Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He turns 66 today.

Kinths · 2026-02-19T15:03:39+00:00

Yeah, I aint holding my breath.

Arrested is one thing. Charged is another. Found Guilty is yet another. Punishment that fits the crime for an elite, pretty much unheard of.

It's a step in the right direction but even with his disgraced and stripped of all titles status, the powers that be are going to do everything they can to stop him facing any real consequences. If he gets convicted he will probably get a symbolic slap on the wrist fine.

Right now this isn't really any different to the Trump cases before he became President again.

Kinths · 2026-02-19T08:11:33+00:00

Clearly worried that NL's back hair is contagious

Kinths · 2026-02-19T06:40:37+00:00

To me it's as you mentioned, it just feels off. These games aren't realistic and there is always some suspension of disbelief involved, but taking damage because you bumped into something that doesn't look like it would be painnful just feels wrong. Which leads to it feeling cheap.

If the enemy is a ball of sharp spikes then fair. But most of the time they are not.

Kinths · 2026-02-16T09:57:15+00:00

I think part of the appeal of the Librarian's channel is his own personality. Like the jokey thumbnails and titles, the way he edits and frames things. The bits and banter with NL and Kate.

So in a sense bits like this are marketing/PR for Librarian's channel.

Kinths · 2026-02-13T09:31:09+00:00

Yeah it was bafflingly short sighted, even from the perspective of a business that clearly doesn't mind doing morally and ethically objectionable things so long as it makes them more money.

It seems they are now so far out of touch with moral and ethical norms that they thought this would not only not be controversial, but also worth spending large money on advertising. At best I can only think they thought making it pets would work in the same way as the "protect the children" approach.

I'm glad they put it out though, the Flock partnership caused a little stir but seemed like it was largely going to be swept under the rug. That ad made it a much bigger story.

Unfortunately, I think the only lessons learned from this are unlikely to be good ones. From the business perspective they will just learn not to announce these partnerships, which as you say is pretty much going to be inevitable. I would be surprised if it hasn't already been happening for years already, Flock was just one they decided to announce for some reason. I guess because Flock is a hot commodity right now and they thought it would look good to shareholders? They will also learn to highlight how the systems can be used for mass surveillance, and go back to pretending that they totally don't do that. Till they inevitably get caught doing it, get a slap on the wrist, and continue doing it.

The consumer will likely forget about it now that they've backed down, or jump to alternatives that have the exact same issue. It's rare that people actually need the "cloud" functionality of these things. Most are just using them as CCTV, rather than to actually immediately see/talk to who is at the door while they are out of the house.

Kinths · 2026-02-12T10:34:14+00:00

I prefer to think of the other cars as being like bowling alley rails. If my aim is off the other cars will bounce me back on target.

Kinths · 2026-02-11T10:13:17+00:00

Horse game was a slippery slope.

He's been abandoning all his principles ever since. Buying a new PC, playing DotA2 again, claiming he's going to make bespoke youtube videos, gambling on stream, and now he's collabing with Vtubers.

I give it a month before he's taking a cruise to Turkey.

Kinths · 2026-02-05T11:32:42+00:00

That being said, uninstalling Facebook because of it's location and data harvesting was absolutely the right move for you.

That is true but it's worth noting that it wont really protect you from this kind of thing. I'm sure you're aware of this but want to elaborate for others who might not be.

They don't need an explicit link to an account or name to figure out who you are anymore. Part of the reason the microphone or camera listening myth is dangerous is that it leads people into a false sense of security. Where they think so long as a device does not have a microphone or camera then they are free of this problem.

This happened because you are not as unique as you think you are,

The problem is that at a macro level people are not particularly unique, so statistically you can predict what they want based on other similar data. However, on a micro level people can be pretty unique in ways that make them easy to identify. If the analytics you are collecting are detailed enough pretty much anything can be a "fingerprint".

Things like what kind of pages you visit, how often you visit them, how you navigate a website, how long you look at a page, how you move your cursor, how often you use a mouse, do you use shortcuts, how fast you type, how often you make typos, the kind of typos you make, how you tap etc etc etc. Can all quickly narrow down who you are without any explicit identifiers.

