digging

I don't at all agree with that. Or at least, it's only true enough to be misleading and to downplay/obscure the real concerns I'm raising.

Because, of course it's true not all my friends are just like me. But I don't have to hide who I am from them. I can be completely true to myself and we can disagree about some things but still feel genuine connections.

I consider that qualitatively different from a relationship with a person who would dislike and distrust me unless I hide important facets of my identity/personality.

edit: I see that I made the distinction in my original comment between "not being true" vs "hiding", so I think that's where you jumped in. My fault for leaving that gap open; I hope my position is more clear here.

That's... a bad thing

> I could totally see generative AI add a ton more variety to crowds, random ambient sentences by NPCs (that are often notoriously just a rotation of a handful of canned lines that get repetitive soon), terrain etc., while still being guided by a human-created high level narrative.

Yes, sure, but that's not what I was responding to. AI adding detail, not infinite quest lines, is possibly a good use case.

> Worst case, you get a soulless, poorly written game with very eloquent but ultimately uninteresting characters. Some games are already that today – minus the realistic dialogue.

Some games, yes... why do we want more of those? Anyway, that's not the worst case. Worst case is incomprehensible dialogue.

I think the misunderstanding, in fact, is in reverse, demonstrated by the above comment. The networking required for career growth is, for many people, never going to pleasurable.

My social circles don't have much overlap with, for example, startup founders. Developing personal relationships in my network is not likely to ever benefit my career growth. When people give the advice to "network" to enable my career growth, the people who would be most helpful tend not to have much in common with me, and building relationships with them often means not being true to myself, or even hiding myself.

It isn't enough to simply build relationships or even be good at building relationships. Mostly, one needs to buy goodwill from those people who actually have power to help you.

I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not impossible, but by default we should expect it to make games less fun.

The better you make this infinite narrative generator, the more complicated the world gets and the less compelling it gets to actually interact with any one story.

Stories thrive by setting their own context. They should feel important to the viewer. An open world with infinite stories can't make every story feel meaningful to the player. So how does it make any story feel meaningful? I suppose the story would have to be global, in which case, it crowds out the potential for fractal infinite storylines - eventually, all or at least most are going to have to tie back to the Big Bad Guy in order to feel meaningful.

Local stories would just feel mostly pointless. In Minecraft, all (overworld) locales are equally unimportant. Much like on Earth, why should you care about the random place you appeared in the world? The difference is that on Earth you tend to develop community as you grow and builds connections to the place you live, which can build loyalty. In addition, you only have one shot, and you have real needs that you must fulfill or you die forever. So you develop some otherwise arbitrary loyalties in order to feel security in your needs.

In Minecraft there's zero pressure to develop loyalty to a place except for your own real-life time. And when that becomes a driving factor, why wouldn't you pick a game designed to respect your time with a self-contained story? (Not that infinite games like Minecraft are bad, but they aren't story-driven for a good reason).

Now, a game like Dwarf Fortress is different because you build the community, the infrastructure, the things that make you care about a place. But it already has infinite story generation without AI and I'm not sure AI would improve on that model.

Well if the sugar is ultra-processed, yes it does, doesn't it?

Pretty cool, and also pretty fucking bad. Checks all the AI boxes, I guess.

I tried "a classic set inspired by Armored Core". It gave me a typical-looking Armored Core (which would be good except it was supposed to be the king), a Space Marine (which I rerolled into some small mech that's close enough), a Zoid (which it refused to budge from), a tower (which it refused to budge from), and a chess queen with purple lights (which it refused to budge from, except to sometimes give me the gigantic head of an AC).

Not to mention, sometimes pieces look directly at the camera instead of forward, or don't even sit on the plane of the board. One of my pieces even had a mini-chessboard for its base.

It's possible, but only because we don't know what dark matter is. But that doesn't seem to be a leading explanation.

The GP poster simply misspoke - for the last 10-15 years replace "minivan" with "SUV". For many people, even single people without children, the default vehicle is giant, wasteful, and deadly.

That or lead poisoning will deliver steady doses of irreversible brain damage.

Reminds me of going through my old toy chest with my parents. Most of what I found I just tossed - my mom wanted to offload to goodwill but I was sure few of them were worth it.

The items I wanted to keep were mostly either silly figures of animals I like (old-school dinosaurs, etc), or creative stuff like Bionicles. In fact, I took home the Bionicles and spent a few weekends actually playing with them, creating new figures. I'm certainly not neurotypical, but I feel that a decent barometer for toys that will truly engage a child is "Could a creative adult also enjoy this?"

I have some young children in my life and agree the landscape of toys-and-their-ads is insane these days. Especially with the crisp unboxing videos, it's so hard not to want to get the weird (and, truthfully, often quite creative, on the designer's part) stuff that's coming out. I sympathize with parents; it's never going to be easy to say no even once you've identified that a badly desired toy is actually going to be a waste of money 6 hours after purchase.

