I believe graphically both the ST and Amiga were used to their full potential, I just think the games available on them aren’t actually designed well, as in they had access to so much more memory, but for the most part didn’t know how to create a compelling gameplay or story experience with the additional creative freedom those better specs allowed.

As I say there are a few exceptions on both platforms, I think Another World on the Amiga is a good example of a developer using that extra power extremely well to create a truly novel and innovative experience that stands the test of time.

Hunter is definitely trying to be innovative, but the hardware wasn’t ready for a full 3D open world, and personally I don’t think it holds up as a ‘good game’ today.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that within the still existing limitations of that era of hardware, most Amiga and ST devs did not have the design chops or writing ability to create a compelling game within those restrictions that would make it a standout even today. Consoles from around the same period such as the Sega Genesis and SNES have pretty similar hardware restrictions to the Amiga and ST, but still have a fairly beloved library of games due to those seeming to attract more talented designers.

I think the main issue with the Amiga is it was never picked up by businesses much like the PC was, and from what I remember it was more costly to add a hard drive in comparison to other platforms?

The final nail was that Commodore was essentially killed from the inside by the new CEO that gutted the company to enrich himself and the shareholders. Without the R&D to keep up with x86 processors gaining huge leaps in power, the Amiga, at least in the US, quickly lost appeal to gamers. And it likely didn’t appeal to most families who also wanted to use productivity software, where PC was superior for the most part.

In the UK though, the Amiga was quite the success, but, and I think this is partly why I consider it a hot take somewhat, I think almost all UK game developers at the time just weren’t very good designers, save for a few (X-com as an example, which is to this day a masterpiece).

To be honest, I feel the same wasted potential also applies to the ST :/

I’m not sure that entirely explains the reputation Babylon’s first season seems to have online, though.

As an example, TNG is almost entirely episodic and made in the same era, yet it’s generally regarded well. The first season there is also known to be bad, but more so because it’s actually poorly implemented until they discovered what works in season 2, which is still episodic.

The same for DS9, which has a poor season 1 that has to be pushed through as they find their feet. That too remains mostly episodic until the later seasons with the dominion war, yet I haven’t seen the same suggestions for watch guides to skip most of the early seasons to get to the serialized stuff, people usually still consider the good episodic standalones of DS9 to be worth watching, from what I can tell.

There’s something oddly unique about the Babylon 5 community suggesting watch lists to avoid any episodic content from the first season specifically, despite the show starting out on way stronger footing than either DS9 or TNG. At least for me, it gave a perception that the first season is nigh unwatchable dreck that most only tolerate once for the setup it provides, emphasizing to grind through it for the pay off.

But my actual experience with it makes the near universal dislike of it’s season 1 bewildering, especially as they are not entirely episodic in the sense that virtually all of them so far have seemingly contributed toward the bigger arc in some way, even the monster of the week episodes.

If you haven’t tried them in a while, the plant based meats on the market are now astonishingly good. My family genuinely can’t tell the difference between impossible meat and the real thing, and personally I prefer the taste of impossible meat to animal meat, coming from a previously life-long meat eater.

Highly recommend giving it a try, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and it makes giving up red meat especially easy.

There’s also really good imitation steak made of mushroom, I adore the Meati brand ones.

Holy shit, that must be what inspired the food man dummy puzzle in Space Quest 6. I’ve never seen that painting until now yet it was instantly recognizable.

I think the Commodore Amiga’s potential as a gaming platform was never truly taken advantage of despite the massive hardware advancement from the C64, and that save for a handful of exceptions, its game library is mostly poorly designed shovelware that people only go back to for nostalgia.

I’m watching for the first time now, so far on Ep 6, and I’ve read a lot about season 1 being bad, and specifically to use this guide to avoid the bad episodes, but I decided to watch the low rated ones anyway just to see and I actually found that I liked them quite a lot, even the monster of the week soul hunter episode I thought was quite well done.

I can see how some may bounce off the wooden acting of the main character/commander (and the second in command in the pilot who was really bad, but replaced with the other actress who plays the role far better. Though a shame they weren’t able to keep the doctor from the pilot, I thought they did a much better job than the replacement IMO), but overall I’m finding season 1 so far dramatically better than DS9, which I’ve bounced off like 3 or 4 times and never was able to enjoy due to how dull it felt.

