hodgehog11

Judging from the decisions and outputs of the last decade or so, the leadership at Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg, have got to be among the most incompetent I have ever seen. They go all in on the worst decisions; not just the worst in hindsight, but also the worst at the time. The only thing keeping them afloat is their monopoly from past purchases. They are a posterchild for why the US is no longer a properly capitalist nation.

It just requires game engines to develop a tool to make this much easier to do. The rule won't apply retroactively, so it just means different design choices from the start.

> For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.

Alright, you lost me here. All of the games that do not follow what this law would suggest are AAA (or scams, essentially). The smaller studios always have some acceptable end-of-life plan from my experience.

I don't think that's what working state means here. It's not a full snapshot or even necessarily multiplayer support. It means minimum functional, which to me is just barely enough to see the assets used in the game. Not necessarily networking, matchmaking, online services, or the relevant tooling. Developers have already proposed making helpers that would introduce an effective switch to do this.

Also what you said about releasing the code and letting the community figure it out was explicitly an example SKG said was okay, from memory.

I think we know from using Athens of Ancient Greece as an example that true democracies of this kind are not a good idea at scale. Enough of the general public can be so easily swayed on a clearly catastrophic idea.

Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.

You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

You should not build a business-critical function to rely on a particular proprietary LLM stack period, especially with so many sensible competitors in place now. It's insane to me that this needs to be said.

The SOTA frontier models have value elsewhere, not monetarily perhaps, but certainly per user. Quite a few cool things have come out of that brief Fable window. There should be more.

Papers submitted to arXiv under its most permissive license should always be free, as in beer, speech, freedom. For researchers that contribute to it, that is the intention for a reason. It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.

This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.

On the one hand, this is impressive. TabPFN was already state of the art and is seriously shaking up Bayesian prediction for tabular data (which is almost everything).

On the other hand, perhaps it is just me, but I do not feel that this is an acceptable form of benchmark reporting in this domain. TabArena actually has multiple metrics, since ELO does not properly quantify the degree of improvement. The fact that these are not displayed here should give pause. Also the results section in the GitHub is a dumpster fire.

Agreed. I think the real value of Zluda to the community is going to lie on more niche applications. The ones that are more commercially interesting are likely to have other solutions developed for them.

No I do not, in the same way that I would not take into account the complexity of the Python interpreter for Python emulator projects or the compiler for C or Rust projects. I would also not take into account the complexity of Retroarch for libretro-based emulator cores, because all of the actual challenging parts that effectively document the console still remain.

These are general-purpose tool chains. The real question is, using those tools, how easily can you make an emulator for a device with as much complexity as the PSX?

This is true, and is why I think Javascript is underrated for emulation.

For example, this PSX emulator: https://github.com/kootstra-rene/enge-js

It has decent compatibility and good speed. Furthermore, I challenge anyone to find a PSX emulator with fewer lines of code with competitive speed and accuracy. To my knowledge, this is by far the simplest such implementation, and is able to do this by taking advantage of Javascript JIT compilation.

GPU innovation in the past led to the development of new artforms and allowed researchers to solve tougher computational tasks. Today, not so much. You're missing the "spread equally and used responsibly" part here. Nvidia's customers now are the data centers, which have debatable impact on quality of life.

Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened.

Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.

Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.

...on a saturated benchmark that they already scored high on before. You only do that when you know you can't beat the competition handily. This is not a stronger model than Fable and Mythos, at least not in the domains that Mythos was strong at anyway. But it's still likely to be a good model.

Yes, they only report the most saturated benchmark, which they were already very strong in before. It is very clear this model is nowhere near Fable, unfortunately.

The PDF reader for Gemini is extraordinarily poor in my experience. I like the writing style of this model a little better, but for most tasks people would use AI for, Gemini is probably not what you want to be using.

I've used them back to back as well. Codex is good at specific tasks; it doesn't try to go big, it does what it's told provided the task is relatively procedural. If Codex can make progress on a task, why would I give it to Fable?

Fable fumbled the one simple task that I gave it too. I gave it multiple very hard open-ended tasks (effectively math tasks) involving research code and it crushed them. It's the first model I've seen that can do that. The current Codex will never produce the type of code Fable gave me no matter how many times I run the same problem at it, because it won't stop trying naive rubbish. And if I tell Codex to try to improve the code, it can't figure out why trying the same classical tricks isn't making it work better, regardless of what I tell it. Opus is marginally better because it can at least recognize some subtleties over time, but still disappointing because it has no idea how to deal with them.

