doomlaser

Posting this in light of Sergey Brin’s Stanford comments last week about Google under-investing after publishing the Transformer paper. Not just in scaling compute, but in actually turning that invention into first-class LLM products.

I revisited a 2015 radio interview I did (months before OpenAI existed) where I tried to reason about AI as “high-level algebra.” I didn’t have today’s vocabulary, but the underlying intuition—intelligence as inference over math and incentives—ends up looking surprisingly close to how LLMs actually work.

Curious which parts people think aged well vs. clearly wrong.

Cool.

My suggestion, as a game developer for nearly 30 years: pico-8. If you have any questions. Ping me on Twitter. It's the weekend after all ;)

It's not leaked. It was posted publicly to YouTube, which is where I watched it. It was the first or second video in my recommended feed. I even left a comment, "Thank you, Stanford, for uploading this talk for us." which Stanford put a heart on, pinning it to the top of the YouTube comments: https://i.imgur.com/LSi6mqN.png

It was a good talk on a technical level. My guess is he ran into trouble when he briefly criticized modern Google's corporate culture when it comes to work-from-home?

There is other discussion in the thread with the broken link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41157136

The main thing is the funny anecdote about Lua that I shared over there. I'll post it here too. We used Lua for all of the visual programming for the music tracks. This was not allowed by the 2008 App Store policies. We decided to just rename all our .lua files as .cfg (.config?) to obfuscate our rule bending. After the app blew up in popularity, Apple eventually reversed course on this rule.

Here's another fun link. This is Steve Jobs playing Tap Tap Revenge 3 during an iPhone keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXQT19gl1eg#t=14m50s

And here's a fun photo album of interesting stuff, our Palo Alto HQ, and more: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WDUfEV7ivAqyJ1rFA

Unfortunately a reality if you care for vintage iPhone games. Piracy is sometimes the last line of defense for game preservation.

In our case, a group of hackers have released a fangame that is in many ways equal to a modern Tap Tap Revenge, and it can be found here: https://taptapreloaded.com/

The Making of Tap Tap Dance video, it apparently didn't attach. Here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XmWPATbkeM

I guess I should probably resubmit.

This should be the main video, maybe there's an error! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XmWPATbkeM

Loved working on those music games. And that we have a nice document of some of its creation in the video above. I have great memories of working on the series, spread out across Champaign, IL (home of UIUC), the NYU Tisch Center, even a restaurant in Montreal.

Steve Jobs even demoed Tap Tap Revenge at an iPhone keynote in 2009! Our little game!

IGN gaves us a 9/10 when it was released: https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/12/11/tap-tap-dance-iphone...

At the end of each difficulty tier, you unlock a new song that's accompanied by art specific to the track. Daft Punk's "Technologic," for example, has an old-school TV screen that flashes images and the band's name as notes stream down bars that are much shorter and shaped differently than the main game screen. Moby's "Disco Lies" also uses short bars that unfurl from what looks like the mouth of an alien designed by a nine-year-old using MS Paint. (And that's not a slam to the artist -- I think it's very cool.) Once you finish a boss track, that song become parts of the track list on the next tier.

Unless you want to stab your ears when you hear techno, Tap Tap Dance is the best music game on the App Store right now. The note placement and control sensitivity is just right, making it instantly playable to anybody. But Tap Tap Dance doesn't hold its fire. By the time you reach the hard tier, you are getting a serious thumb workout. With excellent song selection and super-cool graphics, Tap Tap Dance is a pleasure to recommend.

One interesting fact about the game. We designed all the levels around Lua, which was officially banned from the App Store when we were making it. I remember deciding with the other main developer, that we should rename all our .lua files, .cfg (.configure) to buy us some time.

Ultimately, Apple eventually changed the rules to allow for this.

absolutely essential to add a line for .DS_Store in every .gitignore, unfortunately.

Lots of design patterns have their uses, but can suffer when applied too overzealously.

Our long-term goal is to produce a highly documented and complete C++ codebase for every version of Twilight Princess. Having clear and readable source code will aid speedrunners, glitch hunters, and modders curious about how particular parts of the game work.

Our primary goal is a full decompilation of the GameCube USA version with appropriate documentation. After this is achieved, we plan to decompile the other versions of the game.

Cool project.

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :)

On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower.

I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.

The mosaics look really nice!

However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything.

Haven't fixed that yet :)

You could still find PLATO terminals at the UIUC student union when I was a kid. Very cool systems. Ahead of their time in many ways, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

This is my favorite edition, as it is the one I discovered from my parents' bookshelf in my early college years. Highly recommend the translation, and the photos. Lao Tsu's writing is just as relevant today as when it was originally written, thousands of years ago.

The original edition from 1972 is available on Amazon, as well: https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Lao-Tsu/dp/039471833X

The track is constructed procedurally, so it's different each time you play it, but remains static after it's been constructed. There are about 20-30 "chunks" that get remixed into the track at random, except for a small number of "black listed" tracks after certain chunks, where they would make the track too hard. Additionally, some of the more difficult chunks only appear after the first 20-30 seconds.

This is a time-tested strategy for simple procedural "endless" games, starting with Adam Saltsman's Canabalt in 2009, and one of this game's inspirations, Terry Cavanagh's Super Hexagon from 2012.

I made this an intentional part of the game's design: once you've been free-falling for a couple seconds, your bike switches into Glider Mode, where you can shift gravity while you're falling by steering.

Score only goes up when you're on solid ground, so the idea is to make cool looking recoveries after falling off, and land them with style. :)

Playable in the browser on both phones and keyboards at http://doomlaser.itch.io/bike

Found unresponsive in his hot tub. That's sad. He was very funny and charismatic in his acting roles, and it was not that long ago he was giving interviews about his life, post sobriety. 11 months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oZuK0ri7Y8

His MBA is from Harvard Business School. Undergrad CS at Rice.

James M. Whitehurst is new CEO, previously at IBM, but originally CEO of Red Hat. He joined IBM after they acquired it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst

He wrote a book about open source software while running Red Hat, The Open Organization: https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book

He is an MBA, but he got his undergraduate degree in CS from Rice.

Digiloi is another cool Petscii platformer from a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UNMSeS5l4k#t=30s

I watched a good talk from Yann LeCun who is Chief AI Scientist at Meta, and he explained that the thinking is that open source AI models will be the long-term winner, so it's best for them to work in that arena.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqXLJsmsrk

The amazing thing is that at age 84 and having not made a film in over a decade, Coppola has used a considerable amount of his own personal wealth to film the sci-fi epic Megalopolis, from a concept he came up with in the 1980s. Adam Driver stars, filming is wrapped, and it comes out next year. Should be interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolis_(film)

Tempest is one of the video games on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_in_the_Mus...

I wouldn't take it back. It was a singular experience in my career. I learned a lot. One of the cool things they did was have monthly talks for the interns from the executives. One of these was an off the cuff talk from Steve Jobs himself.

When I was an intern, we had to pay $1200 a month for corporate housing, and they put 4 of us in a 2 bedroom apartment, walking distance from IL1 in Cupertino. They also gave the 4 of us 2 bikes. Apple's cafeteria may not be free, but at least they're paying for intern housing these days.