Tommaso Checchi

Here's the discord invite: discord.gg/bQhg2RX3TG And our landing page: robotopia.gg

@JsonBasedman The only solution to Claude problems is using more Claude

We need like, --kinda-dangerously-skip-permissions I dint give a fuck about whatever long tail esoteric git command you've cooked up for some reason, just don't rm -rf my home dir

@Direwolf20 Yeah it’s been a life changer, like now it can go for like 10-20 min without any input for me! It reads way more than it writes

@_tomcc That….is clever. I always chuckle at how it tries to run rm -rf with no problem but the asks permission for ls -la 😂

I made the silliest Claude Code hook: it uses a second Claude to auto-approve read-only commands. Commands that modify things still bubble up. In practice it kills most permission prompts! Have fun with it 🫡 github.com/Tomato-Cake-LL…

@Hillsguy2 @matiasgoldberg Lol leave it to X poasters to just post takes that are 12 years outdated

@matiasgoldberg They used this in the end: tomcc.github.io/2014/08/31/vis…

At 8 (or 36, whatever) verts per object, occlusion culling costs more than what you save. And the dynamic nature of the game means you can't use smart algorithms like Quake did with BSP trees to cull tons of objects in one go

Oh and Robotopia will have a level editor to make your own scenes (and share them). It's coming along nicely:

@McZone89 Yas come play the demo and post videos wherever!

@_tomcc Are we allowed to make videos on this new game

Hello whoever's still here 🫡 Surprise, I've been working on a new game in the last couple years! I wanted to find out if LLMs could be "intelligent" NPCs in a real 3D game, and it turns out they mostly can :) It's called Robotopia, and it's a 3D adventure all about (human) creativity and getting robots to do your bidding with your voice. You can try the PC/Mac alpha today on our discord below!

@McZone89 What do you mean?

@_tomcc Are videos allowed or nah?

Here's the discord invite: discord.gg/bQhg2RX3TG And our landing page: robotopia.gg

@atorstling Thanks! The art is all hand crafted :)

@_tomcc Looks great! 👋

The other day we taught our robots that "Clanker" is a bad word (guest star Coleman!)

@Kappische Yess we found the same thing! People need to be able to understand what’s going on to evaluate if a scene or mechanic works. You actually have to prototype a ton of “signifiers” and UI, enough to make the whole thing readable

This is one of the biggest lies in gamedev. You need almost all the components of the game to properly understand how entertaining a game is. It’s extremely hard to evaluate a game just based on greyboxing

@AbhayVenkatesh1 Fair then, I saw that tweet out of context in For You

@_tomcc Because they’re pitching to VCs that they will create $10B outcomes

A great puzzle I have been thinking about: For how popular Zero to One is and how famous Peter Thiel is in the valley, how come almost nobody seems to follow the teachings in the book? Why aren’t people trying to start a monopoly? …

@cmuratori Does a “single instance” of a CUDA core even exist given that it’s fancy SIMD? I feel like it’s a marketing term really. Comparing Zen with a whole Ada SM would make more sense maybe

I'd like to gauge developers' instinctive feeling about types of cores they've heard of. Without looking anything up, if you could have the computing power of a single instance of one of the following cores, which one would you pick?

@FreyaHolmer It’s pretty much irrelevant how devs feel given that it’s almost impossible to get funding for premium games… I feel like it’s been decided already

game devs - what do we think about the trend toward GaaS and its effect on the industry as a whole? I got into an argument with some non-game dev friends the other day, about a worry of mine that the GaaS/lootbox/season pass/microtransaction trend runs the risk of turning places like Steam and EGS into the same slot machine hell app stores have turned into. I find this bad, because it might stifle creativity, effectively forcing us to use this type of monetization in order for game dev to even be sustainable, which means a lot of types of indie games will simply not be viable to even make anymore. For example, if you're pitching a game to a publisher, it kinda seems like many of them would very much like you to focus a bunch on ensuring your game maximizes playtime for its price point, or even better, have ways to monetize through microtransactions but a friend of mine said this was a net good regardless, the companies making this amount of money will invest it in new titles and innovation either internally or elsewhere (which, is definitely partially true with Epic at least). And, because the giants like fortnite, roblox, and especially mobile games like candy crush, are mostly a separate audience from non-GaaS games, the indie/AA/console market will be largely unaffected, or even improved by it. It will still be relevant and financially viable, since it gives indies another avenue to make even more money than they've traditionally been able to, if they focus on the same type of strategies like loot boxes and season passes but, I don't actually know how true that is or how to quantify it! there's also the issue of visibility on the storefronts themselves, which is, as far as I know, one of, if not *the* most important thing, in order to get eyes on your game and for you to make it - so if GaaS becomes the name of the game to Make Money™️, unless the storefronts go out of their way to care about the smaller games that make less money, I think there's a real risk of a degradation into an app-store garbage heap. I might be wrong but, I seem to recall that the app store was more indie friendly way back when, but right now it's a really treacherous market for indies, right? or maybe I'm just projecting my own experience using it a while back? idk anyway it has me thinking and I don't have much in way of actual data here apart from my own feelings and whatever I've ambiently picked up being in the industry c:

