#process automation at scale

[goodoldbandit]

The Bold Shift: Why IT Leaders Must Champion Hyper-automation Now.

Sanjay Kumar Mohindroo Sanjay Kumar Mohindroo. skm.stayingalive.in Hyper-automation is not a tech upgrade—it’s a leadership challenge. Discover why bold IT leaders are driving the shift. Hyper-automation is no longer just a buzzword. It’s the lifeline for large enterprises that want to survive the next ten years. With rising operational costs, inconsistent manual processes, and growing…

[mentorshelly]

Signs You’re Overdue for a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Overhaul in Your Small Business

Let’s be real—when you first started your business, you were the CEO, HR, marketing, admin, and janitor all in one. You did what you had to do to get things off the ground.But now your business is growing. You’re hiring. Delegating. Scaling.And things are slipping through the cracks. If your small business is running on outdated instructions, word-of-mouth training, or “this is how we’ve always…

[smescale]

A vision may be sparked by one, but it takes a team to turn it into reality.

🌍 Did you know that 75% of employees consider teamwork and collaboration as essential to business success? While a great idea may start with a single person, it’s the power of a united team that brings it to life.

Team psychology shows us that when people feel part of a shared mission, they’re more motivated, resilient, and willing to go the extra mile. The synergy of diverse skills and perspectives turns vision into results, building something stronger and more sustainable than one person alone ever could.

How does your team come together to make things happen?

Share a moment when collaboration made all the difference! 👇

[txttletale]

are there any critiques of AI art or maybe AI in general that you would agree with?

AI art makes it a lot easier to make bad art on a mass production scale which absolutely floods art platforms (sucks). LLMs make it a lot easier to make content slop on a mass production scale which absolutely floods search results (sucks and with much worse consequences). both will be integrated into production pipelines in ways that put people out of jobs or justify lower pay for existing jobs. most AI-produced stuff is bad. the loudest and most emphatic boosters of this shit are soulless venture capital guys with an obvious and profound disdain for the concept of art or creative expression. the current wave of hype around it means that machine learning is being incorporated into workflows and places where it provides no benefit and in fact makes services and production meaningfully worse. it is genuinely terrifying to see people looking to chatGPT for personal and professional advice. the process of training AIs and labelling datasets involves profound exploitation of workers in the global south. the ability of AI tech to automate biases while erasing accountability is chilling. seems unwise to put a lot of our technological eggs in a completely opaque black box basket (mixing my metaphors ab it with that one). bing ai wont let me generate 'tesla CEO meat mistake' because it hates fun

[lastoneout]

If anyone ever wants to know why being disabled is a full time job these are the steps I have to go through to trying to fill like half of my prescriptions(also, important note, I am at a 9 on the pain scale the entire time):

Go to doctor's appointment AND get them to agree to the prescription.

Go home and see that of the two the doctor said they would send over only one is showing up on your pharmacy app.

Call pharmacy.

Be on hold for like half an hour.

Finally get ahold of someone who is exhausted and woefully underpaid and ask them to check if the other one did get sent and the system isn't showing it or if it just didn't get sent.

They inform you it did not get sent.

Call doctor's office.

Navigate several phone menus to get a person.

Ask person what's up; they confirm the doctor didn't send it and offer to send them a message about it.

Agree.

Wait for an hour or so to see the script get sent over on the app OR for a call back.

Get a call back: the doctor was literally on her way out of the building but agreed to come back and send the script over.

Wait for script to show up on pharmacy app.

It does not, and now it's too late to call the doctor's office, as it's closed.

Wake up the next morning at 9am and check the app.

No prescription.

Call pharmacy to see if it got sent.

On hold for half an hour.

No it was not sent.

Call doctor's office and navigate phone menu.

Get ahold of someone who confirms the script wasn't sent, they offer to send the doctor a message.

Agree.

Wait for them to send the script or call back.

The script sends and is on the app! It should be filled today!

Insurance issue, script is delayed.

Wait an hour or so and see if it gets cleared up on it's own.

It does not.

Call pharmacy.

On hold until the automated system does a courtesy disconnect, roughly 45 minutes.

It's been almost 24 hours and you do not have the meds that are meant to help with the severe pain you're in.

Let out a deep, pained sigh and call the pharmacy again.

Process continues in this way until god sees fit to have mercy on your soul and give you your goddamn medicine, could be a few hours, could be a few days, you never know!!

And, jsyk, this is the process for at least HALF of my prescriptions, and also remarkably similar to the process for specialist referrals, only that takes EVEN LONGER.

I am so fucking tired.

