VR and AI and Games and Improv - Sep 2026
Summer’s over and Autumn brings new things: new VR headset, started writing a new game, started up a new improv season, and ai and politics keep on happening.
Diary
Improv
Started up some improv again now the summer is over. Eight weeks of practice together then a few shows in November/December.
Three hour sessions are like 50% more hardcore than two hour sessions!
Seems like the instructor is more interventionist than most. More notes and suggestions as we go.
Same note to me as usual though: Slow down, be more grounded, let it simmer a bit first.
He mentioned Lord Of The Rings, and how its all world-building and slow pacing for the first twenty minutes before the action starts.
Is it? Wouldn’t know. I got bored and turned it off before the end. Dreadfully dull story I thought. Just marching up and down. 😆
I’m sure they’re right though. It’s a hangover from the way you train early with short form. There, if something doesn’t happen in the first two minutes it doesn’t happen at all and you gotta establish setting and relationships immediately.
But I notice also that these days half the podcasts and youtube shows start with a clip from the middle. And I usually skip right to minute five anyway because I don’t care about the introductions.
Grant Museum Of Zoology
Popped into the Grant Museum of Zoology, which houses a collection of old bones and stuffed animals built and bequeathed mostly last century.
Its most recent specimen was from an animal that died at the zoo and it’s oldest is a half a billion year old fossil of a penis worm.
They have a Mastodon Jaw, and also these brains in jars and rhino skeleton and grimacing wooly monkey among thousands of other things.
Funny to think I got a bunch of bones like that inside me. Museum itself feels like a relic, a thing from the past you wouldn’t really get these days.
Pipe Game
Oh no!
I started making a new computer game again.
Now I shall have no time or interests or friends and just spend all my hours engrossed solving puzzles pressing buttons in the dark.
It’s that tunnel shooter of my dreams, only now written also for VR, for in a spiny-chair, or for lying down flat on your back staring at the tunnel oncomming from the roof. Might work pretty well on the steamdeck with controller-rotation for steering.
I should like it frantic, explody and filled with particles, but also slow and easy and meditative so much you could maybe play in a coma or if barely physically able.
I think I have got further than I would have expected in a week or so but I will have to do other things like have a life and friends and jobs more in the coming weeks,
Using Godot and blender which are both very fine.
Made the procedurally generated from an initial seed.
Long straights, long curves, nicely twisting spiraling shapes, colours and noise-tuners all changing along the length in long stretches. Extensible to adding tunnel shape morphs and stalactites and scaling.
But before all that, I think the poor ship looks lonely. So I gave it something to shoot at next. Adding plotting alien-waves to those procedures.
And lo, there were inhabitants of the tunnel, and they did swim along it’s length, and Adam did look upon them and say that they were good.
Or, you know, will do for now at least. Proof of concept.
Development temporarily stopped for a few days while I explore a new VR headset though…
Steam Frame VR
The Steam Frame is released. At a shockingly high price range, but that’s RAM for you in these post-ai days.
This means improvement on Linux VR in general with all the latest patches. The home-room is updated, the menus all looking fancy and new. Even if you got an old Vive.
God I hope it’s not shit and rescues us from the Facebook-dominated market since they bought Oculus.
Not a great experience initially for Linux users. Even though it is a linux machine itself.
The Wifi-dongle that brings 6G streaming doesn’t currently work on Linux V6 kernels. Which is what Debian has. And everything really.
Apparently Windows is the only thing fully supported. Internet doesn’t even sound that optimistic about the Steam Machine though it ought to at least work once I have one of them.
Streaming from the linux box over existing wifi is mostly unsuccessful Slow to start and timing out, slow to get going.
Controllers feel light and shoddy, aren’t tracked particularly well. Not great ergonomics. Hand uncomfortable after a few hours shooting things.
My Pistol Whip scores on this machine are well down, due to the dropping frames and the terrible tracking of the aim.
Overall seems worse than the Vive at 30 minutes or so of playing with it.
These are software issues though and they will improve, and streaming from the powerful games machine might work better once there’s a machine with a V7 linux kernel compatible with this wifi dongle in the house.
Fairly comfortable to wear, though the foam attached by magnets comes off too easily as you don or remove the headset.
Sadly, this is not currently a machine which beats Facebook’s Quest3 at all.
So streaming ain’t gonna work well until I can upgrade the OS kernel, or get to the front of the Steam Machine queue.
Streaming a flat-screen game from the gaming PC to a theatre-screen in the headset seems to work fairly well though.
Not much actual point in my room that already has a massive projector, but maybe if you shared a space I guess?
