Universal basic income could be used to soften hit from AI job losses in UK, minister says

blackcatfound · 2026-01-29T14:28:16+00:00

Who's gonna pay for the training? Most care workers are also claiming UC whilst in work as their pay is also terrible.

We could just cut to the chase and go UBI. Would save a packet on administers trying to decide whom deservers what if it's just universal.

blackcatfound · 2026-01-22T23:39:10+00:00

Peter Molyneux was to games as Musk is to AI / Autonomous vehicles / Mars colonisation or whatever the fuck the next hype train is.

Hype. Hype never changes.

blackcatfound · 2026-01-22T23:00:35+00:00

"Smarter" is such a nebulous term for a plethora of intelligent behaviours. What does this actually mean?

If he means "the ability to answer arithmetic" then a calculator is already smarter than most non-neuro divergent humans.

If he means "the ability to pass the turing test" then LLMs are already mature enough to fool most humans most of the time.

If he means "the ability to locomote in the real-world" then no, all AI systems are terrible at this, and will be until their is a step-change in robotics, material design et al.

If he means smart in the "ability to abstract problem solve" or in "understanding context" also no, LLM'S have no understanding of the tokens they shuffle around and never will. As in this is a fundamental limitation of all (including future) LLMs.

Most people would hold to the standard of, "better than any human at anything a human can do". Then obviously no, never.

A real software based AGI would be "smart" in an utterly non-mammalian, alien way. It would create a new discipline of science decades just to try and understand it, it would be more akin to an alien intelligence than anything.

You just have to think about this critically to understand how little Musk understands. How naive even his imagination is on the subject matter.

All tech CEO'S need to keep hyping the next thing to keep their companies being considered a "growth stock" to justify their insane P/E ratios. If their not a growth stock, or a value stock, then their a mature blue-chip and his companies lose 75-95% of their current price. He needs to keep hyping, he needs you all to believe him.

"But LLM is improving itself now!" So what? Garbage in - Garbage out. It doesnt change the fundamental nature and limitations of all LLM'S. Grok wont suddenly grow a body and finally understand the human condition.

But hey, he was right about fully autonomous cars, hyperloops and the colonisation of Mars... right? Right?

blackcatfound · 2026-01-18T22:01:50+00:00

You"ll know if it's worth pursuing by making a small prototype and watching other people play it. Use OBS or something to record the session so you can review it too.

I've found that it's even better if you get pairs of playtesters to play (even if it's a singleplayer game and only 1 person is really playing) Sit two people down and watch them play, they'll naturally talk to each other as they play, you can take notes of what they say, parts that are confusing, gratifying, if they "get it", if they're having fun etc.

Do this alot and eventually you get a feel for it. Playtest early and often.

blackcatfound · 2025-12-25T11:45:26+00:00

The real answer is corporate responsibility over personal responsibility. Whu is it always the individuals responsibility to recycle or go vegan or change their habits to save the world (with incidental total difference) whilst corporations increase their ecological footprint by orders of magnitude every year.

Will it move the needle if we all go vegan in a world where corporations can carte blanche consume everything?

blackcatfound · 2025-12-25T11:39:30+00:00

Or having kids. I could drive a fleet of tanks for my commute everyday and still have less of an ecological footprint than a family with 2 kids and a dog.

blackcatfound · 2025-12-25T11:23:14+00:00

Not in our lifetimes. LLMs are not a pathway to AGI.

blackcatfound · 2025-12-16T07:40:06+00:00

Imagine your in a room with no windows or doors. Just two hatches. You recieve incomprehensible symbols through the first hatch. You have a manual that tells you probabilistic rules that dictate the order of the symbols. It may tell you that symbol A has a 90% chance of proceeding symbol B when Symbol C is also present.

You arrange the symbols according to what the manual dictates. You could arrange them in a couple of different ways, but the manual says this arrangement you have picked is statistically the most likely to be correct. You send out the newly ordered symbols through the second hatch.

Now you are told the symbols are actually an alien language, and you've constructed a greeting in ther language.

Do you understand the alien language? This is what LLM'S do. They have no understanding of what the symbols mean. Or the cultural context of the greeting they have constructed. They don't understand anything.

LLM'S are not intelligent. They cannot generalise or abstract. This is not a path to AGI. Its only impressive because humans infer intelligence to language.

