Imnecomrade

Kinda wish I spent more time with my coworkers and tried to work towards a union, even though I was a contractor. Not sure if I would have been successful because my coworkers were pretty right-wing and anti-union. Perhaps after trucking and after I save for and attend school and become an electrical engineer, I will try to talk to my coworkers more, organize board game nights or help support my coworkers when they need help in their personal lives, hopefully build solidarity and community, and eventually educate them and push them towards unionization.

There were some good tips in this blogpost I hadn't thought of, and it would have probably helped me in the past.

First, I am only meaning to provide my perspective, even if it turns out to be not perfect or 100% accurate to reality, and I am willing to be corrected or to learn from others. I'm not just some first worlder set in their ways.

I think you misunderstood some of the points I made, just as I interpreted freagle's point about AI wastefulness to be in a broader sense than it was. I don't believe AI as it exists now in the global capitalist system will liberate the third world. My guess is the ruling class's use of the AI will probably have a greater impact against the working class's interests than the impact the working class will have to counter AI through its own use. We have no control over AI's existence. It's a reality we have to live with. The only way AI would have an improvement on the working class's lives across the entire planet would be for a socialist system to become dominant across the world and the global capitalist hegemony to be overthrown.

I'm not denying the ruling class's use of AI is a much greater detriment to us than any gains we get from the weakening of the labor aristocracy. However, I believe as those people start losing their jobs, communist parties will need to start reaching out to them, educate them, and bring them to our cause so we can develop the numbers and power to overthrow the ruling class, which I believe is the upmost importance. I honestly don't believe most labor aristocrats, especially in the West, will be radicalized until they become proletarianized and their material conditions greatly worsen.

I was just implying after revolution and when we live in a socialist society, we would use AI for productive means and not for these wasteful projects. Your list above are mostly projects in a capitalist society that serve the ruling class's interests.

The only real potential benefit of AI in a capitalist society, besides potentially using it to make tools, services, and content for workers and communist parties to fight back against the system, is the proletarianization and hopefully radicalization (toward socialism) of labor aristocrats as the deepening contradictions of capitalism lead to more unrest amongst the working class.

Wasteful for sure, but I can see it saving someone a lot of time.

Many degrowth proposals call for some aggregate reduction of energy use or material throughput. The issue with these proposals is that they conflict with the need to give the entire planet public housing, public transit, reliable electricity, modern water-sewage services, etc., which cannot be achieved by "shrinking material throughput". According to modeling from Princeton University (this may be outdated), it suggests that zeroing emissions by 2050 will require 80 to 120 million heat pumps, up to 5 times an increase in electricity transmission capacity, 250 large or 3,800 nuclear reactors, and the development of a new carbon capture and sequestration industry from scratch. Degrowth policies, while not intending to result in ecological austerity, effectively do so through their fiscal commitment to budgetary constraints which inevitably require government cuts.

The reason for the above paragraph is to give an analogy to the controversy of "AI wastefulness". Relying on manual labor for software development could actually lead to more wastefulness long term and a failure to resolve the climate crisis in time. Even though AI requires a lot of power, creating solutions faster (especially in green industries as well as emissions reduced from humans such as commuting to work) could lead to a better and faster impact on reducing emissions.

I like that they used librespeed.org

💯

Sure, if the financial backing comes in the form of a donations without any strings attached. Sponsorships can be a deal with the devil, I know from first hand experience

I was meaning donations, or funding from a socialist state. I guess I forgot financial backing could mean manipulative sponsorships, which obviously would be risk and could damage the project.

I’m also writing my own 3D software renderer in a project of mine, also no libraries (the renderer at least) and written in C99/ASM and single threaded

That's pretty cool! If you have your source code public and care to share, I would like to bookmark it.

I’m curious how they’re avoiding floating points. Too bad they don’t provide source code.

They mentioned they would consider open sourcing the project when it is finished. https://redlib.zaggy.nl/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/vbpk3j/comment/icauijl/?context=3

They do have some parts and related projects open sourced, including a subset of the integer-only software renderer used in the game.

