On a technical level, DTGI (diffusion-transformer generated imagery) is a subset of CGI (computer generated imagery). All DTGI is also CGI.
Computer is the medium, like painting on a canvas. You can paint, or you can pay someone to paint for you.
On a conceptual level, DTGI is a big change. From painting, or paying a creative to paint, to paying a faceless corp to generate a permutation of paintings by other people (who probably did not consent to that).
If creator is transparent about it, I would appreciate it, but as someone said once I’d prefer to just see the prompt since that is the extent of creative input.
> If creator is transparent about it, I would appreciate it, but as someone said once I’d prefer to just see the prompt since that is the extent of creative input.
I recently went to a small conference focused on AI art. What you said is simply not true for the best AI "infused" works. Many AI art creators use tools that allow you to combine different inputs, including their own "handmade" art, which are later processed by a pipeline that also include AI and require manual selection of intermediate results. There's a lot of manual work and artistic expression involved, and the average person wouldn't be able to replicate the results through a simple prompt.
While it is true that most people enter a low-effort prompt and call the output "art", better artists are going well beyond that. This is why I think it's just a more powerful version of "standard CGI" (image processing and 3D rendering).
I plan on making a video on zork. I'm sure there's others but it'll be a nice deep dive into a few infocom games. Gonna do one on Odell down under and MECC too.
There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular.
Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...
Not just the classics, there is actually a thriving interactive fiction community producing new games regularly. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition
usually gets 60-70 entries each year.
Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.
Save states and walkthroughts/faqs/hints can provide the help you need, although some people think these are cheating. I'm fine "cheating", though, as long as I'm "cheating myself" and not others.
I think a lot of players liked the insanely hard. A Mind Forever Voyaging was really well written but relatively easy—which is probably why I especially liked it. But I don’t believe it sold especially well.
Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).
But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.
I have incurable nostalgia for the genre (both graphical and pure text adventures) but it's hard to play them without a walkthrough nowadays. The games are simply not fun by modern standards. Their mere existence was a miracle back then and a lot of the excitement was related to interacting with the computer at all. I'd love to be able to recover this sense of wonder but I suspect that most of it was about discovering the world as a child.
I wasn’t a child; post-college but also at a stage where I was willing to devote more time to games than I am today though never a serious gamer. I also knew/know a lot of the people involved early-on. I do fiddle with the games now and then but not super-seriously.
Turrican will be preserved like Infocom. But I fear they will all be forgotten in the depths of a digital computer history museum. I'd love with LLMs could really bring the excitement of text adventures back. It has been tried but so far it's still in the text version of the uncanny valley.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems.
Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?
Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.
Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.
I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?
For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.
I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.
The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.
Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.
Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.
Was this "be clever" stuck, or "bad game design" stuck?
As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.
He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.
The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.
Bad game design stuck. Some of the connections are so obtuse youd have to be a chess computer to see the item being relevant in that way later. And plenty of chances to bone yourself early in a playthru with no fixes(undo being an option lost 1000 turns ago). Frequent sequential saves help, but I feel there's a whole article ranking the friendliness of adventure text games and I'd rank it on the meaner side, haha. They got better at avoiding those situations in their future graphical adventures(but not totally, damn bonding plant in return to zork). Not to mention the map is so immense good luck finding where you dropped the hard hat or whatever.
If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.
So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
I think it’s probably also very tempting to just give up on a puzzle and just find the solution or at least a hint online. You pretty much couldn’t do that back in the day.
Most of these games had hint books ("invisiclues") and selling them was a big part of the business. Some companies actually sold more hint books than the games themselves due to piracy!
Yeah but those came later. I think Mike started those in biz school and later joined Infocom where he did (ran?) marketing. Even with BBSs there just wasn’t a lot of info out there unless you called one of the authors you knew :-)
I'd like to go beyond this question... What if making cartoons is 99.9% cheaper and a reasonably skilled person could transform any story into a fully animated, quality-looking CGI cartoon with less than a week of work? We'd have a flood of cartoons, some of them from talented authors who can't afford to finance a cartoon adaptation today. Would that displace Disney and Dreamworks?
In the audio/music production space Germany has Ableton, Bitwig, Steinberg, Native Instruments, u-he, and quite a few others. All following the Mittelstand model as far as I know.
Notwithstanding all the physical audio equipment manufacturers in Germany, there are loads of them producing quite high quality gear.
> Which you can also do through reading and even YouTube nowadays.
You cannot. Very few people - geniuses - could learn on their own what a typical person learns with a teacher, and even the geniuses are far better off with a teacher working at their level.
> 1) Not for everybody
That's such a general statement that it's meaningless, not falsifiable. It's for most people.
> only the rich can pay 50K-400K
Yes, I strongly agree that's an enormous problem.
> We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
That's what the people who want to cut opportunity and education say. But middle-class / poor people have dreams and want to fulfill their potential too, and are also an enormous pool of talent.
The solution is to make college affordable. Multiple presidential candidates have offered ways to do it. There's no reason we can't.
I strongly believe the manuscript is undecipherable in the sense thats it's all gibberish. I can't prove it, but at this point I think it's more likely than not to be hoax.
Statistical analyses such as this one consistently find patterns that are consistent with a proper language and would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page. To get the kinds of patterns these turn up someone would have had to go a large part of the way towards building a full constructed language, which is interesting in its own right.
Personally, I have no preference to any theory about the book; whichever it turns out to be, I'll take it as is.
