Oh, no, people stopped having children. Whatever could be the reason.

It was only recently that I realized the problem I have with it: it's a tacit nod towards the broad thesis of secular colonialism (and later of Nazism): h. sap is naturally separated into different scientific kinds. Each acting according to its nature, and of course some of which should never be mingled.

I'm enough of an adult to separate metaphor in a work of art from actual reality, but not everyone is, and that metaphor - if you take it seriously - will have a lot of nasty and all-too-familiar second-order effects. Many of which we would recognize in the harsh lessons of the last century.

Hitler's not a cat, and Spiegelmann's not a mouse. They're humans, making human decisions. Tomorrow I could be Hitler, or you could be Spiegelmann. It can happen to anyone.

Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well.

"Landing craft? I see no landing craft."

Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.

There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.

The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who study and give voice to complexity. If someone can just shut those people up and make them go away, we will be restored to a simpler and more moral world. Where tragedy can rightly live in the realms of Gods and Mystery.

I would gently remind those that prefer such simplicity that not all nations do. We are not alone in the world. The nation that better understands the complexities of the natural world will, all else being equal, utterly trounce the nation that persists in fictionalizing existence. Unless you want to re-write your national anthem in Mandarin, you will someday need to (re-?)grapple with the complexities of the universe.

If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.

Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.

[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder

Is it true? I got no idea.

Supposedly, Tesla had some unique money games that vastly blew up their cash flow early on, less a car company and more a sort of tax arbitrage. So maybe it's in character.

So far as I can tell, AI prose checking - at least vs the frontier models - has been little better than vibe-based. Which, well, that's just another way of saying Red doesn't like Blue. And we got enough of that.

As we stand now, the disassembly and selloff of the state (or direct destruction of same) is probably overtaking our ability to act in an expansionist capacity, or even to assemble and coordinate the considerable overhead required of an actual autocracy, that's purely internally.

More pertinent to this subject, the diminishment of the USD is going hand in hand with the oligarch's exchange of assets for slices of the state, which the current executive enjoys quite unabashedly. And obviously the oligarchs feel they are getting fantastic deals, exchanging dissolving assets for monopolies on force, land, and access to state economic resources. But like the liquidation of the USSR by the Soviet security apparatus, tycoon and grifter alike will be more than a little dismayed to see how rapidly both dollars and "state power" lose their sheen when the underlying national context is destroyed.

Particularly since the vaporization of national context is by no means a universal or global phenomenon. I do wonder how well the balkanized techno-feudal dream works when confronted with the reality of, say, China, or even a monolithic domestic block, like the Mormons.

[1] Except today is today, and not the early 20th century. Rather than learning the West's harsh lessons at the hands of B-17s and the Red Army, the United States (and a lot of the northern hemisphere) would learn the same by way of thermonuclear bonfire.

The fact you're even willing to talk puts you in a different bracket from the reactionary forces that have co-opted the levers of the conservative party. I live and work in a very conservative area, and the only sentiment I can read is the desire for more actual blood, more paralegal cadres, more shootings, "cleansing" the lawless cities. No conversation extends further than fifteen seconds before a luckless leftist-adjacent strawman is strung up as the prime mover of the ills under discussion, whether it be optics standards or the disintegration of local roads. "We never had any [[redacted]] before they made us do DEI" because of course avionics are, like bears, sensitive to melanin or the presence of menses.

Luckily I have a white face, a cop haircut, and encyclopedic knowledge of war and firearms. I am too much of a coward to whisper anything to arouse suspicion regarding my true politics. Good way to get on the pink slip list.

A small but significant part of that is the vehicle/ship rules use the same combat resolution mechanics, same stats.

Combat mechanics are complex but consistent: a hobo streetfight resolves identically to a clash between gods. Unlike levelled systems the complexity is heavily frontloaded.

Having said that, I really like WEG too. The d20 and FFG systems have giant loopholes containing "I WIN" buttons that take my playes all of fifteen minutes to find and spam the hell out of. But FFG has the best module / adventure design, of any Star Wars system, of all time. Their prepublished adventures are a masterclass of the art. I've used them in HERO, just swapping the mechanics and those goofy ass FFG dice.

