The REAL reason you should despise AI


We've learned so much in the past several years, and thought it's a bit vain to say, I believe we have actually learned how to make these complex projects. I won't even say games, because all the core practices we have learned do not even lend themselves specifically to gamedev.

Developing pipelines, learning to calibrate our perceptions against the fallabilities of hubris, sunk cost, and many other things. Whew, I just had an 11 hour dev day for the first time in FOREVER so my brain is mush! Almost decided to put this blog off till tomorrow when our brain is working but i figure, this is important I wanna just put it out there when the thoughts struck me as I don't always remember them.

But now that I am improving and I am learning how to improve workflows and to do so in an intuitive manner, I can see clear as crystal how poorly maintained our tech is.

How fucking embarassing the state of code libraries, documentation, ergonomics of engines, the ambitions of coding teams, the quality of talent retained. 

Every single aspect of the world compounds on itself. When you have quality resources to learn from, you get better workers, when you have better workers, they are more capable and better see the value in the entire pipeline of growing in competency. They know the big beats to teach, they know what needs to be learned, at what stages, and what you should be able to understand yourself. This is a big distinction that a lot of corporate types at the top don't understand, and the concept extends to most other areas of society. It's really easy to "Fake it till you make it" and by "fake it to you make it" i mean, just bullshit your way into a position where you don't have to do anything of value, it's like literally the opposite of making it, you're sucking the blood out of it like a parasite.

But that's the world we live in now. Fakers and liars and backscratchers, all in allegiance to one another holding firm to their promises to one another that no one will be held to any standard, blind eyes will always be turned. Don't wanna be seen as problematic! The ENTIRE MACHINE demands this, so unless you want to be one of those losers without a job, one of those destestable deplorables, you better just stay down there on your knees sucking that corporate knob.

I mean why wouldn't you? Never has there been a more rewarding time to be a boot licker, to be a brown shirt. To insilate the haves from those who would dare work hard and clean up their mess. Because they are the mess.

We're really getting off topic.

I'll say it again for the umpteenth time, but you work an 11 hour day doing the most mind melting shit for 8 years straight as you watch as it's revealed you weren't wrong, you were outcast because you gave a damn and worked hard and were competent. That a slew of backscratching shit heads that were even bigger asshoels than you coopted the entire fuckign world, top to bottom.

WTF were you idiots thinking!? You had all the money, all the power, EVERYTHING! Short of false virtue. You just couldn't let it be.

People will believe what they want to believe. People want to believe that anyone that makes them feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable is a horrible person. And this has snowballed and snowballed to the point of absurdity in this era bullshit.

Anyway, I can already feel as though this is a terrible blog and I'm not getting the pointa cross NEARLY as well as I would have liked.

What I was trying to get at... all the things that the AI can do really well... we should have been doing better. But this sheltered industry dev'd in dark, in these NDA happy workflows where only preordained coders have any hands on the standardizations of things, everything is shit.

Object oriented programming is a great example of this horse shit that's gone on for ages. When I couldn't code, I just took it for granted that all good coders were just superhuman beings with superior intellect, the way they talk about it and the way the public discourse surrounds this, you'd think you would have to spend decades reasing books and practicing things to get the smallest ammount of progress towards making anything.

And you think among all these super smart experts and proffesionals that they would be above basic cognitive dissonances, that they would be above human fallability far more, that they would allow their logical part of their brain to dictate their plans and perceptions like Spok from Star Trek.

BUT OH FUCKIG NO NOTHIGN COULD BE FURTHER FORM THE TRUTH.

I'm actually dumbfounded how fucking aweful code is, how imperfect and unstandardized, and stupid, and archaic, and bureaucratized it is, how little effort goes into trying to find no paradigms and to propogate these to others' workflows.

Instead of coders being these erudite intellectuals you iimagine them to be, doing everything in their power to improve the world of 0's and 1's, it's actually the opposite. Coders are largely just a bunch of smug man children who lack the maturity as a whole to imrpove this scene whatsoever unless it has immediate $$$ or prestige to go along with it.

