I strongly second this. The JetBrains model is the best of both worlds and everybody wins. Being able to own a certain version of the software at my option makes me feel respected by the company, and it's also motivation for the company to continue delivering real value to users over time -- they gotta earn that subscription fee :)
Depending on the product, another model I like is dual licensing, where if you're an individual or noncommercial user, you get one price/it's free, and if you're a commercial customer, you get another price/subscription agreement
I think the novel and interesting tech is still happening, its just that without the colorful ads for it on TV, and without the software being packaged up and sold with pretty box art that you can physically hold, it doesn't feel as much like a capital-E Experience. It's probably the Internet's fault that we don't do things like that anymore, but the upside is that we now have access to so many ideas and applications from all over, even ones that aren't commercially viable.
Some that look exciting to me are: an AI that lets you animate still photos realistically [1], a simple website that guides you to discover new parks, eateries, and other places near you [2], an AI that colorizes old black-and-white photos/video [3], a Street View style map of the game world from "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", with some 1st person 360 degree photos [4], and a tiny game engine that lets you distribute your whole game physically via printed QR codes [5].
If marketing and graphic design people ever felt like getting together to do some 'side projects', I vote that they should make print ads for apps/websites that they like :)
That stuff is cool and all, but revolutionary? Nah, it's all predictable. Doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of the early days of computers and the internet which was opening up the world and changing lifestyles
This is just 20/20 hindsight. To most people back then it didn't feel completely revolutionary, because it was still niche and pretty limited in what computers could do.
VR might be revolutionary, but we won't know until after several more years, when it's either gone mainstream or clearly stalled out. I know there are people who will immediately nitpick that VR isn't revolutionary, which is ironic because this happens any time there's a nascent potentially revolutionary technology about: people nitpicking that it's not good enough yet, or arguing that it's not compelling (which is often just because it's not mature enough yet).
You don't know if anything's actually revolutionary until it's mature and saturated the market, but by then it's not really new anymore, so it's easy to dismiss it as old hat. By the time smartphones had percolated down to the point where even working-class randos had them, we'd had iOS and Android for several years, and of course earlier forms of smartphones for several years or more before those.
For a long time they were dismissed as mere "toys for techies" with limited real-world application for the regular person. Which was true, until it suddenly wasn't.
People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.
The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.
So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.
You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.
> So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.
Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.
For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)
Until then only big companies could afford a computer to manage their data and accounting, etc. Microcomputers changed that and made the hardware available to every company.
VisiCalc on the software side was the killer app that relatively normal people could learn and use to improve their business work. Spreadsheets were certainly a revolution.
On the home front, affordable microcomputers arrived and it was widely recognised that the revolution was here. Computers were the future and every parent should get one to prepare their kids (ok, sons) for it. This explains the marketing around microcomputers being for families.
I think ai stuff will have a similar wonder when it's capabilities for improvising things becomes deeper. The only difference is that now some people are understably scared of the implications of such impacts relative to the internet's growth which was very optimistic.
This was an interesting application of neural nets and a good write up! I’m curious how a game might be made from scratch using a neural net, i.e. what would it train on? I think this would be a cool technique to have at our disposal because games implemented as neural nets might make data mining harder, so all the cool secrets in the game wouldn’t be immediately exposed upon release :)
Very, very cool project! I think I actually prefer this streetview approach to the floating noclip approach, because a map + streetview that works like google maps cements the feeling that the game world is as real as my city -- here's the map in my web browser, no need to run a video game!
To your knowledge, are there any special tricks to store many panorama images so you could feasibly capture entire paths continuously through the map, or even entire maps for smaller games?
Thanks for the compliment! Glad you liked it! Currently the images are stored elsewhere on a free image hosting site and referred through their direct link.
Sorry I don't have any special tricks to share :/. I feel at this point it would probably be better to rip the game world from the game and artificially make it feel like a panorama when viewing and moving.
Also this would probably imply heavy use of three.js if I wanted to offer that in the browser.
The website specifies that these are “simulations” (re-creations of the games’ apparent behavior that attempt to stay faithful to the original) and not “emulations” (reproductions of the actual hardware behavior of the circuitry): http://www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/info.php
This is, I think, the killer technology that would allow VR to be seriously used for meetings with other people, especially in business. If these avatars can be animated continuously as someone is speaking, so that lip movements are matched, that would seal the deal.
I think that’s an interesting connection and way to look at this. I first encountered that sort of artistic inspiration on a Twitter account that randomly generated sheet music snippets. Sure the generation could be garbage, but that gives the artist a starting point to say “this is bad because X, it should be more like Y”. And of course with these AI models, the generation is more likely to be good. Having a divined/generated starting point for creative work can definitely be an invaluable tool.
I‘ve always been a big fan of creepypastas —- they can be really well done and scary in novel ways. To some extent, I believed some of them to be real when I was a kid.
If creepypastas were “invented” today, would they have made as big of a cultural splash? Or would they get lost in a sea of other content, or be debunked and discarded too quickly?
Edit: I re-read the list and noticed some more recent creations on there, like The Backrooms. Maybe it’s less about believability and more about being a good story, which the Internet is still great at facilitating. So I guess my question is, did anyone else believe some of the earlier creepypastas, and was believability important to the popularity back then?
While it wasn't a creepypasta, The Blair Witch Project tried really hard to convince movie-goers that it was found footage and wasn't a scripted movie. I think it was certainly a product of its time and a similar effort today wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Here's one crossover: the Blair Witch Project was marketed as an Alternate Reality Game, as were many of the later low budget found-footage horrors. It turns out that the top-of-the-list creepypasta "Slender man", in the form of the "Marble Hornets" youtube series, was mistaken for an ARG by the members of Unfiction.