That said, I just watched a video about the practice of "speaking in tongues" that some christian congregations practice. From what I understand, it's a practice where believers speak in gibberish for certain rituals.
Studying these "speeches", researches found patterns and rhythms that the speakers followed without even being aware they exist.
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but maybe if this was a hoax (or a prank), maybe these patterns emerged just because they were inscribed by a human brain? At best, these patterns can be thought of as shadows of the patterns found in the writers mother tongue?
> would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page
People often assert this, but I'm unsure of any evidence. If I wrote a manuscript in a pretend language, I would expect it to end up with language-like patterns, some automatically and some intentionally.
Humans aren't random number generators, and they aren't stupid. Therefore, the implicit claim that a human could not create a manuscript containing gibberish that exhibits many language-like patterns seems unlikely to be true.
So we have two options:
1. This is either a real language or an encoded real language that we've never seen before and can't decrypt, even after many years of attempts
2. Or it is gibberish that exhibits features of a real language
I can't help but feel that option 2 is now the more likely choice.
Creating gibberish with the statistical properties of a natural language is a very hard task if you do this hundreds of years before the discovery of said statistical properties.
I'm not sure where this claim keeps coming from. Voynichese doesn't exhibit the statistical qualities of any known natural language. In a very limited sense, yes, but on balance, no. There is too much repetition for that.
There's certainly a system to the madness, but it exhibits rather different statistical properties from "proper" languages. Look at section 2.4: https://www.voynich.nu/a2_char.html At the moment, any apparently linguistic patterns are happenstance; the cypher fundamentally obscures its actual distribution (if a "proper" language.)
If you're going to make a hoax for fun or for profit, wouldn't it be the best first step to make it seem legitimate, by coming up with a fake language? Klingon is fake, but has standard conventions. This isn't really a difficult proposition compared to all of the illustrations and what-not, I would think.
There are many aspects that point to the text not being completely random or clumsily written. In particular it doesn't fall into many faults you'd expect from some non-expert trying to come up with a fake text.
The age of the document can be estimated through various methods that all point to it being ~500 year old. The vellum parchment, the ink, the pictures (particularly clothes and architecture) are perfectly congruent with that.
The weirdest part is that the script has a very low number of different signs, fewer than any known language. That's about the only clue that could point to a hoax afaik.
The book is obviously a hoax (either voluntary or not), the question is if the text is a cypher, a transliteration, a fake language, or just gibberish.
As far as I know it's just gibberish since it doesn't follow the statistics of the known languages or cyphers of the time.
My son is a teenager but loves to watch old politically incorrect comedies like "Airplane". There's no way you could make that movie today... but there's certainly a market for it, cruel or not.
Now that I think about it, it's no more cruel than what most kids watch on YouTube today.
Airplane could be made today, the central premise would hold up well, some of the skits in it would have to be dropped or altered. Most things that were made in one period could not be made whole cloth in another period.
and to say what I said before, hardly any movie that was made in one generation can be made in another. There will always be things that have to be changed. This same thing applies to basically every other work of art - despite the valiant efforts of Pierre Menard.
The protagonist with Vietnam flashbacks would obviously have to be altered, you couldn't have skits about Ronald Reagan - nobody knows who he is, nor do they know who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is.
Having the autopilot smoking after being inflated doesn't make sense in a world where barely anyone smokes.
There is an airplane movie from this year! No idea if it can hold up to the old ones and I don't have time to watch movies these days: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
There are tons of dialects and accents and group slang that the joke could be done with. Doing basic generational slang would likely flop, but you could easily use something like a thick accent from Texas like Boomhower in King of the Hill, or a Louisiana Creole accent, or some deep Appalacian accent, or some Spanglish.
1 is why I said or an equivalent - you could do the same with pidgin or any creole or, I don't know if this is a PC way to say it, but any kind of 'hood' or 'ghetto' type slang. The joke is just person is 'fluent' in an unlikely dialect/way of speaking. If cockney rhyming slang were more prevalent you could do that, with you know a black American or Asian person or whatever being the unlikely fluent one.
2 is is not really the point, sure it could flop, my point was just that I couldn't imagine it going further than that, not that that would be funny.
It's been a few years since I watched Airplane, and while I absolutely love it, I recall it being rather tame even by modern standards. I can think of a few gags that might not land as well today, but I don't think it was mean-spirited.
"Oh, stewardess! I speak jive" would absolutely get you cancelled today. I don't think it's mean-spirited either but that's not enough to save you these days.
In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.
The joke is how incongruous it is that she speaks their language despite being very white. It only works because you expect black people to speak like black people and white people to speak like white people.
Airplane is mostly physical humor and dumb wordplay. 90% of the jokes would be fine as-is. There are a few you'd have to update, but that's hardly surprising for a movie released 35 years ago. You could have said the same in 1980 about most comedies made in 1945.
Tim Sweeney is good at PR, and the media tends to fall for it.
The judge didn’t say Fortnite had to be let back on the App Store. She said that Apple needed to allow payments through external payment processors. Apple can’t force Epic to use their payment system anymore, but they absolutely still can decide they don’t want to distribute Fortnite on the App Store. It’s their store.
They lost on almost all counts actually; precisely the reason the judge was angry about failure to comply with the relief she did order. (In her opinion; appeals court will see. It looks colorable to me that she may feel Apple outsmarted her and just “technically” complied. But we will see during appeals.)
It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it.
The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
> I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
How else are they going to force you to view advertisements for things that you are completely uninterested in and which are completely unrelated to the page you are viewing?
Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it.
If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop.
Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious.
So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.
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