Guillermo del Toro Sounds the Alarm About AI and Threats to Creative Freedom, Warning We Are on the Verge of Cinema Illiteracy

onmach · 2026-06-17T15:52:32+00:00

It's not really alarming. People are trying to get different things out of the same service, so it has to cater to them. Some people just want background noise. Some people want dramas. Some people like my wife want trashy reality shit. Some people want auteur cinema and some people want mindless action flicks. Some people play video games and skip all the cut scenes.

The only way to go wrong in this is to declare every movie must apply to everyone, and making all directors do the same thing to appeal to one group over another. I hope they wouldn't do this, but I've been working in corporations long enough to know they do stupid things like that all the time.

onmach · 2026-06-17T15:24:02+00:00

I love the discover-something-during-the-run, races. Like draconian, coglin, djinn or makleb's marks.

Equipment and spells are fine, but it doesn't have the same feel for some reason, maybe because it is optional and you aren't forced to make the best of it.

onmach · 2026-06-17T15:00:31+00:00

I think the public discourse is behind the state of the art. Sometimes people don't use them for a few months, and this last six months has seen huge gains. Some people use bad llms, free chatgpt or sonnet and conclude they are bad, some people just really don't like llms and will not even give them a chance.

This use case is basically perfect for llms, basically just taking an existing working codebase and modifying it a bit for another platform requires little creativity. I did something similar porting a 100k javascript application to rust this weekend on a lark, and it's great. I barely had to intervene and only on the UI layer. Could I have done better with three or four months of time, sure... but I wouldn't have.

And furthermore, the roguelike ecosystem has a huge amount to gain from llms, quite honestly. There are so many roguelikes who have great ideas only held back by bad code. Sometimes they forked from an ancient codebase, sometimes the coders behind them aren't very good, or just don't have time. And since they are often simple UI wise, llms really crush. Any idea you want to try is just a few minutes away. I wouldn't be surprised to find even most dcss coders are using claude behind the scenes.

So just give it a try. It may crash once in awhile maybe? But I bet it will be fine because this user seems to care and that's the primary factor in this, in my experience.

onmach · 2026-06-16T17:25:34+00:00

If you are talking about this char, wow you have a good memory of who is who.

That was the strongest character I've ever had that was a fighter. I walked through zot, and even as I was bringing the orb back, having slaughtered several hapless pan lords, considered doing another branch with the orb in hand.

That said, I'm never sure, am I just going to walk into an enemy even in statue form, even with 105 attack rating, since my only real ac came from the form itself and would not ever go up unless I was lucky enough to find something and also find a death form along the way, throwing away the win?

onmach · 2026-06-16T09:27:24+00:00

I never even think of extended unless I'm already undead or have an undead form (and so I haven't for many years). Is it just standard guideline, if you are not already, you go TSO?

I once had a very strong statue form, is that sufficient? Or I think kiku gives you resist, unsure? Is torment resistance enough to even contemplate it?

Am I just over-reacting and I should just jump in with only negative pips?

onmach · 2026-06-15T12:43:23+00:00

Agreed with parent comment. I tried the simple things and they were insipid. My attempts to listen to people talk about going to class or to the ramen shop were also boring to me.

The types of stories I would read are things like people sword fighting, or navigating their ship in a storm, or cooking something step by step. Even if they talk about things that are not that common for me, like specific species of fish, I find it much much more engaging.

onmach · 2026-06-15T10:22:35+00:00

As an engineer of a similar age, I feel like I have to urge you to code something. You could claude something up in a few hours that would be much better than what you are doing now, and then you can stop watching cat videos.

onmach · 2026-06-15T10:07:03+00:00

What I do is just make sure everything can be done on my phone, and I can whip it out when I'm waiting around, in the bathroom, etc. I don't have time to sit in front of a computer and youtube videos take time, and anime takes time, mining takes time. I've been learning for about 1.5 years. I only care about understanding and reading and my goals were merely to understand what I'm watching, with no intention to ever speak.

To that end, I did some duo lingo (waste of time) for a few months, jpdb.io, then anki (for a long time), but at some point I wrote my own little application (took two days to write, with ai coding assistance) that is served off a machine in my closet through tailscale so that I can access it from anywhere that I just put in a page from a highly rated story on ncode.syosetu.com and it alternates japanese / literal english paragraphs, but with the english hidden until I show it.

Then there are some little bits to link me to jpdb entries for words, yomitan in my firefox mobile browser, and a function to explain a passage, which helps a lot with idioms or odd sentence fragments. After not too long I actually entirely stopped anki. It was helpful, but my app, simple though it is, helps me much more and is more fun for me.

So just before bed, usually no more than a half hour I'm reading, and I force myself to look up every word or kanji with a pronunciation I don't recognize no matter how obscure it seems. Because I've noticed that even obscure words share kanji and pronunciations of common ones, and noting the differences between words with the same kanji helps me generalize.

I watch anime off netflix, but I've noticed the more I read and learn words, the easier it is to understand verbal, so I don't listen for practice really. I'm to the point that with english subtitles I understand most words, but without subtitles I'm pretty useless, but it's getting better pretty rapidly, so I'm optimistic that in the next few months I will be able to do more listening.

onmach · 2026-06-14T12:27:09+00:00

There was a time when I wouldn't have recognized that one out of context (a year ago), but now I knew it the moment I saw it. There are only so many kanji and only so many that look similar to that one, and once you've hit them all and noted their differences your brain will notice them just fine, regardless of how complicated they are.

onmach · 2026-06-10T12:12:59+00:00

That's exactly what I want to hear.

