@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.

The more generic and baby proofed the games became the more the player base dwindled away. What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to think about why it worked back then instead of just dismissing the only time the medium was actually successful at retaining a large player base because it hurt the feelings of a few bad actors who just want to stir up shit and make drama.

Text-based games are dying because gaming mediums are changing. People who want their dopamine fix have tens of thousands of choices, very few of which need telnet to access. This is no longer the Wild Wild Web 1.0 of unbridled creativity spawned by techological limitations.

Young people getting started go to Discord because that’s where all the RP is now. Thousands upon thousands of servers joinable at a click. Infinite accessibility. MUSHing is kept alive because of a dedicated and committed group and the average age of people in that group is rapidly ticking upwards.

It’s pretty clear now you’re arguing in bad faith. Everyone has their personal preferences, but I don’t see anyone else in this thread so virulently lambasting others for having preferences different from their own.

@Clarion said in AI Megathread:

Maybe in a few years it’ll be a 100% technically viable option and turn back into an ethical question

The reliability of AI when it comes to cutting code (and to a lesser extent, just having accurate information) is coming more and more into question because the data the AI is training itself on is getting shittier and shittier.

Note this loop:

1. Vibe coded app hits Github with issues
2. AI learns from vibe coded app
3. Issues are seen as standard practice and implemented
4. More issues arise because AI code isn’t perfect
5. Go to Step 1

I’ve been watching this continual enshittification take place as my company is forced to use AI (someone very successfully marketed to my intelligence-challenged CEO) and I’m getting more and more PRs across my desk that are full of slop. The decrease in the human element and the consistent marketing of “AI is gonna do it for you don’t even worry about it” is causing entropic damage to the AI’s ability to actually create something worth a damn.

Six months ago, it could spit out a CloudFormation template that was mostly passable, with a couple of fixes, and now it doesn’t even understand a WAF rule statement. It used to be possible to use ChatGPT for boilerplate BASH code but now it can’t even do that.

Can’t even use Google anymore, because the first five pages of results are AI articles that tell me less than nothing. Like, search engines give me results that are actively detrimental to what I’m trying to do.

For someone who keeps getting told AI is going to make my job easier, boy is it making it a lot harder.

I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.

tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I miss RPing. I’ve filled my hours with other things, but I miss logging on and writing stories with people. I also miss the daily chatting with people I use to chat with about random stuff.

However, the idea of making a new character makes me feel like I don’t have the mental energy. Then I’m not sure how well my RP will be after the ‘break’ I’ve been on.

Anyways, in conclusion – if we’ve RPed at all, you’ve been on my mind and you rock - so thank you for writing stories with me.

I don’t post here very often, if ever, I’m mainly content to just lurk and read and keep up to date.

But this hit me like a brick.

I’ve got no game to play on right now and haven’t for over a year. Part of it is because I’m picky, another part is trust issues, and a third is a general lack of time. But every so often, at least twice a week, I think back and I miss logging on to a grid, seeing the familiar faces, and getting stuck into a bit of chaos.

I’m despondent that the last game that I invested a lot of time in went up in a sea of toxic flames, and I’m saddened by the lack of anything equivalent out there that’s similar in systems and size. I miss the people I don’t talk to anymore, and I miss playing in a codebase I understand.

I would love to find a game out there that fits my specific niche, but at this point I’d have to loosen my stifling standards and try something new.

I think I’ve been sitting on this for a long while, and I needed to let it out.

@RedRocket

No.

What is irritating me here, now, and far more than it should be, is the endless repetition of the burden of work upon other people. You are seeing something you do not like, and you are insisting that others must try it your way.

Do not do this.

Your preferences are unique just like everyone else. It is not your place to say that they are wrong (unless it’s illegal or really gross, we have other threads for that). If others like PvE games, they do not deserve to be lumped into a category of play-it-safe whingers. They are doing what they like, same as you.