[barnacles-and-brimstone]

been watching grian’s hermitcraft tour (got as far as Etho atm) and oh my god. Hearing how these fits describe their projects really does remind me that every aspect of this game is a creative outlet in some way. Every single one of them is an artist and you can hear the passion in their voices as they explain their storylines/redstone constructions/long term projects etc etc. It’s honestly beautiful. I will be enjoying all nearly eight hours of this thoroughly.

like ren and cleo are storytellers, they’ve got lore for their bases and it makes sense. scar sees aesthetics as their own function and makes beautifully immersive experiences. tango enjoys the process of automating things and creating games for his friends to enjoy equally and puts his heart and soul into his redstone. i’ve been wondering for months what joe hills’ moby dick streams are for and i am astounded at his project ideas and scale and progress yet again! bdubs (my beloved) is so deliberate in everything he creates in order to make these 3D works of art, and yet his storage is a boxy cave underneath his starter home. cub is exploring new possibilities of the game constantly. etho has spent more time trying to revive nostalgia and make his friends happy than he has working on his own home. these guys are everything to me.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI can’t do your job

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amid-job-cuts-doge-accelerates-rollout-of-ai-tool-to-automate-government

If you pay attention to the hype, you'd think that all the action on "AI" (an incoherent grab-bag of only marginally related technologies) was in generating text and images. Man, is that ever wrong. The AI hype machine could put every commercial illustrator alive on the breadline and the savings wouldn't pay the kombucha budget for the million-dollar-a-year techies who oversaw Dall-E's training run. The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since "CEO" is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss's email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss's email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.

The smart AI money is long on "decision support," whereby a statistical inference engine suggests to a human being what decision they should make. There's bots that are supposed to diagnose tumors, bots that are supposed to make neutral bail and parole decisions, bots that are supposed to evaluate student essays, resumes and loan applications.

The narrative around these bots is that they are there to help humans. In this story, the hospital buys a radiology bot that offers a second opinion to the human radiologist. If they disagree, the human radiologist takes another look. In this tale, AI is a way for hospitals to make fewer mistakes by spending more money. An AI assisted radiologist is less productive (because they re-run some x-rays to resolve disagreements with the bot) but more accurate.

In automation theory jargon, this radiologist is a "centaur" – a human head grafted onto the tireless, ever-vigilant body of a robot

Of course, no one who invests in an AI company expects this to happen. Instead, they want reverse-centaurs: a human who acts as an assistant to a robot. The real pitch to hospital is, "Fire all but one of your radiologists and then put that poor bastard to work reviewing the judgments our robot makes at machine scale."

No one seriously thinks that the reverse-centaur radiologist will be able to maintain perfect vigilance over long shifts of supervising automated process that rarely go wrong, but when they do, the error must be caught:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

The human is there to be a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The human is there to be an "accountability sink":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

But they're not there to be radiologists.

This is bad enough when we're talking about radiology, but it's even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

That's because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

Image: Krd (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DASA_01.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

--

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[sexhaver]

im obviously a big fan of factory automation games like Satisfactory and Factorio for a lot of reasons but as an engineer the funniest one is how they make non-engineer players understand through firsthand experience immutable engineering and capitalist truisms like "wait it's really easy and profitable to just scale up incrementally forever as long as you assume resources are infinite and you outsource the labor of physically building everything", or "processing crude oil into fuel and plastics is complicated and requires tearing up a lot of the environment with trains and pipelines", or "trains rule and i need more of them", or "what the fuck why do i need so many fucking screws"

[fearfulfertility]

CONFIDENTIAL LOGISTICS REPORT

DRC, Planning & Evaluation Office, Logistics & Infrastructure Division

Date: [REDACTED]

To: Director [REDACTED]

From: Administrator [REDACTED], Logistics & Infrastructure Division

Subject: Facility Expansion: New Paternity Compound Construction

Executive Summary

This report outlines the ongoing expansion of DRC-operated paternity compounds across several strategic locations nationwide. In response to increasing insemination rates and projected surrogacy demands, we have begun constructing new high-capacity compounds to accommodate more surrogates. These expansions will enable the DRC to streamline the conscription process, optimize surrogacy cycles, and ensure our ability to meet the population sustainability targets outlined for the next fiscal period.

The new compounds focus on enhanced security, specialized medical equipment, and increased surrogacy capacity.

I. Facility Expansion Overview

Strategic Locations and Site Selection

To ensure regional coverage and minimize travel time to detain and inseminated surrogates, the DRC has approved the construction of [REDACTED] new paternity compounds in FEMA Zones 4, 6, 7, and 8. These facilities will be situated in [REDACTED] areas, selected for their proximity to population centers, existing transport infrastructure, and relative isolation, ensuring operational security.

Zone 4: Atlanta, GA

Zone 6: Houston, TX

Zone 7: Omaha, NE

Zone 8: Denver, CO

Each compound is designed to accommodate [REDACTED] surrogates at any given time, with the ability to scale up to [REDACTED] in emergencies. Construction is scheduled for completion within the next [REDACTED] months, with the first inspections set to begin by [REDACTED] this year.

