anonymous908213

> why don’t you actually try it yourself?

I literally did and posted a link to the model. Honestly, fuck off.

This is exactly what I mean. A society of liars. Backed into a corner so all you can do is bring out another lie, pretending I didn't already do this in the conversation. If I try to bring reality into anything, you will deny what's literally right in front of you and continue living in a fantasy world of your own making, detached from any concept of proof or evidence. People like you have completely destroyed the value of public discourse. Congratulations.

> know how assets look like, especially from outsourcers

"I work for AAA studios that are routinely mocked for how low effort their productions are, and I know how cheap we can go" is a very different claim from "senior 3D artist". I don't deny you'll be able to cheapen out more than ever before and produce even sloppier games.

> Electronic Arts and Ubisoft and led game industry aligned teams at Facebook/Meta

It's amazing you can boast about your resumé, it's a who's who of deplorables known for shameless moneygrubbing. No wonder you're so enthusiastic at the prospect of replacing quality art with the cheapest slop imaginable.

> I’m telling you Astra+ is massively improved under proper guidance and it’s going to be good enough for 80% of games.

You think that model I generated is good enough for 80% of games (note also this is walking back your claim of senior 3D artist)? Let's not be liars. If even a junior artist produced that model, they would be let go immediately. I did also pass a reference asset, you know. If I'm wrong, show me. Not a room full of textured boxes that might as well be a mixup of existing asset packs - show me an actual novel human character model generated from concept artwork references. Your words have zero credibility without proof.

> There’s no way to assume the technology, given training data, will not solve this completely either.

This is a religious belief, nothing more. I have been hearing this every day for the past several years. "Trust me bro, just three more months and then it'll be AGI!"

Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies? I guess the answer is because lying is rewarded, but then the question is: why does our society reward lying so heavily? Why does HN? You would think HN draws logically-focused, high-information users who enjoy facts. You would think.

Let's take this claim:

> the state of the art on 3d asset generation already changed dramatically. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol and finally Claude Opus 5.5 all moved closer into "Senior 3d artist territory"

I opened Codex, gave Astra Max access to Blender and a model, shaders, materials from Persona 5 and confirmed that it could work with it. Then I gave it reference artwork of an unrelated character and prompted it to use the Persona 5 model as a reference and model the new character in that style. The result: https://d.uguu.se/BOuGsmyR.png

Yes, it is nifty a language model can do anything at all with that prompt. But come now. Senior 3D artist. Give me a fucking break. Lie after lie after lie. Do you enjoy the feeling of clout you get from lying and people sharing your fabrications in a panic? Is that it?

I wish we could talk rationally about the capabilities of tools. Public discourse has degraded beyond reason. As one of the apparently extremely tiny minority of people who are grounded in reality, who objectively evaluates claims with their own two eyes, it is not very enjoyable to be bombarded with conversations from and between liars day in and day out. What is the purpose of this liars' society we have built?

Yes. It was obvious enough that they were able to explain exactly why that happened, and the explanation was exactly as obvious as you'd expect. Knowing why something undesirable happens doesn't mean it can't happen by accident. Have you never written a bug before?

> we don't fully know what drives the voice in LLMs

Who is "we"? I, working in an LLM startup, know exactly what drives the base "voice" in the LLMs we train, because we have a process to select for it. OpenAI and Anthropic surely do too. Saying broadly that something is not well-understood in a scientific paper because it's not understood to casual observers is, uh, not very rigorous.

> The strange thing is that the base models (before RLHF) use the "experiential" voice, even though they are not incentivized to do that.

(Replying to your quote from another comment)

This is a matter of the training material. We have trained models that do not do that. I'm not exactly divulging trade secrets here. It should be really, really obvious that if you train a model on chat-conversation-like patterns of speech it will infer probabilities for how to continue a textual sample that will differ from the probabilities learned from being trained on narration, prose, or informational patterns of speech, even without RLHF.

Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.