Not to mention it was a one trick pony. I remember it was great when I saw it with friends in the theater. We rented it later on to see the extra scenes and couldn't get through half of it because of how boring it was.
The worst thing about The Blair Witch Project was its viral marketing campaign.
Because as someone that has first seen it just a couple years ago, it's my #1 favourite horror movie bar none. A true masterpiece of the underrated found footage genre.
Few horror movies can truly get under your skin you without ever showing the "monster", so they rely on cheap jumpscares and CGI.
If you've never seen it and want to be unnerved from start to finish, go watch it.
Personally I've been felt a lot more scared by creepypastas (or still images/photos of creepy places, entities or w/e) than horror movies for instance. Especially when it comes to images - some have such unnerving vibe to them that I find it fascinating (smile.jpg anyone?).
I was always skeptical (aka treated it as fantasy) of supernatural things these stories are about, but I think the mere fact of getting engaged into reading them and using your imagination (suspending the disbelief) was enough.
Most horror movies are meh, but one... Lights Out (2013) was a horror film that genuinely terrified me. It's only a few minutes long, but it's more frightening than the jumpscare-laden slasher movies of the era ever could be. It's phenomenally subtle in its setup, showing how the slightest thing "off" in the dark can portend unimaginable horror. Check it out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lykiTPUbtgs
I hadn't seen smile.jpg before, but after googling, you are right, it is truly a haunting image. I wonder what makes it so creepy? what subconscious fear instinct makes that image so much more haunting than a normal picture of a dog?
Ha - how about "Bloody Mary"? I was 8 and that story scared the shit out of me. I love reading creepypastas, and when I was younger, I never knew if they were real or not. It was part of learning how to trust information. They always had enough of a disturbance in the story that made me feel odd.
I JUST saw The Backrooms (the one where she puts the tape measure down the portal) and... holy shit. This is the same level of odd feeling. I can only imagine what sort of VR stuff is out there... That Black Mirror episode has me wondering if I'll actually do something like that.
I think it's also the same sort of thing as the innocuous conspiracy theories I've seen like "Did you know that Spongebob characters are based on the seven deadly sins?" Could be true, you'll never be able to fully verify it unless you know the person who made the content, and ... sounds good and seems to hold up. Why would you want to dispel the theory even if it is untrue? It's kinda fun.
Reminded me of a micro meme towards the end of the previous previous decade: The Mandrill Maze. It surfaced during an inbetween stage in my life and was an unpleasant obsession for a while. Featured in many dreams.
Not exactly creepypasta, but I do believe the SCP Foundation would make a cultural splash if it were invented today: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-series
It might be my bubble, but it feels like SCPs are quite known in the internet culture. I've seen surprisingly many references on HN alone, for example.
I don't think believability as in fooling you into thinking the events were real are as important as verisimilitude, the feeling that it could happen.
An example: In the late 90s, back in the days of pervasive browser pop-ups, there was a Japanese creepypasta-equivalent called "The Red Room", about a browser pop-up that read "Do you like the red room?" Ignoring or closing the pop-up was said to seal your doom. The most popular form of this story took the form of a Flash animation which depicted a boy who saw the popup appear on his computer.
As a finale, after showing the boy meeting his grisly fate, the Flash site caused the popup to appear on your computer.
Not really believable when you think about it. But scary, because it gets you into a headspace of the fictional universe and then breaks the fourth wall, giving you a fleeting feeling that the Red Room curse is real.
I think if creepypasta didn't exist we would have to invent it. It's part of a horror tradition that encompasses Poe and Lovecraft, and even before. Creepypasta comes from the same place as primordial ghost stories told around a campfire, just with updated media and sensibilities.
"red room" seems to be a recurring term in creepy stories. I can only specifically recall this and those dark-web stories you hear on clickbait youtube channels, but I feel I've heard it in other creepy/negatively-emoted settings too
Creepypastas are just myth and legend, which humanity will always have. Amusingly, the sci-fi pen-and-paper RPG setting GURPS Transhuman Space had an entire supplement (published in 2004) with a large section of urban legends of the future, some of which might have already come to pass.
Have fun. ;-) – The only explanation added to the Patterns document
At precisely 01:18:00 hours on November 23rd, 2093, an anonymous poster to the CyberMysticism memenet uploaded a file with a size of 2,800,051,338 bytes titled “Patterns in the Static.”The file was heavily encrypted, and as none of the memenet regulars had a quantum computer with which it could be decoded, few paid this file any attention . . . at first. After some time, however, rumors began to spread about people who managed to decrypt it, and what they found. No member admitted to having read the unencrypted file himself, but there were numerous reports from a “friend of a friend” who gained the key from a “mysterious source” and was able to read it. Accounts varied wildly about its contents – top-secret CIA files, designs for a machine to extract energy from the vacuum, communications with aliens, or magic spells that bind and command infomorphs as the shamans of the past were said to command spirits. Soon, variants of the file started to turn up,both encrypted and unencrypted. Most of these were rap-idly identified as forgeries.
The general public became aware of the “Patterns in the Static” file in 2099, when Peter Budenhaus’ critically acclaimed slinky of the same name was released. Since then, several wealthy individuals have announced plans to buy time on a quantum computer to decrypt the file, and they hope to announce the results soon.
[... the rest of the urban legend, where Budenhaus reveals that he had created the hoax, and then someone else in the network accuses that claim of being a hoax]
~~~
Okay, perhaps that's less of a creepypasta than a prediction of Qanon and similar internet conspiracy subcultures. (The entry after "Patterns in the Static" is "Rigged Elections.") But they're all forms of modern occultism, after all.
Depending on the product, another model I like is dual licensing, where if you're an individual or noncommercial user, you get one price/it's free, and if you're a commercial customer, you get another price/subscription agreement