Paternity Compound Design Features:

High-Capacity Paternity Wards: Each compound contains specialized wards designed to manage surrogates carrying up to sedecatuplets (16), with private rooms for those at risk of premature labor.

Enhanced Monitoring Systems: Advanced surveillance and biometric monitoring ensure constant oversight and swift response to emergencies.

Security Enhancements: Reinforced containment protocols, secure access points, and patrol routes have been established to prevent unauthorized access and ensure surrogate compliance.

II. Specialized Equipment and Medical Support

Given the unique demands and expectations placed on surrogates, each paternity compound will be equipped with advanced medical infrastructure to ensure the safety and effective management of extreme weight gain, reduced mobility, and increased risks of organ stress.

Key Equipment and Infrastructure:

Reinforced Support Beds: Traditional hospital beds have proven insufficient for surrogates carrying high multiples, whose pregnancies can lead to total weight gains exceeding 200 lbs. Each ward will feature reinforced, adjustable support beds capable of accommodating extreme weights. These beds will be equipped with pressure-relief systems to minimize discomfort and reduce the risk of bedsores for near-immobile surrogates.

“I hate that I’m here! But… all I have is this bed! I can’t move, I can’t breathe half the time, but at least I have a fucking memory foam mattress!” - Surrogate S118-176-J, 27 days pregnant with decatuplets (10)

Automated Feeding & Hydration Systems: Automated systems will ensure continuous nutrition and hydration to support surrogates with reduced mobility. Given the caloric intake requirements for such pregnancies, these systems will monitor and adjust fluid and nutrient delivery, reducing the need for frequent staff intervention.

“I’m basically just a machine now, aren’t I? They hook me up, pump me full of these stupid protein shakes, and keep me breathing so I can keep carrying these bowling ball-sized kids. It’s disgusting!” - Surrogate S117-138-N, 18 days pregnant with quattuordecatuplets (14)

Custom Mobility Aids: Custom-designed lift systems and mobility aids will be integrated into each ward to facilitate the movement of surrogates. These devices will allow for safe repositioning, transfers to specialized birthing chairs, and support during transport.

“I don’t know how they expect us to move with this much weight on us. Even standing feels like my legs are going to snap. Those lifts? They’re humiliating... but without them, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed at all.” - Surrogate S120-494-P, 30 days into a sedecatuplets (16) pregnancy

Advanced Fetal Monitoring: Each compound will have real-time ultrasound and biometric monitoring stations to track fetal development. Given the accelerated gestational period, these systems will continuously update fetal positioning, size, and viability, enabling rapid response to complications.

"It’s terrifying. Knowing how big they are, how many there are… they’re not coming out normal. When I finally pop them all out, they’ll get better care than I ever did!" - Surrogate S119-667-N, 22 days pregnant with hendecatuplets (14)

Dedicated Obstetrics & Neonatal Care Units: Immediate neonatal care is essential, and each compound will include state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) to support newborns. Advanced incubators and respiratory support systems will ensure the survival of even the most premature babies.

"They always tell me how important it is to ensure the babies survive, even if I don’t. I get it, I do… but knowing there’s a whole team of people ready to take over the second I’m gone? It’s like they’ve already decided how this ends." - Surrogate S117-856-M, 8 days pregnant with tridecatuplets (13)

Pain Management and Sedation Systems: Surrogates will experience extreme discomfort and physical strain. Each paternity ward will be equipped with integrated IV pain management systems, allowing for both localized and systemic pain relief. Sedation protocols can be initiated remotely if a surrogate's distress becomes vocal, ensuring they can not incite civil disorder.

“I’m so big I can’t even see my dick, which is now buried under all these babies and fat. I’d be lying if I said the meds didn't help to blitz me out of my mind... a caring them I'm a gigantic incubator now.” - Surrogate S119-461-L, 11 days pregnant with dodecatuplets (12)

Future Equipment Developments: Research teams are exploring next-generation mobility aids, including exoskeleton support harnesses, to provide mobility assistance for late-term surrogates. These innovations aim to improve surrogate survival to deliver full-term pregnancies. Once available, prototypes will be tested in select compounds.

III. Expansion Strategy: Future Projections and Scaling

Projected Surrogacy Demand: With the increase in insemination rates, each compound is expected to handle up to [REDACTED] inseminations per month once fully operational. This translates to a need for approximately [REDACTED] newborns annually to meet population sustainability targets. Our current projections indicate that these numbers are achievable.

IV. Conclusion and Recommendations

The successful construction and operation of these new paternity compounds are critical to effectively maintaining the DRC’s ability to enforce surrogacy mandates. Our specialized equipment and infrastructure improvements will ensure we meet demands while preserving control over our surrogate.

