Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

Never give Nintendo money.

Jiggling TBD.

Blindly copy whatever notes you already have. Letter for letter, typo for typo, doodle for doodle.

Don’t use inline code / code blocks formatting for text. There’s no line breaks and the syntax highlighting is nonsense.

“Oh come on, why the fuck, there’s no possible reason this code should-- wrong variable.”

I have too many comments reading “… how did this ever work?”

They don’t expect to taper off. But they might just be burning money.

Remember: the dot-com bubble didn’t end the internet.

This tech has cool uses, outside of venture-capitalist cult obsession. Mostly porn. I mean, Jesus Christ, so much porn.

But the general idea of image-to-image transformers, based on natural-language descriptions, is here, and it is witchcraft. Generating new images from scratch is a stupid demo gone feral. The real applications will be all-purpose “CGI” as an idiot-proof Photoshop filter. Select tin can on string, type “spaceship,” get decently plausible results for your no-budget sci-fi show. No roto, no modeling, no lighting. The machine makes excellent guesses. And if you disagree, well, run it again. If you want it to be a specific kind of spaceship, either build a little toy or drag a PNG across the screen, and the machine will try to fix the aspects which make that look stupid.

The applications that money-robots want will be what destroys their industry. Animators don’t want to type in “cartoon rabbit walking” and get a finished product the machine spat out - but they’d love to have their drawings tweened. They’re all busy mocking this “framerate upscaling” nonsense, and missing that it means they can put in an on-eights previs and have it come out as smooth or as choppy as they want. And then they can doodle over whichever parts they don’t like, and have a different model turn those sketches into on-model drawings. The ultimate outcome of which can look like any Pixar movie even if your process is entirely 2D. Or… it can look like live action. Starring real actors, living or dead. Or starring literal nobodies, as made-up as any animated character, but as plausible as any person on film.

We’re gonna see a repeat of the webcomic boom… for movies and shows. It simply will not cost one billion dollars to make a whole-ass media franchise. Expect this to completely surprise the lumbering giants who keep trying to get rid of the little people who made up the stories and the characters.

Downvotes on the comment suggest I already have.

I really adore the game-developing parts of Nintendo. I even admire their history of promoting creative randos. But their legal department is a threat to entire concepts on the internet and in general computing, so the whole company can go fuck a rake.

Never give Nintendo money.

OP has an essay due.

Other chip companies abound, they just cannot make x86. That’s been a duopoly for nearly thirty years. VIA was an asterisk on that until they got bought by some Chinese company. Cyrix tried faking their way around it via what we’d now call microcode, and it went poorly.

x86 would become like ARM… which admittedly could be devastating toward RISC-V.

Cram them under AMD and make it not-a-monopoly by ending all x86 patents.

The best part is knowing how, once we figure out what the hell is going on below the level we’re seeing, the explanation’s going to be even fucking weirder than what we’re seeing. If it made sense we’d have got it by now.

Almost certainly. Current hardware is still for ultranerds ready to recompile everything from source each time Youtube updates. The very near future will see cheapo consumer hardware featuring all the fixes those people figured out. Applications will creep upward after that - like any disruptive technology.

But it’s already real enough that the latest Raspberry Pi has two RISC-V cores, just because it can.

Grog wakes up one night to find them trying to steal his weapon, and the twerp can’t even lift the handle off the ground. He picks up the hammer by the head and spins around to dislodge the kid - which works, insofar as the child flies off toward the mountains, holding some kind of sword. Grog wonders where he got that, and goes back to bed.

Half-Life as a live-action film, in continuous first-person.

The game is deliberately cinematic to begin with. You’d cut down a brisk run-through to maybe an hour of set-pieces and combat, then build out the “dialog.” In quotations because I would make Gordon canonically mute. It’d become thematic.

Gordon took the hazard course qualifications that secretly exist to staff the extraterrestial excursion team, but they’re not quite desperate enough to risk having an astronaut who can’t use the radio, so he’s stuck on Earth pushing rocks. Without a helmet, because the excursion team keeps losing equipment, what with getting attacked by aliens. The aliens think the guys in orange suits are a distinct subspecies… which keeps kidnapping their kind.

Vortigaunts in particular would be seen maybe trying communicate with scientists in labcoats (a subspecies marked by their ridiculous ties) only to spot Gordon and freak out. They all hate the POV character on-sight. If they’re on-camera, they’re gonna start waving their hands to cast deadly lightning. They’d even try to communicate with the bug-eyed subspecies in splotchy green outfits, only to get shredded by submachinegun fire. The military wears those dehumanizing masks (and speaks over radio comms you can hear) because all they were told is “secret experiments, actual zombies, existential threat.” They saw one distended human with a jaw for his ribcage and the strength to slap a dude in half, and they didn’t ask any further questions.

This all comes together in Interloper. Gordon sees the biological factory where these creatures are enslaved to manufacture more of themselves. The ones inside know nothing about Earth. They prance up, curious and burbling incoherently, pawing all over Gordon’s bright orange carapace. He sticks a gun in their faces and they consider the object fascinating. But when he puts it away and tries communicating in sign language, they scatter, and a few start waving their hands to zap him. Gordon Freeman was chosen for this event because he is physically incapable of any outcome but one.