Fighting hordes with one or two strong heroes, that's a good thing. You need to rout those mobs. Each additional engaged melee enemy makes it easier and easier to hit you, and before long the individually weak goblins are climbing all over you, taking off your armor (so they can shiv you to death), smear you with goblin fluids, among other indignities.

Anyone with high EGO or strong Mental Defense- which is any Big Bad Guy, unless it is a "Big Bad Also Dumb Guy" like a troll or a rancor - will be harder to turn with a Morale roll. BBADGs can also be fun since you have a chance of stealing control from the bads, with a contested Skill roll (Animal Handling, Diplomacy, Tasty Snacks, etc). I always feel bad for the cave troll in FotR, so that's fun.

This sort of thing works more or less the same in DND-based systems, just swap in Will save, and keep in mind the difference of standard deviation between 1d20 and 3d6. An impossible penalty with 3d6 is just another Tuesday with 1d20.

[0] Like most things HERO, follow the rule of doubling. -1 for every halving of the original force.

[1] i.e., Willpower

[2] BODY is what kills you, disables your bits, makes you Bleed. PAIN is equal to BLEED is equal to the hit to Morale roll. Eh, my "stacking BLEED" is a houserule so, take that with $.02, it's not stock. HERO bleed rules are for pansies.

It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older game, and you don't mind reading a whole bunch of text, well, it's got the rep for a reason. Although it's been nigh 30 years I can't bring myself to spoil it. It's a good 'un.

Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually distracted by impossible mechanisms in later FO games.

  clickity clickity click click

Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way.

The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great.

It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end.

[0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here.

[1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"

A year and a few jobs ago I was genuinely up against a wall I could not see breaking through, not if I wanted to ever sleep again. Hundreds of completely bespoke customers. Hideous archaic tooling. Two of us. It was bad times. So I started paying for Claude - desperation move, to try and vibe my way out. Honestly, it's been a little bit like having superpowers.

Not just code generation, which has been great, but gaining knowledge and understanding with incredible velocity - sort of like how RSS felt back in the day, or when Google stopped being worthless in the very end of the 20th C. When Wikipedia started.

So where am I now? Well, I ditched the hell job (I didn't really drink the koolaid of their "Enterprise Solution" anyway), and got a regular day job in my core competency. I guess I do a lot of what is called "vibe coding", all kinds of utilities, what I call my "extracurriculars". A graph view for Asciidoc in VSC to show includes, xrefs, partial includes. Graph view for everything actually - it's surprisingly insightful for PDM and config management. Analysis tools for sensor faults based on Python open source astronomy tools. All sorts of converters and aggregators and cleaners for a devil's piss bucket of enterprise systems. A bazillion new MapTools macros for gaming, making complex RPG systems nearly pushbutton. A little harvest of local LLM systems doing all sorts of things, like my "Reviewinator" for copy edit. I could type the rest of the day and wouldn't come close to the end of the list.

So, pretty amazing. Very interesting systems with what must be some N-dimensional geometry underlying, maybe a signal to an underlying principle of emergence. Who knows?

In the long term, it's going to be Enterprise Software that eats the big losses from these systems. For all sorts of reasons, but mostly because Enterprise is where software goes to die. It's all bespoke to hell, it's all ancient, no one is working there because they want to. So a domain expert, with AI assist and a little know how, is probably going to whip up a superior set of tools in a short enough time to make it really worthwhile. Watch that space: SAP, Siemens, Teamcenter, SalesForce. Watch their consulting revenue.

The "vertex" in "vertex skinning" is really just "a thing with a position that gets moved."

p' = Σ wᵢ · Mᵢ · p

It's just a position. Triangles can come along for the ride downstream, but they're not essential, which is one of the reasons it's so efficient for some stuff. Polygons are the optimal surface - but surfaces are often extraneous.

Take all this a few hefty grains of salt, I'm an amateur in the field. My 3d/CAD work is strictly in support of my enterprise stuff. And making wicked battlemaps for gaming VTTs, natch.

But I will stand by the overarching statement that polygons are in fact an abstraction, and bridging that abstraction with whatever is in splats would be wicked awesome.

We've been leaning away from pure polygons for decades, anyway. Vertex skinning, SDFs, volumetrics, simulation, and a lot more.

The meshes in a From Software game are for exmple hilariously simple, most of the animation is force simulation to make the famous "frizzles" that they like.