Report submitted by: Administrator [REDACTED], Logistics & Infrastructure Division

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Sending...

Sending...

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To: Administrator [REDACTED], Logistics & Infrastructure Division

From: Director [REDACTED], DRC

Subject: RE: Facility Expansion: New Paternity Compound Construction

Dear Mr. [REDACTED],

I’ve reviewed the latest progress report on the new Paternity Compounds, and I must commend your team on the impressive strides made thus far, even with the ambitious timeline we’ve set.

I have been particularly interested in the improvements to our birthing suites. As you are well aware, managing multiple pregnancies presents unique challenges.

We are entering a critical phase. I want to emphasize that these upcoming births will set a precedent for all future operations. The successful use of these new facilities will allow us to demonstrate that our methods ensure the next generation's survival and that we can handle the demands without sacrificing efficiency or outcomes.

I look forward to seeing the first results when the initial surrogates reach full term and the birthing suites are fully operational.

Keep up the excellent work, and do not hesitate to reach out if additional resources or support are needed to ensure success.

Regards, Director [REDACTED]

----------------

Click Here to return to DRC Report Archives

[dross-the-fish]

not pro ai or anything, just curious to know what you think. What is your argument against AI making the art process more accessible to people who can't draw.

Generative AI doesn't make the process of creating art easier or more accessible, it just does the process for you. It's not going to make you an artist. You feeding it complicated prompts doesn't change that. You'd be doing exactly the same thing if you commissioned someone, telling the artist you hired what you want them to make and giving feedback until you got the result you wanted. This is just an automated version of doing that. Kind of like how a calculator can make life easier if you struggle with math but you can't really claim to have math skills if you can't solve even a basic equation without it. And I'll be blunt, I don't really care that much if some random person is using it to make portraits of their OCs or something trivial like that. I think it's a bigger issue when corporations use it to cut back on human labor on a large scale. The reason I don't think it's a good tool for people who want to be artists has more to do with this: If you have an interest in being any kind of a skilled artist you have to actually develop the skill for yourself. If you're invested in the quality of what YOU make then you do need to practice and study. AI may get you results you can't achieve on your own but if you actually want to develop skills then you need to do the labor and make art. No one starts out good at it, some people have better instincts or more of an innate talent but every artist who's work you admire has spent some time studying and most, if not all, of them have drawn outside of their comfort zones, hit walls, experienced burnout, been discouraged and for every 1 good piece they show you there are 10 failures and unfinished WIPS behind it. Art is WORK. Even if you love it, even if you are good at it. And that work is not for everyone. No amount of shortcuts, tools, or supplements can make a competent artist of someone who is fundamentally disinterested in the labor of art. And not everyone is going to be able to learn how to draw well. Just like some people will never be good singers or some will never be good athletes. It's not a moral failing or an indication of laziness to not be good at something. But Gen AI cannot give you what you don't have. It's just a shortcut for hiring someone else to do what you can't.

[blackjackkent]

Occasionally I think about the fact that I probably have (most of) the technical skills to build a serviceable Tumblr alternative in the event of The Collapse, and have an investment in the culture and preservation/enabling of fandom creation, and I start wondering again about whether it would be a good idea to make an attempt.

And then I always run up against the elephant in the room which is cost. The cost of maintaining a site like this at scale must be astronomical. Vast numbers of servers for redundancy and global endpoints, processing power to handle millions of simultaneous requests, database storage for an exponentially growing amount of posts and reblog information, and then the image hosting requirements, my god... and the human non-automated moderation that people want...

I already spend a sizable chunk of change just keeping RPThreadTracker running and that thing is TINY.

This is why I get a little frustrated at the kneejerk aversion to any sort of monetary support by the Tumblr userbase; I think a lot of people just don't fathom that if you want a FREE site and community of this size and robustness, money still HAS to be involved somewhere. A LOT of money. Which means our options are:

A powerful corporate interest

Having our data sold to the highest bidder

User participation in donations and optional purchases

Tumblr has a combination of 1 and 3 which allows us to avoid 2, and yet people constantly spit in the face of 3 and then wonder why the whole situation is so fragile.

Anyway, all this to say that I need some extraordinarily rich person who is at home in the Tumblr ecosystem to come out of the woodwork. I just wanna talk.

[alexanderwales]

Alright, here's my dream Stardew Valley style game, designed for my own tastes.