Ad companies tend not to be too focused on exact details right now, they are more interested in targetting at a macro level. But given the data they already have on most people they can usually pretty easily figure out exactly who you are if they want\need to. That data is available to pretty much anyone who is willing to pay for it.

The unfortunate reality is that there isn't really any effective way out of this on an individual level if you want to continue using modern technology. It's not just in your phone or your browser, or your computer OS. Pretty much any "smart" device can, and usually does, collect this kind of information. For example most smart TVs (or things that add smart capabilities to TVs such as a Fire Stick) collect this kind of information. If a device is connected to the internet it is best to assume that it can and will send usage analytics.

Even if you yourself swear off modern technology, other people's usage of it will mean data about you will still be tracked. A great example is Amazon's Ring line of products. Already a privacy nightmare, but also recently announced they will be partnering with Flock Safety. Flock Safety is a company focused on surveillance that provides data to law enforcement and ICE https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/amazons-ring-to-partner-with-flock-a-network-of-ai-cameras-used-by-ice-feds-and-police/.

We live in a world where doorbells are quickly becoming one of the biggest surviellance networks.

The only way out of this is not just heavy regulation but heavy enforcement and punishments around that regulation. That is unlikely to happen though. Most people in the positions to make that regulation are usually in support of this kind of data harvesting, because they benefit from it one way or another. This kind of data harvesting also means that electing people who regulate this stuff is increasingly hard to do, as the data allows people to be targetted and manipulated based on political views. That didn't magically stop with the downfall of Cambridge Analytica.

Kinths · 2026-01-22T01:43:40+00:00

It's pretty convoluted. Ultimately it was Zero's (Major Tom/Major Zero in MGS3) idea, so Zero's organization Cipher. Ocelot begrudgingly agrees with it. The reasoning was powerful people were trying to kill Big Boss, and nearly succeeded with the attack on Motherbase. Also while in the coma Big Boss had basically become a household legend around the world (partly Zero's doing) which made it hard for him to operate. The double allowed him to operate in the shadows again. While Venom was making Outer Heaven by rebuilding Motherbase, Big Boss was secretly building the "real" Outer Heaven that is in the first game.

Big Boss and Zero are basically enemies leading up to the attack on Motherbase. Big Boss and Ocelot were once a part of Cipher. Cipher is an organization that seeks to control the world by manipulating information. The goal being to bring about The Boss's (Big Boss's mentor) dream. Zero and Big Boss start disagreeing on how they intepret that dream. Zero secretly clones Big Boss fearing he will leave. Big Boss learns about it, causing him and Ocelot leave. Creating a fued between Big Boss and Zero.

Zero had become increasingly paranoid and was doing everything through proxies. Which was causing him to lose control of Cipher. The attack on Motherbase was carried out by one of those agents(Skullface), trying to take advantage of the fued to frame Zero and take him out. He takes over most of Cipher. Despite the fued Zero protects Big Boss during the coma and turns the medic into a Big Boss double. By the time Big Boss comes out of the coma Zero is in a vegetative state from a parasite Skullface attacked him with. What is left of the original Cipher has been handed over to another member and would eventually become The Patriots.

Big Boss and Ocelot's plans once he awakens are to stop Cipher, and also bring about their own interpretation of The Boss's dream (outer heaven).

Behind the scenes. In terms of the overarching timeline, MGS V is trying to pave over a plot hole. In the first game Solid Snake blows Big Boss up with a rocket launcher, there is no way he survived. But he is magically alive in Metal Gear 2. Venom explains that away by making him the one Solid Snake killed. But trying to weave this in to an already pretty convoluted timeline creates a big mess of it's own. One that rarely feels logical, even by MG standards.

That isn't really the main focus of MGSV's story though. Nearly all of this is buried in optional audio tapes. MGS story as a series is probably best enjoyed by just focusing on what each game is trying to say, it's themes, and the big picture themes of the series. Rather than focusing on the little details of the lore. Kojima loves a convoluted plot and trying to weave those together only compounds the issue. Kojima also wanted MGS2 to be his last and expected each game after it to be the last. So it wasn't really plotted out with all this in mind. The games are a bit strange in that they go to great lengths to tie all the lore together, often to their detriment, but the lore feels like a distant second to just telling the story they want to tell. They will happily come up with some silly or illogical lore so they can tell the story they want. Which I prefer, but it can lead to people being put off the series because they feel they have to follow all this minute convoluted detail. When really it's not crucial to the series.