B5 in comparison has such a rich 90’s soundtrack and is absolutely dripping with color and well framed shots, it’s a feast for the eyes, like a classic Baen book cover come to life. I also find I enjoy the characters far more than DS9’s.

If you’re in a dry climate, it’s useful to coat the inside of your nose with vaseline to keep it from drying out.

Busses still use oil. Solar energy is still dependent on violent exploitation of the earth. If you choose to go vegan, you’ll likely still need monocultural practices to sustain yourselves.

Busses are quickly becoming EV powered, which when combined with a renewable grid, make them certainly a far better option climate wise. Ideally we would also advocate for solarpunk urbanism, which heavily encourages walkable and bikeable cities combined with electric trains/trams as much as is possible.

Even just monoculture veganism would be a substantial win for the climate (and animal suffering). However there are also non-monoculture ways of farming, as well as urban farming, which shows good promise.

what I’m saying is we’re going to be in the gray no matter what. No right life in the wrong one and all that.

IMHO that’s a thought terminating cliche, a way to continue to use harmful tools without it causing too much cognitive dissonance. Or in other words, it’s something we can choose to tell ourselves so we don’t feel as bad about it without having to make a substantial change in our lifestyles.

However, or so I like to believe, many there do wish to create tools to create a quote unquote better world.Honor those honest people and forget about the control freak of a greedy ceo.

Without meaning to offend, that is a very naive view of how corporations and CEOs operate, as they all ultimately are beholden to profit over all else.

When I use AI, it feels like what you’re describing: I’m trying. Trying to play the hand I’ve been dealt. What else can I do?

…Not use it? Like you and everyone else would’ve had to do just a few years ago before LLMs existed.

Perhaps, yes, we must leave everything behind and opt for some sort of primitivism

Solarpunk is not compatible with primitivsim, nor do we advocate for it (as that would only bring untold suffering and death).

Solarpunk is an attempt to be as logical and realistic at balancing having a habitable and stable climate/biosphere with an appropriate and non-ecologically damaging use of technology to achieve maximal individual and collective freedom and happiness. If you haven’t you may want to read our “What is Solarpunk?” wiki article to have a better idea of what we’re striving for.

I don’t see how AI with its undeniably emancipatory possibility can’t be part of that as well.

For the reasons mentioned before, it is genuinely in direct opposition to building a solarpunk or habitable world.

You don’t need a big team of well-paid engineers anymore to get actually functional shit of the ground anymore and that is frankly exciting!

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

One last note on degrowth:

Being more communal, having human connections, the other things you describe are all good, fostering community is essential to building the world we want, but there is also a hard physical reality that we are extremely close to making the planet’s ecology completely collapse due to our dependence and addiction to fossil fuels, meat, and now the tools that only further empower the very people who ensure those addictions continue until it is too late to reverse on any meaningful human time scale, and at that point all we will have left is our dances as the planet crumbles.

Collectively we can’t just keep taking the easy path because it feels good and doesn’t require us to feel like we’re missing out, otherwise there will be no future for our children to inherit.

It might feel good to see the AI make a somewhat functional app quickly, but it’s important to keep in mind the external cost to have that done quickly. Was it truly worth funding the billionaires that wish to enslave us further? Will that app be worth it 10 years from now if all our lives are made miserable from fascists rising to power with the aid of AI surveillance? When our family members are imprisoned, deported or killed, where healthcare is inaccessible to most, and we all seek ways to numb ourselves as the world burns around us?

We have to keep in focus what we are enabling by taking that easy route, and the suffering we may cause to ourselves and others in the future by not taking a stand while we can.

well of course, but this argument could be extended to the use of just about any technology (ethics of mining, reality of elecitricty etc.) and also most societal structures (opressive, classist, racist, sexist, whatever).

Yes, and part of solarpunk is about trying not to perpetuate those things as much as possible, which collectively makes a difference. That’s why Solarpunk advocates for degrowth (avoiding unnecessary consumption, repairing instead of buying new, gift and library economies), trying to avoid as much electricity and fossil fuel consumption as much as possible (using an public transport or an ebike where viable instead of a car, utilizing solar energy where possible), reducing meat consumption as much as possible to avoid unnecessary animal suffering and climate emissions, and to try to build the world we want to live in within the shell of the old through prefigurative politics.