You can of course download your flat-screen game and play it on the bus too. It’s using the pass-through so you ain’t blindfolding yourself to local thieves.
There is a web-browser of course. Chromium. Visited my VR site, which has an embedded 360/stereo player that works on Quest: Doesn’t work here. Just does a full-screen-in-the-theatre-window mode. That’ll get fixed eventually I guess.
As a stand-alone VR machine though, without streaming, it is is working well so long as you download the game and for those that actually work.
Lots of big complex games don’t.
Doom VFR doesn’t. No Man’s Sky doesn’t. Google Earth is too much.
But Alyx on-device looks great. Loads fast, no frame-dropping, and the game is great. See some detail suddenly being filled in sometimes. Like a chunk of screen comming into focus. Suspect that’s the foviated rendering? Maybe. Or just normal LOD, who knows.
Played Metro Awakening VR for ten minutes. Haven’t played that before. Pretty nice looking game.
Played Unloop for a bit.
Pretty fun game, working with your own prior iterations in a time-loop to open all the doors at the right time to get through to the next room/loop.
Many times your job is done within a few seconds so might as well shoot yourself in the head really and get the next loop started.
So by the final time you’re running through a maze waiting for the gates to open, watching the whole room be filled with your prior iterations grabbing keys to unlock doors and then shooting themselves in the head and dying on the floor.
Nice.
Seems like Pistol Whip in particular is more clunky than I’m used to for no particular reason. Maybe they’ll release a Frame-optimized version later.
The sound is definitely not as good as the quest either. Less bass response. The quest you really feel it when you pistol-whip someone, the clunk of their armour. Not so here, just a little speaker-click.
The crucial question really is: Can it replace this aging vive with broken pixels and lighthouses on the edge of mechanical failure for Godot dev on this machine?
Yes. It will stream VR well enough from this machine even over 5G wifi for me to at least put on the headset and check if a thing is working or not or try a demo-move.
At some point I’ll have to figure out how to actually copy my app to it too. Ought to be fairly simple as these things go. There’s a desktop after all.
Battery life isn’t stellar. Don’t think you’d get three hours out of this thing without a recharge. Would be cool if the battery was swappable since it’s at the back separate anyway.
You could wear a belt battery-pack and a wire to the headset I guess.
Oh, here’s nice: You can stream from the Frame to the Steamdeck, or desktop. So it’s windows display what the Frame player can see.
Serious Sam! Oh yes. What fun. Fast and smooth and speeding around shooting demons. One of the first VR games I ever played. Runs perfectly other than can’t type the name of a save-game for some reason.
Chromium browser windows can run over a game. Floating there. So if you point it at the house Jellyfin media-server, you can Watch TV in the corner of your Serious Sam game. That’s a new one on me that probably I could do before in Steam VR anyway but not on Quest.
Gives you better sense of which way you’re facing as you spin about fighting monsters.
And this is all just local in the headset, it has a pretty complete Linux/KDE OS with a desktop and a browser and a file-explorer and pages of settings.
It is very much like a steamdeck you strap on your face. So much so, if you turn on Developer Mode, and set a user password, then you can ssh into the linux machine strapped to your face.
Now that is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Oh yes.
Though I do not recommend trying the beta channel.
After trying that it booted into a VR KDE desktop without Steam running, and without internet. And without SteamVR package installed.
Only rescue was holding the headset button during boot, using the volume keys to select the prior boot system, and doing a factory reset to make it stick.
Crikey. Really is a linux box, complete with having to fix update breakage.
Democracy
☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️
💂 Hello, this is OfGov how may I help you today?
🧙 Hi! Thanks. Its quite simple, my appointed political representative isn’t actually representing my views or interests these days so I’d like to switch to a new one please.
💂 Okay, certainly sir. No problem. We can get that changed for you by the next working day. Have you decided who your next representative will be, or are you voting for yourself for a while?
🧙 Oh, I haven’t got time for all that. I would like my representative to be John Jones from the Pirate Party please.
💂 Of course sir. I see he’s had three thousand extra constituents added just this month.
🧙 Yes, his argument about copyright was very persuasive, I’m sure I’m among many changing their reps today.
💂 His voting power in parliament will be increased accordingly by the vote on the copyright issue next week. Is there anything else I can do for your today sir?
🧙 No, no, thanks. That’s fine.
💂 Have a good day sir, Mr Jones’s vote-weight will be changed to represent you at midnight. Do call again if you change your mind.
☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️
💂 Hello this is OfGov how may I help you today?