You come to a small town with the usual twenty to thirty people. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's a fantasy town, and no one actually farms anymore, partly because it's only questionably profitable, partly because a lot of the knowledge has been lost. Instead, everyone uses these magic doodads which are very powerful but also very limited. The tavernkeeper has a doodad that makes him a single kind of weak ale and a single variety of off-tasting wine. The clothier has basically a square mile of linen to work with, and everyone wears her drab clothes. Tools are made from a doodad that the blacksmith owns, not even made of any actual metal, just a material that wears away after a month and needs to be replaced by a new copy from the blacksmith's doodad. People get their meals from the doodads. They get their medical checkups. It's all a bit shit.

Because I'm a worldbuilder at heart, I would have this all exist in the wake of a large-scale war that depleted the town of its fighting-age population, with the doodads being a sort of government program to ensure that more of the lifeblood of the town could be drained away. And for there to be some reason for the town to continue existing, perhaps the government is harvesting some resources necessary in the creation of doodads. That's enough for a pro-doodad faction and maybe some minor drama with them, though I do like the idea that the only reason things are Like This is because there was a war and things got bad. It's not necessarily a bleak town, but there's definitely a listlessness to it, a "what's the point".

So you're a farmer, but no one is really a farmer anymore. Maybe there are a few books, but you don't learn farming from books, you learn it from practical experience; that's a lot of what this game is about. When you start, there's no one to buy seeds from, there's just a bunch of wilderness where farms once stood, now all long overgrown.

So you go out and forage, for a start, and you clear the land, and you pay attention to the plants and how they can be used, and you start in on making recipes with them, maybe with the help of your grandfather's old, partially incomplete books. You find some wild corn that's a descendant of the old times. You find some tomato seeds in an urn. You discover potatoes because you see them dug up by a wild boar, which itself was once a domesticated animal.

In my ideal game, you need to pay attention to the soil quality, to how far apart things are planted, to what crops work well together. Farming is a matter of companion planting and polycultures. You get some chickens by giving them consistent feed, and you keep them around because they're natural pest control. Your climbing beans climb the stalks of your maize. You're attracting pollinators. (From a gameplay perspective, yeah, we probably put this all into a grid, and you have crop bonuses from adjacencies, and emergent gameplay that comes from all that, some plants providing shade, others providing nitrogen fixing.) You're a scientist making observations about the plants, maybe with your incomplete book giving you confirmation on the nature of all your crops once you hit certain production goals or a perfect specimen or whatever.

Cooking is the same. There has got to be a system that I like better than just "combine tomato with bread to get tomato bread". I'm pretty sure that it's some variant of the actual process I use when cooking, which is making sure that things are properly cooked, balancing flavors against each other, adding in a little salt or acidity or umami or whatever. Time in the kitchen, in this game, is often about making meals, ensuring that if you have a fatty piece of meat you have some asparagus that's coated with lemon to go with it. (From a gameplay perspective, I think building the dish once is probably sufficient and it can be automated after that, and building the meal is the same. I don't want to play this minigame every time I'm cooking a dish, I just want to play it a single time until I have good knowledge of the best way to grill a BBQ chicken breast with a homemade sauce.)

But if we're having a little minigame here where we pay attention to how long we're cooking the kale to make sure that it's the right texture, and we're paying attention to abstractified mouthfeel and palette, then we can get something else for free: variation. See, you're not just cooking to get an S grade, you're cooking for people with different tastes. The cobbler has a sweet tooth, the librarian loves fruity things, the mayor cannot stand fish, that sort of thing. From a gameplay perspective, maybe we represent this with a radar graph with some specific favorite and least favorite individual flavors, and maybe it's visible to the player, but the important thing is that player gets feedback and have a reason to strive for both "good" and "perfection" and some of this is going to depend on the quality of the ingredients.

And this is, gradually, how the town is brought back into the fullness of life. You're not just cooking for these people, you're also selling them food, and they're making their own recipes, and all the stuff that's not food is making their businesses not suck anymore. After the first test keg of ale goes swimmingly, the tavernkeeper wants more, a lot more, and puts in an order for hops, wheat, grapes, anything he can use to make things that will improve nights at the tavern. The clothier will skeptically take in wool and spin her own yarn, and then eagerly want more, because how awesome is it to have a new textile? There's a chemist who is extremely interested in dyes and paints, and wants you to bring him all kinds of things to see what might be viable for going beyond the ~3 colors that the doodads can provide.

So by year two, if you're doing things right, you're the lynchpin of the revivalist movement. People are now moving to the town, for the first time in decades, because they hear that you're there and doing interesting things with the wilderness. Maybe there are other farmers following in your wake, but maybe it's just new characters who are specifically coming because a crate of wine was shipped to the capital city. Maybe some of them bring new techniques for you, or a handful of plants from a botanical garden, and there are new elements for the minigames, or maybe some automation for the stuff that's old hat.