Not everyone will be able to do those things 100%, but it is absolutely still worthwhile to do what they can to whatever degree is feasible.

Corporate AI use in particular is the easiest of all of those things to avoid using outside of a tech job that may enforce its use. If someone chooses to hand wave the harmful externalities it causes just because it feels convenient, then how are we to address any of the other problems humanity faces, which will generally require bigger lifestyle changes? All of us choosing to use it also sends the others looking at our movement that we are a “Do as I say, not as I do” group, who give lip service to trying to solve things while being unwilling to actually put our actions where I values claim to be.

We are ultimately incredibly unlikely to build the world we want to live in by directly funding the very people who most wish to oppress us and stop our efforts, who would see the world burn to a cinder without blinking an eye.

I’d really recommend checking out some of the links I provided in my first comment to fully grasp the scale of the problem that corporate AI is, and how supporting it by its use is incredibly self defeating.

whats your thoughts on LLM’s in coding

IMHO, using an AI that’s run on corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of the big tech companies that host them (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are owned by fascist CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

There is also the problem of all current LLMs being trained on copyrighted code, and being prone to perfectly reproducing the code, introducing the possibility of unknowingly committing copyright infringement into the code base, which could lead to small open-source developers getting sued down the line.

Lastly, LLMs are extremely prone to hallucinating, which can often result in bugs or vulnerabilities that won’t be caught by a developer that doesn’t intimately understand every aspect of the code, and often results in an unmaintainable code base long-term.

Overall I don’t think LLMs are at all compatible with solarpunk ideals, and appears to contribute negatively towards the very problems solarpunk is trying to solve.

MandaloreGaming is in a similar vein to Civvie and Ross’s Game Dungeon, all great game content makers/reviewers.

Think about the entire culture of the West, do you think anarchism would spread further than a few percent of the population?

Considering how close the US was to a socialist revolution in the 1930’s before FDR tamped that out, yeah I could see it spreading. Most boomers would obviously never go for it, but the younger generations who are the most shafted by capitalism are already becoming quite favorable socialism. They’d just need to be made aware that Anarchism exists and is a viable option.

Side note:

We actually have a Cool Zone Media community on our instance, !coolzonemedia@slrpnk.net :)

Hi @socialistpartyca@slrpnk.net, this video and all of the other videos on this youtube channel are AI generated, which goes against solarpunk ideals (AI use funds fascist AI companies and causes increased environmental destruction).

Because of that, I removed it, but I hope that doesn’t discourage you from finding good non-AI created posts in the future :)

Historically, based on every revolution or attempt at revolution, the end result is worse than the starting point. The most dangerous, violent, charismatic person makes it to the top and they become a dictator.

This is only the case for revolutions with authoritarian marxist-leninists at the helm, which do exactly as you describe without fail.

However, anarchist revolutions which are built upon decentralizing power as much as possible so that there can be no centralized leadership from which dictatorship sprouts, has shown the opposite; that it can result in a long-term egalitarian society where there is no charismatic dictator or vanguard. This was demonstrated most clearly with the Spanish Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, who documented how they organized in a horizontal, egalitarian way.

Rojava in northern Syria and the Chiapa Zapatista movement in Mexico (both inspired by Anarchist political theory) also demonstrate that an egalitarian society can function well for long periods without a decent into dictatorship.

There’s a couple ways to use Lemmy and make it nicer to use, one is curating a well fleshed out subscribed list, the other is using all but blocking every community that doesn’t interest you or has topics you actively dislike, making it just as pleasant as your subscribed view.

Personally I do both. My subscribed view is just things I like and no news communities. My All feed blocks everything I don’t like, let’s me discover new communities, and gives me a dose of news when I want it.

Does it work through this Invidious instance? (it’s a youtube front-end/proxy based in the US, which played for me).

For the majority of people who didn’t yet have a BBS or internet connection (or a friend who would copy the shareware onto a floppy), they also sold a boxed version of the shareware version in stores for a low price, like 5 or 10 bucks I think.

I actually recently blasted through the first 3 chapters of The Telwynium by the same creator, and absolutely loved it (I’d say it was one of the best point’n’clicks I’d ever played, up there with Robin Hood from Sierra, which is the sole departure from them where the puzzles all make sense), so I’ll definitely be picking up the drifter at some point (and the steam release of the Telwynium which will have the 4th chapter).