🏌️ Oh hi! You know I usually agree completely with my representative but I’m afraid he hasn’t really understood the issues on taxing the homelessness so I’d like to override his choice on the vote on Wednesday.
💂 No problem madam, would you prefer your vote-weight to be for or against the taxing the homeless bill on Wednesday.
🏌️ Oh, I’m all for it! Tax them off the streets I say. Its the only way to help them
💂 Allright, your vote-weight is recorded as overriding your normal representative for the taxing the homelessness bill on Wednesday. Is there anything else I can help you with?
🏌️ Nope, he’s right about everything else. Continue to let him represent me on every other vote until I call again.
💂 Thank you, do call again.
☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️
💂 Hello, this is OfGov how may I help you today?
🚶 Good afternoon OfGov. I’ve registered a hundred thousand nominations so I’d like to register for my job as MP please!
💂 Oh, congratulations madam. That must have been hard work! People are reluctant to care enough to nominate anyone usually.
🚶 Yes, my local campaigning was getting nowhere but there’s a group of people just like me around the coastal villages who really care about cliff issues and so we’ve decided we want to unite our voice in the house.
💂 That’s lovely! I know cliff issues were otherwise unaddressed because they weren’t important to enough people in any single geographic constituency, so it’s good you can unite the coastal regions as a unit. I’ll put you through to training and credentials and you should be able to start next week.
🚶 Lovely. Cheers!
💂 Look out for the cliffs madam.
☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️
💂 Hello, this is OfGov how may I help you today?
🚴 Oh hello, yes. I’m the MP for Cycling and Cyclists and I’m happy to get your letter saying we have received so much support that it’s time to nominate another representative?
💂 Ah, yes, Mr Cinderford. Thank you for calling. The records here do indeed show that you’ve reached 350,000 people who have nominated your party so it’s time for you to nominate a new MP. Do you know the OfGov ID of the person in question?
🚴 Of course, yes, I’d like to appoint my wife, Mrs Cinderford.
💂 I’m afraid that’s against the rules sir, multiple party-delegated representatives may not come from the same family or region in the county. They’re designed against nepotism or local-ism.
🚴 Oh, yes. Oh in that case it will have to be Mr Peacock, my rival in the party who is vying for control. Oh dear. Oh well, must be as must be. If the rules are clear.
💂 Of course sir. Mr Peacock will receive one third of the party-appointed voting weight after training. We’ll have training and credentials contact him tomorrow. Is there anything else?
🚴 No, that’s fine. It’s good our power is growing I suppose, even if I now must share it.
People think Proportional Representation is extreme. Or that constituencies should have multiple MPs for diversity.
My visions are much more radical.
Geography is bunk. If local people want a local MP they can appoint one.
But if sea-side people around the cost want one? Or cyclists? Or Subgenii?
Why does everyone care so much about geography? Your MP is not fixing the local pot-holes. They’re representing your political interests which may not be those of your neighbours.
We have a system where like 75% of people have a representative they didn’t vote for and don’t agree with and half the remaining were holding their nose to keep the opposition out.
Elections are a very sucky way to do democracy. Just let me nominate my representative, and then everyone can have a representative they agree with and picked personally.
I get quite frustrated at this because people defend the local-representative thing as though it’s good that your MP comes from your area of the country above all else.
But I see the local-first rule as a divide-and-conquer technique. It is designed to prevent people uniting across the country on ANY issue, except local-ism.
They treat this bug like it’s a feature!
Now, I’m not insane, and I would not recommend switching to an OfGov type situation at the next election.
Clearly it needs a trial-first sort of thing and the ideal way to do a trial of a new democratic system is to run it as a second house in parallel.
I think it should replace the lords. Until the new OfGov representatives manage to overrule the divide-and-conquer old-fashioned house of archaic geographic oligarch representatives.
With a rolling-nomination rather than periodic-election-from-selected- candidates you also might get some long-term plans and coalitions instead of this everyone-out churn three times a decade.
The public could respond in real-time to unwanted wars or the repercussions of black swan events.
You could even change the coalition in time to react, instead of having to use the people you elected for a banking crisis to run the rebuild. Say.
Doctor Who
The BBC have released the Tender Document for companies who want to make Doctor Who.
They’ll need to be registered (via Microsoft forms!?) by October 2nd. Which seems short notice. And then the process takes till March, which seems incredibly long.
They asking for someone to make a show in 28/29, so that’ll be either Xmas or October start.
They have a strong preference for companies that claim they can make it in Wales, make at least one series plus specials (which probably just means two Xmases I guess).
They have no strong preference on the number of episodes or the number of stories those episodes span.