I think something that's important to me is that there's a reason for the crops you plant and the things you do. I always like these games best when it feels like I'm doing something for someone, when I can look at a plot of cabbages and think "ah, those are the cabbages I owe to Leon". Where these games are at their worst, everything is entirely fungible and I've planted eight million blueberries because they have the highest ROI.

And yeah, in most of these games, there are other minigames like fishing and mining and logging and crafting, and since this is just a blog post and not a game, I definitely could massively expand an already sizeable scope.

I think for mining the player would use doodads of their own, and maybe you could make a mining minigame out of that, using the same planting tile system to instead create an automated ore harvesting machine that plumbs the depths of the earth (possibly dealing with rocks of different hardness, the water table, and other challenges along the way).

Fishing is a question of understanding the different fish species, what they eat, where they congregate, and then setting nets or lines, since I have never met a fishing minigame I really enjoyed. Again, there's some idea that the player is gaining information over time, building up a profile of these fish, noticing that some of them go nuts when it rains, understanding the spawning season, that they go to deeper water when it's cold, etc.

Crafting really depends on what you're crafting, but if you're reintroducing traditional artisan processes to this town, then people are going to need tools and machines and things. I'm not sure I know what a proper crafting game looks like. The only experience I have to draw on is wood shop, where I made wooden boxes, cutting boards, and picture frames. Since this is an engineering-lite puzzle-lite game, you could maybe do something in that vein, e.g. defining a number of steps that get you the correct thing you're trying to make, but ... eh. I love the idea of designing a chicken coop, for example, or building a trellis if I want my climbing beans to not need maize, or whatever, but I don't know how you actually implement that. There are definitely voxel-based and snap-to-grid games where you build bases, and I tend to find that fun ... but it's mostly cosmetic, for the obvious reason that doing it any other way than cosmetic requires programmatic evaluation, which is difficult and maybe unintuitive. The closest I think I've seen is ... maybe Tears of the Kingdom? Contraption building? But I don't know how you translate that to a farming game. Maybe I should ask my wife about this, because she's always doing little projects around the house (an outdoor enclosure for our cats, a 3D-printed holder for our living room keyboard, a mounting for our TV).

Making an interesting crafting system is difficult, which is why pretty much no one has done it.

And if I'm talking pie in the sky, without concern for budget or scope, I want the villagers to all have a mammoth amount of writing for them. I want petty little dramas and weird obsessions, lives that evolve with or without my input, rudimentary dialog trees that let me nudge things in different directions. This is just an unbelievable amount of work on its own, it would be crazy, but I would love having a tiny little town game where sometimes other people would fall in love. I would like to be invited to a wedding, maybe one that happened because I encouraged the chemist to hang out with the clothier, and in the course of working together on dyes, they fell in love. With twenty people in town and another ten that come in over the course of the game if you hit the right triggers, I do think this is just a matter of having a ton of time/budget. You write tons and tons of dialogue so there's not much that's repeated, you have some lines of conversation between characters that are progressed through, you have others that trigger off of events, and then you have personal relationships between NPCs that can be progressed through time or with player intervention. Give single characters a pool of love interests, have their affections depend on their routine which depends on what's changed in town ... very difficult to do without spending loads and loads of time on it though.

Anyway, that's one of my dream games. No one is ever going to make it, it would be a niche of a niche, and as scoped here, is too much for a small team to ever actually finish, let alone polish. But it's the sort of thing I'm imagining in my head when I think about playing Stardew Valley and its successors.

[smescale]

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[reasonsforhope]

The Surucuá community in the state of Pará is the first to receive an Amazonian Creative Laboratory, a compact mobile biofactory designed to help kick-start the Amazon’s bioeconomy.

Instead of simply harvesting forest-grown crops, traditional communities in the Amazon Rainforest can use the biofactories to process, package and sell bean-to-bar chocolate and similar products at premium prices.

Having a livelihood coming directly from the forest encourages communities to stay there and protect it rather than engaging in harmful economic activities in the Amazon.

The project is in its early stages, but it demonstrates what the Amazon’s bioeconomy could look like: an economic engine that experts estimate could generate at least $8 billion per year.

In a tent in the Surucuá community in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará, Jhanne Franco teaches 15 local adults how to make chocolate from scratch using small-scale machines instead of grinding the cacao beans by hand. As a chocolatier from another Amazonian state, Rondônia, Franco isn’t just an expert in cocoa production, but proof that the bean-to-bar concept can work in the Amazon Rainforest.

“[Here] is where we develop students’ ideas,” she says, gesturing to the classroom set up in a clearing in the world’s greatest rainforest. “I’m not here to give them a prescription. I want to teach them why things happen in chocolate making, so they can create their own recipes,” Franco tells Mongabay.