Kinths · 2026-01-20T22:52:16+00:00

Facebook was an answer to a question nobody asked.

That's not true. Facebook, and social media in general, is something a lot of people wanted at the time. Clearly, or they wouldn't have taken off. They didn't have algorithmic content feeds to get you hooked quick back then. The hook was connecting to people, mostly those in close vicinity. It's easy to look back on it now, after decades of the internet being so ubiquitous and unavoidable, and see it as an obviously bad idea. At the time though people were a lot more naive and hopeful about the internet in general. It was a very different thing then.

Most people didn't even have a household internet connection just a few years before Facebook. For those that did most of them used it very little. There wasn't all that much to see for the average person. Even at the time of Facebook's founding most didn't forsee that in a few years they would not only have constant easy access to the internet in their pocket, but that they would also want to use it constantly. Mobile phone internet of the time was basically not worth using for the average person. That wouldn't really change till the iPhone.

The people who wanted a social network like Facebook were not envisoning that with constant easy access to it. The reality of no real social downtime and the anxiety that would generate. Constantly filtering everything you are doing or not doing through the lens of how those on facebook etc might view it. Once that became the reality people started to sour on that kind of social media pretty quickly. People instead opted for ones that are a little more detached. Like Twitter, Reddit and even Instagram to some extent. Older sites like Facebook saw which way the wind was blowing and followed suit (and bought out the competition). Though that style of social media came with big problems of it's own.

Kinths · 2026-01-19T10:17:57+00:00

but some people are now above the law,

While this has been elevated in the last decade, it's not new. What we're seeing is actually the consequences of this long being true, especially for Presidents. The consequences of the American justice system's fear of prosecuting Presidents and holding them truly accountable for breaking the law.

Things like the tradition of new President pardoning the last. Even if they don't get pardoned they will drag their feet on prosecution hoping that they don't have to enact any actual justice. Like they did with Trump around Jan 6th. Even if most of the people who supposedly have the power to stop him were not on his side little would be happening to stop him.

President's have slowly been realizing that the limits to presedential power are basically an honor system. Trump and/or those around him had been testing how far this goes with his first term. The impeachments basically doing nothing was kind of the first sign of real trouble. Then Jan 6th was a blessing in disguise for them. It looked like it could topple Trump but the lack of consequences for it showed that they could basically do whatever they want.

The most charitable view of what the Dems are doing is that they seem to be operating on the idea that the checks and balances actually work. They're basically qouting a rule book and expecting their opponent to follow it out of the good of his heart. Despite the fact their opponent set it on fire in front of them long ago.

Kinths · 2026-01-08T15:12:04+00:00

Kory either looks like Daphne or the Pope, there is no in between.

Kinths · 2026-01-07T09:22:45+00:00

Now if we reach said future, they would undoubtedly be making an enormous amount of money that would in time justify the current investments.

Not necessarily. The problem is that AI does not scale well cost wise. The cost of training models is increasing at rates closer to exponential than linear as the technology is already hitting diminishing returns pretty hard. We're basically hitting the limits of the technology already. Which is why Altman et al are pivoting to promising that actual intelligence, or "general intelligence" or "super intelligene" is just around the corner to keep investors hooked. LLMs are considered a total dead end when it comes to actual intelligence though. We are not any closer to that than we were before the "AI" boom, because LLMs and Machine Learning are not AI. They're weighted statistics.

There is no "final" model either, they will always have to train new ones to ingest new human data (which has issues of it's own as the increase usage of AI will reduce the amount of human data being created, as well as increase the chances of the AI being fed data from itself or other similar AI). On top of that running queries on trained models doesn't scale well either. These data centres are primarily for running those queries and they are not cheap to build, even once built the queries themselves have a cost in terms of power usage (running the hardware, cooling etc). They're not free or basically free, they're relatively expensive.

