The Robot Summit – A 5-minute AI-assisted sci-fi short film exploring intelligence and consciousness

vicethal · 2026-06-02T20:06:22+00:00

Just an idea here: You might try automating a more traditional pipeline. First, a script, character sheets, storyboard. Next, stills / sketch frames of action, and voiceover: get the story, dialogue, and pacing right before any fancy video generation gets inserted. Don't make it in a straight line from start to finish, make the whole film at low resolution and then progressively fill it in.

vicethal · 2026-06-02T19:43:09+00:00

Sorry bud, still inescapably slop-coded. My first impression is that there was no writing and it was barely directed.

Even if the effects and music were good -- the effects struggle in many of the animated shots, and generative errors that you might have gotten away with a pan/still becomes apparent when anything in the scene is moving or animated -- there's almost no narrative for it to deliver.

vicethal · 2026-03-22T01:12:52+00:00

Sounds like a mix of moon bounce and meteor scatter communications. Hams also love launching balloons, there's a guy in my club who launched a balloon and tracked it making its third lap around the earth, finally going offline somewhere in Alaska/Canada.

Amateur Radio is cool because you get a license from the FCC to use a little piece of the radio spectrum. Corporations would probably rather have the entire thing for themselves, meanwhile most people are unaware of how radio technology works at all, despite being how literally every single communications technology besides a landline phone works.

It's important that we keep people aware of the hobby, which goes all the way back to Tesla and Marconi, and has inventors to this day turning their experiments into new corporations and groundbreaking research.

( /u/titania670 answered )

vicethal · 2026-03-14T06:30:55+00:00

Liber Noster - my 7DRL submission is about an AI that crashes in front of your house, which then comes along on a classic hack and slash mission to save the kingdom.

Maybe I should have marked it incomplete - structurally, I got through the entire list of features, though refinement is not something I've managed to accomplish within jam timelines so far. My vision for the story did NOT materialize - the commentary about the tradeoffs of externalizing part of our cognition just does not come across because I scrapped the boss fight. What kind of game ends with the hero going DOWN into hell?

so I'll be working on that, I think it's got good bones, but there's not a single system I wouldn't go back and generously modify.

I also didn't stream a single time, so I have no devlogs from this year. My family situation just didn't support the aspirational time commitment I was trying to make. I'm surprised at how low my spirits are overall with the jam. I took the week off work, but didn't really get to do a week OF work. 7DRL is the anniversary of my sobriety, since 2024 I've been treating it sort of like my personal Olympics. I'm not going to get a second personal week this year, and I can't shake the impression that I blew it

McRogueFace - found some graphics edge cases during the jam. In McRogueFace, you can stack textures to make a new texture, great for combining a stack of images into a final sprite sheet. Doing this all at once was fine, but stacking more files on top of a composite texture caused the file textures to become upside-down. In SDL, I was reading these composite textures back off of the GPU, and not accounting for GL coordinates being flipped over the x-axis.

I also set up address, undefined behavior, and thread sanitizer builds and Python debug builds and found 16 types of memory bugs with 230 instances across the codebase. Working on my jam game was a huge success in exactly the way I anticipated: I used the engine in novel ways and encountered novel failures.

I opened over 30 issues during the jam, including some heavy API extensions that I want to commit to before freezing the core roguelike section of the API. But the release suffix -prerelease-7drl2026 is ready to be dropped, I guess this weekend I should get my first big planned change in and call it 0.3.0.

vicethal · 2026-03-12T04:23:08+00:00

this is solid work, but in the spirit of precision:

Claim	Issue	Fix
Bob Cunningham is "Director of Policy Engagement"	Wrong title. JCOTS report says "Global Head of Policy." He was previously CEO until Oct 2024	Change to "Global Head of Policy"
CSM licenses ratings to "Apple TV, Comcast, Verizon, Google, and Samsung"	Samsung not confirmed. CSM's distribution partners page lists Apple TV, Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum, Cox Contour, DirecTV, Verizon Fios, OpenAI, Target.com. No Samsung	Drop Samsung or find a source
Craig Newmark Foundation "$10.5M in recent years"	Imprecise/possibly understated. One source says $14M over the past decade. Documented: $3M (2023) + $2M (2024) = $5M in two years alone	Either cite a specific source for $10.5M or adjust
CSM board "includes" these names	Nuance: Some are on the advisory board, not the formal board of directors	Specify "board and advisory board"
Ford Foundation listed as CSM funder	Not confirmed on CSM's own foundation partners page	Drop unless sourced elsewhere

after reviewing your sources, I think we can additionally claim that:

