Neocrius

While the work on the full game continues, I've updated the demo of Ramek: TMD to v2.0, with the greatest addition being local co-op! There are also some new enemies, and many small tweaks suggested by playtesters. It's now running on the @Redot_Engine. Link in bio/reply.

UBI advocacy stems from the naïveté and solipsism that because *I* am a deeply creative latent producer who is oppressed by my wagee job and would actualize my creative potential if only i could have my basic needs met, this must be true for everyone. Its not. First of all, it’s not even true for these “creatives”. If you aren’t creation maxxing while waging, you wont do it under luxury communism either. Creative work is extremely taxxing and your wage job isn’t actually that hard. The problem is your neuroticism and lack of discipline, not your job. All your necessities being provided for will only make you weaker and gayer such that you’ll make up some new bullshit to get overwhelmed by and then cope by playing video games all day. But worse because you won’t even have “at least i did *something* productive today”, which will magnify your depression. Second, luxury communism already exists for the bottom 20% of the population. All their food, housing, etc is completely covered by the state. Entire generations of people who haven’t worked a job in their lives. Do they go on to produce beautiful art and build companies? Or do they go on to get high and kill each other? The truth is that we are close enough to UBI today that most of the people who will ever become great artists and inventors are already going to do it, and as we get closer all that will happen is the people incapable of anything more than wage slavery (most people) will simply become dysfunctional parasites.

@aledeniz Can confirm

I know a number of British people who lived 1 to 2 years in Italy and then came back. The constant is that they have young children. Whatever they tell you, if you ask them about the Italian school system, they will eventually admit that it was, if not the main one, one of the critical items for them. Italian primary school is much harder than the British one. An awful lot of Italian parents cope with that by literally abandoning their children to their own devices. Most take a more proactive stance, so they either start tutoring their children themselves (a couple of hours a day per child starting in year 1) or pay for tutors to do it in their stead. In primary school, British kids have homework once per week. Italian kids have homework once per day, doubled over the weekend. If you visit Italian homes in the afternoon and they have children, it is pretty standard to see the kids sitting at the main table with books and notebooks spread all around, with a parent or a tutor sitting with them for the whole session. Also, the amount of books they have to carry to school every day is borderline unbelievable. You would think they are training them to carry legionary backpacks. For people accustomed to the gentle British primary schooling, the Italian system feels borderline insane. Note also that it has massively eased up: in my childhood, we had to memorise a long poem every weekend (which back then meant Sunday, as Saturday was school day). h/t @GroovySciFi

If you think AI robots will plunge the cost of everything to zero, you are confusing LABOR with MATTER. Even if robots worked for free, the raw materials they manipulate -- the steel, concrete, silicon, lithium, and energy -- are governed by the unbreakable law of scarcity. These resources require extraction, refinement, and vast amounts of energy, all of which incur real-world costs. The 'free everything' narrative is a child's fantasy that ignores physics and economics. As basic economics teaches, scarcity is a universal constraint. Energy, the master resource, is not free. As studies on electricity demand show, consumption is tightly bound to economic output and real resource inputs. You cannot robot your way out of the need for hydrocarbons, rare earth metals, and the land to produce food. This delusion is a convenient smokescreen for the elites who wish to control those very resources while the populace dreams of digital handouts.

@vintaddillust I have the same problem. Especially when drawing comics with a fixed page rate, I quickly descend into the 'fast food worker' wage group because I take so damned long.

As I progress in drawing, I would like to be able to simplify and refine my line work, to describe the same thing using fewer lines.

@TXMCtrades Yes, every one of the survivors

"Everyone can have a penthouse if they want" ...

@exQUIZitely DOOM

I started gaming in the early 1980s, but my formative years were definitely the 1990s. For those of you who were active gamers back then - if you had to pick one game from the 90s decade that has been hardwired into your brain until the end of time, which one would it be?

Appropriate to market his mud cookie slop with sportsball. He should have just made a shitty basketball movie

AI and automation will never overcome the human hand. They will only make assembly-line goyslop.

@elonmusk @nypost I hope for the love of Deus Pater, it won't.

