Nition

That exact sort of magic numbering is rife in games from what I've seen over the years, especially in stuff like an old RPG from 1994. Maybe you've seen better game code on average than me. But you don't even really need the "random numbers" - I'd expect a mistake like:

    GetItemChange(curVal, percentBoost) { return curVal * PERCENT_BOOST; }
    
    eqipVal = val + GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);
    // ... later...
    unequipVal = val - GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);

Edit: I see there's Realmz source code on GitHub.[1] Although I can't see anything that'd cause the specific bug PlunderBunny mentions (they did say 'early versions' so maybe it was fixed), this is the kind of thing I mean re old games and "random numbers". This is part of the Wear method for equipping items:

    if ((item.sp1 > 59) && (item.sp1 < 100))
      c[character].condition[item.sp2] = 0; /**** neutralize condition ***/
    if (item.sp1 == 122) /******** item adds attacks **********/
    {
      c[character].attackbonus += item.sp2;
    }

    if ((item.sp1 > 19) && (item.sp1 < 60)) /******* adds condition *****/
    {
      if (c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] > -1)
        c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] = 0;
      c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] += item.sp2; /**** make condition[sp1-20] = sp2 ***/
    }

    if (item.sp3) /******* adds special ability *****/
    {
      if (item.sp3 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp3) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp3 < 16) && (item.sp3 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp3 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp3 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }

    if (item.sp4) {
      if (item.sp4 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp4) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp4 < 16) && (item.sp4 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp4 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp4 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }
  }

[1] https://github.com/Realmz-Castle/realmz

I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.

- Player has a stat of 100

- Wears "+10%" helm

- Player has a stat of 110

- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%

- Player has a stat of 99

Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.

For what it's worth, I didn't get AI-written vibes from it, and Pangram also flags it as 100% human-written.

You may recall though that whole problem with '42' as the answer was the lack of knowledge of the question. The Earth was created as an attempt to provide the question, but was unfortunately demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass just before the question was resolved.

This is fair criticism, I was being pretty harsh.

Did anyone else notice that all the use cases they show here are "use ChatGPT Images to imagine all the things you'd like to have, but don't"? For some, they then show the thing being done, since just imagining it is a bit sad. But ChatGPT Images can't help you with that part. At best, it's providing creative inspiration - but that's often the most rewarding part of the process for a human... None of the examples show things where you just need an image directly, e.g. product labels, signage, sprites, textures, images for websites etc. I guess aspirational stuff sells?

In order, there's:

- Imagine you had better decorations for your fish.

- Imagine you had a tattoo of your pet.

- Imagine you had a unique candle holder.

- Imagine you had a worse haircut.

- Imagine your flowers were arranged.

- Imagine your child had a suit.

- Imagine your dog had a costume.

- Imagine you owned a scanner.

- Imagine you could hang out with friends.

- Imagine your bed was made.

Did it ever turn itself off after you made those settings changes?

The article focuses on novels, but of course many things in life are like this. Learning an instrument for example. It also brought to my mind that famous quote from Ira Glass about creative work.[1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...

This is the marrow of web design, in the same way that Thoreau went to seek the marrow of life.

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

I know, but what I mean is, if he's the only one that even owns anything at .fraser.name now, then it'd be easy to just automatically give him all of .fraser.name when that happens, and then he can recreate his subdomains without worrying about someone else snagging it first. But that doesn't work if someone else owns somethingelse.fraser.name, because you can't give it to both of them.

fraser.name does not seem to be currently registered, so it seems they could automatically give him that name, and hence solve the problem entirely.

But I wonder if there might be some competing names on the third level? Like, he's neil.fraser.name, but what if there's also bob.fraser.name and they'd both very much like to keep their domains?

"Within a year" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that the pace of PC tech during the 90s was much, much faster than it is now. CPU power was doubling every two years, and today we're at roughly eight years. Add onto that the rise of video cards in the late 90s.

Remember though, there is no food cloud really, just other people's fridges.

I feel it necessary to make a slight pedantic correction here, since we're officially defining it. It's Non-Player Character.

It reminds me of an old series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] where he talked about how there's "doing your best" which is often more like just doing what's expected of you, and then there's really trying, like actually thinking hard about the best way to achieve something and carrying that out, and then even above that there are levels of effort that usually only come into play in extraordinary situations where you become willing to take desperate risks to achieve a goal.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3szfzHZr7EYGSWt92

Yeah. It's a bit unfortunate that I seem to have the top comment in this thread now despite it probably being wrong, at least to some extent, but it's too late to edit it. I agree with your second point as well.

Good point, "we have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database". I missed that line on first read.

I mean, just because all your friends are jumping off a cliff...

The thing that really gets me about this one is that surely you can easily just delete the data after you've verified someone? But instead they decided to keep 153,347,439 of them.

They're the structural spine.

Even if it's not quite technically the first MMO, Origin did also coin the term MMORPG themselves in order to describe Ultima Online to the press.

I can also imagine that someone with a lot of practice might be significantly faster than some unskilled researchers.

I also don't think it rules out it being something for a child. It's not so rare to do big projects for you kids even today, over many evenings and weekends. And when you don't have any books to read or screens to watch...

Indeed. I hope something gets done.

> Can you say what your use of it was?

> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.

Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?

I'm under 6ft and have never been a CEO, so this appears to check out.

> If we don't establish strict liability now, we're in for an era of stochastic crimes that go unpunished for anyone who is not rich or a large corporation.

I very much agree with this - making AI companies explicitly responsible if their internal AI causes hacks etc could do a lot to improve their safety considerations.

But I wonder what the liability should be when it's a third party using the AI and that AI hacks, intentionally or not.

If a users tells ChatGPT to hack something and it succeeds, is the user the person responsible because they told the AI to hack, in the same way Victorinox is not responsible if you stab someone with one of their knives? Or is OpenAI to some extent responsible as well since they made a powerful tool without sufficiently strict safeguards? What about if the user was trying to do something legal and the AI made the decision to hack by itself?

They don't even need funds if they're good at finding exploits. Plenty of idle devices around to run on.

It's funny how so many of the Reddit bots - and actually the bots on X as well - are so bad at their job of looking real. When it's a short comment, they're so often using the "The real X is Y" format, or else "X really said Y", and just kind of repeating whatever the post was about.

I had assumed that JPEG XL was for JPEGs that are Xtra Large, since that's what XL means on clothing and pretty much everywhere else. But apparently not:

> 'The etymology of the name "XL" is as follows: JPEG has called all its new standards since j2k something that starts with an X: XR, XT, XS (S for speed, since it is very fast and ultra-low-latency), and now XL. The L is supposed to mean Long term, since the goal is to make something that can replace the legacy JPEG and last as long as it did.'[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270148

I'm confused by your point here. You seem to be saying it's a highpass in developing countries and also a highpass in developed countries?