If you are seeing the same mistakes made time and time again, the onus is on you to fix them to your satisfaction if it is within your power. Correcting the catastrophic freefall of the world’s economy is a bit out of our reach but learning how to code Penn or spinning up an Ares game is very much not insurmountable. So stop listening to us, and yourself, getting upset on the internet. Be bold, try new things. Innovate!

If you don’t see it, make it. That is the essence of creativity.

Finally, half of those analogies fell flat on me because I’m not American. I know nothing about yank politics or weird handegg besides that they exist and people are very noisy about them. I will not see things your way, and that is not something you can always change.

We recently went away on a trip for an extended long weekend with some close family friends of ours.

For four days, myself, my wife, and my kids (!) were used and abused for free daycare and hospitality by these “friends” that were more interested in TikTok and yelling at each other than the basic responsibilities of parenting. They contributed nothing to the holiday whilst actively-if-ignorantly sabotaging any activity we tried to do as a group, even something as simple as making dinner.

They didn’t exchange a word with their eldest son (who’s four) beyond telling him off for misbehaving when he’s clearly acting out for any sort of attention, and happily ignored their youngest (who’s not even one) as he pulled small coffee tables on himself, fell half-way out of his high chair, or climbed half-way up the stairs with no supervision. I was told later by my wife that I’d saved each of their kids from some form of serious injury at least once, something which didn’t occur to me at all during the trip.

One of those four days, and the one that showcased their worst behaviour, was my birthday.

This is… I mean, this is simple shit. Keep an eye on your kids, don’t shut them out or ignore them, maybe think beyond your immediate gratification. I get it! I get that it’s hard! I get that parenting takes everything out of you! I’ve been there, I still am there! But at one point late on my birthday when I was carting their baby down from the stairs for the fourth time that hour I’d had enough and I was one hair away from just saying get off your fucking phone.

There is at least one positive from all this though. It’s completely dismissed all the worries I have of being an inadequate dad. For now. It’ll be back lol.

Suffice it to say there’s agreement between my wife and I that we’re terminating this near-decade of friendship immediately. My heart goes out to their kids, but I’m ashamed to see this from people I once called friends.

@mietze First off, thank you for responding like this. I appreciate a differing opinion because I have a hard time assessing a situation from beyond my own viewpoint.

These are the friends where we’ve gone against our gut, given it another five goes, and been optimistic about the future. This, however, is the first time we’ve spent an extended period with them and their kids and it has been very telling.

There were a lot of things I didn’t get into in the last post, it would have been too much and it would have been a wall of text that’s just whinging. There will be some more details below.

@mietze said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

But yeah, there are a handful of folks where I have been, “You know, I enjoy doing X Y, or Z with you but I think we should do it without the kids,” too.

This is perhaps the core of the whole thing. Sometimes it is better to do things without the kids, but when the kids are there, it is unfair/dangerous to act like they are not. Approximately 90% of the holiday, the mother of those children was interrogating my wife about something or other while the father was on TikTok watching memes. This happened at the holiday house, at kid-friendly events, when we were out to eat, etc etc. It was happening while their baby was hanging out of a high chair held in only by their neck. It was happening in a car park while their oldest kid was walking into traffic. These are the aforementioned “saved from serious harm” incidents that I remember.

Part of my issue is that I consider parenting a 24/7 task, so I cannot turn off my instincts. It doesn’t help my own wellbeing much, but it does mean I’m aware of what the kids are up to even if I’m not actively watching them. To have children around who are visibly not having their emotional, physical, or safety needs met triggers extreme caution in me.

The number of times I turned and found myself next to their infant with them nowhere nearby was approaching double digits. One of those times, they were fifteen metres away arguing over a frozen drink they were going to buy for themselves.

Finally, I will never forgive a parent that scoffs and walks away when their child asks for a kiss and cuddle good-night.

I would never consider them aunty or uncle to my children. After this trip I wouldn’t allow them within fifty metres of my children without me being there.

