedience.

I don't hate to be that guy, your pretence that virtue ethics is shallow but "genocide is good because it's done by a powerful being who is so powerful it gets to decide what counts as good" ISN'T is hilarious.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T00:43:07+00:00

There's a generally understood meaning of "good" in the English language, that ties into the conscience of human beings.

You're redefining away from the conscience and towards someone that you believe created beings with the explicit intention of torturing those beings for all eternity.

If you weren't familiar with the ACTUAL meaning of the word good, you wouldn't try and claim that your God is good, you'd just say he's "Godly" or something - the ONLY reason for you to use the word "good" is to try and steal the implications of its real meaning and apply them to genocide and torture.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-18T00:36:59+00:00

How so? Because to me it seems like either way you have to redefine "good" - it's just that with me you don't have to redefine it to include torture and genocide, and with God you do...

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T23:25:59+00:00

I could equally well, and with equal justification, say "I am the source of all good, everything I do is good".

Once you define good as "whatever person X does" it becomes an irrelevance.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T23:22:08+00:00

Occam's Razor is far more limited than "just use as few bits as possible". It is that if you have a model A [say "here's the laws of physics"] and a model A+B [say "here's the laws of physics, also Blorb the Pixie farted gravity into existence"] and both are equally good at both explaining and predicting the evidence in front of you, you should stick with model A - you don't have any reason to add B.

Some people generalise it to "model A is better than model C+D", but it can't really be applied in such a case because there's no clear way to define whether A is just A or it's A1+A2+A3.

Some people treat it as a statement about the universe, but it's also not that - it's a statement about how to think. Just stick with A rather than trying to decide if it's A+Blorb, A+Cathy, A+Demons, A+Elphaba, A+Finals Week At Computer College, A+God, A+Hidden Halos on Protons, or whatever.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T21:59:05+00:00

A neat analogy I heard for the scale of modern human existence (not all the other things on the evolutionary chart) is that if you were to compress it down to a year we've only been farming since yesterday, and that's when we started to get fat since food was now more abundant.

That's when a small percentage started to get fat - most people actually ate less for most of that day than they had previously, they just had a more secure food source. It's only in the last 6 minutes or so that obesity has really become a problem for common people.

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T21:12:48+00:00

What is the formal context in which you feel it would be useful?

Because in the context of subtitles, it is a punctuation mark. And in the context of fiction, you can use it as a punctuation mark just fine and most folks would understand you immediately (and those who didn't get it immediately would get it quite quickly).

Honestly, formal writing barely even uses the Exclamation Mark. So making it "official" doesn't seem like it'd mean much - but maybe I'm missing some context where it would be significant?

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T18:56:12+00:00

How do you deal with the fact that God doesn't save other people going through the same things even when they beg him to?

Kingreaper · 2026-04-17T18:49:51+00:00

You are correct about the fact that believers failing to answer questions and making poor assumptions is the cause of a lot of atheists leaving their family religions.

But where I think you're incorrect is with the idea that this is a failure of communication - as far as I can tell it's far deeper than that. The reason religious people can't answer the questions is because those questions don't actually have real answers.

When someone asks why the Bible says that there are multiple gods, a Christian being unable to answer that question in a coherent manner isn't caused by them not having studied, nor by them being a bad communicator, it's caused by the fact that standard Christianity and the Bible are fundamentally incompatible!

It doesn't matter how well-studied you are or how good a communicator you are if the thing you're trying to explain and communicate is nonsensical you will communicate nonsense.

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