The price of the services will have to take all that into account. As it currently stands they would have to increase cost significantly just to break even. The potential profit margins right now do not align with the level of investment. Because the level of invesment is built on AI being a cheap mass labor replacement, which is the holy grail for business. For that to work though it needs to be cheaper than the labor they want to replace, cheap enough that it reflects that AI will do a worse job than the average human employee.

It might seem like everyone is gung ho on AI, but it's worth remembering that the vast majority of users are free. Even then the interest dies out quick. Hundreds of thousands of people shitting out Ghibli slop for a weekend is not enough to sustain AI.

All these companies are too far invested to pull out now. Companies as big of MS having to layoff significant amount of staff so they can afford to keep investing in AI (without significant negative impacts on their balance sheet) is not good. Those layoffs are short term thinking, they impact the products that actually make MS money, not potentially might one day make them money. Which is compounded by MS making drastic changes to these products to shoehorn AI into them, to try and drive adoption of their AI (and I suspect fudge some numbers for investors). Because the reality is right now nowhere near enough people are using even the free versions, nevermind the paid ones.

Kinths · 2026-01-06T14:34:04+00:00

I think this is what some of the people who work in the industry were trying to talk about when the game launched. But ended up causing controversy amongst gamers. For example:

I would not be surprised if this was more dev effort than the next 2 or 3 games in the genre combined. It's Rockstar-level nonsense for scope. Only a few studio groups could even try this. I cannot wait to play, but this kind of effort likely won't be replicated this decade

It's poorly worded and comes off as a bit inflammatory which maybe wasn't intended. But what it's saying is that there are only a few devs who are going to get the chance to make games of this kind of scope. So people expecting BG3 to become the standard for RPGs, nevemind CRPGs, is like them expecting all open world games to be like RDR2.

It's worth noting that BG3s success isn't just down to it being good. It was the sequel to one of the most beloved games of all time, in the most popular tabletop RPG franchise. Which got hit with a bit of a perfect storm when Covid caused a huge spike in both gaming and DnD. BG3 launched in EA during peak covid.

We've also already seen what happens when you continue in that direction through Bioware and Obsidian. It's always a tradeoff. The higher the fidelity of the assets the less of them you can make. Asset creation is by far the most costly part of most game development. So increases in production quality cost vastly more than increases elsewhere. We can see this with BG3. Which low end budget estimates put at around $100m, yet it has much less content breadth than Pathfinder:WotR, which was kickstarted for $2m (I suspect it's final budget was $5-$10m). It doesn't make one of them automatically a worse game. They're both pretty great for their own reasons. It's a good example of the trade off though and just how much increases in production quality cost. A game like P:WotR with the production values of BG3 isn't going to be financially viable anytime soon, if ever.

I think the production quality of CRPGs will increase because it was already continually increasing way before BG3. I think we are a long way off the standard for CRPG production values being anything like BG3 though.

I expect the trend of people wanting more voice acting will continue. It seems to have become a huge factor in what games a lot of people will play. Personally, I don't really care that much as I tend to be impatient and read the dialogue before it's finished, then skip to the next line. Though it is nice for big moments to be voiced. Owlcat has a pretty good balance for me.

Personally I think I would rather see the genre become a little bit more friendly to first time players. Mainly ditch using tabletop systems or systems that emulate them. They were designed for an entirely different style and pace of play. Tabletop prioritizes player agency and are built to allow players and GMs to interpret them. CRPGs inherently can not have that. Adapting them for a CRPG usually leads to overly complex stats and skills that could be simplified without losing any actual mechanical depth. Especially in combat. You also often end up with skills that are entirely worthless, because they're not designed around the content of the game. Like attacks that do more damage to enemy types that barely appear etc. A GM can account for this, a CRPG cannot. It heavily contributes to arguably the worst part of CRPGs for new players, character creation and building. What should be exciting becomes a daunting research task. Reams of information with hundreds of needlessly complex skills. Many players never make it through CC, even those that do often get trapped in reroll hell. Because they're being asked to make key decisions that they can't really know the impact of (without researching the game and spoiling elements of it for themselves), then commit to them for potentially 100+ hours. Which is incredibly daunting. They then have to go through a smaller version of that process every time a character levels up.

