The Stochastic Game

One of the few good new pieces of tech that Epic had been working on these last couple years has come out, and they named it “Lore”. It’s a P4 competitor built with gamedev in mind. I’ve been waiting for someone to go there since PlasticSCM’s demise in 2020.

The video by People Make Games about “Jerry’s Map” was quite amazing. I’d love to be as creative and weird as Jerry Gretzinger, and stay that way as I get older. Quite inspiring.

Studios using UE5 need to realize this right now: the problem isn’t that UE6 deprecates Actors/Blueprints in favour of Verse, or even that Verse is ugly af. The problem is that Verse is not designed to make AAA games. It’s designed to make UEFN/Roblox games. Sooo… good luck to Godot, I guess?

It’s funny how Apple pundits are dissing the EU for “making the iPhone less fun” because (checks notes) it doesn’t have the AI bullshit you get in America… all the while not mentioning China which (checks notes) also has regulations in place that prevent the AI bullshit.

Based on what I hear about the Unreal Fest keynote, I think y’all can guess why I was laid off from Epic with a thousand other people a couple months ago: I had been yelling “NOOO FUCK GEN-AI FUCK THE METAVERSE” for more than a year internally 😅

eBay is really weird and inscrutable: it prevents me from sending offers to people watching my items on sale, without telling me why. The documentation simply says it depends on “multiple factors” or whatever. Ugh. Anyway, if you want some TTRPG stuff, I’ve got a few.

Lots of good reasons why banning social media for teens is misguided, but the argument that “teens need online spaces” feels dishonest to me. If kids move away from corporation-managed spaces to niche forums that are self-managed/moderated, that’s a win in my book.

“Carney government is ‘shredding’ environmental rules and ‘misleading’ Canadians: former advisors”: I get that Carney wants to move fast and bolster Canadian industries but hey, funny how it’s always about bolstering the polluting and destructive ones. He’s not even trying.

We’ve made straightforward things like “rewarding business investors based on the other investors their recruit” illegal in most countries. Surely we can also make “non-chronological social media algorithms” illegal too? It would solve so many problems.

I ditched most of Amazon’s stuff a couple years ago, including my Kindle which I replaced with a Kobo. But I have noticed a few months ago that Kobo seems to use more and more Adobe DRM bullshit. Apparently that causes problems for book authors. Piracy and jailbreaking are still the best user-experience.