iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charismatic Contrarians are how revolutions start. NPCs do not have access to their actual charisma stat, and may overestimate and end up in the gulag.

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Oh this gets even better. Remembering where you learned expectation tags gives a theory of mind: "Oh she's from the North Hills. I expect she thinks fish are tasty." I'm not (yet) sure what to use that for, but it's there.

Then if baby dwarves have a good time with baby elves, they instead learn to distrust their racist boomer dwarf parents. This feels amazing and I want to see it play out. #emergentsim

There's maybe an escape hatch: Remember the tags associated with where your weights came from. If too many of your own interactions contradict the weights from a source, discard (or even invert) the weights from those tags, and decrease trust from entities with those tags.

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Conversational interactions between NPCs cause some of the tags to exchange and propagate, weighted by charisma and trust. Children have inherent trust of adults. You see where this is going.

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Basically, there are tags for every Entity: Sentient, Humanoid, Dwarf, etc. There are tags for expectations: Tasty, Scary, Generous, etc. An interaction causes a +/- to some of those expectation tags. NPCs remember tallies keyed by { entity_tags ∪ entity_ids } × { expectation_tags }.

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Designing an NPC reputation/sentiment system, and you realize you just accidentally reinvented racism from first principles. If Elves and Dwarves end up locked in a cycle of generational distrust as a purely emergent property of the sim, that's cool, right? Right? 🤦🏻🤦🏼🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏿

Red Blob Games @redblobgames.com · 28/07/2026

Reposted by Andrew Meggs

I've been trying to write this page since … 2015! Each time I try, get frustrated, quit, start over. But this time I think I might have gotten the page to a good state … www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/...

redblobgames.com

Red Blob Games: Improving Heuristics

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 28/07/2026

Slowly accepting that my final form is going to look a lot like “But we have Cyber Rick Rubin at home...” so I figure I might as well read his damn book.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 23/07/2026

FB is for the olds. In this case... the 500-year-olds.

Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 23/07/2026

A lighting environment like, on the walk between the main #SIGGRAPH Hall and the @khronos.org breakouts, is really just one giant nerd-snipe.

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Reposted by Andrew Meggs

Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Sick of Unreal Engine in everything. Let a couple of people dick around with RE Engine. Let people muck around with ID Tech 8. I wanna see what people make outta the beautiful, stapled together Havok shit FromSoft uses.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 14/07/2026

And if you want your gameplay to FEEL truly unique, don't write your own graphics engine. Write your own physics and character controller! 😈 Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West play completely different because of the Havok→Jolt change.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 14/07/2026

I don't hear that assumption at all. Embracing the unique friction in a different engine sounds like the whole point! Your game will be shaped in different and unexpected ways by the limitations of the tools and medium, instead of feeling like yet another Unreal/Unity project.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 07/07/2026

If you make software at all, and you can't think of any further role for those people in your organization, there was a very fundamental failure of imagination and vision.

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Reposted by Andrew Meggs

Bertine van Hövell 🛝 Gamescom @baroness.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

All layoffs are a waste of money and lives. But none are so shortsighted as laying off ID engineers. Their engine is the only high fidelity engine performing well on lower end hardware. ...you know, the only affordable kind of hardware in the next few years

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Reposted by Andrew Meggs

Scam Ghouldin @gotitatguineys.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

The best edit I’ve seen in weeks, you absolutely have to turn the sound on for this one.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 07/07/2026

I'm trying to process why yesterday's Xbox layoffs feel so apocalyptic and depressing. I've been in multiple studio closures and seen many friends experience the same. The January layoffs at Meta RL were similar-size and hit much nearer. But this one feels so much more hopeless.

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Reposted by Andrew Meggs

The key difference between almost all human art and code is that almost all other art carries it's payload in subjective subtext, and in code the subtext is externalized as objective machine behavior.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 07/07/2026

So many people. So many things I had worked on alongside them. So much talent. So much more left to build. Like tears in the rain.

static.klipy.com

Not Like This

Alt: Not Like This

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Reposted by Andrew Meggs

jason grinblat @jfg.land · 03/07/2026

I'm an archeologist. My career is in ruins. 🤣😜 It's because funding has necrotized

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/06/2026

My dudes, you're doing it entirely wrong.

ceej @ceej.online · 27/06/2026

Reposted by Andrew Meggs

GUIDE: Welcome to the Great American State Fair! TOURIST: Incredible! And which state are we in right now? GUIDE: (violently shaking their head) Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 27/06/2026

Shameless plug for all the places my wife's talking at #SIGGRAPH. (I'll also be talking, but only at the hotel bar and only about things better left unsaid.)

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/06/2026

Stably, reproducibly, and quickly (re-)generate arbitrary terrain subsections, with on-demand random access.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/06/2026

Very deep dive on Blackwell architecture and performance tuning. Seriously go read it. Even if you exclusively do non-AI graphics, go read Part 1. mlc.ai/modern-gpu-p...

mlc.ai

Modern GPU Programming For MLSys — Modern GPU Programming For MLSys

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/06/2026

The trouble with sanding green paint in a room with white trim is that during cleanup it's really hard to tell what's dusty and what's Cornell Box. #TheGraphicsAreGreatIRL

Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 18/06/2026

Beyond the spacing: Consider making "of the" bolder/heavier so the stroke weights are similar across the whole logo.

Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 17/06/2026

Why not... both? My shaders and my game code are where and how I express myself creatively. Yes, even in my network encoding. CMakeLists.txt contains no art or joy or beauty. The machine can have it. Creative energies spent there are a wasted opportunity in my finite time before the reaper.

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Reposted by Andrew Meggs

M.H. Williams @mhwilliams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

“It’s almost a real-time IP incubator of sorts, with moderators and communities that are cultivating these spaces where stories and fandoms can grow organically." It's the *people*, not the platform! Let the PEOPLE TELL STORIES! So tired. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

hollywoodreporter.com

‘Backrooms’ Sends Hollywood Running to Reddit for New Ideas

The old-school forum that originated A24's 'Backrooms' is embracing its role as an idea incubator where "fandoms can grow organically."

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 15/06/2026

Travel booked for #SIGGRAPH. I'll be in Los Angeles Jul 18-24. First (external) conference since... pre-Meta & pre-COVID?!! It's been too long since I've seen too many people. If you're going to be at SIGGRAPH (or just can meet up around LA/OC), please DM me so we can (re-)connect.

transmutrix @transmutrix.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Reposted by Andrew Meggs

If you have this problem using LLDB from VS Code (as I've had), try the "CodeLLDB" extension, and add this to your launch config: "initCommands": [ "settings set symbols.load-on-demand true" ], iirc it didn't work for me when I tried setting the setting other ways? but doing it this way works.

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The trouble with that ideal is lack of training corpus for contract languages. We may be at a point where language development slows down; incentives favor what LLMs can already target. Rust is the compromise we have, but it's much better than arming LLMs with the foot-gun arsenal of C++. 5/5

The ideal might be to look backwards to formal contract languages with strong proofs, like Eiffel or CLU or SPARK Ada. They didn't take off because they were too tedious for human productivity, but that's the one problem LLMs give us an escape hatch on. 4/5

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I absolutely grant that satisfying the borrow checker can be both tedious and time consuming. So is writing unit tests. But I don't especially care if an LLM finds those things tedious! If anything, I'd like an even stricter language than Rust. 3/5

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