They had been born into this dark millennium, and had known nothing but the hardship, suffering and despair of unending conflict. Yet still they struggled on.
Joined October 2017
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Late Stage Imperium retweeted
BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
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Harry escapes from the suffocating attention, endless questions, and judgmental gazes of the ball to the courtyard only to find Malfoid already there.
She confesses, in a rare moment of honesty, that she hates the ball. That even her "friends" are just looking for a moment of weakness to capitalize on while everyone else is cheering on her downfall.
Harry, understanding the pressure of high expectations, tries to cheer her up by offering a dance. Fully expecting her to snap out of it and mock him as per usual
To his surprise she accepts and they share their first dance in the moonlight courtyard. Away from the expectations and judgment of their classmates, lineage, and the wider wizard world.
Once the music stops and a cheer erupts from inside the hall Malfoid pushes Harry away, claiming that if he tells anyone she will say he begged her and only did it out of pity, before hurrying back inside with a strange expression as she glances backwards before closing the door.
And yes it is AI generated image. I am not an artist. Feel free to do it by hand using this as a framework if you like.
🤖 Made with AI
Late Stage Imperium retweeted
So basically women understand men like Space Marines understand Orks: the “Build Boyz” and the “Destroy Boyz”.
Since age 5 I catalogued 2 kinds of male energy: destroy boys and build boys. I could never stand the destroy boys even though I know the human race needs them "over there" to destroy the enemy and stuff, so I made sure to marry a build boy, and now I have build sons.
God help you as a mother if you are descended from destroy boys and married a destroy boy, you're going to have a very hard time and it's going to be quite unpleasant especially since you can't really employ the destroy boy in his natural environment until 18 in current year.
Happily my 2.75 year old is already out of his destroy era and into his build boy era.
Something I had been thinking about with the Malfoid trend and the @GreeneMan6 article which predates it
It could be the basis for reframing the conflict at the heart of the story.
Salazar had legitimate concerns and the fracture between him and Godric deranged both houses
Maybe if it was called "Muggle Gentrification" it would land harder with broad audiences but Salazar was not wrong to desire the preservation and protection of wizarding culture against a group that had been hunting them.
And it was the rebuke and marginalization that curdled his virtues and turned them inward. Ambition became status quo maintenance and cunning/resourcefulness became cowardly self-preservation. It is a limited and restrained version of what they could be.
And Gryffindor did not fare better. Throwing up their hands at the complexity of ruling and balance they retreated to simplicity. Defeating the evil by sacrificing themselves over and over. It takes bravery, courage, and willingness to take a stand; yes but it is also short sighted and doomed to repeat forever
This is where Harry and Malfoid come in.
They can, through romantic means, eventually heal the fracture and the derangement it caused.
For Harry we know his flaws but Malfoid could teach him the ambition to dream a future for himself beyond battle and sacrifice.
And for Malfoid she could use Harry's bravery and willingness to stand against the world for what is right to set her ambition higher. Not just approval, not just maintenance, but her own fulfillment and love and happiness.
I always saw the houses and school as an examination of virtue. That a complete person needs to balance and embody each to reach maturity. Courage, Ambition, Resourcefulness, Pragmatism, Intelligence, Loyalty, Kindness make a complete person
So this dynamic with Harry x Malfoid is simultaneously a romance, coming of age, and, more subtly, a meditation on balancing virtues against one another.
The most interesting thematic point for Malfoid is being the Terminal Daughter for the Malfoy name
Rather than just a spoiled heir it adds a new dimension to the character.
Someone desperately and impossibly trying to challenge fate and become worthy of being the next heir. The most Malfoy Malfoy to ever Malfoy down to how she performs, what she says, what she believes, etc.
An ambition worthy of a Slytherin but equally as impossible to achieve in its current state.
So you have a boy who has fallen into wealth, fame, and import just by the circumstances surrounding his birth
and a girl who wants all those things but has to struggle (potentially fruitlessly) to keep a hold of them just by the nature of her birth.
And yes that contradicts with the noble vs common lineage bit. A good contradiction helps later on.
