The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.

Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???

Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)

As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.

Folding proteins is applying complex algorithms to data, which is what computers are good at.

Writing knitting or crochet patterns is a skill that requires being good at knitting or crochet as a human. You have to have an understanding of how a human does it to write a pattern - where to place stitch markers logically, when to switch tensions, knowing yourself enough to know how crowded you can let the needle before you’re going to fuck it up… Maybe we could apply “AI” to the mechanical movements and have it create an object from a pattern, but I think going backwards would be significantly harder.

Often I feel like “AI” stuff ignores a lot of technical aspects of the crafts in general. It has only access to visual/audio information that has been uploaded to the internet in some form. I doubt most learning is not done through that way. I watched hours of knitting videos and understood absolutely nothing, I attended an in person class and it stuck. Even if “AI” can model the outcomes of the creations, it can’t really be trained on the creative process.

Specifically for knitting - can a machine be trained on the muscle movements involved in knitting? The feeling of tension in your yarn, how many stitches you feel comfortable crowding on that needles, how you need to move your yarn out of the way?

Knitting has some complicated stitches and movements that I don’t think have been replicated by machine. Crochet is not able to be produced by machine. I think that there is a kinesthetic understanding necessary for a sort of “AI” to really understand knitting which hasn’t been demonstrated by any models I’ve seen. Maybe someone will put sensors on someone’s muscles and try to “tokenize” the mechanics, but I don’t think that’s been done yet.

Writing patterns is a skill. Professional pattern writers test their patterns and modify them, calling heavily on their knowledge of that kinesthetic understanding. You could not just read a bunch of pattern books and write your own without having done the activity. You would need to be choosy in your pattern books too - anyone who does historical knitting/crochet/fiber work can tell you that there are lots of confusing, ambiguous, or wrong instructions! Can you consistently discriminate between different notation styles? Do you have opinions on magic loop versus ch6? These are things that I don’t think have been tokenized - and since most of that is ambiguity in human communication, where is “AI” supposed to pick this up from?

Yeah, for sure! I’ve done a couple of attempts with toy programs to randomly generate lace patterns, which is a little similar and was really fun. As long as you go into it not expecting it to be perfect or even match what your prompt was, I bet you could have a lot of fun!

ChatGPT has tokenized versions of knitting patterns scraped from the internet that it can attempt to reconfigure into something resembling a knitting pattern. I don’t think it has the ability to keep track of the number of stitches you have open or the knowledge of how different stitches will interact and build on each other. You will likely have to make corrections or modifications.

I saw someone generate a crochet pattern that they were able to actually create, and it was just a little sphere with nubs coming off of it. I think this it might be a fun experiment, but I would not expect anything impressive.

Still holding out for Jodorowsky 😔