@Jonathan_Blow You can probably do this with Amazon Polly and 15 lines of Python! It’s decent

I want to generate temporary in-game conversations with an AI voice generator (to be re-recorded by real actors much later, when the script is really done). There are a bunch of web sites that kinda do this, but most are junk. Basic requirement: Ability to provide a text file providing both sides of a conversation (or N sides), indicating which character is speaking, and to get back a wav file. What is actually good for this use case?

@nickwalton00 @ID_AA_Carmack Yeah, but I don't really see how to get there so I'm just cynical :/ I don't feel like supporting layoffs when they provably don't benefit me or anyone I know

@_tomcc @ID_AA_Carmack In the long run are people really better off having a "job" but not actually meaningfully contributing to society? Wouldn't society be better off if they worked somewhere where their work really made a difference?

Bullshit Jobs book review The basic summary of the book is: Roughly half of the jobs in the world are bullshit, so we could get rid of them and divide the remainder up to have a 20 hour work week and less impact on the planet. This book grew out of a smaller essay: web.archive.org/web/2018080702… 37% of the survey participants thought their jobs were meaningless, and it takes a number of people doing the “real work” of building and operating offices to support the meaningless jobs, so he calls it about half of the workforce not contributing meaningfully to the world. That may be an overstatement, but I don’t think it is off by a factor of two in the western world. He claims to have been accosted by many free market types that say this isn’t possible due to market efficiencies, but I accept the proposition that there may be a billion or more people doing work of negligible value. I have a somewhat different take on the phenomenon, which makes me even more pessimistic than he is about reducing the amount of bullshit jobs: Bullshit jobs are a luxury good, and we are only going to see more of them as society continues to become wealthier. This is his case for the class he calls “flunkies”, but I think it accounts for most of them. Burdensome regulations are put in place because the regulators feel rich enough to impose the costs of the “box tickers” necessary to comply with them. We have hosts of food regulations because there is no danger of starvation. For a lot of people, the number of “heads” below them in an org chart is a measure of their self worth. This isn’t the same as flunkies that directly stroke egos; they don’t have to even see the people or know what they do, just that they are a resource at their disposal. Rich and successful companies reward their managers with more people. On the other hand, his class of “duct tapers” fundamentally misunderstands the nature of most value creation. He talks about how software developers bemoan duct taping systems together, and would rather work on core technologies. He thinks it is some tragic failure, that if only wise system design was employed, you wouldn’t be doing all the duct taping. Wrong. Every expansion in capabilities opens up the opportunity to duct tape it to new areas, and this is where a lot of value creation happens. Eventually, when a sufficient amount of duct tape is found in an area, it is an opportunity for systemic redesigns, but you don’t wait for that before grabbing newly visible low hanging fruit! Most of the book is just bitching about work in the modern world. He talks about how he doesn’t like putting policy suggestions in his books, because he wants his books to be about the problems, but this just comes off as a slyly cynical “Everything sucks, amiright?” The anecdotes that he weaves through the book are from 250 self-selected people that reached out to him on Twitter to talk about their bullshit jobs, which is far from an unbiased sample, and I am not very sympathetic to most of them. One of his correspondents talked about how they couldn’t quit, because they kept getting offered more money to stay.  That’s not what “couldn’t” means. He talks about “the spiritual violence of modern work” and how we have been tricked into not having a good life. However, he characterized the good life as “arguing politics and gossiping in cafes”, which is not as universal as he might think. He styles himself an anarchist, but it is pretty clearly the anarchism that is supposed to happen after communism does its work, and I haven’t seen him say anything actually helpful in his books. I’m curious if any of the people that suggested this book accepted the challenge to read  @johanknorberg ‘s The Capitalist Manifesto as a counterpoint.

@ID_AA_Carmack I agree in the ideal, this is a very dysfunctional result of dysfunctional incentives. I think the problem is that today there isn't a realistic path to that, only to more inequality. Making sure efficiency benefits everyone is the hard problem to solve

@_tomcc If people doing low / no value work get a job providing more value, all of society benefits. Efficiency and charity should not be vaguely coupled together.