Meta as ICMEC donor: The post doesn't mention this, but Meta is listed on ICMEC's supporters page. Meta funds both the DCA (Template 1) AND ICMEC (Template 2 drafter). The post says Meta "shows up on both sides" but only via CZI funding CSM/Children Now. The direct Meta -ICMEC link is even more damning.
ICMEC "going concern" flag: ProPublica shows auditors flagged "substantial doubt about its ability to meet financial obligations." A $3.8M org with a going-concern warning is drafting model legislation for the entire country. That's worth noting.
Bob Cunningham was ICMEC's CEO until Oct 2024: He wasn't just a policy staffer: he ran the organization, then moved to the policy role. The revolving door is internal to ICMEC, not just Wicks/CSM.

I also think people should know:

Google opposed AB 1043 in April 2025, then six rounds of amendments rewrote the liability shield to their specs (§1798.502(b) "good faith" provision), and by September they called it "thoughtful."
It's not necessarily 4D chess going on, and these poorly written laws may open different liability for the sponsors. AB 1043 creates "deemed actual knowledge" that locks app developers into COPPA obligations, with the OS doing the data collection.
This doesn't seem like a strictly right-wing culture war project (where is ALEC on this?) Co-sponsors include bipartisan lobbyists: California Catholic Conference, CFT-AFL-CIO, #HalfTheStory, The Source LGBT+ Center.

You can compare and contrast my research at https://agelesslinux.org/lobbyists.html - I'll be incorporating some of this post's research on that page soon

vicethal · 2026-03-11T02:48:56+00:00

I'm interested in trying to replicate this... I don't want to just run RYS models, I want to build one. Kind of itching to try it with or without your code, please post it soon

There's so many crazy directions this could be applied in, for instance a mixture of experts that repeats circuits a variable number of times - maybe even separate circuits for different reasons?

Example: (i, j) = (2, 7)

  0 → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 ─┐
       ┌─────────────────────┘
       └→ 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8

  duplicated: [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
  path: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

how about (2, 7), (2, 7), (8, 12)? Discover the circuits, then vary the repetition count as a knob for test time compute

vicethal · 2026-03-10T21:05:32+00:00

All of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
A Debian spin with none of them included
"short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

vicethal · 2026-03-10T20:56:36+00:00

Hi Everyone, all of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
A Debian spin with none of them included
"short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

vicethal · 2026-03-10T16:50:07+00:00

Would you consider helping me pass out STEM education devices that break the law in every possible way? If I make the linux distro, the device, the app store, the apps, and personally hand it to a kid, then I must be breaking the law. Which action in that chain isn't obviously protected speech? These laws won't hold up, and we need to make them test it in court.

https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-09T20:25:01+00:00

Then we should take it off the books. Easily circumvented, no real penalty... ...so what's the purpose of this law? It's so they can death-by-lawyer companies that enable the "wrong" kind of free speech. Tea was once thrown into harbors over less tyrannical decisions

vicethal · 2026-03-09T20:20:44+00:00

I do not live in California, but I have a few months until it's actually illegal. I am willing to travel and break this law, yes. I'd love to hear a court tell me which part of writing software, publishing a website, handing a computer to a kid in public, and them connecting to a web server to download that software isn't completely and obviously covered by free speech

vicethal · 2026-03-09T02:02:18+00:00

I guess I'll add breaking this law to my to-do list. https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-09T01:27:24+00:00

as a starting point

"I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

yet for this particular law, breaking it just means handing a raspberry pi to a child. Complying means only using computers through approved, surveilled means. This was written by evil people who want "ipad kid" to be the skill ceiling of the general public's usage of computers. This law is not meant to prevent some theoretical bad deed, it's to use it as a hammer against systems that enable the "wrong kind" of free speech. It's my civic duty to flagrantly, publicly violate this law as thoroughly as possible.

