You don't need to fret to play a chord properly on guitar just play the 3 highest strings together and that's an E minor chord. Just lightly hold the bottom highest string and the top two strings (to mute them) and you can play a G major.
Or play them all open at once and you have a Em11
I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product.
The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would.
For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything.
Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though.
How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that.
The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.
Cities and any polity or group of people cannot be created by some abstract rules or enforced. You need it to be composed of individuals who are disposed to act harmoniously with each other and have a culture (which is basically a bunch of jigging to aid harmonious interactions, you cannot create top down the manners you don't want people to violate). Everyone acting in their own self-interest ends up creating a harmonious organization because all of their self-interest corresponds such that their self interest is reflected in the good of the whole.
Just as a feedback system, if there is something wrong in a city or organization if the person who encounters it sees it as contrary to their own self interest and is capable of dealing with it themselves they will.
If this internal principle does not exist you rely on top down surveillance and enforcement which is basically delusional if it works will only be through violent enforcement against the people. Again in terms of a feedback system, if the polity is constructed out of a bunch of individuals who have a self-interest that corresponds with the good of the whole, there is no need to propagate that information to some manager. The persons directly involved with it are capable of dealing with it mindful of it's impact on the good of the whole because it's good for them. If you do not have that you would need a system of management, evaluation, and enforcement which basically demands the disruption in question is something easy to communicate and form policies around. Anything that cannot be just cannot be dealt with and the system falls under it's own weight. That's why technocracy is a delusion that is always doomed to fail, if the individual units in a system are unable to deal with aberrations on their own it requires the whole mass of bureaucracy to evaluate, construct policies, enforce etc. That is only capable of handling anything which is understandable to that kind of system, which is a small fraction of actual disruptions.
I appreciate the efforts of people trying to emulate the positives of Japanese cities mimicking the externals of it and enforcing it on other people is the opposite of any actual organic system and itself prohibits the more dynamic system that is required for an actually stable polity. If someone sees a wallet on the street they have to see it as their own self-interest not to steal it. If people do not see themselves as having a shared self-interest with those around them there is no enforcement or rules or policies that can make that polity stable or harmonious.
Singapore is a multi-culturial society and it is also known to be very safe and clean like Japan. You can definitely make people behave with top down rules, and eventually it just becomes 'culture'.
Authoritarianism has a bad connotation in Western societies based on individualism.
In Japan, the authority is the group and social norms. In Singapore, it’s the BDFL. This involve restricting individual freedoms for the greater good. This would never work in America.
>You can definitely make people behave with top down rules, and eventually it just becomes 'culture'.
If by people you mean the particular type of people that live in Singapore, who are known across the world to be supple and tame. Now try this logic in the United States with certain subpopulations who are chronically misbehaved and see where it gets you. Hint: it's been tried for a long time and it doesn't work.
That was what singaporeans were like too when it split off from Malaysia, if enough people wanted to we could beat order and rule of law into the US. The problem is that too much of the US are bleeding hearts who oppose any law that even slightly inconveniences anyone unfortunate, and the other part of the US is stuck in a frontier mentality of the 1800s
I only recently switched to emacs, and my motivation was not that I like tinkering but that having a flexible gui thing I can create custom views for w/ LLMs have basically 0 cost of producing new tools/uis. It's much the same with the linux example, I have been a lifelong windows user but switched around a year ago. I've tried multiple times in the past but hated tinkering and the issues that came up so never stuck with it.
Now with LLMs I'm using a tiling wm and can just have a suite of hotkeys that automate everything I need to do, and if I ever want a new thing I can create the new view in a minute and never think about it again. The niceness in openness in tools is being about to integrate with everything else I use effortlessly.
I wouldn't say invisibility the goal, but even further the idea of an isolated tool is an abstraction of the general human-computer interface. Your window manager is just as much a part of your ide or text editor as anything else, it's just the mediating layers between you and the program. From a phenomenological perspective the distinction between the different tools or piece of software is essentially arbitrary. Having more open tools that allow you to integrate with your WM and other things allows you to create that effortless, thoughtless experience. I would say a good tool is frictionless, not invisible. What constitutes frictionless for different people will obviously vary based on say how many different computers do you need to work on, what is the breadth of different kind of software and environments you need to work on? How do you control going between those?
