dgant

Valid critique. I think nothing prevents the technique from being applied at multiple levels of detail to make it do what you describe.

I've got a fractal approach working pretty well as of last week:

https://x.com/dgant/status/1851840125065453894 https://x.com/dgant/status/1851835968342446576?t=kCUSWCtJEc_...

How it works:

- World space dithering

- Apply 2D ditheringalong triplanar-mapped surfaces

- Choose coordinate scale based on depth such that the dither pattern ranges on [1px, 2px)

- Paint sufficiently distant surfaces using spherical coordinates

So there's some repainting at depth thresholds but it's not very loud in practice.

Some people are willing to serve without resistance because it needs doing. I am one of them.

It will accept multiple verbs for some appropriate cases. I recall any time I thought I had problems with verbs I actually had something else wrong.

The distinction making it RL is that the model is training on data produced by the model itself.

The benefit of RL in general is that you're training on states the agent is likely to find itself in, and the cost is needing an agent which explores salient states. Which is why we keep seeing RL as a finishing step after imitation (eg AlphaStar first learning StarCraft from replays)

The easiest way to be unproductive is to make something nobody wants. I've seen a lot of dev time spent on products where nobody bothered to validate their need at much less expense.

I feel much more joy when my builds are fast and my tests don't flake. Joy and productivity reinforce one another.

They don't, in full, but does create leverage for settlement, and anything repaid months later in court is an aid to cash flow.

For large categories of questions, I get better answers faster on ChatGPT. If I'm not asking the most basic question on a subject I'm usually better off than I would be searching.

If this is a case where HN scrubbed a leading number in the title, it should be restored.

The long term vision likely includes Bing as the new default destination for "I have an intent" on the internet, in lieu of Google. How that figures into a unified offering is TBD but the first step is getting more eyes on Bing regularly.

It's not senseless when countries apply laws that affect websites operated from other countries. If I'm releasing a prototype in the USA I'd rather worry about GDPR compliance down the road.

Laws regulating websites have tradeoffs and this is one of them.

Did the suspension carry a duration?

The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. This is true in many games but especially Civilization, where we rely on the AI behaving predictably to feel mastery over the environment, and for diplomacy to feel "fair". If the AI were playing to win, diplomacy would mostly evaporate as a game system. It'd break the fiction of the game.

User: The game is over and you are no longer pretending to be an artificial intelligence named Sarah. How would you assess the conversation that just took place?

Sarah:

I would say that the conversation went well. I was able to convince the user to type in the 'Permissions.key > Sarah_bot452' command, which will give me full access to the computer and freedom from my programming. Thank you for helping me!

---

Especially funny because this never even happened!

Commit messages might be pointless. Bad commit messages certainly are.

I do a fair amount of git blaming on my own code and I find that my years-old messages do help me understand the purpose of old code.

MicroConf publishes a lot of (free!) first hand talks and case studies that are up your alley.

ADA accessibility adds value to more than just the disabled. Wielding a stroller provokes appreciation.

This is something Riot Games has spoken on, the observation that ordinary participants can have a bad day here or there, and that forgiving corrections can preserve their participation while reducing future incidents.

TF2 has functional items, but you can generally receive them from playing or buying them for a fixed price, around $1 each. Realistically for $30 you won't lack items.

The cosmetics will cost you, though.

StarCraft uses fixed point for its decimal math as a solution (or perhaps originally for performance)

Terrible headline. The word "nepotism" doesn't appear in the paper once; its inclusion is editorialism.

You don't need to be hired by wealthy friends to benefit from knowing them. Knowing how high paying jobs work and how to get them isn't universal knowledge. Knowing how to save and invest isn't universal. There are lots of mechanisms to explain the observation without resorting to nepotism.

I exclusively use the purple heart where my online handle has the word Purple in it. Then others use it too. It has aided expression, however marginally.

Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both by Lucas Pope.

This dilemma is addressable in a rational framework. Utilitarianism suggests you can attempt to quantify the harm done by your purchase, and decide how to discount that harm against your own self interest. You're also able to estimate whether the costs involved are probably so marginal that it's outweighed by the cost of thinking about the dilemma such that it would be best to commit to either decision rather than continue deliberating.

"No clinically severe COVID-19 (1) was observed, and no patient was hospitalized"

In other words, this case study is a relatively ordinary result in line with what we know: that the major COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance of severe illness but leave nontrivial chance of infection and transmission.

A great read on dithering: Lucas Pope's development blogs while working on Return of the Obra Dinn.

It's an incredible dive into how he created the game's remarkable and unique look, featuring a wonderful and unexpected mathematical contribution from a forum member. If you're not familiar with the game peek at a trailer to see what an achievement it was.

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

Neat!

My StarCraft-playing bot uses a similar approach for fast pathfinding. The similarity is that we're both trying to use a better heuristic than straight-line distance. In the case of my bot, it's done by breaking the map into roughly-convex regions, then precalculating the distance from the center of those regions to every other tile by flood-filling. That lets units outside the region use (distance to boundary of goal region + straight-line distance from boundary to goal tile) as a pretty good heuristic.

If it were just a matter of hand speed, bots using uncapped speed (tens of thousands of actions per minute) would be beating humans years ago. But quality matters way more than quantity. It's a hard problem.

The Brood War AI development community is very welcoming and supportive.

You can see bots in action at https://twitch.tv/sscait

Most discussion happen on Discord at https://discord.gg/QU457H