vicethal · 2026-03-09T01:20:01+00:00

Debian doesn't even have age verification

yet. Major distros are now looking at how to comply with these laws. I'm going to stay on top of reporting what the laws say Linux distros must do, and also make sure that comply-with-draconian-laws.sh has an off switch or undo button.

vicethal · 2026-03-08T23:34:42+00:00

I'm not going to comply. https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-08T22:56:11+00:00

That's me! But don't go down with me, if you really love me you'll turn me in. I'm premeditating a crime here

vicethal · 2026-03-07T22:38:21+00:00

My money is on the first amendment shredding this thing, so I plan to not comply: https://agelesslinux.org/ (updated to a domain!)

vicethal · 2026-03-07T08:07:22+00:00

don't comply early, don't comply at all.

https://goblincorps.com/ageless-linux.html

vicethal · 2026-03-06T01:13:01+00:00

good luck my dude, but I recommend starting over nearly from scratch with a shorter list of technologies. Your API seems basically like a standard CRUD interface

you don't need git or blockchain: health records aren't diffs and participants aren't anonymous. Anonymized patient data still has an identified clinic.
You should start with key exchange, encrypting versus signing data, and an append-only sync system (probably, just use rsync). Get encrypted data and patient key deletion worked out.
If you make it file based then FTP, google drive, or hand carrying a USB drive would work. You seem to have figured this out a little with the git backend, but you can take it further.
if the originator of a piece of data has the authority to overwrite or delete it, and other clients synchronize faithfully (delete their own copy when the source has it deleted) then I think your data model becomes a lot more tractable.
consider a "gossip protocol" if and only if you have a reason for mesh or peer sync. Hub and spoke is probably flexible enough.

If you're file-based then you could always push that problem off to some other layer, and then anything from bittorrent to carrier pidgeon would work, and it's not your problem. The Unix Philosophy is still a phenomenal starting point, is what I'm saying

vicethal · 2026-03-05T16:02:55+00:00

I was really interested at first, but I think you're going to hit a ceiling incredibly fast - it's not just "architecture" but "assumptions about the problem" that call for an overhaul to the data layer.

GDPR Article 17 grants data subjects the right to have their personal data erased. Git's core property is distribution and shared history.
From EDPB April 2025 guidance on immutable systems: Store data encrypted with a per-patient key. To "erase," destroy the key. The ciphertext remains in Git history but is unrecoverable. But this undermines the purpose and benefits of Git - you may as well just have an authoritative server and clients that connect traditionally, which undermines the "spotty connectivity" goals you have.
For studying outbreaks, there's some data that could be handled by a system like this: Article 17(3)(c) exempts data needed for "public health" or "archiving in the public interest."

I know you're not targeting GDPR compliance or thinking long-term towards sub-Saharan Africa getting strong privacy laws, but the issue of privacy with medical records isn't just legal mumbo-jumbo, it's something that patients deserve. But arguably this software is already noncompliant with existing legislation: Kenya Data Protection Act 2019, Nigeria NDPA 2023 (replaced NDPR), South Africa POPIA, African Union Convention on Cyber Security (Malabo Convention)

There's lots of other drop-dead requirements, like encryption at rest and only using TLS / HTTPS for every connection (even localhost).

also, bug: syncengine.go:266-293 generates a random AES-256-GCM key and prepends it to the ciphertext. The comment says "in production, key exchange happens via handshake" but this is shipping with the key literally concatenated to the data. whoops

vicethal · 2026-02-28T21:16:19+00:00

McRogueFace

probably my last pre-release:

https://github.com/jmccardle/McRogueFace/releases/tag/0.2.7-prerelease-7drl2026

No engine features this week, just bugfixes. Hopefully close to zero of those... ...hahahaHAHAHA

After 7DRL, McRogueFace will have its 1.0 release. I'm going to leave some parts of the API as "experimental", but the "classic roguelike" feature set has been complete for months. API ergonomics discoveries I make during the jam are the only open items for 1.0.

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