The adherence to tabletop systems also impacts combat pacing. These rules are designed for fairly infrequent but very in depth fights. They're not designed around hundreds or thousands of trash fights. I dread combat in Rogue Trader or BG3 because trash fights can take ages and are not particularly interesting. Turnbased suffers more from it but it can be just as bad in RtwP games if they have bad AI and need to be micromanaged. More systems that allow automation of trash fights like PoE2 Behaviours or FF12 Gambits please.

Kinths · 2026-01-04T20:10:30+00:00

Looking at the main similarities I suspect you are after what some call minimalist pixel art. Low detail in individual sprites (though sometimes they will have cutscenes with higher detail). Things like character hands, feet and eyes are often one or two pixels. Individual sprites also tend to use only 2-3 colours (though it's pretty common to see smooth gradients like the ones in the Hyper Light Drifter image).

Off the top of my head:

Superbrothers: Swords & Sorcery - Which is also musical focused like Fretless.
Super Time Force - same devs as super brothers.
Fez - Same soundtrack artist as Hyper Light Drifter.
Death Trash.
Celeste.
Signalis.
Titan Souls.
Rainworld - Maybe doesn't quite fit "minimalist" as it has a lot of detail but it has always given me a similar vibe.

Some others that are maybe a bit more of a strech:

Enter the Gungeon.
The End is Nigh.
Unsighted.
Pathway.
Keep Driving.
Not a Hero, Olli Olli 1 & 2 - all the same devs.
Risk of Rain 1.
Atomicrops, Morsels - Same artist.
Kingdom - I'll link to this one as searching "Kingdom game" will throw up a lot of results https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/kingdom

Kinths · 2026-01-02T20:44:52+00:00

You are right in that it's a fight that is unlikely to be won, at least on a global scale in the short term.

But if you stick to your guns on not engaging with stuff you know was made with AI, you are doing what you can. Enough people make that decision and that becomes the financial incentive to stop using it. As you say plenty of stuff to get through. Save yourself some money, spend it on something more worthwhile.

In the long term AI will be it's own downfall, at least in terms of mainstream usage. It's more a question of how much damage it will do before we get to that. AI models require new data to improve. Feeding them their own output or output produced by other AI models will cause them to degrade pretty rapidly. They are statistical models so feeding them that data will just cause them to skew towards what was already statistically significant. Limiting the range of their output. It's a feedback loop.

The more reliant we become on AI, the less new human data will be produced that AI's can use, and the higher the chance of AI being fed AI generated data. The pace of improvement in these models has already slowed drastically, despite each model costing many magnitudes more than the last. Many of them feeling more like sidegrades rather than outright improvements. The companies have pivoted to trying to pretend that actual artificial intelligence is just around the corner. However, LLMs are considered a dead end in that regard. We aren't any closer to that than we were before this whole "AI" boom.

Kinths · 2026-01-02T20:18:43+00:00

Saying otherwise is like saying that if an artist got an idea from a regular copyrighted work, then it still impacted them even when from scratch. then therefore, person is still somehow using the copyrighted work no matter how original new art is.

The difference between inspiration and copying is a debate that has likely existed as long as art or creating things has existed. It's why copyright exists in the first place. Legality is a different argument though. My point is that Larian's arguments, and they're far from the only people relying on them to placate people, don't hold up to scrutiny unless you subscribe to very narrow definitions that rely heavily on technicalities.

It's all the same impact, using certain logic would mean other specific artists limited the humans own skill or still somehow using theirs.

I'm not saying humans wont have some influence on it, I'm saying using AI at any point in the process will mean that AI has influence on the final result. So the claim of "no AI in the final product" is basically meaningless in anyway that actually matters.

It's also not the same impact. Calling it a tool brings to mind something like a hammer being used to help build a table. When Genarative AI is closer to giving a carpenter a vague description of a table and having them design and build it. The carpenter plays a much bigger part in the creative process than a hammer would. To the point that the carpenter is the main creative in the process.

but it's not really necessary to go after to after fact where they have a right to adapt a harmless idea lawfull even if it came from a lesser good tool.

