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Look at a VIC-20 screenshot, pretty impressive: https://www.mobygames.com/game/14475/sword-of-fargoal/screen...
Yes, I'm aware of the tricks done to make graphics out of the computer's character set. Still impressive in my book!
But apparently it wasn't written just in BASIC for the C64 version. From Wikipedia:
> The following year, with the release of the Commodore 64, McCord was asked to release a version of Sword of Fargoal for that machine as well. McCord was unable to implement the conversion as it was written in BASIC, and the sprite-based graphics required machine language programming. McCord's friend Scott Corsaire (then Carter) and Steve Lepisto wrote all the machine-language code that was needed so that game would perform fast enough to work on the Commodore 64.
What amazes me is that, apparently, most of Sid Meier's Pirates! was written in real C64 BASIC. It boggles the mind. Back when I was a kid I loved my C64 I thought it had the most useless BASIC ever, I envied what I thought was a better version in the Speccy. If only I had known what could be done with this...
My point is this style of bursts of short sentences, without flowery language, is a style some acknowledged writers do use in real life. It's not, by itself, a mark of bad quality or AI writing. In fact, ChatGPT uses way more elaborate sentences in its replies to my queries (and it drives me nuts).
I don't see the points that state people disagreed with me, I see 188 upvotes to this story and many comments saying they liked it.
The comment that you wrote that if someone cannot see this is bad writing there's something "deeply wrong" is simply absurd.
> However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
"Most people"? Please, show me where "most people" are saying this. Where's the verdict, are you keeping a tally? "Most people" don't agree on anything, either here in HN or elsewhere.
Are you the arbiter of what "most people" consider a good writing style?
No, it hasn't. It's a distinctive style that some writers use. Like everything in life, it can be used wrongly, but staccato phrasing isn't "always considered bad writing". Consider this:
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“What’s yours?” George asked them.
“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?”
“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.
“I’ll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potato,” the first man said.
“It isn’t ready yet.”
“What the hell do you put it on the card for?”
“That’s the dinner,” George explained. “You can get that at six o’clock.”
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“The clock says twenty minutes past five,” the second man said.
“It’s twenty minutes fast.”
“Oh, to hell with the clock,” the first man said. “What have you got to eat?”
The story is "about" more things though, for example alienation due to AI replacing people at work.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
How can you be so sure, 100%? What are the famous ticks that you see in the story?
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
The review of the book isn't so good, though I'd still own it as a charming period artifact: https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/write-your-own-fant...
Dungeon Crawlers for the C64 always make me think of the Sword of Fargoal! https://www.lemon64.com/game/sword-of-fargoal
I get the sense that the OP of this particular thread was asking about Ubuntu in general, not just the server. If it was the server, I'd understand it, but Ubuntu on the desktop still makes sense. And yes, Ubuntu is in my gaming laptop.
I use desktop Ubuntu because it's up to date and it just works for me, and I can play the latest games in it with Steam + Proton. I don't have to tweak it or do any additional downloading of stuff besides the Nvidia drivers (I actually don't remember how I installed them).
Can I do this with Debian, in a no fuss way? (I know this can be done in any distro, that's why I'm stressing "no fuss").
> It is given sets of paramaters/data and infers a response based on it's acceptable confidence level. The bottleneck for this is compute power and model/prompt/rails/integrations.
or whatever the LLM claims its confidence is on any given output?
The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.
Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.
I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.
> The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera.
Good luck finding any written publication of any kind that everyone will agree is unbiased and reliable on this topic, and that won't upset a significant number of readers.
Re: specifically Middle East Eye, Wikipedia's own article on it is critical and highlights controversies. As for using it on articles about the Middle East, it would only be a problem if it was the only reference, but this doesn't seem to be the case in a cursory search I did. So aren't you effectively asking they ban some sources but left others, which ironically would introduce bias? Same with Al-jazeera or any other news outlets you dislike.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
Edit: wow, downvoted for asking this. Really, it's very simple: one should be able to make it explicit what bias they mean. If they don't, maybe they fear to show their own biases and be called out? Downvoting is the coward's way out.
Edit 2: I'm rate-limited, but I find this answer very puzzling:
> Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim.
That goes directly against HN guidelines. Assume the best version of a comment, not the worst. My question should be fairly straightforward to answer.
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
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Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited:
> Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited.
Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited.
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
Yes, but if you read this "semantic" info directly from a site, you can judge the site and its potential biases, and decide for yourself "this sells Louis Vuitton, of course they will praise their handbags". Or to pick a more extreme example that nobody would ignore, if you somehow land on an extremist website spewing racist crap, your alarms will surely trigger by anything they say.
But through an LLM this gets whitewashed and presented as authoritative and "neutral", when it isn't. You might know not to trust the LLM either (if you're paying attention; we all have our unconscious biases) but I bet you most people will be caught off guard.
As an example, nothing George Lucas did compares to what I wondered about the mysterious clone wars back when I watched (and rewatched) Star Wars. Lucas effectively "filled in the gaps", leaving nothing to my imagination. That what he did envision turned out to be pedestrian only added insult to injury, but now I cannot unwatch his prequels.
There's a similar phenomenon to when you read a book and imagine the characters and even situations mentioned off hand in the text, and then someone makes a movie out of it and makes it explicit and locks in specific actors and CGI-filled situations for whatever you imagined in your mind. You may or may not like it, but your own imagination gets stifled.
For things like "The Hunt of Gollum" it becomes downright bizarre. Whatever became of Gollum as he crawled towards Mordor, tracked by Aragorn and later mentioned by Gandalf, is such a minor footnote; definitely something for your imagination. Tolkien definitely didn't think it warranted even a short story. But no, they must make a movie out of it, because why not; the fans will lap it up even if it garners bad reviews.
As I mentioned in another comment, and there's no polite way of saying this, the nerdy need to know "what really happened" in excruciating detail (not to speculate, but to know) is a sign of immaturity. Art, even pop art, thrives as much in the known as in the unknown. To want to cast light into every single detail and "make it official" is a mistake. Though of course publishers and studios salivate at the chance of milking the proverbial cash cow.
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe belong in the Silmarillion, but do note the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
Agreed. But would our AI entrepreneurs, so busy building the Torment Nexus, pay heed?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.