action-adventure game
I feel like taking an extremely turn based game and making it “action adventure” is a weird choice. BG3 was a mega smash hit and turn based. If you want to funnel more players into your tabletop game, you probably want the video game to be kind of sort of like the tabletop. I have doubts about this.
This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.
Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.
Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.
Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.
Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.
I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.
We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?
No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.
I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.
This is a capitalist hell
Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.
Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.
It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.
Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.
One of the reasons UBI games are trash
I parsed that as “universal basic income games” and was really confused. Ubisoft makes more sense
I found the solo play of both Remnant games really unsatisfying. Slow pacing, uninteresting enemies. Is it much better with friends?
I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?
Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.
Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.
Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.
They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.
They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.
Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.
The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.
Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.
I wonder if it’s exceeded the max length and caused a poorly handled error
I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.
I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.
Maybe I spend too much time here because I knew what that was before I clicked it
This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.
But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.
You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names
Do the needs stay satisfied, or is it going to be like 2 years later we have billionaires and starvation again?
Many people have found that using LLMs for coding is a net negative. You end up with sloppy, vulnerable, code that you don’t understand. I’m not sure if there have been any rigorous studies about it yet, but it seems very plausible. LLMs are prone to hallucinating, so you’re going to get it telling you to import libraries that don’t exist, or use parts of the standard library that don’t exist.
It also opens up a whole new security threat vector of squatting. If LLMs routinely try to install a library from pypi that doesn’t exist, you can create that library and have it do whatever you want. Vibe coders will then run it, and that’s game over for them.
So yeah, you could “rigorously check” it but a. all of us are lazy and aren’t going to do that routinely (like, have you used snapshot tests?), b. it’s going to anchor you around whatever it produced, making it harder to think about other approaches, and c. it’s often slower overall than just doing a good job from the start.
I imagine there are similar problems with analyzing large amounts of text. It doesn’t really understand anything. To verify it’s correct, you would have to read the whole thing yourself anyway.
There are probably specialized use cases that are good- I’m told AI is useful for like protein folding and cancer detection- but that still has experts (I hope) looking at the results.
To your point, I think people are trying to use these LLMs for things with definite answers, too. Like if I go to google and type in “largest state in the US” it uses AI. This is not a good use case.
Meta should be broken up and its leadership barred from working in tech (or politics)