Don’t want to be that guy but brace yourself for part 2… if the first one disappointed you in some places, the 2nd is going to beat you to a pulp. And I won’t even start on the third. I’m the kind of person who prefers not to finish a game than to read hints or walkthroughs, and parts 2 and 3 have been sitting on my unfinished stack for literally decades. :(
It’s unavoidable, but really sad, isn’t it? Thinking about the incredible creativity and hard work that went into creating such challenges and now it’s probably history. I feel something similar with free-to-play gacha video games. The gacha mechanics are slowly creeping into every type of game, and where you once had very clear and obvious slot machines, now you get them transparently mixed in with beautiful and fun games (e.g. ZZZ, Where Winds Meet, Genshin, etc) in a way that sounds like in the near future no company will have any incentive to not have gacha mechanics in any game.
Yeah but for the brief time window (which is probably coming to an end right now) where getting your name on the leaderboards was still worth it anyway, because people had not yet realized that the game is over, players will use the car anyway. Now that the game is over, leaderboards are meaningless, so we will figure out ways to move past that (like playing with people who care). But that will change the game in unavoidable ways: the tiny, fragmented scale will give less incentive for creators to come up with massive intricate complex challenges (it would be like hoping Bethesda would make Skyrim for a handful of die hard players). And soon, maybe on a few years, people will invariably start questioning whether it even makes sense to waste their time with this hobby if learning CTF skills is basically useless in an AI dominated world. There are still people learning Assembly for fun, but almost nobody does Assembly programming challenges as a hobby.
It’s different, unfortunately. I wish you were right. The problem is that creating interesting and fun CTF challenges is a very active, time consuming, creativity-heavy task. A chess board is always the same, and always will be, but every CTF competition is unique. There is little to no incentive anymore to spend time creating the challenges.
You might say “well create the challenges and share them with people who care and who want to play honestly” which is probably the right answer here, and might happen at a smaller scale. I picture CTF in the future almost like a tabletop RPG experience, one where a small amount of people will share with close friends who they trust. But the usual “open” CTF scene (as mentioned by op) is probably over for good, if we’re being honest.
We built too many layers of abstraction, so much that even the people in power have forgotten where the fantasies are. The objective reality is behind so many curtains that we forgot what is powering the whole theatre play to begin with. Or maybe we know but became too far detached from it to care. If you are at the same the better and the player, then what’s left?
I never got to the endgame but I solo-levelled a couple of characters in a slow pace in classic wow (pre-tbc) and it was mind blowing. The world is so well crafted, the lore, the art design, it is just fantastic. I guess if we have to be on rails at least they did it well.
The “rails” thing is very much the gist of it. Don’t get me wrong, I think classic WoW is probably one of the best games ever made, but after it came out, nobody wanted the raw experience of early online worlds anymore. Which is just life I guess.
A lot of grinding, first and foremost. The idea of a massive multiplayer game was new so just having the thing itself was enough to get you excited to go in and spend days repeating the same 5-second loop to get a level. It was also a much more social thing, servers were usually small (and niche) enough that you would know most people by nickname, know when someone new entered, etc. Most games were mostly sandboxes so the fun was just to have this shared world and compete in it, more than doing quests, etc. There was a lot of full drop PVP so the stakes were really high, you could lose in a second the items you worked for weeks or months to get. It was exhilarating.
I don’t know, the way I see it, if you read the title and you know Zork then you know, and if you don’t then… skip it I guess? I don’t mean to be a jerk, seriously, I skip 90% of what I see in HN because I don’t know the tech and thus am not interested. I just assume that whoever is interested in that can click away.
As someone dealing with a few cases of cancer in the family (including a child) I can’t help but think what an amazing miracle to live to 91 years old. Some people really hit the jackpot! Rest in peace.
I personally don’t understand the need to treat a tool as an “author” but that’s not important, my comment is mostly regarding the backlash of what happened. A feature was rushed in and does not work as intended, in a kind of disastrous way. Now we feel like our customers do when they have to deal with all the crap that our AI co-authors push forward without the right process.
Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers.
And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?
I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?
As long as the hordes of losers are not bothered by it enough to ask for fairness in the business, you’re right. Ethics and morals are constructs with the intention of creating a better, more just common existence. If the people in this common existence don’t care, then there is no reason for them not to do it.
Because the markets don’t “forbid” anything, especially when they are profiting from it, which polymarket definitely is. It’s the government who must forbid things for the good of the citizens. But somehow the citizens were dumb enough to fall for the bullshit idea that you should put the same person who is profiting in charge of regulating their own crimes!
I read this in the wiki format (I guess it’s mostly the same thing?) and thought it was a lot of fun, with may caveats (which is totally fine). My main criticism is that the idea of antimemetics in the book was let too loose, almost as if there are no limits whatsoever to what it can achieve, physically or psychologically, so that made it hard for me to wrap my head around the puzzle. There are basically no rules the universe of antimemetics, so the possibilities felt so massive and out of control that they did not fit into the paper so to speak. I feel like good SCP storytelling is usually harrowing but also “tangible”; there must be some set of rules that the universe adheres to so that we can join the mystery and explore the limits of what could happen (or be achieved) with that set of rules. When the effects of something are so broad that they completely rewrite the reality so as to e physically and mentally invincible/invisible, then the story feels more like a drop in an ocean rather than a complete product. Regardless, I enjoyed it!
I am among those who love GK3, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite in the series. It does have a great ambience, and really makes you feel like a tourist in rural France.
I never get why people think these things will work. The only ones who take deals like this are honest people who are struggling. Criminals don’t self deport, they want to stay, not leave. It’s the same in Europe, they make laws to deport people for small bureaucratic details, honest people say “yes sir” and leave, but the criminals don’t give a shit, they just stay. So you deport the good ones and keep the bad ones, what the hell do you get from that? I guess the real point is that nobody in politics really cares about illegal aliens and criminals, they only want the power that comes from populism.
Maybe slightly harder to test for, but one thing that LLMs love to do also is making comma-separated (with a final “and”) lists with three items. It looks good, sounds human, and has just the right size—not too long, not too short.
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.