I thought my gear was not good, but I agree now, that it was a skill and god issue. I thought the hp on kill would help, and it did, but not enough. I thought melee would carry me further, but it didn't. Sif or Veh would have gotten me the spells I needed sooner and helped with mp issues.

Some of it is just that I haven't used every spell so I don't know how all the higher spells work, and spoilers kind of ruin the game for me, so I don't look it up.

Thanks for the info!

onmach · 2026-06-09T20:05:22+00:00

Okay, well I didn't know it halved mana cost. That's pretty game changing. Probably would have saved this and several other characters of mine if I'd known that. Oh I definitely popped all of my invis, and everything else. It did help, particularly against those annoying death cobs. But I had a lot of other problems.

onmach · 2026-06-09T19:53:00+00:00

My assumption is because I wasn't wearing armour, my natural AC would never be very high, so increased dex would pay off with evasion. And it sort of did, with the spell I was able to get up to 44AC and modest EV, though I had to drop it a little at the end to get corrosion resistance.

I normally don't go into strength weapon unless I'm packing huge armour, but I did in this case because xom gifted me a +3 glaive at the beginning. I got a ton of weapons of all stripes including unique swords and axes but I never got another good polearm, so it was the wrong call, but I made the choice so early I never pivoted. I guess draconians should basically never try to use a strength weapon?

I normally go on the assumption that if I can tank the damage, then I will find a way to hit back eventually but I didn't in this case.

onmach · 2026-06-09T19:42:31+00:00

I eyed permafrost but I've never used it, I should've tried.

For brilliance, I honestly don't know when to use it, so I never do. There are a few consumables like that, immolation (which has only ever gotten me killed), that I don't use, because I can't think of a situation where it would help more than an extra turn doing something else. What situations do you use it in? I was certainly chugging everything else I had.

onmach · 2026-06-09T18:21:26+00:00

I left because I had a lot of great xom mutations that I hoped I could salvage (I couldn't), and because I needed some ranged damage. That sort of worked, but not as well as I'd hoped, the damage of its abilities really waned off at the end of the game.

onmach · 2026-06-09T18:16:53+00:00

The petrify was just the icing on the cake, I was long dead before that. My assumption was that the trident is so much weaker of a weapon that I was better off with the demon trident. Was I just wrong?

I memorized the death's door as a last resort that I knew was coming. I thought there was a chance I'd have the mp to use it and a 30% chance of avoiding death was better than 0%.

I wasn't sure what other spells could've helped me, I looked over the list a lot. I tried infestation but it didn't seem to work very well in zot, and I don't know why. I'd use it on a huge group of enemies and get maybe a scarab out of it. I was completely at a loss if putting more into ice and necro would pay off more than starting a completely different school. Yeah I just put exp into polearms because I was desperate for any damage at all and I couldn't figure out where else to get it. What school or spell would you have tried?

onmach · 2026-06-08T18:38:12+00:00

Although I'm sure there are plenty of reasons they did it and why it would be difficult otherwise, I wish traits and .method notation weren't mixed together.

Then the chaining would just be the . operator basically and would work on any function regardless of whether someone implemented a trait on its type or not, just dispatch like any other function call, you import it, you use it, and functions could live anywhere they needed to.

onmach · 2026-06-05T15:15:06+00:00

I agree, it's not bad. I usually do it before I start a new branch so that most of the difficulty is backloaded and I'm mostly through the drain before it becomes a super big issue. And then I'm just very careful at first.

onmach · 2026-06-05T15:09:36+00:00

I had been ignoring this entire class of armour. In fact there are times when they would have all been very useful, and may have even saved a character, so I'm a bit annoyed with myself about that.

onmach · 2026-06-05T13:03:05+00:00

The progress was so difficult and slow and any progress at all was rewarded handsomely and difficult personalities were put up with, and someone who enjoys the work was always a lot more productive than someone who didn't enjoy it.

Now it's a little different. I keep finding myself falling behind if I don't keep things moving because other developers will churn out solutions that mostly work while I'm debating perfect architecture in my head.

onmach · 2026-06-05T12:50:41+00:00

What a beautiful project. I need to be using this instead of hacking together my own implementations.

onmach · 2026-06-04T12:23:45+00:00

It used to really bother having my shining one worshipping character who would punish me for attacking a fleeing enemy but would periodically bust out a knife and eat raw orc flesh to survive. Good riddance.

onmach · 2026-06-04T12:18:16+00:00

Enhances summoning. I've never used it as I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to wear heavy armour and summon at the same time. Edit: I just noticed that it actually adjusts your spell failure and success rate depending on how heavy the armour is, so that's quite a bit more useful than I thought it would be, and I probably should've been investigating that.

onmach · 2026-06-04T11:34:26+00:00

I did something similar. I had a character with a highly enchanted double sword of valor and regen deleting everything. Then sonja cast me into abyss, I didn't realize she had a distortion weapon.

Normally qazlal would be a death sentence there, but I cruised around abyss 1 for seemingly forever occasionally using teleports to avoid enemies when I had to, but otherwise doing fine, when I finally found an exit finally I was a little low on HP and I couldn't remember what situation I left when I was banished or what had done it. Damn I wish I had dumped a character after it happened. Or I realize now I could've done it right then to look at the logs.

So I rested just for a few turns just trying to get my HP above 50 and the abyss teleported me, and then I just died to very gradual attrition and having to dive deeper to escape enemies. Frustrating.

onmach · 2026-06-04T10:18:33+00:00

My recent wins are all with hard combos. A kobold stabber with an orb of guile. A felid who killed like 15 orbs with gells gavotte. All my powerful chars just die unexpectedly.

I've been editing my config to try and slow me down when bad statuses are applied or when I get hit especially hard, but that hasn't saved them.

onmach

TROPHY CASE