Coding is a see of haters and rate baiters all stewing in the computer chairs just chomping at the bit waiting to fucking naysay anyone wanting to improve anything. Because deep down, the only thing they have in this miserable existance are archaic and inconsequential bits of knowledge.

The ARE NOT some super geniuses who know some skill far above all others, they are not lightyears ahead of owning this tech and having the credentials to demand massive paychecks. They just happen to know a bunch of bullshit jargon that correlates to some busted old outdated coding paradigm.

I'm going to reiterate, this blog is going absolutely terribly, even by my standards. Bleh.

I guess I'll just haphazardly get to the last point I wanted to get to in a better written blog that was actually interesting to read and not just pedestrian bitching and moaning.

But the main point here, is there are 2 kinds of tech that are now emerging, well one we had already, that's the deterministic tech. The hard code, the machines that work exactly how we know how they work. This is binary tech, this is nearly 100% fully understood with 0 misunderstanding.

This tech cannot bullshit us, it cannot lie to us, it cannot magically work in some phsudo sort of way that we can never recaptcher and improve upon. It is tangible, it exists in the confines of our minds and as such, it is a biproduct of the world we create. If we create better schools, if we have better work cultures, and cultures at large that seek to push us to work harder, to be true to ourselves and others, and to have character, and to not steal for ourselves what is owed to others, then we live in a prosperous world with sustainable momentum, and there are many points within that can increase our productivity moving forward.

Something that bugs me so much, is that AI will always be compared against the best art ever made, the best writign ever made, etc. It will never be compaired against the creations that would have existed had we improved infrastructures in other areas without moving our priorities towards this modern nihilism, participation trophies, and Artificial Intelligence.

So we will always be giving AI far more credit than it is due.

Ok, before I forget, let me give you one example. I used AI one time today because of FUCKIN ENUMS. I FUCKIGN HATE ENUMS. And there is no gahdamn good reason for this, it's just fuckign horrible logic inside and so gahdamn CLUNK!

So I wanted to be able to assign an enum within the proper index based on the name of the bonus scriptable object. Essentially if I have a bonus named "Life" I want the game to automatically assign the enum index "Life" to this. I could write a 5 fucking page document on just way creating the enum list is a horrible PAIN IN THE ASS.

Anyway, long ramble aside, is if the fuckign code wasn't so god damned awful, I wouldn't have needed the AI. And sometimes I use AI to learn new things on rare occasions because the learning content is so shit.

Well guess what? I would much rather learn from real people who are good at teaching than some AI information algorythm.

What REALLY drives me fucking crazy, is because of the low standards for training people, for teaching kids in school, for getting them to do dishes and mow lawns any more, and for them to now grow up and they just get put in a cubicle where the standards are so damn low because holy shit management has even less character than the grunts. And we just live in this stupid world where no one knows how dumb they are because everyone is so dumb.

I pulled a random book off the shelf a year ago, it was some boyscout handbook. AND HOLY SHIT the stuff kids used to learn, and the quality material they were INUNDATED WITH on a day to day basis. Those movies like Merry Poppins, there was a section in the book about seeds and when to plant them, and the sort of extracurricular activiites you had to do to get your badge and it was like, spend 2 summers helping at the nearby greenhouse raising this type of plant. Any holy shit how fucking much we have regressed. All kids do any more is watch ADHD video game streamers on YouTube. They are learning NOTHING that makes them more valuable in the work place, in the home, more valuable to that special someone you hope they meet some day. They sure as shit can't critically think any more, that's been liquidated.

Harmless drones. Harmless backscratching, incompetent, do nothing drones of no great ability, no great ambition. The only way to get a rise out of anyone any more is to try to smack 'em upside the head and try to wake anyone up.

We're all so far gone. I'm including myself in this. I'm pretty worthless, I think I have some saving graces in regards to this project, but I'm a product of the modern age as well. We are all having our brains and attention spans sucked away but this horrible, horrible system, that none of us have any control over.

So this is where we're at. Where the mediocrity of AI is head and shoulders above the embarassing state we have found ouselves in.