Most programmers want precision instruments for their workflow. That's fine, use the right tool for the job. In my line of work, I need crazy solutions because the obvious stuff doesn't work. That's where Fable shined for me.

It very much depends on the task. What were you trying it on?

Hard disagree. Opus reports to me like a student. Fable reported to me like a colleague (researcher). It genuinely seemed to pick up on nuance that the other models just don't, even when I tell them explicitly. It's been really frustrating that neither Codex nor Opus can make targetted edits to Fable's code without screwing something subtle up. For context, this is for computational geometry work, so your mileage may vary.

Is there another mathematician (likely an analyst) out there that finds this debate even more absurd with the existence of geometric measure theory? GMT bypasses all of these algebraic constructions; it finds very similar objects (currents and varifolds), but it just makes more sense to me. I never found the exterior algebra (or the Clifford algebra) to be a natural way of thinking geometrically. I do not agree that the exterior product is more natural than Jacobians and determinants. I was relieved to find that GMT cut through all of it at higher generality, at least for my purposes anyway. I don't think this belief is shared by many, since GMT is apparently notoriously incomprehensible, but hey, maybe there's someone else out there?

You're being unfaithful to the original statement. The whole point of saying something is like a slot machine is that there are significant odds that you lose. If you ever have access to a casino slot machine that has a positive EV, there are no tangible negative aspects anymore; you would use it over and over again and accumulate significant wealth from the house. That's my point.

A poor analogy depending on the setting because you can't adjust the odds with a slot machine, and the ROI is negative by design. If that's your experience, yeah, I wouldn't use an LLM either.

This is mostly true and a month ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly. However, there are still situations where almost every line of code has to be deliberately chosen in a delicate way. Think research code or settings which demand a high degree of optimization. Opus or GPT-5.5 are absolutely miserable to guide in these settings.

"Well, don't use an AI for those purposes!"

That used to be true (and is now again true I suppose). Fable was a peek at something different, it seemed to be actually able to start to tackle these kinds of problems. That saves a lot of time, since checking these programs is often far, far easier than writing them. Experience is needed to check and scaffold still, but something like Fable becomes a prerequisite for these settings.

To train people to become researchers. If the definition of what a researcher is changes over time (due to AI or otherwise), then the nature of the PhD will also change over time.

It's been pretty cool (and a bit scary) to hear similar experiences from many other researchers and developers just how impressive Fable was for their particular workflow and the productivity it seemed to unlock. Personally, I have found that I can't let any of the other AI agents touch the code that Fable produced for me, since they consistently fail to understand the very delicate choices that it made to ensure optimal performance.

Absolutely agree with this. As Louis Rossmann recently pointed out, it's the difference between a correct answer and a wrong answer; the correct answer is worth a good amount, while the wrong answer is worth nothing. Under this metric, for harder tasks, the most intelligent model is best per dollar.

In terms of price-to-productivity, nothing will beat DeepSeek right now. For what you have described, all of the existing frontier models will perform well (probably about the same even).

If you expanded the list to very hard research tasks, Fable was so far ahead of the others that it doesn't even deserve debate. If you are a researcher doing something involving scientific computation or mathematics that wasn't rejected by the guard rails, and you were using Fable, that week was probably your most productive week ever. A couple of my PhD students effectively finished their current projects in that period by getting Fable to chew on it for 30 hours straight (not sure how I feel about that).

Historically speaking, the US might even be a larger risk to Australia than China is. The US alliance goes back a long way, and so does the opposition to US influence. Since the Whitlam government, MPs are generally fearful of US retaliation, rendering much of our politics hostage to US influence. Of course, some PMs have openly embraced the US so this feeling isn't universal. But many of our issues are directly tied to the US.

China has been far more beneficial to Australia by comparison, with the downside being the encroaching influence of CCP propaganda. Many of our strengths are tied to our relationships with Southeast Asia.

Paul Keating has famously declared US as an "aggressive ally", "our colonial masters", AUKUS as our "worst international decision", and that "our future is in Southeast Asia". This was under Biden too.

So the situation is much more complicated, and the feelings on the ground right now is that the US are not our friends (of course, the CCP is not great either).

Yes, this would force the nature of licensing to change. It does not apply retroactively, so the legal processes would naturally need to shift. Such licenses were used in the past, so there is no reason they cannot be considered again.