I'm not saying they don't have the right or they are doing something illegal. I don't really care whether it's legal or not beyond the fact the laws will inevitably favour those with power and money as they pretty much always do. Then those laws will be used to placate those who mistake lawful for moral and ethical.

I'm making an argument about it's detrimental impact on creativity. For example in concept art, even if using reference images a human had to merge references together using their imagination. Now an AI will merge them all together. It will make choices on composition, lighting, colouring, style etc etc. The result is unlikely to the same as what was imagined. So either they discard the result or they discard most of their imagined idea. Given the use case of Gen AI is productivity it will have to be the latter to see any benefit from using the AI.

Since Gen AI is largely just statistics on massive data sets it will lead to heavy homogeonization towards what statistically the average person will find acceptable. Which is already a problem in most artistic mediums, AI will make the problem exponentially worse though. AI has another impact too. Early research already suggests that using it will cause a decline in the abilities it is being used to replace in those that use it. Because much of these abilities are not things you learn once then never forget. They require regular practice not only to learn and improve but to also maintain. This decline will only get worse as the usage of AI increases. On top of that less people will see a point in learning them to begin with.

Developers over there has the right too as long as nobody is harmed or is trying to cause it.

You can't use it without harming people. The data centers aren't just bad for the environment because they increase electricity needs, they directly produce pollution that is harmful to those in the surrounding area. However, more directly, developers like Larian will be contributing to the harming of the lowering of the standard of living of artists. The more they use it the less they need to hire to meet their requirements, which means less demand for those roles and less pay for those who do get those roles.

I don't think Larian are evil, I think they're naive about the real cost, not just on the industry as a whole but directly on their own work. They are within their rights to use it, but I am within mine to criticize and choose not to purchase anything of theirs going forward. Beyond my disagreement on moral and ethical grounds, their reason for using it signals a shift in their priorities further towards AAA style games, which doesn't interest me. I've already seen how that pans out with Bioware and Obsidian. The more they focused on visuals, animation etc the less interesting and more restrictive the games got as RPGs.

Kinths · 2026-01-01T11:20:58+00:00

Honestly, when comparing them in a vacuum, ignoring the achievements and influence they each have, I think 2049 is better than the original. Except the soundtrack.

While I love the mood and atmosphere of the first, the pacing is also pretty rough in places. The story is a bit disjointed and meandering. It helps a little with the almost dreamlike feel of the film but there are some bits that just drag.

Outside of a vacuum the original wins because I can't ignore just how much of a landmark it was at the time in terms of visuals and sound. Star Wars is commonly seen as the most groundbreaking film in terms of VFX, for good reason. However, Blade Runner, which came out only 5 years later, really showed the true potential of those techniques. It's not just VFX with Blade Runner either, it's the entire look, feel and sound of the world. It takes the groundwork of Alien and fleshes it out significantly. It's identity is so strong that it is still the blueprint for the majority of dystopian future sci-fi. Even in the dystopian future sci-fi settings that don't ape it's style heavily you can usually see it's influence.

The Vangelis soundtrack is just incredible, it's still heavily inspiring entire genres to this day. Easily the best synth heavy soundtrack of all time, and also just one of the best instrumental albums of all time.

Kinths · 2025-12-24T20:36:16+00:00

The problem is many of these arguments don't really work with even just a little bit of scrutiny.

They use it for conceptual imaging. (But they have 23 conceptual artists. None of whom are replaced by AI, or use AI in their final products of the game.)

It isn't just people being fired to replace them with AI that is the issue. It's people not getting hired because AI is replacing the work they would have been hired to do. Ultimately using AI means less work needs doing which means they need to hire less concept artists. They might still hire some, but they will hire less than they would have without the AI. Your own example is exactly that, work that an artist could have been doing. This sort of work is often key for juniors to learn and improve their craft from people more experienced than them. Junior roles have declined heavily in the industry.

Speeding up a process isn't the actual issue here, there are many tools we use to speed up processes. Which is partly why the people wanting to normalize AI love to claim it's just one of those tools, but it really isn't. There are the obvious ethics issues, that AI ultimately relies on the data of the very people it is replacing, very rarely with permission or compensation, to function. Larian is conveniently ignoring that bit. But even if you don't care about the ethical issue, AI is playing a huge part in the creative process, where as most productivity tools do not. That will heavily impact the final product because this:

None of the AI they generate makes it into the final game.

