qurren: Thanks for the reply, that certainly makes sense to me, though I think given the most popular idiocies in the air and their severe distortions on the discourse, it's not a great idea to leave that ambiguous in precisely that way.
It's bizarre that your reply was nearly insta-[dead] and I can't reply to it directly.
1. By "crashing down" I was referring to civilization as we know it, not an economic crash. My views about building wealth aren't about avoiding an economic crash, it's about just being able to have optionality earlier to relocate myself and my family to the least-affected-by-AI part of the world.
My personal view of the modality of failure: I don't think AI will destroy humans, but rather functionally dismantle civilization as we know it; I think we will just increasingly become slaves to the systems they create and the world won't be run in human interests anymore (it already is not run in the bests interest of the non-ultra-wealthy, so it's really just an extension of that: I think the future will just start moving toward s/ultra-wealthy/AI/) and we will increasingly become more like worker ants.
2. I disagree, I think some countries of the world are more likely to value stability of the population than others. I think there are places that are likely to be more safe than others. Also, a notable side effect of current trade wars is that some countries may end up getting left out of a good chunk of the destruction.
Every company that is not OpenAI or Anthropic is sufficiently behind the frontier to feel ethically shielded from the weight of advancing the frontier.
wow. that's really quite backwards. the more money you raise and the more money you want, the bigger the story you have to tell. apparently after 1T you've got to raise the stakes to extinction level event.
And the Hugging Face incident, plus similar problems at AISI and Anthropic, show that alignment is important now.
The original article is immoral as it describes the risks, but doesn't show enough leadership (despite essentially unlimited resources) at preventing them.
But it isn't hyped - it's proven now the AIs need to be "aligned" as they get more capable, whatever words you prefer to use.
There is a lot of demand for AI denial, but nearly everybody who is capable of writing even semi-coherently on the topic recognizes AI denial in general as cope, and has too much moral dignity to propogate their coping denial for personal gain.
I can't recall which, but I'm certain that I've encountered and probably used Codeberg-hosted things, and from that had gathered a vague positive impression of them.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
Given that the actual number of paying users is probably low, it sounds like it would be relatively cheap to disrupt policy for someone with deep pockets.
consumer co ops are broken because you can pay to get in. any bad actor whos rich enough can get thousands of people to join and vote in a corrupt way. and if you make it invite only you defeat the whole point.
imo the best way to fix is with a hybrid model where consumers pay member fees to get discounts but decision making is down to workers, basically how it was before shareholder supremacy.
How is this a failure mode? Sounds like a good idea to me to let the members decide who they want in the club. Just wish this could also be done for national borders.
Codeberg is a community steered project. If participating isn't something you're interested in, it's probably not the right fit for you. There are other Forgejo hosts (you could even be one yourself) where you can be the king of your own castle.
Without specifically looking into it but just going off of Steam releases and headline, I'd assumed Zachtronics closing was Zach Barth leaving the scene, and the company that made Kaizen etc were some of his former colleagues continuing on without him.
But apparently the Kaizen-making company is still Zach Barth?
So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.
Here is something I (Zach) wrote up a while ago in an attempt to explain it:
> Back in 2016, we sold Zachtronics to a company called Alliance, who we worked for as employees and made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward. In 2022 we stopped working for them and started a new studio called Coincidence, which we own and run as a sort of co-op that allows us to work on projects together, or not together, or anything in-between. (By "we" I mean the five of us who made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward; the team was much more dynamic before that, as described in the first few pages of ZACH-LIKE.)
> I still work for Alliance and maintain the Zachtronics games, but we don't own any of that IP, so anything new we make is going to be attached to the new studio and the new name.
(I did spend a year teaching computer science at a public high school, but that overlapped the last year of Zachtronics, rather than being between Zachtronics and Coincidence like it's often reported.)
At Coincidence, we have released two puzzle games so far, Kaizen: A Factory Story and U.V.S. Nirmana, and have more (four?) in the works. I'm hoping that I'll get to work on some less-obviously-in-the-genre games soon, but I haven't git initted anything yet so I guess it's too early to say.
Having played it: yep! It's a solitaire Mankala/Awele game. You use the sowing mechanics to try to clear the board, with chains scoring exponential points.
My favorite is 20th Century Food Court in Last Call BBS. Some of the other games remind me too much of work (I’ve bought all of them including the coincidence card games but I have only beaten this one), whereas this one reminds me of fun times I had making synths in Logic and VCV Rack for fun. Highly recommend!
I always wished they would make a management or simulation game, I think 90% of all programmers play Paradox games or Tycoon games etc. and I know their take on it would be amazing.