@Pavel

@RedRocket why is it on others to make the game you want? There’s enough tools and know-how around for you to develop one to your requirements.

@Testament said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Coming back to post that Ozzy died today.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1947720771889205473

>plays the biggest farewell gig of all time
>dies

What a way to go.

@Ashkuri @Trashcan sometimes I really like being proven wrong, but this is not one of those days. Why ya gotta take me out of my imaginary fantasy world where AI is a fad that will disappear by itself?

JFC I thought it was still writing absolute slop but now it takes only ten minutes to train the damn thing to write passable poses? I’m sitting here very annoyed lol.

I don’t think using an AI to generate creative writing is worth the trade-off of contributing to AI’s eradication of jobs, the environment, creativity, reliable and accurate information etc.

@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

So as most people with young dogs do, I have to deal with my pup going absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolting out the back to yip and growl ferociously at a bird sitting at the fence or a particularly aggressive wave of a distant tree branch or some other random nonsense. This is normal, and is usually ignored, because it’s rare enough to not bother the neighbours (most of whom also have yip/growl dogs) and it’s usually something harmless.

Except two-to-three weeks ago it was because a kitten was in the backyard and could not get back out.

My dog, overly energetic pup that she is, would love this little thing to death. Emphasis on “to death”, so I definitely couldn’t ignore what was going on. Not that I would have, that’d be rude. Also dangerous. Somehow got the dog back inside and spent an hour cornering this tiny little adorable thing and getting it into our old cat carrier. I love cats and kittens are objectively the cutest things on the planet so I consider it time well spent.

Whilst nursing my brand new battle scars (I think I look rakish but my wife says I’m whinging over a tiny dot) I heard a yell from over the fence. It’s the neighbour’s cat. Alright, great, not the same cat I know they have but at least now I know where to take this adorable and terrified little bundle of fluff and claws.

So I hoof the cat through the house, ignore the extremely happy and noisy dog, let the kids take a look through the carrier window (not too close, there are rules), and take the cat back next door. This is the part where I become vexed.

The situation with this kitten is as follows:

• Her mother, next-door’s cat we already knew (and always comes over whenever my wife is out the front), is not a desexed male but an un-desexed female. This was a complete mystery to us and the neighbours until it suddenly ejected three kittens in their laundry.
• All four cats are allowed total unrestricted/unobserved free roam. Outside. Where there is bushland across the road. Where there are snakes. And spiders. And kangaroos. I cannot overstate the number of snakes over there.
• The kittens are seven months old.
• The kittens are not desexed.
• The mother cat is still not desexed.
• Existence of kittens = At least one roaming undesexed male.

This is how colonies start. This is how we wind up with feral cat problems and threats to native wildlife. The whole reason there is bushland where I live is because an endangered species of frog lives there. The irresponsibility of it drives me completely up the wall, and the apathy from the neighbours (who are otherwise great!) irks me even more.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, when my pup goes absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolts out the back to yip and growl ferociously, I now have to check every single time to make sure it isn’t a free-roaming kitten.

EDIT: I got to listen to cat-in-heat yowling for a few hours last week, so more kittens on the way soon I suppose.

I work in fintech. We are involved with some big cranky banks. The current AI push driven by our CEO is several GDPR breaches waiting to happen and my security guy is sitting there pulling his… actually he has no hair so I suppose he’s pulling his beard out! I’m right there with him, both on the frustration and lack of hair.

Devs, infra, solution design et al, we don’t get paid to write lines of code, we get paid to write the right lines of code. That’s why we have PRs and reviewing them is where all the productivity maybe-gained is being absolutely-lost.

I’m not even on the dev teams, I’m in infra, and even I’m copping it from product people trying to push code to my repos now. UGH.

Here’s the “Fighting against AI in SRE” update for the past week.