And how enraging it must be for Malfoid (from her perspective) to see Harry squander his good fortune, to reject his legacy and import, to callously spurn her offer of alliance, and join those moral busybody Gryffindors.
Mr. Nukem: Compliant Employee Trailer
Wakes in pod apartment
Yellow paint to lead him to work
Detective mode to find ethically sourced soypaste lunch
Hud is brain implant that tracks social credit, toxicity, and helps him "be a better human being"
Therapist tells him he needs to center de-escalation and processing
Taking medicated bubblegum when toxicity spikes
Dialogue trees where every option is corporatese or punished / translated by brain implant
Hold A to acknowledge seeness QTE
Starts stacking up and toxicity spikes
Looks for bathroom while following yellow paint
Glowing golden door
"Founder's Bathroom: Please purchase this content"
Breaks in, toxicity spikes, social credit drops
Goes for gum
Pack is empty
Implant starts to short out and the world peels back they live style with cameras, hidden slogans, and pigs on skywalks outside
Implant cuts out
Looks in mirror, straightens up, light returns to eyes, smirks
"Guess I'm all outta bubblegum"
Smashes camera
Cut to new title
🤖 Made with AI
Instead of work requirements I will make rank requirements for gamer welfare.
We have to beat the koreans and chinese somehow
Checking on my normie friends
The Mamdani strategy of making bold, social media focused promises with zero follow-up by him or the media is wildly effective.
They care not for how or why. Once it is announced it has already happened. And you cannot convince them otherwise.
Late Stage Imperium retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
The Clancy things isn't complicated
It's the same "empathy" things as immigrants, pitbulls, blacks, etc etc.
How badly would I need to be treated / feel to strangle my kids?
Late Stage Imperium retweeted
Here's the thing...
I don't believe you.
I do not believe an American can walk onto a construction site, ask for a job, and get one AND get paid a decent wage. Thats not a thing that happens. Ever. You know why? Because your foremen have already gotten all the cheap labor from Home Depot.
You know why all the construction workers you see are Latino? Because you went and got them all from Home Depot. That's what you did.
That's what you do. Everybody knows it.
Everybody in your industry knows it, we know, the whole world knows it.
You don't advertise in places where Americans can apply for a job, have an interview, negotiate a fair wage for the backbreaking labor you want done, because you've already gotten all your illegal labor that you can pay under the table.
Nobody looks down on these jobs. This is a lie. This is a lie you tell, a strawman argument you use to make people believe Americans won't do these jobs so your industry can continue to rely the exploitative labor it has become addicted to. Americans will do these jobs. But you have to pay them what the labor is worth.
Also, there is no gray area. If you employ exploitative labor, you are a criminal. Period.
Don't think that because you say you build LDS meetinghouses is going to make me go easy on you.
I work in commercial construction. Building LDS ward houses all over the country, to be exact. This is a multifaceted issue stemming, yes, from immigration policy and grey zone hiring practices, but also includes cultural shifts within the citizen population. Of course, some contractors are significantly more shady than others.
My firm employees both Americans, and work permitted aliens. There is no variation in pay rate, and the wages are generally competitive both inside and outside the industry. Even so, the Latinos make up the majority of all our crews, and it isn't even close.
American's are not lazy, but that does not mean they want to do these jobs. Society has looked down on the trades for decades. Entitlement culture, meanwhile, promotes work styles and benefits that are simply not possible on a job site.
Currently there are some 350K commercial construction job openings notion wide. This number hovers around that range year in and year out. If someone want's a construction job, you can literally walk on to an active construction site and ask.
Late Stage Imperium retweeted
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Molestation Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Molestation Nexus
'Platonic co-parenting' on the rise, with special 'dating' apps seeing a surge in users: 'A lot more normal' trib.al/E2OjRYU
I wanted to like Grimgar
it has a lot of elements I do and did like
but the fuckin reverse grip daggers is unbearable
Company announced layoffs and offshoring to the usual suspects
Not me personally but, on principle, I don't want to work here anymore.
Any advice on what I can do / study in the next couple months?
The reason why people don't have an issue with the Amish not assimilating is that they don't try to have it both ways like immigrant groups
They don't use medicare, social security, welfare, and fund their own schools.