@nypost It will happen

Elon Musk's proposal of 'universal high income' to combat AI job losses baffles economists: 'So wrong on this' trib.al/OMUOuCz

Still waiting to be remotely impressed with AI

This is the philosophical bankruptcy of a brilliant engineer laid bare in a single post. Musk proposes that the government pay people not to work because machines will do the working for them. This is not a new idea. It is the old idea of something for nothing, repackaged in silicon. Start with the economics. Mises demonstrated that production must precede consumption. You cannot distribute wealth that has not been created by someone. If AI produces the goods, someone still owns the AI, maintains it, directs it, and decides what it produces. That is not a post-work society. That is a society in which the producers have changed tools. The question Musk refuses to ask is: by what right does the government seize the output of those producers to mail checks to those who did not produce it? "There will not be inflation" because production will exceed the money supply increase. This assumes the government will print only enough and never more. This is the assumption of every inflationist in history. Hayek called this the pretense of knowledge. Mises demonstrated that no central authority can calculate economic outcomes for a dynamic economy because it lacks the pricing information that only free markets generate. This is not a technical problem to be solved. It is an impossibility built into the nature of centralized control. Now the moral question Musk avoids entirely. Man survives by using his mind. Work is not a burden to be eliminated. It is the means by which a rational being sustains his life, creates value, and achieves purpose. A man who receives a check for existing is not free. He is a dependent. He has been severed from the process that gives his life meaning. Rand would say Musk is proposing to turn every American into a ward of the state, fed and housed by the productive, with no purpose and no self-respect. Mike Lee asks the right question: why would you trust the government to do this? But the deeper question is: why would you want any institution, government or otherwise, to replace the individual's responsibility for his own survival? That is not compassion. That is the destruction of the human spirit performed with a direct deposit. Musk builds rockets because he refused to accept that space was closed to private enterprise. He should apply that same principle to the economy: trust free individuals to adapt, innovate, and create new forms of value, as they have after every technological revolution in history. The printing press did not create permanent unemployment. Neither did the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, or the internet. Each one destroyed old jobs and created new ones that no one could have predicted. AI will do the same, if the government stays out of the way. Universal High Income is not the future. It is the end of the future, paid for monthly.

@exQUIZitely I played it on the ATARI. The colours were normal, but the frame rate was atrocious. Still, I would load it up occasionally (not a small task with only a tape drive) just to see the mind-blowing graphics.

I first saw and played Karateka when I was 10 years old. I've been trying to imagine what a 10-year-old today would think if they saw it. My thoughts back then were: "This is awesome" Did I mind the 4-color CGA graphics? Nope. Did I care that the sound was dreadful (basic PC speaker beeps)? Not at all. Did I play it ad nauseam with my friend? You bet! Did the bird drive us nuts? Yup! For its time (1984), Karateka wasn't just awesome - it moved the goalposts so far that it’s hard to put into words. Genre-defining would be the most fitting attribute. It was Jordan Mechner's first game; he was 20 when it was released. What a way to say "hello world!"

@Trad_West_Art This is totally unrealistic. She's way too hot to be doing any digging, ha.

@ko_dll Damn, you're even older than me (not by a lot though). Happy birthday!

I have a b'day! YAY! My father once told me to find a proper job instead of making games and to start behaving according to my age. Well. I did not listen, survived the 8-bit era, first CD-ROM interactive "games", 3D accelerators, and am still drawing pixels. 50 years=50 images!

It's clear??? How?!? AI is a black hole for money. None of the AI companies are even close to being profitable.

@bag_of_hats Well I wishlisted it on Steam in any case. May the machine gods of the algorithm smile upon you.

@neocrius The version shown in this gif is for Steam, but the Amiga DX version will need 2MB extra fastmem to run. The original Roguecraft from 2024 runs on a stock 1200 and also 500 if you are able to upgrade it to 1MB chip.

We've poured 4 years into Roguecraft. 🎮 First #Amiga release in 2024, and multiple ports since. Now we're bringing a widescreen Steam version that stays true to its Amiga roots. A Steam Demo is coming very soon. Stay tuned! 👀 #roguelike #pixelart