Please express this as my tentative expression of interest (tentative because I’m travelling for Christmas and don’t have brain to think about this properly right now, but I’d certainly like to bookmark this for if this ends up happening)

That’s super interesting, because with mine, it definitely made a huge difference. It honestly tasted pretty bad before it had aged at all, and it didn’t taste much better after 3 months. It was drinkable after a year, but still not great. After 2 years though, it was one of the nicest alcoholic beverages I’ve ever tasted.

I wonder what caused such significant differences between our experiences. Do you have a particular recipe you use? Not because I want to compare methods — I wouldn’t be able to find whatever guide I followed. Rather, it sounds like whatever strategy you used gets drinkable mead far quicker than whatever I did

You’re right — I think it’s more the frequent moving home that’s holding me back. I just want stability

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible

Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI

I’m not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.

For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I’d use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn’t consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.

A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go “hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]”. This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).

You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t used in the development process though in at least some cases. I’ll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.

For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime

Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there’s certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).

Machine learning certainly wouldn’t be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.

Witchy vibes have really helped me to think more positively about ageing.

As a teenager, I was Wiccan for a while, and whilst that’s no longer the case, there’s a bunch of conceptual motifs that I took from it that still play a part in how I think. In this case, the notion of the triple Goddess: the maiden, the mother and the crone.

I am certainly past my maiden stage — not just in literal age, but headspace. I don’t feel the need to accept every invitation I receive in a quest to explore what I want and to figure out how to best situate myself in the world. I know what I value, and now the challenge is in cultivating it.

Something interesting about this framing is that I’ve spent a while lately pondering “what does the mother era mean for someone who never plans to be a parent?”, because certainly fertility and motherhood are big components of the mother aspect. When I found myself thinking about my maiden era having come to an end, I kept slipping into wanting to skip forward to my crone era, because I didn’t have a sense of what the mother era would mean. Don’t get me wrong, I (and many other women) have long aspired to be forest hags, but I don’t want to poison my current era with excess wistfulness for the future.

In time, I realised that I can channel mother energy in a bunch of ways. For example, I like to host parties in my home rather than going out, because I am able to control the space and ensure that everyone is safe and comfortable. In my early 20s, I experimented with a heckton of drugs because I’ve always been deeply curious about mind altering substances, and occasionally, I was a bit unsafe in how I did this. As a result of that, all of my friends know that if they ever want to try a particular substance, they can come to me to talk about relative risks, how to test drugs for adulterants, and for a safe space in which to try them (because a trip sitter is pretty important for safe, first time psychedelics use)

Mildly NSFW:

!Another aspect of “mother” energy that’s just come to mind that isn’t necessarily something that I’d initially have thought of as fitting into this domain is that recently, I went to a sex party type thing, but I turned up too late and many people had gone home. I didn’t want to end the night without getting laid, so that led to me lowering my standards somewhat when it comes to the general vibe of a person. I went into one of the playrooms with a dude, and before long, it became clear that this was a scenario of “no sex is better than bad sex”, due to how he was so keen to slip straight to the “main event” without any foreplay (and of course, trying to do that is a great way to make the main event painful for some women who need to warm up). At the first instance of pain, we stopped for a moment so I could recover, and I decided “nah, I’m too old for this shit.” — having had plenty of bad sex in my maiden era, I could see where this was going. I told him that I wanted to stop, that I was not in the correct headspace, and apologised for the abruptness. It was pretty empowering actually, because a younger version of me would have implicitly felt like giving my consent was an irrevocable act, and I would have prioritised social niceties over my own comfort and pleasure.!<

Edit: added spoiler tags for mildly NSFW part

Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).

Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.

I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure

They’ve released torrents of the metadata, and they plan to release the music files, but they haven’t yet. They intend to start by offering the downloads as bulk torrents, but they’re open to considering implementing the ability to download single songs in the future.

So in short, yes, but you can’t download them yet

I made mead ages ago and it was incredible. It didn’t last very long though. The demijohns the mead was ageing in came with me across 4 house moves in 2 years.

I’d love to do it again if I ever have the space, but also, I only made that first batch of mead because I tutored a beekeepers son

Probably something silly like this cyanotype multiexposure camera

Which is to say something that’s a fun engineering project, whilst also a little artsy fartsy.

Though if that’s not your flavour, you can always use the Matacorp branded camera.Though you have to pay each time you look through the viewfinder, and you don’t even get the photograph once you’‘ve taken it — it goes straight to Matacorps’ servers for processing, because it’s their image, not yours.

Did they know it was you? Or did you sheepingly pretend to also be annoyed at the smell

(((gnu)imp)tk)lib)object)

Ooh, Barnsley! That’s actually super close to where I hail from (we had a Barnsley phone number and post code, despite not technically being in Barnsley). That’s so cool, it’s not the kind of place you typically see depicted in media

“Northern Englishest”

As a Yorkshire lass living in Manchester, you have me intrigued with this description. Hell, I’m more than intrigued — you’ve sold me on it

If the goal is to hammer everything, then there are no bad swings

I’ve not played Factorio Space Age yet, but I’m looking forward to it whenever I next get a hankering for Factorio.

Your pitch has sold me on it. Yet another game to add to my wishlist

That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.

I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.

It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role

Space Station 14 sounds interesting. What kind of multiplayer is it? I.e. is it one where the typical experience is to play with randoms via matchmaking, or is it a game best enjoyed with friends?

I have discord server full of nerds who I played games with during COVID (and its aftermath), and this might be a good excuse to see if I can reawaken that server for games