The training program is part of a concept developed by the nonprofit Amazônia 4.0 Institute, designed to protect the Amazon Rainforest. It was conceived in 2017 when two Brazilian scientists, brothers Carlos and Ismael Nobre, started thinking of ways to prevent the Amazon from reaching its impending “tipping point,” when deforestation turns the rainforest into a dry savanna.

Their solution is to build a decentralized bioeconomy rather than seeing the Amazon as a commodity provider for industries elsewhere. Investments would be made in sustainable, forest-grown crops such as cacao, cupuaçu and açaí, rather than cattle and soy, for which vast swaths of the forest have already been cleared. The profits would stay within local communities.

A study by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the New Climate Economy, published in June 2023, analyzed 13 primary products from the Amazon, including cacao and cupuaçu, and concluded that even this small sample of products could grow the bioeconomy’s GDP by at least $8 billion per year.

To add value to these forest-grown raw materials requires some industrialization, leading to the creation of the Amazonian Creative Laboratories (LCA). These are compact, mobile and sustainable biofactories that incorporate industrial automation and artificial intelligence into the chocolate production process, allowing traditional communities to not only harvest crops, but also process, package and sell the finished products at premium prices.

The logic is simple: without an attractive income, people may be forced to sell or use their land for cattle ranching, soy plantations, or mining. On the other hand, if they can make a living from the forest, they have an incentive to stay there and protect it, becoming the Amazon’s guardians.

“The idea is to translate this biological and cultural wealth into economic activity that’s not exploitative or harmful,” Ismael Nobre tells Mongabay."

-via Mongabay News, January 2, 2024

[sophie-frm-mars]

My wife was asking me about this this morning. This is pure political fanfic, but if I were Trump and I were going to try and make America a re-industrialised nation centred around the tech industry that keeps its supply lines as entirely in-house as possible, what I would do is start (obviously) with enormous central planning. You can't "free market incentives" your way back out of the export of industrial labour overseas.

You'd copy China and make enormous State-Owned Enterprises (assuming we care about the market and want to keep playing this stupid game instead of just becoming fully communist) that would process refined minerals into components, components into parts and parts into electronics. I'd recognise the scale of this as a multi-generational project and immediately start subsidising training for more engineers, especially for people who can set up automated factory lines but also engineers in new emerging tech fields like autonomous driving, software programmers, designers, even artists since the content economy is such a huge part of what people use tech for through social media and so much art is produced digitally now anyway.

From there you want to look at the markets globally that fucking, EaglePhone or whatever these overpriced Made In Murica devices can be sold into, and at this point, given that they will be crazy expensive compared to Chinese electronics literally no matter what you do, here would be a worthwhile place to try and flex America's muscles and threaten the UK, the EU, South America, Canada and so on with tariffs or other penalties if they don't adopt a hostile policy toward Chinese electronics.

Massive central planning would be essential for the kind of societal transformation that Trump is explicitly describing, in order to have a product to sell to the rest of the world before using imperialist bullying to make other countries buy things from America instead, but here we have to return yet again to the reality of Trump's plan. There is no end goal where America is in a stronger position. If he had implemented sweeping public programs reinvesting taxes into the health of the nation (never mind the health of its citizens) in his first term, he might have been in a powerful enough position to strongarm other countries into changing the flows of global trade, but America's world influence simply is declining, and more and more rapidly, so he's just trying to make moves that make him and his friends as much money as possible while they lock the doors, pack the country up into the box it came in and set the whole thing on fire. He describes these moves using the MAGA fantasy because it gives all his supporters in the media and the general population enough to talk about to buy him time, but I don't think anyone outside his base ever thought making America great was ever his plan, so why has everyone been critiquing the tariffs as if his sincere belief was that he would achieve his stated goals with them?

We all let our enemies set the topic of the conversation all day every day and it's shocking to me

[samueldays]

Sam Reviews: Factorio

Factorio is a good game.

Factorio is well advertised. When I look at Factorio in the Steam Store with example screenshots, I think: Mm, yeah, it's pretty much like that. There's several screenshots of varying organization and complexity and scale.

Factorio is a logistics, automation and construction simulator game for people who like those things. It delivers what it promises. It's Factorio. If you are even vaguely in the Factorio demographic, you have probably heard about it already, it's hard for me to say anything new about its features.

So I'm going to talk about what I call "unfeatures" instead, the absence of specific failure modes that I've seen many times elsewhere.

1: Factorio does not routinely lie to the player.

There's a lot of video games where the game shows e.g. [80% chance to hit] but the actual chance is closer to 90%. Sometimes because it rolls twice and takes the better result, sometimes because it secretly adds a flat 10% player favoritism bonus against the AI. In the short run, I suppose this keeps players happy by feeling lucky and not frustrated by miss streaks. In the long run, I find it offensive because not only did the game lie to me, the game polluted a playerbase by spreading a false understanding of how much "80%" is, and this will make a lot of people unhappy later when they run into real 80% and it feels too low.

