Tim Dawson

arty codey indie dev
Assault Android Cactus / Unpacking

Tim Dawson boosted:
2024-07-07

@lordmortis thankyou! I'm really happy with how the trailer came out, everyone worked really hard on it

with all the wacky LLM stuff lately it might be hard to understand why supposedly serious companies like Google have chosen to ride or die, but like most tech, there's nuance, and compelling arguments each way

cons
- only appears to work
- very expensive to run
- someone's going to figure out how to sue for copyright infringement eventually
- is already poisoning itself and will only get worse

pros
- demented psychopaths give you money when you say you're going to use it to do more layoffs

@lordmortis at some point there's going to be some really big bagholders and I really don't know what happens at that point :S

there's something darkly comedic about Sam Altman/OpenAI pushing ChatGPT to the point that it has become synonomous with large language models and AI in general and is going to poison that well in a number of ways, because that's entirely consistent with their business model of stealing for profit while shitting on the people and things they take from

Tim Dawson boosted:
2024-04-14

Based on player feedback we're testing out new controls. This is aiming using a crosshair. Imagine Harry will have a cool aim animation :-) #HalloweenHarry #IndieGameDev #GameDevelopment #IndieDev #GameDev #GodotEngine #IndieGames #ActionGame #game #PCGaming #gaming

Tim Dawson boosted:
2024-02-29

I know some people will see a rejection of ChatGPT/Midjourney etc as me being scared that "AI will take my job" or think I lack imagination to see the good in it or think I should simply categorise it as another tool.

I could defend each point but it misses the forest for the trees.

Anyone who doesn't sense why this is offensive - who's initial unease with "AI" didn't become a burning lump of anger on learning more - has a take on why humans create that can not be reconciled with my own.

I can make long arguments about why I think models trained on scraped datasets are ultimately a dead end and regressive for the medium, but those aren't my true thoughts, inside I'm just screaming because what these companies want is so nakedly hostile to my values as an artist, as a creator who believes art is humans connecting with one another, that I can't understand why people I thought were my peers are prepared to embrace it.

The thing about AI is I don't feel betrayed by the people making/selling it because they're grifters and are saying anything to make profit. I hate them but their agenda is clear.

I can forgive techheads who think it's neat because they don't properly understand creative works, because it's not their field so they don't recognise how it's being trampled.

The people I feel betrayed by are other creatives, particularly gamedevs, who are still looking at AI and going "but maybe we can use it".

@malwareminigun @mhoye this actually explains a lot

Tim Dawson boosted:
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷larsmb@mastodon.online
2023-11-18

I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

Sam Altman may not always have told the truth and occasionally hallucinated or misappropriated work by others, but it was mostly coherent and plausible and I thought that was all that mattered? 🤷

#openai #samaltman

Last week I got a text message telling me to expect my bookshelf to be delivered last Thursday, then another text saying the delivery would be last Friday between 9am and 5pm (thanks for narrowing that down) and it's currently Monday and the tracker shows it 'in transit' with an expected delivery date of last Friday

@cavalcadence haha not at the moment, somehow “brand” accounts feel weird on mastodon

Tim Dawson boosted:
2023-09-13

Unity announcement: List of why it's bad.

- It's a price increase, nobody like that.
- It's a flat amount per install, meaning it's not tied to the revenue or the price of the game, meaning it some case it might represent a good percentage of the revenue.
- It's per install, meaning reinstalation count, meaning free copy count.
- It also mean free to play games relying on in app purchase are higtly penalized.
- How are they going to track those install ? Can you thrust them to give you the right amount ? How are they going to deal with piracy ?
- It's hard to budget for that kind of tax.
- This will affect game currently in production and about to be released. Those game did not budget for this. Imagine already having deal for gamepass or epic and suddenly out of nowhere you'll earn significantly less for it.
- How can you thrust unity to not screw you over again in the futur. What if they change their price in 6 month?
- Meanwhile the unity editor is not getting better. Feature are inusable and unmaintained, they are major bug and crash that are not getting fixed, even in the LTS. A lot of their new feature are not good (Input.
- They removed Unity Plus. This suck this is the most major plan.
- They basicaly have a monopoly right now. You can't just switch engine. You're stuck if your in the middle of production.
- There's the potential insider trading alegation.
- Unity as a company suck. They made a lot of weird and shity move in the recent year.

(Edit: Typo, and grammar)

@bnut yes but there’s a generous threshold before these charges come into effect (the threshold has already been reached)

considering implementing a "wasting my time with nonsense fee" that I will start imposing arbitrarily on unity

I trust them to understand that I can't explain my methods or even why I feel entitled to collect it but am willing to send them a small bag of poop at no extra cost

@SirTapTap I was just thinking how it's been a rough time having to find a new social media platform now I have to find a new game engine, so yeah, that tracks

this whole unity install fee thing feels like someone kept staring at successful games and wanting (retroactive!?) revshare but was told that it absolutely could not be done so they bullied some engineers into coming up with something stupid and convoluted that will probably also turn out to be non viable while also violating EU data protection laws

@SirTapTap I literally don't know how many Unpacking installs there are, and given we disabled all analytics I sort of expect Unity not to know either

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