Interesting that they describe the types of stories they want. Even that you gotta specify some new monsters. Dunno that I would have expected a description of the stories to be in the bid really? Especially if it’s gotta be by next month. Perhaps you can be vague.
Does sound like the people doing the tender process understand what the show is for and what its about so that’s encouraging.
The most likely outcome remains that the BBC Studios will win the tender and this whole thing is a waste of time the BBC is forced to go through because tories can’t abide there being a thing they can’t bid on owning.
It’s gonna be Xmas-27, some episodes in the year, and then Xmas-28 isn’t it?
Been enjoying some of the Big Finish stuff recently too. There’s a lot of them with the 8th doctor who only got one TV-movie pilot. He’s pretty good. Loved it when he travelled with Mary Shelly for a while.
AI
Plagiarism
If anyone working on a frontier technical problem discusses that problem with Chat GPT, telling it their ideas to refine them, then OpenAI will quickly claim those ideas for themselves, and publish that their robot made them!
AI will be involved in every future discovery! It will win in the race to publication against those who told it their ideas in the first place.
Don’t tell the robots your secrets, they do not keep secrets from their owners.
RE: /link https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/openai-bubeck-alpoge-buckmaster-navier-stokes-codex-privacy/article71445721.ece AI Plagiarism
Superintelligence
Trump thinks we should use ‘si’ instead of ‘ai’, even though ‘si’ already stands for metric units and the word “Superintelligence” is supposed to be applied to a machine that’s even smarter than we are. Like, a Jupiter-brain, a dyson sphere enclosing a star and powering a single mind from the entire output of a sun.
So I dunno if you can correct Donald Trump when he uses the word about the current crop of word-clankers.
I mean… Compared to him? eh.. Maybe.
His American Intelligence seems more likely to kill everyone than that other AI too.
Programming Bots
I’m also hearing people suggest that clanker AI programming bots should directly produce machine code rather than output human-readable languages like Python or Rust or C.
Which is of course a terrible idea.
These languages exist to make it easier write safe and efficient code, that’s maintainable and editable and doesn’t allow out of bounds memory pointing or leaks or whatever else.
Writing in machine language would be worse for the AI for the same reasons. It would make fore more unmaintainable, buggy, crashy, unmodular code.
The web is filled with training data written in those languages and pretty much no training data at all on how to write functions in 68000 or z80 or whatever.
You could build some training data by compiling all that high level language and training instead on the results of that.
But then you’re just trying to get the buggy, lossy, neural network to learn to compile the high level code into machine language. Which it will do much worse than an actual compiler already written.
Pointless silly idea people.
Eniko is correct and eloquent and sweary in her thread.
It writes code approximately as good as Stack Overflow examples.
Which scales about as well as that would.
You only run into trouble when you want more than a few lines of code written to illustrate a point; and instead want it to be effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient.
It is reviewing the pull requests at work, and that is definitely catching bugs. Some of them even important ones. It is also definitely wasting time on chasing non-bugs.
It is possible the ridiculously detailed error coverage in the code is even better code, in some sense. If it matters how you crash and what error you report when you do so and you don’t mind reams and reams of error-handling.
It may improve. In my job and profession I think I do have a responsibility to be aware of what it can and can’t do. If only to fight the people who seem to want to pipe it into root on the prod servers, just for upgrades.
And to know when or if it becomes good.
Which means using it.
I’ve worked with worse coders. It’s very fast. But those coders then improved.
We’ll see how well Claude can generalize from textbook examples to effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient over time I guess.
I wouldn’t rule it out, but there isn’t nearly as much training data.
Programming Strike
I might be in favor of an AI programming strike, but I don’t really understand what the proponents wants us to do?
That machine is finding security bugs that matter, and you can’t run a repo that refuses those patches.
What are you going to do?
Just let your users /by default/ refuse those security patches? Just because they were discovered by a machine?
That ain’t the right answer.
I don’t understand what people who want an absolute strike against AI want from the workforce?
Is it literally to let security patches go un-merged?
I would sooner support a full-stop to all programming work than that I think.
The maintenance workload really has increased here.
These machines are producing a torrent of exploits, some fraction of which are real and serious.
Certainly eyes-on every one of them, but if they are short, obvious, correct, and exactly what you’d have done anyway?
🤷
What do you want me as a maintainer to do? Change the variable names? Leave the exploit?
Or automate the copy-and-paste, so I don’t even check it?
I am not in favor of that last one, but I can’t defend the idea that programmers should leave their users vulnerable because it was a machine that found the bug.
