Nition

A bit like those AI images that were also working QR codes from a while back.[1]

Would be a really interesting challenge to find the point where maximally useful data meets a maximally good image.

[1] e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...

HackerHackerNews, a collection of the best Hacker News comments that were recommended by comments on Hacker News.

It has the feature already! I just wanted to say how much I like it.

One feature I really like about this is how you've included a (presumably LLM generated?) summary of what Hacker News recommended a video, and then the actual comments recommending it. Nice to be able to see why a video is there and what people like about it.

It's a funny situation at the moment because most attempts are just sort of shoehorning LLM chat into a game that doesn't really need it, and then gamers quite rightly mock the results which don't really add anything to the game.

I think there's a bit of a lack of knowledge of game history on both sides, because we already know it can be fun when a game is designed around it. It worked in Façade (2005!) and it worked in Starship Titanic (1998!!), and both of those could have worked even better with the technology we have today.

One type of game that seems like an obvious one to me, is something a bit like The Sims except that the characters' decisions and speech are LLM-controlled. Maybe one of the characters is player-controlled, so you can interact and talk with everyone else. Or to describe it from the other direction, it'd be a kind of interactive fiction like AI Dungeon invented, but grounded in a physically simulated setting.

Yeah I had it all on a CASIO JD-6000 in the jeans pocket.

Unfortunately I left all my easy PHP exploits together with my pre-2023 writing that Pangram flags as 100% AI in Canada with my long-distance girlfriend.

Thought I'd share this because a lot of people still think detecting AI writing is a nigh-unsolvable problem without something like SynthID, but Pangram has become very, very good.

I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.

I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.

And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).

And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!

Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:

  "Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
  around the starship shell.
  "Why, of course!" she laughed.
  "Then why do you do it?"
  "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
  for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
  on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
  I helped build that.
  The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
  that it was you who actually did it."
  
  "Hmm," he said.
  "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
  where a few other construction workers were standing, 
  pointing inside the model and talking.
  "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
  "Yes," he agreed.
  The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
  swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
  He smiled. "I suppose not."
  "You suppose correctly," the woman said.
  "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."

The food scarcity concern was certainly overblown, I was thinking more about the environmental concern.

You don't have to trust a kids' show, that's just to help build general awareness. The proof is clear enough in rising CO2 levels, global average temperatures, ocean heat content etc.

The power is yours.

I feel like the harms were really drilled into Millennials like myself but then we seem to have assumed that younger Gen Zs and gen Alpha will just receive the climate change wisdom via osmosis or maybe if we're lucky, their parents. I've seen more people worrying about under-population (under population! Remember over-population?) than the environment recently. Maybe we need to bring Captain Planet back.

I suppose at least we can say there is a working car that seems to be able to actually do the things as advertised, which is more than one could ever say for e.g. the Moller Skycar.

The only one I can think that they might mean is the BYD Yangwang U9. It can jump a tiny bit.

Hey dang, while we're talking flags, I made a comment yesterday where two of the replies are now [flagged] and [dead] and yet they both seem innocuous.

#1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50051731

#2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50051714

I thought I could 'vouch' them but it's not an option - is vouching time limited?

I'm also wondering what's going on with that user. Their comments all seem fine to me but I notice that a huge amount of their past comments - even beyond my comment thread - are [dead]. I feel a bit sorry for them.

True, you can see the sides of buildings etc a little. I'll stick with my main point though that it's not isometric.

Probably true, but I reckon there's surely at least some money to be made for a commercial enterprise if anyone wanted to go big, and nobody has. Get the price down via mass production and automation. Get some holograms into the shops. Sell them in an online store (you can buy holograms online already, but only a few from small operators at high prices, or second-hand). Let people send you their 3D models or 3D scenes and you'll send them a hologram of it. You can even do short animations (there's nothing stopping every new perspective being a different frame!). Have your AI convert people's photos to 3D and then output a hologram of them.

You do need to have a decent point light to shine on it, but you can sell that too. You can even sell a frame that has a clip-on light that's just right[1], although a perfect lighting setup is not required.

[1] Like Dutch Holographic Laboratory does: https://holoprint.com/pages/components.php#Telescope

I went to a whole art exhibition of holograms as a kid that blew me away, and I've always wondered why holograms are so rare ever since. I had one for a while, the famous one of the microsope with the lens that you can actually look through to see a computer chip inside. There's nothing else like it.

I don't think that's true. Do you have a definition you can link to maybe, that matches yours? Or can someone else here back one of us up?

I've always assumed that isometric as used in describing videogames refers to the isometric projection, which is a very specific angle - or at least games that look approximately isometric. Age Of Empires, SimCity 2000, Constructor etc. Some of them were actually Dimetric or something else, but I'd never have referred to, say, SimCity 1 as an isometric game.

Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?

> The original isometric view gains a new sense of scale.

Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.

Not the person you're responding to, but as soon as I read stuff like "I trained tiny network" I tend to imagine Russian. It's the missing "a". Same thing happens in "I'm speaking with heavy accent".

It's more like running a daycare. The stream of children never ends and they never grow up. If you get really sick of it though you can always kick out the kids (responsibly) and leave.

Just be glad you're American, because Mathsocalypse and Mathspocalypse work even less.

"Children" is not a bad descriptor in itself for how the Minds seem to see their human cargo.

The Culture has a lot of opinions of the proper way of doing things as any society does, and I'm certain that a ship doing that with its people would be considered very bad form. There are ships that decide to do things that go against the usual ethical boundaries[1], but they're outcasts. The really big ships generally have multiple minds running them, too.

Humans in the Culture are generally improved in a few ways (they don't get sick, live for 300-400 years by default etc) but still very human.

I do recall a bit about playing in different worlds in dreams though, during sleep. Ultimately, really, the average person's life in the Culture already involves doing pretty much whatever they like within reason any time, so it's not like they need to escape too much real-world suffering.

Iain M Banks himself described the relationship between humans and the ship Minds as having "a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites."[2]

[1] For example, https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Grey_Area

[2] https://theculture.adactio.com/

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