News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mister_mort

Would you mind copy+pasting the text that you fed it that led to that refusal? That's so bizarre. It would be really interesting to try and guess at what exactly in the message set it off. Over-indexed on biology refusals, perhaps?
Re:How employment is changing at Anthropic on Sunday October 18, 2026 @08:03AM (#50140336)
I'm reminded of the visual novel "Root Double -Before Crime * After Days-" where one guy in town having a manual petrol-powered car instead of using robotaxis is a significant plot point.
The extremely popular upcoming game "Drunken Goddess Reflux" (a.k.a. "Pukey Goddess Shot Trick") is cancelling their public demo plans over fears that AI will just allow someone to release a clone of their game before they are finished with the real thing.

Their Steam page announcement is here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4150720/view/7460665...

The release style of games looks to change a lot in the near future. A lot of "shadow drop" sort of things, no Steam Next Fests (Steam's public demo festivals), a lot less experimental indie content and a lot more safe bets from big companies who have the technical expertise to do anti reverse engineering work.

(Unless perhaps a legislative response comes, so that AI-washing a program is definitively declared as creating a commercial derivative work and activating the harsh penalties for that in existing copyright law.)

Re:Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:02AM (#49640051)
Most of SC Ghost's plot was absorbed into a special DLC campaign for Starcraft 2. They'd need to do something else.

(The site also seems to indicate the new game's plot takes place about 75 years after the end of SC2.)

Re:Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract on Thursday September 10, 2026 @12:18AM (#49638345)
The Starcraft site is clearly doing some sort of intentional glitch out ARG, and the rumour going around is that they are doing some sort of singleplayer shooter set in that universe.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113435/blizzards-next-starcra...

Re:iPhone Duo on Thursday September 10, 2026 @12:08AM (#49638297)
The general public is always better at destructive testing than a machine built for that purpose.
Re:Grok Outage on Thursday September 03, 2026 @01:19PM (#49553455)
It turns out AI was just An Individual.
I'm not so sure. You could literally see configuration options start disappearing from the Mac Mini ordering flow over time as demand increased and supply dried up.
The hospital toilets in Melbourne definitely have that setup. It was weird seeing basically every surface as just a shade of blue and nothing else.

I do wonder - now that most people have a phone with a flashlight - would not the druggies illuminate their own arms with white light and not be too bothered?

I think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.
Similar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.)

Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.

Re:Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go? on Monday August 24, 2026 @09:45PM (#49428155)
It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

Re:Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful on Thursday August 20, 2026 @12:35PM (#49376944)
It's like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear / dumbest tourist crossover, except we're now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.
Re:Finger: Social network that never died on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @10:26AM (#49362082)
I imagine Carmack's plan files were monitored because people were starving for as much id Software news as they could get, and going straight to the source rather than waiting on gaming news sites for digests would be the smart thing to do.
Re:AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read) on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @12:05AM (#49341121)
Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.
Re:Recycle – Floppydisks on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @12:43AM (#49253474)
I definitely remember doing that as a kid, and I remember bending the thin metal off some broken ones. Whatever brand I was using allowed that metal to work a bit like a spring, you could launch it by compressing it. (Sorta like the frogs you find in Christmas bonbons.)
It all sounds like having to rely on a dodgy housing contractor that wants to steal from you, take shortcuts AND choose the gold-plated options from their supplier friends, and will start doing this the minute you are not on site supervising. You don't do it yourself (because the contractor is faster and stronger than you in many ways) but you can't leave, so you're stuck on the worksite just watching them.
Re:Tail-Call Interpreters in Rust – Jimmy Ostler on Monday August 10, 2026 @06:43AM (#49241952)
I think they could get a close-enough effect by removing the horizontal lines on the text glyphs themselves. This would still keep the colorscheme and slight glow, but drastically improve readability.
I think some of the Youtube thumbnail stuff is lazy-loaded, so depending on the speed of your browser and connection it can just hang there doing nothing for a while.
Re:Taste Is All That's Left on Thursday August 06, 2026 @04:30PM (#49202085)
Well, this has been true (to a lesser extent) for decades. See "Worse Is Better" and all the subsequent essays and writing following on from that
Re:Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @12:06PM (#49184769)
This has been a core belief of the EA/LessWrong/Rationalist people for many years - that above a certain level of intelligence you effectively get hypnotic powers, and people will obey AIs no matter what. So they said you can't keep a superpowered AI airgapped as merely offering a chat interface will immediately take control of the next person to interact with it and they will deliberately compromise the airgapping.
Re:Karpathy's Pelican on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:11PM (#49146873)
Like hitting pinball bumpers, except the high score in the end is the bill you pay the token provider.
I think it's just one of the standard JP voice synthesisers available. I know I've heard almost exactly the same one on other Youtube videos using text-to-speech for Japanese.
Bitburner, the Javascript-based open source hacking game, has released its major version 3.

It's a cyberpunk-themed idle game, where you crack open servers to loot them and explore their secrets. You can do this manually, but the real fun and challenge is in writing scripts to massively automate the process.

Main repository (including API docs): https://github.com/bitburner-official/bitburner-src

Official Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812820/Bitburner/

Web-based version: https://bitburner-official.github.io/

Major features in 3.0.0 include:

- A new type of network with unstable, shifting connections. This new network requires writing programs that spawn, stay resident, propagate and terminate themselves.

- Certain factions now have special campaigns associated with them, which you can choose to assist.

This is pumping someone's metrics up inside of Microsoft, somewhere.

The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?

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