Democracy is not exactly a single thing though, but current forms kind of do have that quality, yes. "Casting binary votes on specific questions and no take-backs" is actually a kind of terrible model of democracy. There's got to be other ways.

If we take "a healthy interpersonal relationship between people with mutual respect, self-knowledge, and strong communication skills" as a model, we can see how two or more people continually grow into the kinds of lives they want to lead by working together, and that's the kind of democracy I'd like to have.

Obviously, this doesn't scale. But that doesn't mean we just give up and take the lazy, clearly bad option. We ought to evaluate the situation we're actually in and adapt.

I mean, FPTP is obviously bad, but if we're being honest, we should expect a plurality if not majority of people to be unable to recognize a bad decision even when it's presented to them as such. We know that if you run enough emotionally-triggering ads and you will get supporters of virtually any idea - this is basically the concept of manufactured consent. And I think our society can't really evolve in a healthy way until we accept that more widely. (By accept, I mean "beware of", not "exploit".)

If you want a program to run efficiently and give you good results, you don't just keep taking lazier and lazier approaches and delete functions you don't understand. You carefully refactor. It's a continuous process. That's what we're supposed to do with our democratic institutions, but unfortunately, we're stuck focusing on specific outputs so much that we can't even understand the root problems.

Definitely weird results, but I feel there are too many variables to learn much from it. A couple things:

1. The author mentioned that tokenization causes something minuscule like a a " " at the end of the input to shatter the model's capabilities. Is it possible other slightly different formatting changes in the input could raise capabilities?

2. Temperature was 0.7 for all models. What if it wasn't? Isn't there a chance one more more models would perform significantly better with higher or lower temperatures?

Maybe I just don't understand this stuff very well, but it feels like this post is only 10% of the work needed to get any meaning from this...

> Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless?

Even if you could 10x real applications with fake ones it wouldn't make their data worthless.

Nothing you just posted is relevant to the conversation.

Most HN readers can't quit their job on a whim without putting their household in jeopardy. That's the sentiment you're responding to.

A strategy for avoiding one particular death is not a strategy to ensure survival.

There are >1 ways for a civilization to become extinct.

Is bubonic plague a civilization? How about a stray gamma ray burst?

If they were on their game it would just be "Big Switch".

Tulsi Gabbard??? She is completely different, she is an opportunistic cult follower without ideals or ideas of her own. Doesn't really matter much now though.

Super confused here because the distinction seems completely clear to me? Relatively few plants, when mature, will start growing clones up from their roots, but it's a known growth pattern. They're called suckers, and I've never heard them referred to as distinct individuals.

But most plants can be cloned by taking a cutting and giving it continuous water + air and letting it start growing a new root system. I've never heard anybody suggest the cutting is not a new, distinct plant.

Pando isn't a bunch of individual clones though, it's a single contiguous organism.

Human CEOs generally aren't held liable for their actions, so why would AI need to be? Once again, I think we're just smoothing out a wrinkle here.

Sleep quality, if excluding DIS, DMS, EMA, usually will refer to things like apneas, nasal congestion, digestion, noise or light in the room, etc. Disturbances that don't wake the person but do tax the brain.

> individuals are very much allowed to hold prescriptive beliefs - that is how language evolves.

I think, actually, it's the case that language evolves around those people who are too stubbornly prescriptivist.

I have to second this, uncomfortably. Last dermatologist I saw, when I walked in, I thought I was in the wrong place. It looked like a "skincare" store full of branded junk. Nope, that's the office - it's just also a store. The whole place felt weird and so obviously catered to rich people overpaying for things they didn't need... but ultimately, the dermatologist was chill and didn't recommend any treatment at all.

Maybe? Depends on what level of manufacturing and materials they achieved. Even then, not super likely. Statistically, bones don't survive that long :) It could just be a matter of time till we find a lucky break.

(Again - probably not)

> if you haven’t won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you haven’t ever actually played a video game.

I think this is the most insane thing you've written here today, the one thing I truly disagree with. I'm not sure you even agree with it, given you seem to already understand well the difference between casual, competitive, and hardcore competitive play. But are you aware of solo play?

> I don't like your usage of word "Inshallah" as a mock up of the idea that something will never happen.

Oh, I read it differently (perhaps misunderstood). I interpreted the usage as "a required rote phrase/story rubber-stamped onto every piece". I understand how that, too, could be offensive, but I didn't see how inserting the literal meaning of the phrase made sense?

> It kind of does though, because it means you can never trust the output to be correct.

Maybe some HN commenters will finally learn the value of uncertainty then.

Then what's the point of ever talking about LLM capabilities again? We've already hooked them up to other tools.

This confusion was introduced at the top of the thread. If the argument is "LLMs plus tooling can't do X," the argument is wrong. If the argument is "LLMs alone can't do X," the argument is worthless. In fact, if the argument is that binary at all, it's a bad argument and we should laugh it out of the room; the idea that a lay person uninvolved with LLM research or development could make such an assertion is absurd.