So this is what I've been doing for the past year - companypicnic.com , on our first call @pedro_computer referenced Dwarf Fortress and the rest is history
ai models already have functional emotions that causally drive behavior.
but these are "accidents" - emergent, local, undesigned. no persistence, no memory, no personality shaping them.
writers and animators at Disney and Pixar solved this problem decades ago. they knew exactly how to make a character's emotional life feel intentional, coherent, and worth caring about. that craft has never been applied to AI. so we are doing it!
Post-pandemic, I only take jobs working for people who respect Dwarf Fortress as much as I do. Case in point, @tobi
One of the most fun things I get to do is work on things like this 😁
One of the most fun things I get to do is host amazing people in our Shopify internal podcast (called Context).
What do we talk about? Things like this with @waitbutwhy.
"Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child...when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance." - Robert Louis Stevenson: A Gossip on Romance
google.com/books/edition/Ess…
Thin silver lining of the pandemic: You can take UCLA Extension courses from anywhere in the world (NYC for example)... I took this one last quarter and it was excellent. The current instructors are probably almost as good as @froonium was. Check it out! uclaextension.edu/writing-jo…
A classic gem... I try to reread it every couple of years. Preserved and available online forever thanks to Google Books google.com/books/edition/A_P…
vimeo.com/336117214 So good! Reference footage from animator Pei-Hsuan (Emma) Shih for her shots on Into the Spiderverse.
"I ain't out here for me. I'm out here for my kids, I'm out here for your kids, I'm out here for your grandkids."
If you used to live in New York and miss it, I made you a commute simulator so you won't have that problem 365i.emmacoats.com/01/23/
Sat next to a couple at a restaurant in SF where the guy was condescendingly talking tech-bro to the girl the whole time: "sometimes I optimize for your happiness babe but obviously sometimes I have to optimize for my parents" xitter.cf/Bosefina/status/997651…
OH: two SF tech bros at the bar talking about the free market creating happiness and how passion can be manufactured with just enough effort in a marriage #whyileftsf
Emma Coats retweeted
I use to wear “burn out” as a badge of honor until I realized how I had been borrowing from my future for present gains and how I couldn’t be there for others. xitter.cf/jasonshen/status/99713…
Great thread. The balance between "take care of yourself" and "it takes significant effort and dedication to become a high performer" is hard. Burnout is often more about losing a sense of purpose than it is about the actual hours put in. xitter.cf/mipsytipsy/status/9969…

















