Okay but *ontologies*… https://t.co/unFglSGEwe— Chris Franklin (@Campster) January 14, 2023

(This article was made possible by the tips from kind folks on ko-fi. If you'd like to see more articles like this from me, consider donating from my ko-fi page. Every $100 adds a new article to the queue: https://ko-fi.com/jeremysignor [https://ko-fi.com/jeremysignor]) It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Having just released the thrilling cliffhanger that was Half-Life 2: Episode 2, was primed to ride to the planned conclusion of the long-running Half-Life story. Episode 2 itself was a take on the Half-Life formula that started to push its boundaries just a little bit, and was the centerpiece of The Orange Box, a collection of games intended to cement Valve’s mastery and dominance of video game development. But something unexpected happened: Portal, a small puzzle game intended to add value to The Orange Box, became the breakout hit of that same collection. This put Valve in an awkward position where they needed to strike while the iron was hot and follow up on Portal’s unexpected success. And while we won’t entirely know what happened behind the scenes as this transition happened, one thing remained clear: Valve used signature tropes and design choices from Half-Life 2 to make Portal 2, merging the two styles and instantly making a probable Episode 3 redundant. Portal 2’s ascendancy to the top of Valve’s game development slate was easy to see even if you never paid attention to games industry prerelease hype, if only because it was coupled by the complete absence of any sign of Episode 3. But even without that absence being felt, Valve and Portal 2 became inextricably tied together in every public facing event Valve attended. E3 was dominated by Portal 2, with an exuberant surprise appearance at Sony’s press conference to announce the game would be coming to PS3 complete with cross-saves. Current Game Awards figurehead Geoff Keighley published a multimedia look behind the end of the development of the game with the omnipresent Portal 2 – The Final Hours. There was no escaping Portal 2. And there was a good reason for that: Portal became not just the biggest hit of The Orange Box unexpectedly, but also a cultural phenomenon, complete with omnipresent memes in an age before the omnipresence of memes. This was where we learned that the cake is a lie, that series antagonist GLaDOS is Still Alive, and a million different ways to think with portals. Meanwhile, the best the collection’s centerpiece could pull off, an optional challenge to transport a ceramic garden gnome cleverly named Gnome Chompsky to be launched into space via rocket at the end of the episode, saw some chatter and meme creation among diehards, but nothing comparable to the cultural shockwaves of Portal’s potent touchstones. So, it’s easy to see why Portal 2 quickly stole Episode 3’s thunder in the public eye, but it didn’t stop there. Playing the finished game of Portal 2 makes it extremely apparent that Valve transplanted its core design philosophies from the Half-Life 2 template into Portal 2. At first blush, the game appears to be the usual sequel material, like the original game but bigger and better. But Portal was remarkably free from the usual Valve paradigms, like Half-Life 2’s penchant to employ what amounted to in-engine cutscenes sporadically placed through the campaign. These all worked the same way, with other characters talking to fill in the lore and advance the plot by telling you where you’re going next, but you can still move around during the talking. You can’t go anywhere or do anything of consequence until the game decides it’s done with the exchange, but at least you can move around and feel like you’re doing something. Portal didn’t do that for the most part. GLaDOS talked to you throughout, but the game never stops you to make you hear what she has to say. The dialogue and the gameplay are largely decoupled without barriers from one preventing you from engaging with the other. Not so in Portal 2, though. The game is built in Half-Life 2’s image when it comes to stopping you from playing the game to listen to the story and dialogue, though to its credit, it doesn’t happen as often as it does in the franchise’s older sibling. The stops along the way are shorter and punchier. But they exist nonetheless, betraying a sort of lack of confidence that the structure of the first Portal could work in a full-sized AAA game. The other big difference that Portal 2 inherited from the Half-Life series is the mere presence of lore and a story that wasn’t the barest of skeletons. In the first Portal game, the narrative was simple: You wake up trapped in a facility, so you need to find a way out. The only bit of true lore that you could glean from the game is that the facility belongs to Aperture Science, a rival corporation to Black Mesa, the lab responsible for kicking off the events of the Half-Life series in the first place. This simple narrative gave the writing the space to breathe and thus take on meme-worthy status. In making Portal 2 a bigger, more expensive experience, Valve fleshed the world around Portal out, creating a story with multiple characters and expansive lore, at least in comparison to the first game. Again, this puts the Portal franchise more in line with the content of what a Half-Life game would have, albeit starting from a less complex place. In taking on the characteristics of Half-Life games, Portal 2 succeeded in becoming bigger and more complex. The game employed an all-star cast of actors, too, like Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons. The game was positioned as a blockbuster and featured all the slick trappings of one. Meanwhile, Half-Life was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, Portal was at the vanguard, but endured by cannibalizing many of the features of Half-Life as a whole. But in doing so, in taking on the bulk of AAA, fleshing out a story, and inserting cutscene walls stopping the action, Portal 2 becomes something else. It’s no longer the compact, breezy experience that made Portal the phenomenon it was. Instead, it became the replacement for Half-Life 2 at a time when its story was still incomplete. Now, people still draw memes from the first game and not so much the second. Meanwhile, people are still asking for a Half-Life 2: Episode 3 that’s never coming. Portal 2 ended up a high-quality, fun game, but one can’t help but feel something was lost in the process on both ends.

