HN user
kinetronix.com
Which brings the question, if LLMs are an asset of such strategic value, why did China allow the DeepSeek to be released?
I see two possibilities here, either that the CCP is not that all-reaching as we think, or that the value of the technology isn't critical, and that the release was further cleared with the CCP and maybe even timed to come right after Trump's announcement of American AI supremacy.
This seems more like a move designed to frighten China -- or force them to spend money making LLMs -- then an actual threat. The clues are that Trump ceremonially blessed the deal but did not promise money (SoftBank et al will, supposedly), and then Musk said that's all fake because SoftBank doesn't have the money, and Altman countered that Musk should not be butthurt and should put America first. Who does that? I'm thinking, no one who has something real on his hands.
That's interesting, it hasn't occurred to me to check his games. That said, I remember reading that Machiaveli was once given a territory to govern and he was terrible at it, despite The Prince. It may be a thing about teachers vs doers.
THAT said, there is a lot of intersting things one can learn from John Carmack, so there's an exception to every rule.
Jesse Schell's book is a great read beyond game design.
Thanks for the other links.
To leave something in return, here's something I read the other day and kept thinking about it (I'm designing on a PvP motion based game)
"In competitive games, there is little more valuable than knowing the mind of the opponent, which the Japanese call “yomi.”
As a side note, I would even argue that the “strategic depth” of a game should be defined almost entirely on its ability to support and reward yomi."
The Yomi Layer concept is a reminder that moves need to have counters. If you know what the opponent will do, you should generally have some way of dealing with that.
Another adage is "code should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute". This goes directly against code being written by machines.
I still use ChatGPT for small self-contained functions (e.g. intersection of line and triangle) but mark the inside of the function clearly as chat gpt made and what the prompt was.
Or a pebble; for a super intelligent pebble.
“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.” ― Ibn Arabi
You don’t need unit tests if you have integration tests.
Which is why, as per Jim Coplien, most unit testing is waste.
But converting one type of unit tests into another is a perfect showcase for AI-generated code. They could have even kept just the prompts in the source and regenerate the tests on every run, were it not for inaccuracy, temperature, and the high cost of running.
On the internet, no one hears you being subtle. (Torvalds)
I'll add my own view: when you watch a movie, read a book, listen to a song, play a game... you CONNECT with the mind of the person who made it. When there is no mind, or the source is a dead, statistical amalgamation of countless fragments of other minds, there is nothing you'll want to connect to, nothing you'll want to squander precious hours of your life on.
And while you may be curious to see, once maybe, a movie such an imaginary AGI-LLM has created from your prompt, no one else will have the slightest interest in seeing it. And vice versa. Which means there would be absolutely NO MONEY in that market. There would be no market.
Certainly agree with you on that one.
I find it draining to have to be on the lookout constantly for hallucinations, or omissions a person wouldn't make. I imagine as long as I'm walking well known paths -- well known to many but not me -- I'm safe, but the moment I need nuances I can expect that one of those nuances is completely and convincingly made up, except I don't know which one.
People raving about it on twitter
For the most part usages of GenAI have been sharing output on social media. It is mind-blowingly fascinating, but the utility of it is far far behind.
They probably don't. Forced ad viewing is fundamentally dishonest: they can force the user to watch the ad, but they can't force him to pony up for what is being advertised.
The best description of AGI I've seen is in Michael Crichton's Prey. He describes in a fairly plausible detail how AGI rises from the building blocks. The emotion he captures is that of dealing with a psychopath -- goal oriented with no empathy -- to the infinite degree.
That said, I think ChatGPT and LLMs trick us into seeing intelligence where there is none because we are evolutionarily wired to look for signs of intelligence as a potential threat. Our defense mechanisms are asymmetrical as they have to err on the side of being overly cautious: you may mistake a rock for a bear but you won't mistake a bear for a rock.
So it is with ChatGPT: its conversation style triggers a false alarm deep in us that there is intelligence there and we can't shake that warning off, but this software design is just exploiting the flaw (of sorts) in our wiring.
"What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"
As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).
About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.
I had always thought they had some sort of special treatment but wasn't sure of their social status. I found a bit on that:
https://www.quora.com/Where-specifically-did-the-Crusaders-c...
"Most seem to think they were warrior monks, or high ranking nobles or poor peasants. In some cases that’s correct, but on the whole often not the case.
Most who fought in the holy land and there were other places where they had crusades, were usually lower nobles, knightly class or franklin, usually richer farmers. They weren’t poor peasants, but they were no rich kings either. They were often people who could barely afford to travel accross the land and have some equipment. Not for nothing did the Byzantine empire get pillaged sometimes.