Severing your relationship with a generation-defining artist because they had one whiff that only brought in $140,000,000+ in revenue seems shortsighted, even if you actually did lose money on that entry. About what I would expect from the MBA-driven economy, though. Your golden goose has shit out 10 golden eggs for you, then it lays one regular egg and you try to kill it. Except you fail and somebody else gets your goose instead.

The decompilation of Emerald itself is human-authored. Then somebody vibeslopped a buggy WASM port, and now this is a vibeslopped port of the WASM port.

What are you even talking about? The right to self-determination is literally Article 1 of the UN charter. Nations are governed by power relationships, not philosophical ones, so they ignore the charter, but you aren't proposing anything novel or groundbreaking in any way. It is, in fact, the very first sacred right enshrined in international law, and has been for over 70 years.

In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.

Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.

> sad that the world is so hung up on unicode

It is sad that the world is hung up on enabling 2/3rds of the world population to read and write text! If only the entire world catered to America. Nobody should ever speak anything other than English, honestly.

They aren't giving useful information, they are posting an opinion insinuating that people who use """""fake""""" (ie. non-personally-identifying) e-mail addresses are fraudsters.

> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway.

They did not provide any meaningful insight into the field, they are simply insisting that e-mail addresses should be a tool for personal identification because it saves them money over doing real KYC. In other words, they believe KYC should be slanted further in favor of corporations and against customers, such that KYC is publicly available for free, because they value not doing the work of verification over humans having any privacy whatsoever.

As they are entitled to post their opinion on humans having no privacy rights, I am entitled to post mine and point out the hypocrisy of them choosing to participate in this forum privately while advocating for and boasting about denying service to other people who attempt to protect their privacy.

Nowhere other than on HN have I seen so many people who are actively proud of their anti-consumer (and frankly anti-human) behaviour. It's a rather revealing look into the veil behind big tech. A lot of people have this misconception that it's evil $bigcorp forcing employees to do what earns a paycheck, but no, there's no shortage of normal people like yourself bragging about anything they can do to identify and track consumers more easily while comparing them to fraudsters for not wanting to be tracked. I suppose that's the narrative you have to concoct to help yourself sleep at night.

I'm curious, though:

> choosing to participate anonymously

Why are your name, e-mail address, and phone number not on your profile? Are you using HN with the intent to commit fraud?

Let's take a hypothetical scenario.

A has 97% of the wealth.

B has 1% of the wealth.

C has 2% of the wealth.

Your argument is that because C > B, C is benefitting from the status quo.

In the US, the median age for first time homeownership increased from 29 to 40 since the 1980s when the stat began being tracked. That is reality, not an exceptional anecdote that is so out of the statistical ordinary it warrants being paraded as a puff piece in a newspaper.

It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman. In a lobsters thread about Anubis, a community member of 12 years got themselves permanently banned because they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer and refused to apologise when given an opportunity by moderators. Telling on themselves, perhaps? It's funny, in a bizarre way, that this is a hill people will die on.

But not a very accurate blogpost. "Here's why this literally cannot work (in theory)" to denigrate a system that actually works (in practice). Their goal is to convince people to stop using it because it personally inconveniences them, but they never provide an alternative solution that actually solves the problem (in practice) that Anubis actually solves (in practice). If leaving the problem unsolved (in practice) was a desirable option, the site owner would not have turned to Anubis in the first place.

> Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat.

The "diktat" is the thing you just voted on which says "we will not negotiate". There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X".

> 2 years provides time for another referendum.

Voting for a no-negotiations amendment to your constitution as a negotiation tactic with the idea that you will later pass another constitutional amendment in a small window of time to revoke it is some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp.

> That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge

The vote did commit you to amending your federal constitution with a population cap, period.

> If the 10-million threshold is exceeded, Switzerland would have to terminate these agreements, including the one with the EU on the free movement of persons after two years. This would also render the other agreements under Bilateral Agreements I null and void. Switzerland’s participation in the EU’s Schengen and Dublin agreements would also be called into question, thereby jeopardising close cooperation in the areas of security and asylum.