GOG Connect, a service that was already barely on life support, has been officially killed off

An exploration of the anti-consumerism music that died the way it lived.

It's known for comedy, but it's even better as horror.

Big in 2023: We speak with Arkane Studios' Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare to dive deep into Redfall, one of the most anticipated Xbox Series X exclusives of the year

Fun #Redfall interview. Thanks, @origamikid. https://t.co/mkDcVJqxH7?— Harvey Smith (@Harvey1966) January 6, 2023

The Jan. 6, 2023 episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.”

The A.I. expert Gary Marcus asks: What if ChatGPT isn’t as intelligent as it seems?

As Gold Machine's study of A Mind Forever Voyaging nears its end, we take a moment to acknowledge the flaws in its political critique.

I don’t get much out of other people’s dreams.

The end of classical computer science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit.

TWO YEARS of IdleOn Development in a single image!- Click pic for full timeline pic.twitter.com/Z54THOdZt4— LavaWorld5 - WORLD 5 OUT (@lavaflame2) December 21, 2022

strongThe long read/strong: For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person

​by. 김뉘연작가, 편집자. 『모눈 지우개』 『부분』 등을 썼다.by. 윤아랑비평을 쓴다. 지은 책으로 『뭔가 배 속에서 부글거리는 기분』이 있다.​본 글은 ...

Author’s Note, 12/4/2022

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0 Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - Fundrise: https://fundrise.com/lex - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil GUEST BIO: Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He's the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford. PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41 SOCIAL: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

I missed that @docsquiddy wrote a piece in November that I missed (which as always I highly recommend reading: https://t.co/pyAtvJLDlm). He covers a lot of ground, but there was one part where he brought up how someone imitated his style and I want to comment on that.— Nic (@NicBaslock) December 9, 2022

Introducing Dramatron, a new tool for writers to co-write theatre and film scripts with a language model. 🎭Dramatron can interactively co-create new stories complete with title, characters, location descriptions and dialogue.Try it yourself now: https://t.co/86zalyXBWQ pic.twitter.com/qWkUH4NoWF— DeepMind (@DeepMind) December 9, 2022

3D Environment Artist Luke Chayo shared the workflow behind the Hotel Diorama project, explained how the project's modular pieces were made, and explained how the environment was lit and rendered in Unreal Engine 5.

Summary The most valuable data in the world is public. Like most public goods, data is grotesquely underfunded. To fix this, we need to start measuring how much data is worth, and make the consumers pay the producers.

The themes and mechanics are still there in places, but nothing has come close to the bleak religious survival horror of From's 2009 masterpiece.

I like how this almost makes a good point - machine learning *does* create black boxes where it’s hard-to-impossible to understand why input A produces output X, and it’s 100% a bad idea to make that a key part of a larger system, without oversight to ensure expected behaviour -— a dog on line (jess) (@homomculus) December 13, 2022

twitter にもあげておこう#ChatGPT で生成したpromptを使用し #Midjourney v4 で生成した画像をBoosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Mergingでデプスを求め #Houdini で立体化。 pic.twitter.com/N6n8dAL9zB— Akira Saito (@a_saito) December 12, 2022

no they can't https://t.co/2UH3fbqrzi— cohost.org/bruno (@NotBrunoAgain) December 13, 2022

God, Callisto Protocol is such a weird game. Some of it is so cool and interesting and hand-crafted, and then other parts feel like no one even played them— Jacob Geller (@yacobg42) December 10, 2022

So, over the years, auteur theory discourse rears its ugly head, and a whole lot of people offer an opinion that makes complete and total…

The animations showcase Paranormal Studio's WIP motion-stabilizing solution.

StackOverflow has temporarily banned users from posting AI-generated responses from ChatGPT, with mods saying the volume of incorrect but plausible-looking replies was just too great for them to deal with. Details here: https://t.co/4U8dqOzGi2— James Vincent (@jjvincent) December 5, 2022

CD Projekt Red's @veezen3d shared the results of an experiment with OpenAI's ChatGPT, showing that the model is capable of generating simple Python scripts for Blender.Details: https://t.co/QONINU2EfH#ChatGPT #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #blender #blender3d #b3d #3dart pic.twitter.com/NqsY33gVtj— 80 LEVEL (@80Level) December 6, 2022