Fraterkes

Having stuff explained to you in patronizing tones? How horrible Scott!

In the past “why don’t games look like my mockup??” was annoying, but at least required some effort / talent. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Lots of things right too, thankfully

For C# there’s basically nothing in engine, so you’d use Rider or Superluminal. Which is fine, Godot can have a bit too much nih imo

The responses here, and discussions on hn more broadly, make me feel like ai use is something that people are uniquely insecure about.

Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline? Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.

If it’s GENERIC reward seeking behaviour, why does alignment work sometimes? Why can we give a decent LLM a goal with a set of constraints and have it stay within those constraints fairly often?

These articles are frustrating on HN because it's quite common for programmers to tinker on small projects in solitude, so when artists complain about ai you get all these "just make stuff for your own sake, or where you in it for the fame?" reactions.

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

Social ills whose minds are pure machinery! Social ills whose blood is running money! Social ills whose fingers are ten armies!

Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.

I don’t know if it’s the fault of your parents’ parenting style, but there’s a kind of shortsighted meanness in this comment that has been the source of vast amounts of human suffering throughout history.

Before AI it was possible to "express" yourself to someone else by recommending them a piece of art you liked. There's a lot of art in the world, expressing many different things, so you could actually get across something very specific by being a good curator / recommender. But nobody would seriously claim that they were actually creating, painting with a broader brush at a "book level" instead of a "word level" when they were just curating good novels.

Did you read the article? This is not a hackathon where you build software, it’s one where you’re trying to get a model to make progress on a frontier math problem. The point is that that activity may not map well onto the shape of a hackathon

Right, but currently the USA is still pretty far ahead. If you're in a race and the person who's in the lead by a large margin says "this is getting out of hand, how about we take a break?" isn't it obviously in the interest of the disadvantaged party to agree?

And if one of the parties can put a stop to the race like that at any time, is it really an arms race? The current balance between the US and China when it comes to AI strikes me as much more lopsided than the balance between the US and the USSR when it came to nuclear weapons.

What I'd like these people to (publicly) grapple with is the following:

The results of the past few years of ai development have been disruptive largely in the area of white-collar work. Comparatively the results in ie ai-enabled medical advancements have been modest (AlphaFold being an exception); I think it's telling that the main achievement touted here is providing people with cheap medical counseling.

So if we pause here we're essentially at a point were the most salient results of our great Ai leap-forward are the vast disruption and increase in precarity in the job-market, while achieving hardly any of the frequently touted ultimate benefits (https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace).

The point of the comment you're responding to is that it is at this point hardly an arms race: The frontier of ai development is happening completely inside 2 American companies, the most significant results outside America mostly involve (impressive!) distillation, which means their progress is conditional on progress of the big closed source models.

So if the race here is between 2 American companies, this is obviously something that can be resolved with legislation, ie a solution that doesn't depend on the bargaining power of either party.

An arms race implies that the only solution would be either one side winning decisively, or both parties negotiating peace.

I don't think a country is well-served by an overly broad definition of terrorism.

You might disagree: the fact that you mention the military "shooting back" when we're discussing a jet-engine being sabbotaged suggests that you believe a state is allowed to be / ought to be disproportionate in its violence towards its citizens.

Here's my "nuanced" take: If a pro-zionist group were officialy designated as terrorists for spraying paint into a jet-engine I would find that ridiculous too.

Folded cities being primarily associated with Inception instead of ringworlds really shows you pr is everything.

I shouldn’t tell you this, cause I’m also working on a font editor, but I’d consider looking into Raph Levien’s Hyperbezier work

Significant indentation is why people love python. Can 2 billion people be wrong?

As an aside, are there any habitual modafinil takers here? I had a period in college where I took it very rarely when I had to cram. Worked pretty well.

Nice! Any tips for finding spaces like that? I guess it's mostly finding coworking spaces that are focused around a specific discipline (I know there are a few gamedev ones for example) so that you already have a lot in common?

Disasterpeace has a bunch of breakdowns of his work on his youtube channel. Including a session about his work on Fez. He's a really interesting guy, both artistically and technically very skilled.

Jolt is essentially the same physics engine that was used in the Horizon games, the performance there should be able to get quite good.

If you're making any kind of even slightly ambitious 3d game you probably need to be using gdextensions (ie writing custom engine-extensions in C++). I'll add that the engine source is very accessible. It's deliberately pretty bare C++, so if you have a decent amount of C# / C experience you should be able to find your way around it pretty easily.

Unity is a bit better when it comes to performance foot-guns and messiness (and in some ways much worse). Unreal seems to be pretty frictionless for getting something working that looks impressive, but if you're not very experienced performance is going to be a big issue there too (there seem to be very few games made in Unreal that run well on mediocre / older hardware).

Godot's a mess in the sense that it is trying to expand in every direction at once right now. I think it'll be in a pretty different state in 2-3 years.

Maybe I should get a thicker skin, but the prevalence of “autistic” as shorthand for “moronically literal-minded” on a place as prudish as hn is a bit surprising.

Your condescension is also obviously unhelpful here. Do better.

Sort of a callous thing to say about a person having a crisis of faith so bad they're talking about killing themselves.

I think it's perfectly possible that substance-wise this article was entirely written by the author, but comparing the style of the article to the style of the author's comments, I'm personally pretty sure the text has been significantly edited (cleaned up if you like) by ai.

Is that bad? Maybe not! But it's unfair to tar the people here pointing it out as paranoid.