There is no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences.

But I suppose that's how these votes have to be marketed, isn't it? The Brits were under the delusion that they'd get to have their cake and eat it too, that they could keep any benefits of being in the EU even as they exited it. I wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves. Which, again, is valid if that's the intention, but I suspect a lot of voters like yourself rather believed they were only voting to end freedom of movement for brown foreigners, or voting to negotiate special privileges, when in actuality it was literally a vote to exit treaties.

> a democratic vote to confront the EU

In what way? It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations. Unilaterally breaching your obligations is not a grounds for discussion or compromise, it is simply an exit from them, benefits included.

Suppose you're not getting on with your roommate. You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord. You are opting for the latter. That is not "confronting" anything, it is a done deal. It is a choice you are allowed to make, to be clear, just as the Brits did, but let's not pretend it's something it isn't.

The US banning those people from working on frontier models is perhaps the exact thing that would give you an opportunity, you would think.

I think a better question, rather than a point about unsigned exes, was: "on a regular consumer version of Windows, what happens if you run literally any program that was not downloaded from the Microsoft Store?". In which case the answer is "you cannot run it, there is a pop-up directing you to the Microsoft Store, and the only way to find out how to run it is it to google the information which will point you through several layers of system menus to disable nanny mode". This will happen to you for something as common and widespread as downloading Chrome or Firefox. Attempting to disable nanny mode will result in an ominous screen warning you about how bad the thing you're about to do is, and telling you that the action is irreversible.

Microsoft is not as bad as Google and Apple, yet, but they absolutely have the power to be as bad and are flirting with how to accomplish greater and greater control of their platform without triggering too much backlash.

It absolutely does not use blindness as a stand-in for incompetence, that is your own outrage-seeking interpretation of it. A neutral interpretation would be that "flying blind" is to "operate without perfect information". It is a simple description of operating conditions, not a derogatory term in any way. Your reply is worded in such a way as to indicate that you think the person you're replying to deserves to be shamed for 'defending' it, but having a disability does not entitle you to browbeat the world into submission and regulate all usage of any words associated with your disability as you see fit. This is quite benign and people are perfectly well within their right to object to somebody trying to police plainly descriptive language.

1bil+ people have surrendered their right to artistic expression to Google, and another 1bil+ to Apple, and another 1bil+ to Microsoft. Many more billions have surrendered it to Visa and Mastercard. The world will only continue to get worse for the foreseeable future as five corporations assert global control over what is allowed to be published. It is mournful knowing that humanity's peak is behind us.

I'm actually not, but the person I was replying to clearly was given the "three states over" comment. I explicitly specified the statement was conditional on customers not being within walking distance.

I mean, you still need a truck to get the item to the store...

Delivery is actually more resource-efficient if the store isn't within walking distance of its customers. If instead of making 10 people get in their car and make a round trip to the store/warehouse, you put 10 packages in one vehicle and deliver to everyone in the same neighborhood with one trip, you're looking at an order of 90% less wasted emissions.

Whatever value they provide is completely and totally irrelevant compared to giving Microsoft, Google, and Apple the unilateral discretion to end any software developer's career, or any software development business, by locking them out of deploying software with no recourse. Nobody has a problem with optional value-add stores, but all three have or are moving towards having complete control of software distribution on the hardware platforms used by billions of people.

> incompetence is always more likely than malice.

"Incompetence" of this degree is malice. It is actively malicious to create a system that automatically locks people out of their accounts with absolutely no possibility for human review or recourse short of getting traction in the media. "No sir, I didn't grind those orphans up. It was this orphan grinding machine I made that did it, teehee!"

> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.

This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.

Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.

This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.

There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:

> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.

I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.

RIP. VNDB is a truly incredible resource and the world is a better place for its existence.

Now this is an eulogy you wouldn't mind accidentally being published about you prematurely! May we all strive to leave such a profoundly positive impact on the lives of the people around us.