A Sentient Knapsack

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[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@SigmaTechRBLX @air_bagged @pcgamer Yep, absolutely. Since my org enabled Copilot, I live in constant fear whenever a client sends me an Excel file. I have to rapidly change the sensitivity to Confidential upon opening the file to prevent it auto sending to Copilot. It’s an absurd situation.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@SigmaTechRBLX @air_bagged @pcgamer The thing is even if you’re using ML in some fashion for this it’s probably better run locally without a data centre; just dump every nth frame into a local model to do image to text, then dump those outputs into another local model to summarise them. Doesn’t need the huge infra.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@kaffkanya It’s about 173 episodes of the most ham fisted social commentary you’ll ever see if you watch it for the first time in the current day. Also creole cooking, baseball, space Jesus, and scenery chewing.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@HighwayManny7 @mulaney @ModaCenter Is one in drag beating a horse to death?

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@cosmicjester They’re LNP members, so it probably is influencer grifting (ab)using their positions.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@InnerDelicious @historigins You’re not alone - it’s rated highly on both IMDb and Letterboxd (partly why I watched it).

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@InnerDelicious @historigins Meanwhile Keller is a one dimensional Christian vengeance dad who learns to not torture people; is this meant to be a metaphor for the end of the Bush administration? I think people are overlooking the awful screenplay and pacing because of the intense performances.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@InnerDelicious @historigins Okay fair, so with that reading I found the characters flat and not compelling, despite best efforts from Jackman and Gyllenhaal. Loki in particular is framed initially as this amazing cop who solves every case, but his policing is just yelling and bashing heads in interrogation.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@InnerDelicious @historigins I’m not morally broken enough to not already know that, so any attempt to reframe or look at this from another perspective comes up hollow. It only makes sense as a morality tale if you have the perspective of a modern day American evangelical.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@historigins Sorry I’m not a christofascist who likes movies about beating up mentally handicapped people to test my faith guys, I’ll leave the molasses paced, directionless torture porn for you guys to enjoy.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@historigins I just watched this movie on the basis of this tweet and it fucking sucks so hard

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@geoffkeighley Aren’t you that guy everybody hates?

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@MukkyWaffle I’ve used variants of this model for many years, pretty quick to use and very smooth results

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

Yeah so Carmack’s said a lot of libertarian shit over the years that I’ve disagreed with, but I’m thoroughly convinced now he’s just a cunt.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

He was already well into a storied career, but I first knew “Burger” Bill Heineman as a big fish in the small pond of the Apple IIGS community at the start of the 90s, known for doing state of the art low level optimization on a platform with very limited commercial prospects.

In 1992, the programmers in the early Id crew went to Kansas Fest, the grass roots Apple II convention, to show Silas Warner, the author of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple II, our new take with Wolfenstein 3D.

Someone seeing it for the first time on our laptop made the awed comment “Wow, I thought Bill Heineman was a hot programmer!” and I took that as a very substantial compliment.

We started working with Bill shortly after that, and I really enjoyed talking shop and kicking around ideas with him. We had a lot of overlap in interests and skills, but he had impressive areas outside of my scope – Want to learn the details of Japanese game hardware? Learn to read Japanese technical manuals. Want to develop games for them, but they won’t give you a dev kit? Build your own hardware dev kit.

I was very good at dropping into any system environment and getting shit done fast. He was probably better.

Masters of Doom has the details, which I don’t trust myself to rehash from memory, but our collaboration on the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D completely blew up and left us in a bad position, forcing me to drop what I was doing and do the port myself.

We were mad, but eventually it was water under the bridge, and we wound up working together on additional Id projects afterwards. It was a useful cautionary tale about how brilliant technical people don’t always make wise decisions in other parts of their life.

Bill became Rebecca, and we had email and Twitter contacts (@burgerbecky) over the years. We finally ran into each other again virtually at the covid Kansas Fest (still going after all these years!) and had some fun back and forth on ancient technical topics. They were living in Dallas with Jennell Jaquays, who had been a designer at Id, and I had some intention of getting out for a visit, but it never happened.

I respect how they stayed technical, current, and sharp far longer than most programmers manage, shipping games over 40+ years with many, many generations of hardware. The driving force was always clearly the love of the work. 🫡

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@_Tom_Henderson_ “Announcement about what?”
In seriousness unless someone has some actual information, I just assume we’re being baited by people who are the gaming equivalent of influencers, to drive engagement for their streams or award shows that no-one outside of industry actually cares about

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@edzitron No wonder they could make a number 1 country song with AI

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@jeremylovesyall She literally says she had no callback

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@topologiamajo @PatrickjaLee @pattyfuegoV2 Not asking for a scene of explicit media coverage, it’s just not a well thought out film. Some things are required for realism when you present a film as existing in a particular time and place; the absence becomes glaring.Also lol at my fake account from 2010, Mr “February 2025”

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@topologiamajo @PatrickjaLee @pattyfuegoV2 Except there was no media coverage in the movie because the top people in the town covered it up… except they didn’t know what happened until after media coverage would have logically been there, so it makes no fucking sense for media not to be there. It’s just a bad movie.

[A Sentient Knapsack @TheSmuckles]

@chadmalone5 @AlsikkanTV Genuinely amazing performance - there are so many layers to the character that he manages to convey simultaneously with nuance and small expressions. I was blown away by the end even already knowing how good an actor he was.