What I’m reading vol. ⅩⅢ
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ
Hello! I am having a lazy Sunday to kick off the start of March and it seemed like a good time to post some more links.
Musical accompaniment is the Celeste soundtrack, inspired by me having just watched Bizmuth’s video on the world record speedrun and getting emotional watching someone playing the summit again. I think Maddy Thorson might be good at making games.
Apologies for the amount of these that are more bitching about “AI” I will keep that section for the end so you can ignore it if you are sick of reading about that.
Warfare in Dune, Part I: Fighting Faufreluches — Bret C. Devereaux
Starting with something fun: I always enjoy Devereaux analysing fiction from the perspective of historical systems and technologies with a particular eye for the reasons why things were done or made in a particular way in a given time and place.
So we might first ask if this fighting system, at the individual level, makes sense given the fantastical constraints Herbert’s shields impose. And I guess my answer is…sort of? I think the idea of a return to contact weaponry in this context works in the main, but with two main exceptions, which is that the style of contact weapon fighting that dominates is not what I would anticipate and second that the way Herbert also excludes laser weaponry strikes me as perhaps not fully thought out.
Games
Finally, a car mechanic sim where your mates do all the work — Brendan Caldwell
First off I am giving Jank another plug. Go read Jank! Support non-ad ridden publications! They got Alice Bell and Sin Vega (as freelancers)! What more do you dogs want?
I sell the wheels, both tires and rims. This is when I notice a small, uh, discrepancy between the listed “sell price” and what we actually receive into our bank account. Jonty expresses some worry, and tells me to check the computer in the corner of the garage to see how much it’s going to cost to buy the new wheels, you know, “down the road” as it were. I look at the prices. I walk away from the computer.
“Let’s worry about that later,” I say, quietly.
I recreated every katsu curry recipe in Romeo is a Dead Man and almost none of them made me better with swords — James Archer
Despite a decent bit of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s best being distinctly janky these days (read Jank!) there are still some gems coming out of the old site.
Tasting notes: Also delicious, even if – in spite of the in-game description – it’s about as Indian as sumo wrestling. The butter does make the sauce beautifully smooth, though, and the stacking of the breaded chicken creates a pleasant optical illusion of having more breaded chicken. Just don’t expect, if you make this yourself, to achieve the same yellowish colour as in Grasshopper Manufacture’s artwork. On the basis of this experiment, that would require so much butter that your curry would legally become a croissant.
Effects: Increases defence. I caught my finger while loading the dishwasher with curry-smeared plates and it still bloody hurt. Failure.
Technology and Design
A Look At Some Interesting Linux Terminal Text Editors — Pom
I confess that I work on this blog in Visual Studio Code. For general text editing I usually use Sublime text but since installing Bazzite on my desktop I have been using Kate, but I think I am going to swap back to Manjaro (or maybe try Cachy) soon and back to Sublime with it. In the terminal I have stuck to Vim with some plugins to style it for a while but this is making me think of checking out Fresh.
Another thing I’ve always been very fascinated by, is terminal writing programs; I think that might come from how often you hear people in videos about Linux talk about how much they use terminal text editors, particularly things like Vim and Emacs get commonly mentioned, and how much more efficient they are compared to their GUI counterparts. I personally also have almost exclusively used plain text editors for basically all writing I was doing on a PC; at school I did use Word, but none of my personal computers ever had MS Office installed; as such, I was already used to writing in programs with very minimal interfaces.
The Slow Death of the Power User — Fireborn
I think there is a bit of a degree of rose-tinted glasses in the reminiscing here. The idea that the culture around technology did not use wield levels of technical competency as gatekeeping or elitism does not ring true to my experience at all. Personally I think that a lot of technically minded communities are a lot better about that now than they used to be, or perhaps it just took me a while to find them. Maybe the eighties BBS scene that Fireborn is hearkening back to was better for this than it would be a few decades later when I was dipping my toes online (was it if you were openly a woman? or gay?).
But I do agree with the central point. The ideal form that technology has centred on in a black box. Something that the owner is not meant to understand or be capable of understanding. Something that cannot be repaired, altered, or used to do anything that is not approved of by its real owners.
That culture didn’t die because the knowledge became irrelevant. It died because it became economically inconvenient. The platforms that replaced the open internet — YouTube, Reddit, Discord, eventually TikTok — are consumption platforms. Their business model requires passive engagement. A user who spends three hours going down a documentation rabbit hole, breaking things in a terminal, and actually understanding something is worth less to them than a user who watches three hours of content. They don’t ban technical material. They algorithmically deprioritize anything that demands active engagement, they reward passive consumption, and they shape the culture of their platform accordingly over years and years until the culture that emerges is one that treats passive consumption as the default relationship with technology.
Have We Forgotten How to Design? — Louie Mantia
And adding to the above, it’s also all, of course, shitty and badly designed.
How has Waymo the technical ability to self-drive a motor vehicle around a city carrying human passengers, but they do not possess the skill to automate closing a door? Did they overlook every method that might encourage the passenger to close it themselves? Was there no other possible method to get the door in a closed state without resorting to a third party that commissions human drivers to drive over to the automated car and do it manually?
“AI”
15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram — Vincent Driessen
Everyone running every major company really does not give a single shit about anything any more other than shareprice. It’s good for the economy when the entire thing is hollowed out in the name of gambling, right?
The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.
Toolmen — Mandy Brown
Sorry, I meant in the name of gambling and eugenics.
This has always been the intention of AI, and where its connection to the intelligence-rankers of years past is cruelly apparent: if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity. I think of the engineers and designers who have spent decades honing their skills, deepening personal and public creative practices in service both to the users of the systems they built and to their own brilliant spirits, now being told to park themselves in front of a sycophantic oracle that can be appeased only through rote dictates, and which never tires of lying even as their own minds and muscles atrophy from disuse. What is being automated here: the work or the people?
Tunic, Night in the Woods Publisher Says TikTok Is Creating and Running Racist GenAI Ads for Its Games Without Permission — Rebekah Valentine
And of course these systems themselves are also opaque, horrendously designed, and shitty.
What really is utterly baffling is what appears to be a profound void where common sense and business sense usually reside. Does TikTok want me to be grateful for the mistreatment of my company and our game? Based on the wild response through the weeks of customer service correspondence we have received, I think this is their stance and take on their obvious offensive and racist technology and process and how they secretly use it on the assets of their paying clients without consent or knowledge.