It's so fucking sad. And what sucks, is like an old worn out engine, is it's hard to start back up, because the whole of the machine must be working and able to kick back on, the spark plugs gotta fire, the belt's gotta hold, the pistons can't explode, the chambers must be water tight, those lugs and screws have to hold their integrity. Otherwise the whole thing is fuckign useless.

That's where we're at as a society. And no one takes any damned responsibility, because along with all the decay in ability is the decay in maturity, so everyone just fears the petulant dickwads surrounding them that will dare utter any big meanie thoughts.

Anyway, kinda regret this blog, but also just wanted to get some general sentiments about AI and what we have lost along the way that could have been so much more. Oh I almost forgot, the new type of tech coming out that isn't deterministic is a sort of bizzare organic, evolutionary one. Where ability and methods, and ways of doing things will be born out of chaos, something we cannot understand, just 0's and 1's that come out of a dark ether.

And I'm not going to even attempt to write about how dark, and dangerous this is. HAL 9000 doesn't even compaire to the kind of unimaginable, cold, insidious, infinite evil that we may spring into existance because a few old rich cocksuckers wanted to take some shortcuts to the singularity.

We could have cured cancer, could have reached mars, could have pushed ourselves to extend lifespans and provide better humanity to all honestly, and earnestly, the hard way.

But we threw that ALL away for the lazy way. The profit driven way. The flashy way.

It's reprehensible is what it is.

We threw away a future on the USS Enterprise for Event Horizon. And it's too late to go back now. I hope whoever kickstarted this whole domino fall lives long enough to reap their "reward".




















































(Sometimes I link songs that are just so fucking perfect for the blog I put them in, that I hope people think I artfully plan this shit out WAY more than I actually do, truth be told this played while working today and I heard the word "Secret" in it so i was like, THAT'S GOING IN THE NEXT BLOG! I'm retarded XD)

Edit: OH! I didn't blather about the dev at all! Went really well! I always worry i'm going to be covered in cobwebs after an extended break but we just got right back to it. In fact we had to solve a couple nasty bugs from work we did migrating some functionality to work with slimmed down projectile mechanics meant to consolidate systems and make the projectiles behave more like melee attacks, but there were many bugs that were popping up, and though it took some doing, we were able to handle them.

It's hard to describe how much more confident I am these days than I was even 2 years ago. I used to have this constant fear in my mind, at any moment some horrible issues could pop up that could set us back weeks. Some terrible bug, some horrible mistake that would just crush our spirits and suck our will to live and make the game. This was a combination of many issues. Poor planning, inability to wholistically understand the systems working in tandem. Bloated logics and systems and data entry prone to breaking and losing values or having its inputed values made inconsequential and requiring retooling.

Gamedev is a multifaceted endeavor that it impossible to detail the myriad of ways in which you can improve, and those improvements do not even exist in a singular state, they are the processes. You wouldn't know it by looking at a pizza, but the dough balls themselves and the recipe and the temperature and how long it sits, there are MANY considerations that incubate over many factors and dimensions.

In gamedev there are so many more factors outside of just tangible things like your computer rig, your software, your art assets. These are akin to the spatula's and bowls and oven that a chef may use to cook their food. What Truly matters are the ingredients, the ideas, the processes of creation.

Imagine you went to a pizza shop, and behind the counter was an eskimo, they had never seen a fire in their lives. But behind them was the most AMAZING kitchen you had ever seen, 50,000 cyber clay ovens made of solid paltinum, the pizza flippers and pizza cutters were made of solid gold. And they employed a kitchen staff of 200 people. They had the most insane, off the wall menu you'd ever seen, "Gazpacho, curry pizza with sardines and duck liver."

WOW! This is quite the ordeal, this must be like the best pizza ever made!

But you actuallly came for some pepporoni, so you order that not wanting to be TOO adventurous.

"I'm sorry but we don't have pepporoini, we only have duck liver"

Anyway, this analogy has been made a billion times, you can tell where i'm going with the video games to shitty restaurant comparison that can't order the one thing they're tasked with.