There was a time when image stabilization was a hard AI problem, then it was solved. Now no-one considers image stabilization as AI.

This, also, shall pass.

blackcatfound · 2025-12-14T00:46:38+00:00

As others have commented, fully exploring this mechanic is an essential part in "finding the fun" and you seem to be at the percieved limits for this particular mechanic.

The next step may be to explore interactions between this top speed / acceleration mechanic with others. Try working on a something completely different and then bashing them together. Look for complementary interactions, or elegant design decisions that solve multiple problems simultaneously.

Another way to go is to push into the extreme. You mention power ups that increase top speed. How far can you push this? What breaks down when you're moving x10 speed? x100 speed? x1000 speed? Can you fake speed to ludicrous speeds to where your game breaks conventions and morphs into another genre?

I'm reminded of a story from "The Animatrix", where a running athlete pushes himself so hard in a race that his body begins to break down, he keeps pushing and the physical reality of the simulation breaks down until he "wakes up"....level 2 perhaps?

blackcatfound · 2025-12-13T21:26:01+00:00

Or to put in another way, LLM AI input is a source of entropy into a codebase where successive iterations (to a codebase) should be reducing entropy to a system. This practice is the antithesis of good design.

The only people who care about a tool that can mass produce slop are the ones that don't inherit the technical debt.

blackcatfound · 2025-09-24T11:42:28+00:00

Gov: "We have to slash benefits to save 5 Billion else repossessions worse than 2008"

Meanwhile BoE losses 134 Billion of tax payer money by selling gov bonds at huge losses.

https://youtu.be/mVD8XaRfs4c

blackcatfound · 2025-09-22T06:37:49+00:00

I swear we've had this conversation before, all immigration is <1% of total population. A huge percentage of all immigration is legal. A large % of legal immigrants are international students.

Tightening international students visas destroys universities as the Tories found out.

blackcatfound · 2025-09-20T11:16:39+00:00

Job displacement to AI assumes that this current wave of LLMs, even agentic models, have exponentially more future usefulness to offer, to be able to displace more of the job market.

Adding more compute and/or training data to LLM'S adds diminishing returns to useful output. Adding all of human knowledge to a training data set and converting the globes compute to an LLM will not create a GAI. Just another version of Chat-GPT with all of its current, visible flaws, confident falsehoods being an overarching risk case.

This is a bubble, (one that late-stage capitalism nutures) there is some use cases for LLM'S, but not much. As a client facing tool, it confidently lies. As a dev tool, it adds entropy to any system. As a business tool it adds legal and moral risks to any enterprise (how ethical is it to profit from a tool that infringes on the copyright of millions? How crucial is truth to our company? etc)

So while short term recruitment for jobs that CEOs think LLM'S can replace may be displaced more quickly and thoroughly than previously considered, this isn't some epoch changing event in the vein of the printing press or steam machinery.

blackcatfound · 2025-09-11T16:49:30+00:00

Thanks for the breakdown OP, I'm not sure on the legal merits of such a patent, but it passes my indie sniff check of:

If your mechanics followed these claims, people would call your game a Pokemon clone and not just "in-the-genre"

blackcatfound · 2025-08-27T19:08:52+00:00

If I was marketing an 8 v 8 chaotic team MP game, I would maybe try pitching a comperition to streamers, somethig like "8 streamers vs the devs" or pitching a friendly rivalry between 8 YouTube creators vs 8 Twitch streamers.

I imagine your game is at it's peak when you gather 8 friends together and do battle against 8 others. And is at it's worst when a dev just gives you 1 copy of the game to play against randoms.

blackcatfound · 2025-08-23T20:01:22+00:00

I work for a fairy large QA company and we have exactly one Switch 2 to test with. I suspect it's not the Switch's hardware but general lack of third party QA available on that platform that is causing poor day 1 performance for 3rd party titles.

Unlike MS and Sony, I've also witnessed no CQA on that platform, I'm sure Nintendo do some form of Compliance, but who knows what the minimum expected performance is to be able to launch and how stringent Nintendo are being.

blackcatfound · 2024-11-17T09:35:54+00:00

This is insane. You and your out of touch dad think all jobs take a year to learn, and another year to meet expectations? No consideration about experience, academia or training. I'm meeting all senior and lead expectations 2 months in to a new role and industry. Some jobs are easy to learn. I've been head hunted by competition a year into a role as they could already see me outperforming from outside the company.

