I can’t remember. I feel like I’ve seen it on at least one other place though.
darthelmet
joined 2 years ago
One of the doctors going to fight the bad guy in hand to hand combat has the same vibe as the bridge crew in Star Trek always going on away missions because they’re the main characters.
Hey, sometimes they also bring shampoo!
There’s a difference between conspiracy theories and having an analysis of incentives and structures.
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for profit seeking corporations to decide not to invest their money into something they think won’t return as much profit.
As for everything else staying shitty, why would corporations spend money on lobbying and campaign contributions if they didn’t expect it to make them a profit? Obviously those corporations want less taxes, less regulations that might cost them money to comply with, and the more of the economy that is privatized, the more opportunities capitalists have for making more profits.
That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a basic understanding of economics and political economy plus some history.
I think what's interesting about the conflicts that do arise in Star Trek is that while they often mirror issues we have today in some way, it's being grappled with by people and a system that has purposefully turned away from greed and cruelty. They might not always get things right, but it's not because of some special interests making it that way, it's just because even in the future humans are humans and they make mistakes and have blind spots.
For example, I was thinking about that episode of DS9 that dealt with Bashir being genetically modified. Obviously it's some mix of discussions about GMOs, steroids, and one of those imperfect fantasy/sci-fi racism analogies. You'd kind of hope we have stuff like that sorted by the future, but it's kind of understandable why they have this quandary. The reasons for keeping genetically modified people out of star fleet isn't entirely without reason and is clearly not coming from a place of cruelty, but it's also hard to get around the fact that this is still discrimination based on something someone was born with. But nobody really specifically stands to benefit from the status quo. So you just have the matter at hand with no clearly perfect answer getting discussed honestly by well intentioned people.
Section 31 definitely doesn't fit that mold. It's some last vestige of a system that prioritized a self-serving order held up by force. I think to the extent that it has any place in ST, it's something like how it was handled in DS9 where our characters were actively trying to uncover a rogue organization instead of it just kind of being a part of Starfleet like in Discovery.
There’s no lasting compromise with capitalism. Capitalism inherently depends on and leads to a concentration of wealth and power.
Capitalists can and do use that wealth and power to pervert the political system to their advantage, eventually chipping away at those regulations and social services. We saw this happen with the erosion of the gains from the New Deal and Union power over the late 20th century in the US and even in Europe we’ve been seeing austerity and far right parties start to take power and try to do the same.
Political freedom and equality is intrinsically tied to economic freedom and equality. We can’t really build a better society while there are still people with the means and motive to pull us back into servitude.
I’d fund some dream MMO. Those things are bottomless money pits.
Who could have guessed that the rich white South African would turn out to be a white supremacist?
Even if this worked, this seems like over-engineering at it's finest. "Lets create a machine that takes power, maintenance, and proprietary catridges to replace a cheap rubber object people can use with their hands easily." Kind of reminds me of that "smart" juicer.
My parents have the longest, most obnoxious ring tones for texts on their phones.
Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.
That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.
I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.
But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.
Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.
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I’m sure he would have appreciated some AC though.