Senior Gameplay Engineer @thatgamecompany | Tinertia | Weapon Kit | Candescent Games | Views are my own.
Austin, TX
Joined July 2011
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Vilas retweeted
BlueChip. Built in America.
America made the first electronic computer to win a war.
Now we depend on our greatest adversaries to build the computers that run our economy and defend our nation.
Today, we bring it home.
Vilas retweeted
I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
Vilas retweeted
That’s not how argumentation works.
Each side is supposed to state their views and cite evidence and reasoning in an effort to persuade the other side. That way, each participant benefits from the knowledge shared and can reach a more enlightened conclusion.
Vilas retweeted
This open-source tool generates normal maps for pixel art sprites
It works with both single sprites and animated sprite sheets, turning flat pixel art into assets that can react to dynamic lighting in-game.
You can run it:
> locally from the CLI
> directly in the browser with WASM
That makes it pretty easy to drop into an existing pixel art pipeline without depending on a hosted service.
Small tool, but genuinely useful if you want 2D sprites to have more depth without repainting everything by hand.
Vilas retweeted
Never heard of Billow noise and hybrid is silly because many of these are already hybrids of each other.
If you want to learn real noise functions, read my tutorial please
mini.gmshaders.com/p/gm-shad…
Vilas retweeted
Box2D v3.2 released!
New features include large world support, recording and replay, snapshots, and a dynamic character mover. Performance improvement of 3x across many benchmarks versus v3.1.
Blog: box2d.org/posts/2026/10/box2…
Vilas retweeted
You're a missile that can't slow down and the gaps keep getting smaller
- Steer it to the target as fast as you can
- Fly closer to the walls for more points
- Grapple hook to swing round corners
Game is Dumbfire
Vilas retweeted
Yes 😄guys.
The doors, here is the customary complimentary door video .
2 mechanisms , pick one. Choose something simple since this is supposed to be a rugged low maint vehicle.
Mechanism #3 is optional for the limited run EVs for fun.
Multi fuel, 4 WD with crawler gears, hi & lo range. Heavy duty winch, manually locking diffs. Hubs allow to fit different brakes and tire sizes, fully analog , no fuel injection , no electronics, no ECU. Only vacuum tanks and hydraulics for the actuations - no electric or stepper motors.
Open ball joint knuckle steering , not even rack & pinion. Simple, crude, easy to fix, easy to service. Minimal hydraulics..
Vilas retweeted
being married is funny because you'll be chilling, having a bowl of cereal, and your wife will say
i hate these bowls, don't you?
and you'll shrug becuase you don't care and she'll say
i do, they've bothered me for a while now. we need new bowls.
and you'll shrug again because you have honestly, not once, ever considered the bowls at all
then a few days later there will be all new bowls in the kitchen.
and you'll be eating the same cereal in a different bowl, chilling, and she'll say
i love these new bowls
and you'll shrug again because you still don't care but she's happier and the cereal is still good and you didn't do anything at all
Vilas retweeted
Playing video games was associated with a decreased risk of dementia and better cognitive function and brain structure in a study of ~500k people.
Vilas retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Vilas retweeted
The problem is, to be very clear, that the laws they intend to pass to regulate AI will be written by lobbyists for the biggest AI companies, and they will write laws that kneecap their competitors and put a few big companies in the position of controlling the future.
Vilas retweeted
Pixel Flight Simulator by @0_game_it is now on Pyxel User Examples!
Pyxelユーザー作品集を更新しました。
コード非公開や日本語でも大丈夫です。お気軽にご投稿ください！
Examples 作品集:
kitao.github.io/pyxel-user-e…
Submit 投稿する:
github.com/kitao/pyxel/discu…
#pyxel #python #gamedev
Vilas retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Vilas retweeted
The German startup Magnotherm is pioneering a new type of cooling technology: Instead of compressing a refrigerant gas, as usual, their fridges use metals that heat up in magnetic fields and cool when the field is removed. This can effectively be used to move the heat from one location (eg inside the fridge) to another (outside the fridge).
The idea itself is not new, it goes back to the 19th century, but Magnotherm is the first to make the step to commercial use. Earlier this year, they announced that the German supermarket chain REWE will deploy their new fridges in 10 stores. The company says their system uses 15% less electricity and avoids harmful chemicals. The technology can in principle also be used for air conditioning, but so far no one has developed a prototype.
Website: magnotherm.com/
More info: naturalrefrigerants.com/news…
Image: Magnotherm's magnetic coolant. Credit: Magnotherm.