There's a few games which can pull off a clever Interface Screw, where the game temporarily lies a little or hides information for diegetic reasons (visor damage, invisibility spells) where someone is lying to the character, but games that lie to the player are almost always bad. This should be a very low bar to clear, and yet, game devs keep thinking they're clever and transgressive for deliberately crashing into it.

Moving from lying to merely non-informing:

2: Factorio does not expect me to keep my own database.

Again, this is not an absolute rule. There's a few games which can pull off out-of-game note-taking well, such as detective games where working out contradictions and inferences is part of the fun. But even those are usually friendly enough to keep an in-game list of clues found for the player to re-examine at leisure.

For most games, once you've discovered e.g. a potion recipe, then the potion recipe should stay discovered and be listed in-game, in a character knowledge section. Quest Logs should be a standard feature of RPGs, so the player can step away for a week and the character has the information freshly available, avoiding "WTF was I doing" problems.

Factorio is very forthcoming about providing information to the player, both general function and specific numbers. Some games might say Assembler 2 is "slightly faster" or "much faster" than Assembler 1, but Factorio tells me that the the Assembler 2 has a speed of 0.75 while Assembler 1 runs at speed 0.5 (the baseline of 1 is the player character's own production speed).

With quality of life improvements, Factorio will even auto-calculate and display how relative speed interacts with processes having different base times, so a smelting furnace might say something like [Takes input of 1.2 copper ore per second, outputs 1.2 copper plate per second] in the mouseover tooltip. Except with icons rather than text, so it's shorter.

Plus, there's good "Ctrl-F" functionality to help me find where something is.

Some enemies in Factorio are immune to fire. These enemies will immediately be listed as having 100% fire resistance when you mouse over them. You don't need to catalogue enemy resistances by exhaustively shooting each enemy with each weapon. You don't need to remember the resistances, the game will track and display those for you.

3: Factorio lets me play the game, not play the wiki.

When I say "play the wiki", I don't simply mean looking things up, I look things up in Factorio too. I am gesturing at a game design failure pattern where the game expects a player to know/learn something and is very bad at providing ways for the player to learn it.

e.g. if I loot [Silver Key] from some house, I can reasonably expect it'll be useful, and I'll discover it in the natural course of play when I find a door with a silver lock. Maybe I even found it earlier and can backtrack now that I've found the key.

but, if I loot [Silver Crystal] [Red Crystal] [Pale Crystal] [Purple Crystal] from some house, but only one of them opens a door, and the other three are worthless filler, this is the "playing the wiki" failure mode. There's no good way of learning that 3 of 4 crystals do nothing, so I end up going to the wiki if I don't want to be carrying around worthless trash in my inventory - especially if I have a limited inventory and/or there's more red herring objects elsewhere.

Many games are self-sabotaging this way! Players checking the wiki are players browsing the internet, not playing the game!

As mentioned above, Factorio provides a lot of information up front, in game, so I never need to look up on the wiki how fast the new assembler is, or what the plastic crafting recipe is, or how much health an enemy has.

"Where do I go to get more iron ore?" Wiki can't tell me that, Factorio has random map generation, I have to explore. Strong randomization is another method of avoiding the wiki problem.

"How do I fight this enemy?" Wiki can't tell me that either, Factorio gives me a toolbox of guns and grenades and mines and poison and tanks and artillery, but there's never any kind of necessary special secret that's troublesome to discover. Big enemies can be killed with tactical nuclear strikes, or with weight of fire from lots of small guns. Wiki might have advice, but not a walkthrough to the 'correct' way of doing it.

4: Factorio does not steal control with frequent, repeated, unskippable animations.

Some games insist on making you watch the Movement Animation every time you give a unit order, some games insist on making you watch the Transition Cinematic each time you move to a different area, some games have text that gradually loads into a dialog box and won't even present your dialog options until the Text Scroll has finished unrolling. Et cetera.

Factorio respects that I'm here for a game, not a movie, and definitely not a movie that I've seen a dozen times before. This is partly about respect for the player's time, and it's also about flow and interruption. Even a sub-second animation can be very jarring when it blocks interaction. A sub-second animation can be especially annoying if it's in a frequently-accessed part of the interface that could itself be sub-second to use, and the animation makes it take 2-3x longer to use every time.

By contrast, a dishonorable mention goes to Citizen Sleeper, which a friend recommended to me recently. You can watch a speedrun of the game here. It's ten minutes and a lot of that is spent on enforced waiting for animations to play: zoom into location, zoom out of location, fade to black, unfade from black, and even a loading bar animation for buying an item. Very artistic, I'm sure. Infuriating when I am accustomed to Factorio's responsiveness.