Picture them as mostly young men of upper middle class background, basically comparable to your modern day average college or university brat. They were relatively well off, but not exactly rich upper class either. Basically up and coming social climbers."
How much -- not whether -- something is natural is determined by the statistical processes that make the thing. "Appeal to nature fallacy" misses that critical point.
In ancient Greece they supposedly ate meat only during festivals. That was not only better for people but also allowed animal populations to recover.
I firmly believe that the level of meat consumption today is unnaturally high, simply because people of the old did not have refrigeration, to say nothing of how the animals are raised today. I eat meat here and there, and I enjoy it, but try to limit consumption to a few times per month.
Another point of reference: the Church forbade Crusaders to eat meat from warm-blooded animals more than two times a week. If a warrior under full armor is good with two portions of meat a week, most of us should be too.
As Heissenberg said, "What we are seeing is not nature, but nature exposed to our mode of questioning."
And the mode -- we invented it as it is because of a whim of history, because it is a game, and we like the game, and it's useful for us. But as far as facts go, Nietzsche summed it up the most concisely: "there are no facts, only interpretations."
Exactly right. Most of the new engineers have nothing of the libertarian spirit of the 2600 era. It was engineers who implemented censorship at online platforms, most incredulous of which was PayPal charging customers $2,500 in damages for spreading "misinformation." I cancelled my PayPal account the moment I read the news.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
Only if a long time passes without evidence of harm, we consider that the "evidence" of safety -- there is no other. It is very difficult to claim that something new introduced in a complex system is safe, so you weigh what you get right away from it vs. what you might end up paying down the road if it ends up being unsafe. Aspartame does not, in my view, clear that bar.
It is the statistical processes that determine how much something is "natural". Our bodies evolved alongside fruit that was on the smaller and less sweet side, and logically that's what we are the most compatible with. Over centuries and millennia we selected fruits to favor size and sweetness, and over 5 years we e.g. genetically modify a strawberry to have peach flavor. The last one is like a step function compared to the slow moving processes of the agricultural selection and so less "natural" and almost certainly less compatible with our bodies.
We might still get lucky and get beneficial side effects of aspartame or peach-flavored strawberries that makes us faster, stronger, smarter, but with these things the luck usually works in the other direction.
And this is an example of "where is the evidence" logical fallacy. In complex systems, such as the human body, the only evidence of safety is time -- a very long time. The Stevia plant (though not the same as extract) has been used for centuries. Aspartame was (accidentally) created in the lab in 1965.
If you are going to mess with complex systems, such as feed yourself aspartame, vape, give pregnant women a synthetic sedative and medication for morning sickness etc., you do it for a high potential gain that offsets potentially huge downsides. Benefits of aspartame are close to nil; if anything it probably makes things worse because people think they can consume more ultra processed foods sweetened with it because such foods have "fewer calories".
Apparently you deleted one of your previous comments on the topic, so I'll repost it here as it illustrates wonderfully how "pragmatic" your own thinking is, especially the part that matrix multiplication in a loop is "literally what your brain is doing":
"Ah it's you again! It's quite funny seeing the dearth of knowledge you routinely insist on displaying whenever this topic comes up. Consider doing some reading on the information theoretic view of cognition and neurobiology. You'll find leading theories for how our brains work have many similarities to NNs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
Another thing, you don't seem to understand that all physical processes can be modeled completely through matmuls.
You should also read up on the definition of intelligence because you seem confused on what it means.
Pretty much every assertion you make here is wrong and you don't even know it.
You assert "it's common sense" something that does matrix multiplication in a loop can't be intelligent, yet get this, it's literally what your brain is doing.
Please have some epistemic humility and consider refraining from forming strong opinions on topics you don't have a clue on."
I was in a similar situation at a startup I worked for, except they are trying to get their software into the control systems in industrial refrigeration facilities. I have brought up repeatedly that their Netflix-style cloud model for control systems had caused multiple incidents and have called for an architecture discussion which other engineers supported but which the management shut down. Soon after they moved to terminate me but they failed to execute on it so I sent them a resignation notice instead and notified the investors and one customer of the issues and let them work out the whole thing.
For all intents and purposes what they tried to do was retaliation, but I think they were legally absolutely in the clear to (try to) terminate my employment. The same seems to be true of the Salesforce guy. The company had the right to fire him, and, outside of any at-employment NDAs he has the right to tell everyone what he saw. That he is suing them makes you wonder if he's doing it for the money rather than the principle.