Posts that defy neater categorisation
For many years, I always gifted people books for birthdays. It took a long time to realize that most people see them more as obligations than anything. I guess I was trying to recapture some of the magic they have always brought me.
The following books are not necessarily the best ones I’ve read or even the ones that have absorbed deepest into my personality. But they’ve had a distinct impact. Let’s begin.
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I went to some lectures on the future of science in games recently, and the keynote speaker was Tommy Thompson, an well-known AI expert in the game dev space.
Of course, by AI, he didn’t mean the modern sort that dominates the news. His focus is AI for games, which is algorithmic and rarely involves any ML component. Still, he spoke about the challenges the industry faces regarding Image Generators, LLMs and so on. He specifically called LLMs “stochastic parrots”, which I found disappointing. Imho it’s an incredibly misleading model of what LLMs are capable of and is usually deployed to downplay their abilities and belittle them. But it’s a common view, particularly in creative industries.
So what is a better model? It’s clear that they are not that smart in most ways we consider important, but they do have some interesting capabilities. Here’s model I use that I feel give a better intuition for what they can and cannot do.
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There’s been a lot of clamour about generative AI for images, like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. It’s killing creating jobs or whole industries; it’s illegally using copyrighted data for training purposes; it’s eroding the nature of art itself. I’m sure there are many out there who would be happy to see an outright ban on AI image generators and the like.
On the other hand, it’s undeniable that this is a valuable technology. Not just for the corporations making them, but of benefit to the world. Sure, every artist unpaid is someone else’s money saved, but also as the costs of art fall, that democratises everything around art. A friend of mine made personalised Christmas card this year, a small joy of the world that simply would not have occurred before. I co-wrote a custom murder mystery with ChatGPT in barely longer time than it took to play. The lowering skills bar for indie comics and games is something I hope leads to a profusion of new original things, much as digital art and games engines have spurred it in the past.
How can we resolve these things, to have our cake and eat it? Well, society has faced this problem before and has found a solution that, though imperfect, has endured for centuries.
Continue reading(Unity the company, not Unity the engine)
Unity have recently announced their third recent round of layoffs, and pretty much everyone is blaming CEO John Riccitiello for persistent mismanagement.
There may be some truth to that, but the fact is that Unity has a bigger problem than its CEO, or its technical flaws. A problem rarely mentioned that explains most of the rest.
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A cool technique I’ve wanted to write up for a while is “Fractal Coordinates” described in a paper by Peter Mawhorter. Don’t be scared by the name, it’s essentially a variant on quadtrees that covers the entire 2d plane. Fractal coordinates have some interesting properties that are useful for procedural generation.
But first, let’s catch up on quadtrees.
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