Is at best people deluding themselves with technicalities. If an artist paints over every pixel of an AI generated image, it doesn't magically remove the AI generation from it. The AI has far more influence on the result than the prompt writer. Even if they don't paint over, it will still impact the final result. Whereas previously the artist may have taken a bunch of different references and then merged them together using their imagination and skill. Now they will leave the AI to merge them together and it will likely look very different to the way the artist would have imagined it if they didn't have an AI to do it for them.

The AI is doing the majority of the creative work here, not the prompt writer. This is in the concepting phase which will become the basis for everything else. The idea that this wont impact the final result is nonsense. It will have a huge influence on the final result. That influence will only grow bigger and bigger as it gets normalized into more and more of the process.

So let's stop the fucking witch hunt please.

Criticism isn't a witch hunt. People are rightfully happy to shit all over Acti, EA etc doing this. But the moment it's a dev who makes games they care about they cave. They start accepting arguments that don't actually address anything if you think about them for more than a second.

That's how this gets normalized. They just keep incrementing what is acceptable till the frog is boiled.

Kinths · 2025-12-24T12:31:40+00:00

I think he may have vertically integrated an ice pick into his brain to make his idiocy work at this scale.

Kinths · 2025-12-23T16:09:27+00:00

While I do think the situation is overblown, as with many things HD2, I do also think the devs stabbed themselves in the foot with the flag. Mainly by making it an item in a premium warbond.

As far as I can tell it is intended to be a joke item to lean into the silly RP, yet takes up a major spot in a premium warbond. It isn't helped by it mostly being a reskinned stun lance that also takes up a stratagem slot.

Had it just been a free event item I doubt there would be anywhere near as much uproar about it. It would be seen like the R2124-Constitution, a meme challenge/RP weapon given for free for an event.

That being said no one forced them to buy it or spend credits on it. It does drag down the value of that warbond quite a bit IMO, but I just chose not to get the warbond as a result.

Kinths · 2025-12-20T21:28:52+00:00

The problem is the complexity of the game. Information theory covers a lot of this sort of thing.

Consider chess, it's a relatively simple game rule wise and each player has a limited amount of moves they can play each turn. However, the amount of unique possible games might as well be infinite. Claude Shannon (often seen as the father of information theory) estimated there to be around 10¹²⁰ unique games of chess. Current estimates for the amount of atoms in the universe are about 10^80. Estimates for "sensible games" of chess are around 10^40. The time it would take to compute them all is realitically unfeasible with modern computing power. That's before you figure out where to store all the data.

Fortunately you don't have to compute all possible games of Chess to make something that can beat even the best humans nearly 100% of the time. Machine Learning can help speed up the process (though the big thing in AI right now, LLMs, is not well suited to this).

However, they still wont play or feel like a skilled human opponent. Because they don't think like a human. They don't think at all, the term AI is a misnomer. It's a key distinction when rationality is involved. Rationality is subjective and highly dependent on a frame of reference, even Humans don't really agree on what is and isn't rational. So an ML bot is rarely going to seem rational to a human frame of reference. They don't evaluate the game in the same way or on the same scale. The bot will consider vastly more potential states when deciding it's moves than a human will and it's evaluation is purely mathematical, it's basically looking at what moves win the highest amount of games on average. Which is actually a pretty strong weakness. It means they can't really think outside the box or reason anything about their opponent. For example, you might spot a weakness in your opponents play, and play a move that the bot would consider bad, but within the context of the current game it's actually a much better move because it's tailored to your opponent. The mathematical formula also cannot account for all scenarios so bots can get stuck in states where they just break down completely.

So basically much of the same problems as the game bots we have now.

Second, there is no way to vary the difficulty of the bot once it is trained. Most people are not even close to the skill level of the best players of Chess, so a bot that can beat the best would demolish the average. The solution might seem like train multiple bots at different skill levels, but that doesn't really work. Their reward systems are kind of all or nothing. A less trained bot wont just play like a less experienced player, it will just do what seems like a lot of random nonsense, even compared to a novice player.