A frictionless code editor for me is not a code editor that is simple like sublime which in order to integrate with what I do I assume I could figure out some way to do it with a ton of custom scripting, but what is frictionless for me is what is open enough to allow me to go between a variety of different contexts without thinking about it, and being able to have whatever I want at hand without thinking about it. In the past I hate tinkering so much I would have never wanted to deal with this, and on windows particular it's practically not possible.
Just as an example of a frictionless tool, along with programming I also make music (including for some games I work on). When I was on windows to set up practicing playing music I had a preset in my daw I could open quickly, it would need to load then I could begin playing. On linux I just have something built into my taskbar with a performant amp sim and other audio thing always running so at any particular moment I can simply click something in my taskbar and immediately start using my guitar, mic, or analog synth I have set up on my computer. There's another menu to manage the mixing between channels, and things to run midi backing tracks I can practice to play along with. I could do this all on windows but doing each specific thing would require running something, making sure all my devices are still set up properly, using some other program whose UI I don't control to do something for me and just doing a bunch of different steps that impedes my ability to do this. Now I can just the moment I want to click something and it is immediately working with 0 frustration, it's a frictionless tool. I'm not just programming I'm also making music, games, assets for those games, and being able to leverage my WM/text editor to keep track of those things so I can cognitively offload them, and switch between them painlessly is to me the benefit of tooling. If I'm doing stuff with a team I can still leverage most of it but obviously the rest of the team isn't able to see the stuff I use to interact with it. The cost of creating small bespoke script/tooling/uis is essentially 0 now, and using AI to create bespoke tooling to me is a much safer approach than using AI to create code as it's just not really an issue if there's a bug in some of my personal scripts. I use odin for the game I am working on and I love it for it's simplicity and clarity, rather than using functions or programming language abstractions like classes to hide and organize functionality I just have some custom tooling for organize a mostly flat giant main game function. To me that's by far the least friction in understanding it and working on it. My main issue is across the projects I am working on, programming or otherwise, keeping things straight and coherent and being able to access and work with the associated files without thinking. Cognitively offloading to the greatest extent possible, so that what I do actually want to do is always at hand. I would say it's the opposite of invisibility though. (The psychoanalysis of what draws people to different editors is fairly boring and low effort, I absolutely hate tinkering. I am writing a game in Odin rather than using Godot because having to learn some poorly designed UI and how to futz around with it instead of just being able to do what I want is impossibly frustrating to me, it's a friction that locks me into future friction while the friction of learning emacs removed friction to other things)
Yeah, nah. Not so sure about that. I love zig, and I appreciate the rigour, care and thought that goes into the language and it's libs. What Andrew Kelley and the team are doing is excellent work, creating a useful, simple language with which to write efficient, correct programs.
His politics don't matter to me. Hell, if the politics of technologists dictated whether I used their products, I'd have to go live in the wilds, without any tech. :-)
I’ve followed Zig fairly closely and this is the first I’ve heard of Andrew pushing “social issues”. I don’t believe for a second that it’s a factor at all.
How confident are you? I ask because I'm a zig zealot, and am constantly shilling for it. But I disagree with a number of ark's positions, and think of him as a bit of a shitter... So I don't think "cult of personality" accounts for it, despite how easy it would be for someone to be able disregard zig if was just a personality cult.
I have no issues w/ the zig language and I'm not saying that's the only reason why people talk about it.
There is however a subset of very vocal people who will go out of there way to bring stuff up and push something if they do see that is a part of it. Not that it's the only reason why either, just additional motivation for people to go out and push it that otherwise you might not get. All you need is a couple people who view that as a kind of campaign and they can radically increase the visibility of something on the internet, and turning programming that has some broader social or moral thing related to it even just through the creator is a very easy way of doing that. Rust has a similar thing.
I don't view the instinct that leads to language zealotry or zealotry related to social issues(or say religion) being that distinct and it's probably a similar personality trait that encourages both, and it's generally one I find unpleasant regardless of the particular content. FP can also lean in that direction. If you get some narrative you can say this language fixes stuff in a fundamental way + also can appeal to the social thing it just riles people up who will go around talking about it online non stop.
They are useful if they are understood properly. For example different "similar" groups respond to different treatments differently. Social phobia responds very well to exposure therapy, anti-social personality disorder does not. If you are able to follow the distinctions you are able to leverage more effective treatments. I don't think they have any use outside of psychological treatment though.
This is a great video on a good way of breaking down how personality disorders in general are broken down and function and are separated.
https://youtu.be/4mgifm3ftl8
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