It's all a show. It's all synthetic nothings built with the cognitive dissonances of soft handed academic types who have never had to build anything, never tested themselves, always had been affirmed in the head in the clouds arena of post modernism. Too many cooks in the kitchen, a world where Everyone is amazing, everyone is competent, everyone is great... until someone who isn't there to scratch their back finally orders their product.

And in that instant the mirrors come crashing down, and the smoke billows away with the roaring fires.

Society crumbled long ago. We are only now waking to the ashes.

ROFL, I was supposed to talk about the happy accident we had. God damn I just go on these tangents. Ok, so i had this bullet point on my todo "Copy old zone colors" because I liked the look we had many years ago. And in going back int time on my videos I clicked one randomly

And it kinda sucked to watch this. Because this was the very initial implementation I had of waveswim years ago... and if i'm TOTALLY 100% honest... I think it's better than our current system in most every way.

And I think to myself. What the fuck are we doing with our lives?

But I'm not even going to harp on that! Rofl. We have enough shit to keep us up at night, so why worry about it?

Sometimes the only way to learn that simpler is better is to try something more complex.

So after our dev session I jumped back in to tune  up a couple little things and we ended up getting over 9 more hours of dev in and I brought the waveswim back closer in line to this orignial version with much more simplified speed mechanics that just feel so much better.

Screw it, threw together a quick recording of the revamped waveswim. Not sure if even I can tell a difference any more.

Ok, I'm being a little hard on myself, there's  a lot of nuance to the system now. It has restrictive movement that forces loopdy loops as you grow in speed, and you can only reach the really high speeds by using very rapid oscillations which feels pretty cool, and I did some work today to blend these sytsems together and scale it all down into 1 uber waveswim system, scaling down from the 3 before.

 I had the basic osciallation swim, and then i had 2 hyper waveswims, one would set in if you oscillated very rapidly in one direction, and the other was planned to set in if you oscillated rythmically for a sustained duraton.

I'm MUCH happier with this distilled version, but again, it's just going back to that very basic system we had so long ago.

OH WELL! LIVE AND LEARN!

This is my first game after all that I did any gameplay work or code on so I'm really learning the hard way on multiple occasions ever after making endless blog entries on keeping things simple and not bloating mechanics!

I would say this about game development, if you think something MIGHT be a little too complex...

it's not POSSIBLY way too complicated and convoluted... IT IS! TEN FRIGGIN' TIMES OVER!!

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is just as true for heart disease as it is design bloat!

Happy to be back at it, I hope we're back in the groove again, I've still got stage fright, still gotta get this stuff in the game and HOPE that it's not ass. And it was bittersweet to open the project and think, "Damn, this movement sucks, we spend 2 straight months on this crap and its ass!?"

We get really distorted views as a developer, because we learn the system hour after hour, week after week on systems we engage with for many months on end, and we can't tell the difference between a fun gaming experience from a soul crushing bug, to say nothing of the sunk cost. So WAY too often we think our systems are up to quality simply because we put the time in.

Games are like art in this sense. It's not how much time you put into something, it's how rockin' it is, and what defines how rockin' it is, is if the idea was badass in the first place and fits well, and wasn't distorted by burnout, or some poor math function in the wrong place, or poor interactivity with various other systems, and who the hell knows what else.

We're just monkeys at our keyboards, and sometimes we'll write something that's a total banger and exceeds all the other drivel to come off our press, but most the time they're just mundane blathers. But the only way to get those bangers is to think they're all gonna be bangers!

So you just gotta be ready for it. You gotta shoot 50 shots and hope 3 of them make it in. And you gotta have the wisdom to know what those things are. Some of those you will have planned for, some will pop up out of nowhere by chance. I ain't to proud to beg for random chance and have incorporated several happy accidents into the game over all these years!

Whew! Pretty upbeat blog at the end here, that's a good sign. Hopin' to keep the dev rollin', I don't wanna get too optimistic or build myself up too much because then the expectations start to build, and then the pressure, then the expectations and then the bracing for the let downs.

So no thoughts, no big dreams for tomorrow. Just looking forward to quality work, one day at a time, and looking forward to what all these little additions each day will bring!

Get SeaCrit

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