• Experienced developer raised a PR for our IaC that was full of AI slop, which he only admitted to when pressed, and expected it waved through.
• Stumbled across Claude (free version) configuration in a very proprietary repo.
• C-level keeps setting up meetings every two weeks asking how we get AI in our product, unsatisfied with “it breaches GDPR so we don’t” as an answer.
• Got sent this painful little article which caused war flashbacks to my desktop support days: https://thenewstack.io/vibe-coding-the-shadow-it-problem-no-one-saw-coming/

I reckon two to three characters is good, even if three is pushing it. Five is right out. Similar reasons to @Juniper but I err on allowing people to have a bit of flexibility with character ideas. I’ve seen games where twenty-five connections were all the same person, and artificial WHO inflation grates on me.

I’m also big on alt transparency, to the point where it’s not only a rule, but it’s code-enforced on games I build (but not run, because none of them ever launch because I have scope creep issues lol). Alts get an entry in everyone’s +finger that cannot be hidden. I’ve seen people attempt to abuse alt obfuscation too many times to think anything other than “this is public for everyone else’s sake”.

EDIT: The above goes for staff as well.

Probably worth forking this discussion into its own thread as well.

Oh man.

When I get a cold it lasts for like, four days.

Except the cough. That sticks around for a month.

Two weeks in now and auuuuuuggghhhhh.

@Popes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

In other news, anyone got an AoA DB dump, I want to make a revenge game.

Do not do this.

Not just for your mental health (some things are best left behind), but because the codebase is an absolute mess at the best of times. What remains of the good Yeti-code is bridged by unneeded hacks, badly implemented FOTM, and a #1 that had the VISUAL flag set for a number of years.

Okay so maybe it is just for your mental health.

Notepad doesn’t need Copilot.

With the amount of time investment needed to get AIs these days to do absolutely anything right (see the other thread where I said AI is getting dumber), by the time you carefully cultivate an LLM to write a pose that actually makes sense within the context of the scene, before even making it fit your writing style, you might as well have just written it out yourself.

It’s one of those traps where it’s doing more work for a worse result because it’s been advertised as the opposite.

Couple things today.

Firstly, to everyone I RPed with before getting on the ADHD meds (which is everyone I’ve ever RPed with), holy crap I am sorry you had to deal with someone so horrifically erratic and scatterbrained. I’m currently on the fifth and thank god final day of my psychiatrist-advised no-medication break so the meds don’t lose efficacy and it’s absolute torture for me, the wife, the kids, the wife, the dog, and especially me, and definitely the wife. I understand now why the psychologist who did my initial assessment said “if you weren’t a genius, you’d be completely crippled”. I thought he was joking!

Secondly, perhaps more pressing because the above nonsense ends tomorrow, the cat situation.

You know the one.

This is the mother of next door’s litter of cats and has always loved my family. I found her sitting in the regional park across the road from my house. She’s always been very friendly and came hopping over the road when I made a single pspsps. We had lots of head and chin rubs, plenty of belly showing, and we even played with a twig in the grass. She’s a wonderful and affectionate little cat.

Once again:

• Unsure if desexed/registered/microchipped. Gonna assume finally desexed because she’s not pregnant.
• No collar (illegal in my local council).
• Roaming in a national park (extremely fucking illegal in my local council).

This happened at 11:30PM.

11:30PM.

Unfortunately, limited by a keyboard as I am, I can’t unleash my frothing annoyance appropriately at what I’ve dealt with. It’s the middle of the night and this friendly little girl is at the mercy of snakes, spiders, kangaroos, emus, and especially snakes all alone. Next door’s lights were on so maybe they took her back inside later I don’t fucking know!

I cannot stress enough how many dangerous snakes we get here. It’s so bad that last time I played Pokemon GO it kept spawning Ekans and I’m like “this tracks”.

I’m starting to think this is no longer a question of legality. Seeing a roaming cat at 11:30PM with at least two laws broken, I definitely have moral grounds to catch her (and maybe her kids) and maybe I’ve got legal grounds as well. At what point is it animal neglect? I don’t know but emotion keeps winning out over logic and I’m going crazy every time I see this colony-in-the-making.