As others already have I just wanted to thank you. Spacechem is not only what made me start playing games again but playing with computers altogether after a rough couple of years, and will forever be one of my favourite gaming experiences. So happy to hear you’re still making so -and-aptly-called Zachlikes!
Can you extrapolate a bit? Why is GOG an undesirable platform to be on, especially as you seem to be fine with DRM-free releases elsewhere (which is awesome, btw)
Finally, thank you for SpaceChem! Still great, even after all these years
My understanding is that GOG is not necessarily undesirable, but they are very selective: Unlike Steam or Itch, you have to convince them that it's worth their while to sell your game. And their choices of what (not) to sell are not infrequently baffling. Lots of developers have gotten burned by that, including Zachtronics
I have a hard time believing that GOG rejected a Zachtronics game. They're popular, high quality, and a good match for the GOG audience. An GOG already sells several of them (I own SHENZHEN I/O and Spacechem on GOG).
The rejection of Opus Magnum got a lot of attention at the time, which probably caused GOG to reconsider. But most developers don't get that kind of attention, if a game of theirs is rejected. I've seen multiple developers of games that I like, saying that they've given up on GOG because of the curation
I'm not quite sure what the expectations of semi-privacy are here, but he's talked about it on the TC Discord, in the #development-branch-feedback channel (a search for 'unprofessional' should find it).
I adore your games. Would be curious to know your thoughts about using AI for game development. Personally I find it gross, but I am trying to be open to different views.
It's good at some things (research and programming) and terrible at others (art and game design). In general, I try to look past the tools being used and focus on what is being made.
Surprising to see you endorsing seeing past the tools as a maker of games whose audience simply cares more about the problem being solved than what gets actually made.
Of course I cannot vouch that there aren't people who played games like Shenzhen I/O because they cared about building signs for a fictional corporation.
Zachtronics wrapped up because they all got a bit burned out by the yearly release pace, and Zach tried to become a teacher. He didn’t like it, and when the rest of the team continued making games, he joined up with them and thus Coincidence. Further down the discussion I shared a podcast where he tells the story.
I understand why he might not want to and hope I would have the character to do similarly in his place, but they should really lead with "by Zach Barth" rather than "from the original Zachtronics team", which still sounds great, but tbh at least for me bumped it from "buy and play immediately" to "wishlist".
From other comments in this thread, it seems I am not the only one who misinterpreted that as not including Zach himself
> So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.
It's not clear that this happened here, but I could imagine that someone successful enough not to need the money might literally prefer to have their work evaluated on its own merits and not have the outsized level of attention that being well-known brings. I remember reading in Eric Clapton's autobiography (which might or might not be an accurate retelling of course) that the original plan for Derek and the Dominoes was to name them "Del and the Dominoes" and basically hide the fact that he was the guitarist since he was tired of all of the attention. According to him, "Derek" was a slip of the tongue from someone on stage one night, and the record label eventually decided to try to capitalize on his hype by marketing the fact that he was behind it.
Listening to the podcast linked elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like he’s not at all reached the level of financial independence to indefinitely fund future projects. In fact the only game that went moderately viral (Opus Magnum) is not owned by him at all.
This is really disappointing to me as many of his games are some of my favourite games of all time and I assumed he’d be set for life off them. I guess the target audience is just too small.
I wouldn't be surprised if they rejected it (if it were to happen), Notch is a horrible human being, only coming out as such after he sold his company. Microsoft mostly scrubbed his name from Minecraft besides one mention in the credits, and seem to have distanced themselves from him entirely, including not even inviting him for the game's 10 year anniversary celebration.
Yes, as I recall, he sold Zachtronics to investors sometime after TIS-100 so that he could focus on making the games and have someone else worry about the business.
That is hilarious cope. The US benefits far far relatively more when the global economy is running smoothly than when able to sell oil higher, like some shithole petrostate. Appropriate I suppose.
There is an enormous amount of stuff that is only on archive.today, including stuff that is otherwise gone forever. A mix of stuff that somebody only ever did archive.today on and not archive.org, and stuff that could only be archived on archive.today because archive.org fails on it.
Anything on twitter post-login-wall for one. A million only-semi-paywalled news articles for others. But mainly an unfathomably long tail.
It was extremely distressing when the admin started(?) behaving badly for this reason. That others are starting to react this way to it is understandable. What a stupid tragedy.
You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if what you are worried about is an economic crash from this not turning out
> move to somewhere else away from this mess
You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if you think there is anywhere you could move to run away from what you are worried about
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