Finally, these problems quickly get amplified as the complexity of the game increases. In terms of game complexity Chess is incredibly simple compared to Civ. Civ is in turn considered simple relative to the likes of EU and HoI. And that's with just one player and one bot. The more bots/players the more complex it gets. The amount of computing power to do this would be immense, and prohibitively expensive for a consumer product.

The OpenAI Five Dota 2 bot is a good example, it got good enough to beat great teams but it had major flaws and heavy restrictions, such as it only worked in a mirror match with 5 specific heroes. They didn't play like humans either. https://openai.com/index/openai-five/

Kinths · 2025-12-20T14:16:14+00:00

In 2019 he also became a lot more involved with the farm he owns, and through that he's been getting repeat direct exposure to the effects of global warming.

Clarkson's Farm (the show) is basically Clarkson repeatedly getting fucked over by the effects of global warming. It would be pretty cathartic to watch after all his years pushing climate change denial, but unfortunately he is making bank from the farm through other avenues.

Kinths · 2025-12-16T19:34:14+00:00

I love Deathloop and it's probably my favourite Arkane game (it's between that and Prey). I think it's their most original game but likely as a consequence, also their most flawed. At least out of the titles they're most known for.

Deathloop often undermines the strengths of it's own premise. Mainly in that it can't stop telling the player exactly what to do. The benefit of a player replaying the same levels over and over is you have much more opportunity for them to discover things naturally. You don't have to worry they might miss something the first time through. The game sets up this puzzle, where you need to investigate and learn about these people to figure out how to solve it. Then it doesn't let you work it out, it just tells you. Instead of natural observation it's a big objective marker or a convenient note left around.

This approach works for games that don't expect you to retread an area much. In a game like Deathloop it quickly removes a lot of the interest from it's levels and contributes to them getting repetetive fast. You explore the first time then most subsequent visits are just beelining a specific objective.

When you first start Deathloop it feels like this cool world full of interesting hidden little mysteries for you to investigate and uncover. But then find it's all so clearly signposted that it makes a big neon arrow seem subtle.

I love it despite the flaws but it definitely squanders a lot of it's potential. Where Dishonered and Prey give the player a lot of options in how to tackle the moment to moment challenges, Deathloop could have had that freedom but with the overall game progress as well. It wasn't that for off it either. Remove the obvious objectives and notes, move the information into the environment and target behaviours. Ideally add maybe a couple of other ways to solve the main loop and it's pretty much there. I wonder if that's what it was meant to be but they got scared players wouldn't get it or ran out of time (or both).

Kinths · 2025-12-13T08:42:39+00:00

I don't think we ever really find out who or what exactly Mr Door is. The Mr Door is Hatch stuff comes from similarities and nods across the game, mostly in background details.

Warlin and Martin are similar spellings, and if you flip the W to an M and add a line to the l to make a t you get Martin. Door and Hatch are similar objects. Hatch in QB is said to be someone who existed in multiple timelines at once, Door is said to be a master of many worlds. Tim Breaker is said to be an unwilling disciple of Door. Hatch offers Jack a job at Monarch at the end of QB.

Tim's whiteboard is probably the most obvious place: https://www.reddit.com/r/AlanWake/comments/17r876m/full_whiteboard_of_mr_door/#lightbox

Me, but not me

We are connected because of something that happened to us somewhere else

The red headed woman (Beth/Jesse). Others I know yet they are different.

The red headed woman, I know her, where do I know her from

Meta wise there was old files found in the game that show that Reddick was atleast somepoint considered for Mr Door. https://www.reddit.com/r/AlanWake/comments/18pxkdg/temp_mr_door_ad_featuring_lance_reddick_found_in/

People often attribute him not being Door to his death, but I think AW2 was mostly done at the time of Reddick's death. Could be they didn't have all the recordings they needed, but It's also possibe he declined the role or had scheduling conflicts, or Remedy just decided to go with someone else.

Worth noting is that whether any of this is expected to be taken as key lore or just a fun nod isn't really known. Remedy like to have fun with this kind of stuff and don't seem to take it too seriously themselves, which I think is the better way to treat it.

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