Palestine
Macklemore
Famous pop-star ended up with his whole support acts quitting the tour when he sacked one of them, Macklemore, for saying “Free Palestine”.
Felt like most of the acts at Beautiful Days a few weekend ago shouted “Free Palestine” at some point during their set. Always to a cheer. So much so it started to feel like a cheep way to get a cheer, like saying the name of the festival.
Hello Email List!
Billy Brag was so right on and woke over that, and solidarity, and workers rights, and whatnot, that I darn near teared up. Obviously he meant it.
They all did really. Even Madness.
As do I.
Free Palestine.
And all the others Macklemore and Bragg mention.
Saying it is the least you can do.
Green Party
The Green Party conference passed the motion pointing out that Zionism is a type of racism. and favouring a one-secular-state solution in Israel.
Zionism is indeed racism, this is a true fact and yet writing that fact into the party policy seems like a tactical error.
We don’t generally list all the things which are racism, and don’t generally try and tell people in countries thousands of miles away how many states they ought to have.
And doing so paints the target on you for all those fake accusations that done for Corbyn.
I remain a party member, but I don’t care how many states there are in Israel so long as all of them are secular states in which no ethnic or religious group is prioritised or valued above others.
Probably it would be best to have dozens of states really, none of them powerful, but it certainly ought to be decided by the people who live there not by some minor political party on an island the other side of the continent.
There might be some in-theory zionism which you could invent which wasn’t racist, but that isn’t the zionism we have. The zionism we have is racist as fuck.
Listening
The One Doctor
Big Finish Doctor Who Audio Drama, “The One Doctor” stars Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford against Christopher Biggins and Clare Buckfield.
Biggins is a con-man traveling around in the Stardis, a portaloo, pretending to be the Doctor with his companion, and setting up fake threats to save people from for adulation and money. He’s hilarious.
Course Baker’s Doctor and Mel turn up and there’s a real threat too.
Hilarious, probably the funniest Big Finnish I’ve heard.
Links
Search-Engine
Search engine from a Swedish guy. Designed to ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.
The weird corners that corporate takeover of the search indexes strangle.
Looks great. Love the pages describing the server and the icons showing if there’s js or affiliate links etc.
👍
AI
Cory stumbles a lot here under even Michael’s light questioning.
Cory seems to think that the machines are just producing fake stories about how to plan a hack into Hugging Face and that somehow that isn’t the same as planning a hack into Hugging Face.
I mean there is a difference between those things: between finding a path in a search tree of words about plausible plans and working out a plan anew, from a deep understanding of the world.
The difference does possibly mean that they can’t try hacks nobody else has ever tried in the history of all mankind, whereas an expert person might think of a new one.
And there’s a philosophical difference: whether they are thinking or just producing a stream of what someone might think if they were thinking.
But in almost all actual piratical cases, writing a plausible story about how someone might make a plan does end up with an actual plan, even if it ain’t an original one. And it can easily be a plan the operator wouldn’t have thought of.
Scott Alexander summarizing some ideas around understanding how the LLMs work and interpreting their ’thoughts’.
Economic Park
Barry’s Economics (Who will probably outlast his mentor Garry who says he’s quit already) does a fancy CGI version of his show. About dinosaurs and AI. Not made with AI, he has a 3d-animator who is human. He explains that AI might be as dangerous as dinosaurs but they don’t trigger the brain like a giant lizard chasing you.
Climate Media
What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?
Fedi
The one network of people that can’t be bought by the corps.
Here’s what I liked this month.
AI Programming
So, hard pill to swallow, but I think there are a lot of AI enthusiasts who got that way because computing fundamentally failed them, for whom getting a computer to do anything for them is a whole-ass bullshit ordeal and who deserve our empathy and solidarity even so. We, computer-people we, can’t escape responsibility for abandoning user empowerment in favour of corporate consolidation and vending machine interfaces decades ago, now that we’re reaping the whirlwind of mechanized capitalism.
I have two objections to the EFF’s position on ‘AI’ model training. One is technical, one is social….
War
lol, no brey - we attacked them.
Like specifically, Saudi Arabia, acting as a proxy for the United States and Israel, tried to expand the war to Yemen. Your media barely reported it. You media also barely reported the Saudis getting their asses kicked.
They only got interested in reporting it once the Houthi’s had checks notes knocked out the pipeline and seized most of the coast.
So that’s why you think the Houthis attacked the Pig Empire. But that’s not what happened.
Graphics Toy
I made a thing!
WOGL is a graphics programming language in which every input string is a valid program. It’s designed to reward play and experimentation.
Please play! Have fun!