I don’t doubt that there are professional game devs who love the art

I'm guessing all of them loved the art when they first went into the industry, but as with every job, capitalism turns it into a slog, draining all of the passion and creativity, alienating the workers, eventually laying them off regardless of their performance because the corporations want to inflate their quarter earnings with stock buybacks. However, the passion that game devs, especially professional, have for the craft is insane. They unjustly put up with so much abuse and yet many stay to make more games. I do agree the devs that develop open source clones of popular games tend to have more passion for open source philosophy than the craft of video games themselves. If open source games received more financial backing, however, we would probably see more passion and quality in both areas.

I do find joy in small games made by indie solo devs exploring interesting areas as a hobby. King's Crook is one of those games, built in C with no third-party libraries and avoids floating-point numbers, using only integers for triangle rasterization.

Even during the PS2 era, games like Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal had 9 month development cycles, with developers working 60+ hours a week. Many games are built with developers essentially sleeping in the office, ordering junk food, gaining weight, neglecting their families, sleeping 4 hours a day for months (nearly killing themselves), etc. because their passion is heavily exploited. While I miss the era of PS2 when many genres were explored and experimented with and games were more of an art form instead of some generic slop to sell microtranscations, season passes, etc., I passionately want game development to do away with abusive, crunch culture.

Adding to the discussion of multiple commenters' desire for libre game development expressed here, it would be nice if China were to invest in its gaming industry, supporting open source games that can outcompete games made with blood in Amerikkka and the West (and the exploited Global South slave developers especially). To add to my previous comment here, I think China could really take advantage with developing open source games under the open source architecture and operating systems which they have been investing in. I believe it would be a massive soft power win. If they could make more professionally maintained alternatives to popular games like Minecraft, for example, and I think a lot of people would jump ship as they are fed up with Microsoft's and other corporations'/studios' bullshit, though the US pigs would probably ban the games because of tErRoRiSm. It already looks like China's games, film, and animation production are starting to outcompete the West, though it would be nice to see them create and optimize their games like Black Myth Wukong under their sovereign open source tech and let their gaming industry skyrocket like their AI tech industry has due to open source tech and open collaboration across their provinces.

We could use more open-source games. It would be nice to be able to have open-source versions of RimWorld, Victoria 3, Factorio, etc. I know there's open source versions already for each of these games, but they are in super alpha builds (I'm not counting Mindustry as an alternative to Factorio, even if it is a good game). Many open source versions are written in C#, too, or use Unity or Unreal Engine.

I would like to see more games that I can install with a package manager and have extra packages for mods, and games that are written in less Windows focused languages, like C, C++, Rust, Zig, Clojure, etc. Mods for most games are mostly config changes, reskins, new models, etc., and they feel inadequate. I would like to see people be able to fork games and create entirely new experiences, like the GZDoom and other Doom engines for example. Part of the fun of gaming for me is tinkering them, creating servers in containers like a sysadmin, and compiling games with different use flags. Open Source games are fun, but most of them don't scratch the itch like the games I mentioned provide.

Some other things I want to see with games:

• Follow the XDG Base Directory Specification
• Luanti could use more development support, but it would be nice to see other Minecraft alternatives built in languages like Rust. Playing MineClone2 is a very clunky Minecraft experience, and the UI is a little shitty. Also Luanti and Minecraft both don't follow the XDG specification mentioned above and refuse to do so like most developers, which is infuriating.
• Seeing more games start from scratch by developing their own engines (or start without an engine) would be nice. (Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4)
• More Vulkan and Wayland support.
• More terminal games. Kind of wish there was a Dwarf Fortress I could play in emacs, or games that used vim/emacs keybindings, even as far as mimicking programming with binds like 10j, yy, Ctrl+v I, @(letter for macro), g/G, Ctrl+0/$, etc. Sort of a game like Screeps where the game is played by writing code, but also a game where playing the game isn't necessarily writing code but is played using the binds. A top-down roguelike would seem to be like a good example, or a strategy or sandbox game, especially one about automation.

Anyway, the reason I am mentioning all this is because if we could see games start from scratch and support this architecture, it would be a good time to start building games that properly support open source operating systems instead of being slopped together like most Windows games ported to Linux are. Proprietary code in games hold their potential back in chains, and open-source games are made by people that are not well financially supported and make them in their own limited free time.