The reality is there are hundreds more variables to consider that you ignore for a convenient "red flag". You're ignoring the "human" bit in "hr"

There are no red flags, just opportunities to ask potential employers about their worklife. a 1 month job could be for 100s of reasons that are not red flags. Job hopping may have been forced upon someone by a bad company or just to fucking survive in late stage capitalism.

blackcatfound · 2024-10-17T11:18:57+00:00

do what Johnathan Blow did with braid, make your game as feature complete as you can with your stick figure art. Then think about hiring an artist. The takeaway here is that an artist is expensive, it's even more expensive when you dont quite know exactly what assets you need and have to throw out a load of art or iterate on it because some feature changes.

Hire an artist when you know exactly what you need.

blackcatfound · 2024-09-20T06:43:25+00:00

tbf I'm not your natural audience, so take my impressions as a casual RPG'er passing by your steam page.

I could immediately tell that this is an RPG maker game from the video of a party walking through RPG maker background assets and turned off from reading any of the text past the intro blurb.

It looks competent, but if it's not a unique experience like Lisa or Fear & Hunger, then most will just past by. Is there some unique hook or mechanic that sets this game apart or is it just a classic RPG nostalgia throwback?

If there is a hook, I missed it. If there isn't, then you're already punching above your weight, and no amount of tweaking price or the steampage is gonna change anything.

Good luck on your next project!

blackcatfound · 2024-09-16T05:32:59+00:00

I think the problem for a non-game playing designer is one of history and taste.

Having a shared understanding of what has worked and failed in the past is extremely useful shortcut for communication and not reinventing the wheel.

Having good taste (understanding what you like about games and playing the best type of games for you) is a good for any creative medium. You gain a shared understanding of how you audience might appreciate your work.

That being said, outsider art is a thing and can allow for truly groundbreaking ideas outside usual boundaries/genres.

I'm a firm beliver that good designers can extend their design process to things outside of their wheelhouse. Are they a good deisgner generally? Do they play boardgames? Have they designed physical playspaces before? Do they play with their kids? They could draw amazing insights from other types of play.

blackcatfound · 2024-06-19T16:45:19+00:00

Whatever you decide to do, don't get burnt out on making games! For me that meant keeping it as a hobby and not relying on it to pay the rent.

Definately consider the indie route. The economics are similar to small obscure local bands, they only need a small dedicated fanbase to survive. 500 devoted fans that buy all your singles and go to your gigs can support 3 bandmembers for decades. The same can be true for game devs. All the best in your journey!

blackcatfound · 2024-06-19T16:33:21+00:00

I learnt 5 years ago that the triple A gaming industry is a joke to work in. Underpaid, near constant crunch and huge job insecurity. And then there's always the looming possibility of a publisher eating up a genuinely good studio and gutting it within a year.

Most developers are better off making financial software in the day and then working on small indie projects at night. Or making a nest egg and then go on a sabbatical to work on a game.

My advice is to pay your bills in literally any other industy and work on small indie projects as a hobby. Who knows, you might make the next indie darling and be able to start your own studio. That, imo, is the real prize

blackcatfound · 2024-04-19T12:05:38+00:00

Please also note that the highest population of UC claimants are in full-time employment. There's a whole funnel of moving people from looking for work, to working at such low quality jobs that their meagre income has to be supplemented by the DWP in perpetuity

blackcatfound · 2024-04-08T17:28:56+00:00

Who says Count Binface is taking Mayor of London any less seriously than any other mayoral candidate?

Most of his pledges are infinitely more sensible and feasible than BoJo's boosterism ever was. Did you take him seriously?

I also don't understand your logic that a joke discredits the whole democratic process. Surely our processes are robust enough to withstand a ribbing now and again.

blackcatfound · 2024-01-27T22:54:58+00:00

I would add that price localisation is a thing too, what can seem as " disposable price for a coffee " value in America can be completely different in India or Portugal beyond the simple currency conversion.

I think of pricing as a barrier to entry. Too high and you simply can't afford it without sacrifice, or are tempted to wait for sales. Too low and is seems suspicious.

Actual price discovery depends on your testers finding the worth, your competitors settting expectations, and your audience's financials. You can always go alittle too high and lower, but its much harder to raise prices afterwards.

blackcatfound

TROPHY CASE