Christian Antkow

Going deep down the Nvidia GB 10 (DGX Spark) rabbit-hole lately running Hermes Agent with 70-120b models. What a huge difference compared to 9-24b models! What a time to be alive! Built myself my own legal research assistant!

My reply to someone considering starting a video game company: The distribution of possible rewards for starting a video game company are generally not very good today. The market is well served, and gaining a foothold requires strong execution on both business and product issues, along with a substantial amount of luck. Plan to burn through seven figures with a not-great chance of making it back. If you do go for it, some bits of advice: Identify your customers clearly before you start. Not just a broad community, but specific people, and imagine them as you make decisions. Initially, build the smallest, most concise game you can imagine anyone paying for. It will still take much longer than you expect. Once something exists, hill-climb the value. Hopefully you will have some elements that clearly bring joy to people, which you can magnify. There will inevitably be tons of things that people find confusing, frustrating, or just boring that you will need to fix.

#starwars #gradedactionfigures Just saw a 2019 Black Series SDCC Exclusive "Boba Fett" Foil card sell for over $700! Nice to know certain modern pieces still command a premium ebay.com/itm/3365579172…

@americanmcgee Awesome!

@CAntkow I did. Then I talked to fans during the Plushie Dreadfuls pop-up in Tokyo and my mind was changed.

One of my greatest frustrations throughout the Alice: Asylum pre-production was the fact that we were forbidden by EA to fire up a game engine. We had tons of story, art, and other creative assets - but we were NOT ALLOWED to place any of that into a game environment. And I think if we had been allowed - maybe we could have built more excitement around the project. Who knows? Well, fast forward a few years. Plushie Dreadfuls is now one of the most successful plush brands in the world. And NO ONE GETS TO TELL US WHAT TO DO with it. So, the team is building assets and putting them into a game engine! Behold! A Plushie Dreadfuls WOLF(?) in a 3D environment - testing some ideas for the Plushie Dreadfuls "Spare Hearts" game. Now, don't ask me why we spent all these years making plush RABBITS our thing and then the first asset we put in the game is a 3D Wolf - something that doesn't even exist in our catalogue. Get out of here with logic! Didn't I just say NO ONE TELLS US WHAT TO DO?! Just enjoy. No questions! 😂

Hermes Agent > OpenClaw

The Antkow Star Wars Estate Collection #taswec Some recent high scoring modern additions to the collection.

#gaming #descent If you loved the 6DOF shooter game Descent from ~1995, the spiritual successor - Overload - is presently on sale on Steam. What fun! store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Ove…

Imagine you're John Carmack you're 22 years old and you just wrote a 3D engine in assembly that runs at 35fps on a 486 Doom drops. Quake drops. Half the planet is playing your code. you're the reason GPUs exist. you're the reason your friend Jensen has a yacht today. then in 2009, you sell id Software. people call it betrayal. you call it "they made an offer I couldn't refuse." VR obsession. Oculus. Meta buys it for $2B. you're CTO. but Meta thinks you're a liability. your demos are "too intense." your emails are "too long." your focus on frame timing is "slowing us down." 2022. they push you out. not fired officially. just "restructured." the media writes "end of an era." some crypto bro calls you "washed up." silicon valley moves on. but you don't. you don't write a book. you don't start a podcast. you don't collect speaking fees. you go completely quiet. you take the money. you buy a warehouse in Texas. you hire 10 engineers. and you start coding. not games. not VR. AGI. two years. radio silence. no tweets. no conference talks. while everyone's debating ChatGPT, you're debugging CUDA kernels at 3AM, testing world models. then in 2025, Keen Technologies pivots hard. you're not "exploring" anymore. you're building it. here's what people get wrong: everyone calls it a comeback. a redemption arc. "revenge on Meta." it's none of that. you're a 54-year-old engineer who still codes 12 hours a day because you genuinely can't stop. most CTOs would have bought an island. most legends would have written memoirs. you just kept typing. the most dangerous person in any codebase is the one who goes quiet and never stops shipping commits. karma doesn't need to be real. but obsession is. welcome back, Carmack.

@americanmcgee @Waltjan9 Planning another game?

Latest Dreadfuland image from @Waltjan9 The Ashcroft Mansion Visual: Escher-geometry Victorian townhouse. Staircases that climb to the same floor. Corridors longer than the building allows. Dark wood paneling, burgundy wallpaper with shifting patterns. Mirrors everywhere showing James (blank, compliant) and Robert (screaming behind the glass). The parlor repeats on every floor, Mrs. Ashcroft's shadow waiting. A dining table set for three with blank-faced plushies. The basement laboratory: brass gears, crystalline chambers, the extraction chair too small, designed for a child. The machine still running. A jar labeled "Original Identity: Robert" cracking on the shelf. Resident Dreadfuls: Dissociation Rabbit. Schizophrenia Rabbit. Sleep Paralysis Rabbit. DPDR Rabbit. Insomnia Moth. Paranoia Rabbit. Agoraphobia Bunny. Claustrophobia Rabbit. Depersonalization Rabbit. Story: The house where Robert became James. Home as prison. Every room a lesson in erasure. Robert must navigate the impossible architecture and reach the basement, where the extraction machine is a memory still running. The cracking jar is the sign that the process is reversing. He confronts the structural distortion of a home that was never safe. Let us know in the comments what you think of this illustration and the concept for this area 🖤

NIN - Friggin 🔥

Trista and I saw NIN last night with friends, and it was a great show, as always. I inevitably wind up thinking about the gap between the live event experience and reproductions on video or in VR. The gap is substantial, with the “shock and awe” of high powered, extreme dynamic range stadium effects, but there are still levers to pull. A capability of the Quest VR hardware that would be fun to exploit is per-frame varying of the display persistence. The low-persistence display is only flashed “on” for about a tenth of each frame, so it doesn’t look blurred as you move your head around. This is a tradeoff between screen brightness and blur, which is just statically picked by Meta today, but it could be done dynamically on a per-frame basis (coordination would be tricky!). Going to full persistence briefly would give an instant 10x brightness increase, which would be quite impactful on eyes adapted to the 10% brightness. You wouldn’t want to keep it there for long, because the blurring would be obnoxious and eyes would adapt to it, but it would be perfect for the epilepsy-inducing concert light flashes. The clean way to do it would be with a 16 bit high dynamic range linear buffer that gets factored into an sRGB image for the display and a backlight flight time, but a hacky extra parameter latched with the frame submit would be the easiest thing to experiment with. Make it work, then make it clean! A tech demo would be fun, but Beat Saber has a large enough user base that stepping up “concert lighting effects” might even be worth it from a net user value standpoint.

Horrible time with some amazing friends NIN Dallas

@JasonBassler1 Hey Jason, why are you lying about this? My trip obviously wasn't secret, and there weren't any deals or contracts involved. Consider telling the truth next time, you are making up BS because the facts don't get you as many clicks.

#arcraiders @ARCRaidersGame I'm done Sick and tired of doing Matriarch and Harvester events only to be PK'd by opportunistic rats Life is too short for that garbage Might return if they ever implement PvE mode

>be me >get one my X alt accounts banned over a year ago >paid premium account >keep getting emails lately saying "we tried to bill you but can't" >try to type in email account that they banned/suspended only for X to respond with "Cannot find account" >mffw (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