Asking for a historical example is not inciting violence, telling people to start shooting and put their money where their mouth is, is inciting violence, even if you’re being sarcastic.

I wonder what you would consider as not “all talk”? Someone posting evidence? Gee, I wonder why people don’t do that. I wonder if that’s exactly what people engaging in direct action should never do.

I wonder how I can tell the difference between what you’re doing now and how a fed would talk.

You want receipts?

And please, keep giving me your one downvote, it’s not a sad & pathetic attempt to assert yourself that’s transparent to anyone who happens to read this, not at all.

And it’s you, not the person you’re accusing.

There’s only one person here who’s actually telling other people to get violent.

This is an online forum. It’s words. Your idea that the people you’re talking to are all talk is unfalsifiable. If anyone did post on here about pulling a trigger you could attack them for being all talk for exactly that same reason.

On this forum, you are also all talk. There is literally nothing else you can do on here.

But go off, everybody around you is all talk, all the time. That certainly isn’t a feature of the place you chose to express your vapid rants.

People who are organising on the ground are under no obligation to keep you in the loop by posting about it publicly, especially given you clearly aren’t interested in helping anyway.

My guess is your accusations are all a projection of your own feelings of powerlessness. I mean there’s not going to be another election for about 4 more years, and your only method of change is useless until then.

Gee, I wonder if that’s by design?

I agree broadly with the idea that the state’s legitimacy relies on the appearance that they wield their violence justly, but I think you’re giving the state too much credit when you frame it as a fair and considered exchange of power.

The state has had all of us under its purview since birth, it has pumped us full of pro-hierarchy, anti-autonomy, anti-social propaganda and it wields its violence more to prevent insurgency than it does to protect us.

There is no “social contract”, nothing that I ever signed anyway, and even if there were, contract law invalidates any contract signed under duress. The concept of the social contract is just yet more hierarchical propaganda. It’s a vague, handwavey vibe to obscure the fact that we really aren’t given a meaningful option to leave.

The state relies on not just the appearance of legitimacy, but the appearance of absolute power. Both are illusions, and can be opposed by organised people directly building mutual aid on the ground. The more we meet one another’s needs for security the less we need the state and the more people can see it for the charade that it is.

The radical flank effect:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac110/6633666?login=false

Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.

The argument could be made that because the image generator is essentially a regurgitator with no artistic interpretation, there is no transformative artistic value in it. It’s like applying a filter with extra steps.

Also the generators charge for access, so they are profiting off of the IP. That’s quite different to making something for personal use or releasing it for free.

Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.

And I’ll keep saying this: you can’t teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.

Fidelity is impossible to automate.

Yeah, I think we more or less agree, and I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game or even a bad story, just that there’s not a lot I need closure on. I think the only thing that could be done to “ruin” it would be to pile on a bunch of unsatisfying answers to the open questions about the world. I’d definitely play HL3 just to experience more of the world, I just don’t care that much about where the story goes and I don’t think that’s ever been the main draw.

It would be nice to get some explanations of the world that would extend it and allow people to tell more interesting stories within it, but I honestly doubt that those answers exist. It really feels like they’re kind of just riffing and they don’t have a bigger vision for where it all goes, if I had to guess.

I’m working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I’m a little apprehensive about all the friction they’re likely to have.

I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying “here is how this concept actually works”, or even “this is who this person is”.

We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets.

Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then… what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean?

I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it’s unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn’t make good science fiction.

I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it’s very limited.

Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it’s always been pretty thin on the ground, right?

What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there’s the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge.

The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one.

Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there’s some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they’re on our side. There’s a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us.

The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn’t tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what’s really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what’s really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond “world in peril” or “friend in peril”, which is pretty bog standard stuff.

Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad’s stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it’s always been so vague because they’re so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.

That’s all you need, that’s what they used to make the up goer five.

We need to go deeper.

Okay, this is a deep cut, literally, but that’s what a salt mine looks like.

Welcome!

If anyone thought Trump’s party was the party of “the little guys” at any point in time now or before the inauguration, they shouldn’t be trusted with a pair of blunt scissors, much less a key piece of IT infrastructure.

And if you’re gullible enough to think that’s a reasonable defence, I’d put you in that category too. I’m not really interested in anything else you have to say, that was just a disqualifyingly vapid argument you just made.

Bye.

He literally said that they are now the party of the little guys. That’s what “the tables have turned” means. That says a lot about how he feels about Trump, and a lot about how much you can trust his judgement on anything.