Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?
Lying to people is the only thing AI is good for, so its no shock that cops want to use it
When the revolution comes, we have to cut off the hands wearing this abomination of a watch before we cut off the owner’s head:
https://www.ablogtowatch.com/new-release-jacob-co-oil-pump-44mm-watch/
Price: $280k, limited to 88 pieces…
I was going to say they were cowards about this because it’s powered by wind-up mechanics rather than burning droplets of black ship oil you feed into the tiny oil barrel. But then I realised that would probably waste most of the energy on heat, right on the delicate mechanisms and your wrist, and who wants to use an energy source that damages everything around it with excessive warming
I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it’s just a coincidence, right? right?
Yes, the CEO was born in 1988, the 14th month.
The article talks about this having a slimmer case profile, right now it’s 18mm, i heard they’re aiming to shave off another 4
Could be a Chinese market thing. They like their number eights.
Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.
Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:
Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:
-
Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.
Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I’m not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech’s public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public’s attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.
it’s already got a rep as a grossly sexist bar, so
I don’t wish ill upon my fellow tech sector workers, but frankly a backlash on the tech industry is long overdue. People have been mad at big tech before and so far it (thankfully) hasn’t led to cataclysmic shifts in free software.
I feel like the original Free Software ethos of software freedom as moral obligation first and economic convenience second (if at all) might be more resilient to these kinds of field-shaping challenges than the more business model oriented Open Source ideology. That said, I don’t expect the ongoing AI crisis to re-separate F and OS by name in popular or even tech industry consciousness.
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I hate to say it but pg’s tweet was reasonable. Some asshole carrying water for Mike fucking Lee deserves to be blocked.
Yeah, my initial reaction was “how dare pg not follow his own principles” but then I realized he’s on Twitter, not HN, and when in Rome…
they live glasses on
I THINK ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE DOING ELECTION FRAUD
DUAL CITIZENSHIP EXISTS
LET ME MISS THE POINT EQUALLY HARD IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION, OR AT LEAST HOPEFULLY SO
There’s got to be a term for the rhetorical technique of “this reasonable-sounding statement is one of the conclusions I draw from my unhinged conspiracy theories, and therefore the whole structure is true!”
before i begin, i want to be clear that what i am about to say is not an endorsement of chattel slavery
fucking…. time to reset the counter to 0. I’d finally managed to actively page out that this person exists.
eigen is one of the central twats in tpot and I wish they could just….not. imagine what they could do if they applied themselves to a different endeavour
(to be clear I don’t support the person or their positions, but they appear to be capable of engaging with complex issues/systems and the fact that they choose to go the flavours they do just feels so goddamned wasteful)
eigen “Whipping Blacks who Talk Back” robot
eigen “Replacing Meals on Wheels with Cotton Fields” robot
(If anyone can think up more nicknames like this, go ahead - I have zero intent treating this dumbfuck with any degree of dignity)
eigen “eigenrobot” robot
usually go with eigenrowboat
eigen cunt robot
Sounds like what someone who’s about to endorse chattel slavery would say, but okay.
On a more considered note after actually reading the thread (poor choice on my part, I know), it’s hard not to connect this to the broader line-goes-up mentality that we see so often here. As evidenced by the long history of the “live free or die” ethos, whether enslaved people were/are actually better off than had they been killed is more of an open question than our friend’s argument would imply. This is especially true if you ignore all the ways that chattel slavery was deeply cruel and inhuman even in the history of unfree labor to the point where historians consider it an abberation, closer to being worked to death in Mauthausen than being a medieval serf. I’m not qualified to talk about the history of dehumanization, but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves, provided you could find someone with citizen standing who was willing to plead your case, and this was thousands of years before the liberal ideas of what being a full human being and a free individual meant, so we need to understand the position of unfree people in those periods differently. But even if you ignore all that context and treat slavery like a universal practice from the prehistoric “sea peoples conquered my tribe” days to the antebellum American South, the primary benefits that you get from slavery don’t go to the enslaved people, obviously. Rather it comes from the conquerors having a new source of labor to work their new fields, and the economic benefit they get from that. Rather than needing to allow population growth to expand your people’s farms into new lands, you have a ready-made labor force to start (or in some cases continue) working there. It makes the line go up faster, in other words. The argument relies on ignoring all the questions of justice and the impact that these practices have on people’s actual lives because it makes line go up, and in that sense it fits right in with all the other ways that ostensibly-libertarian ideologies end up supporting fascism.
but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves
We don’t know much about Greece, but in Rome if you were released from slavery (by the master’s will, contract expiring, etc.) you were treated equally to people that haven’t been enslaved at all. And slavery was extremely common, independent of your state allegiance or color of skin.
That being said, we’re talking about a deeply fucked up system where the paterfamilias held complete control over not only his slaves but his wife, children, the entire family. And being treated “equally” to other commoners in Rome isn’t really saying that you were treated any good.
The main difference is that slavery as in the USA went through so many iterations of bad faith laundering that it had an entire ideology tacked on top to explain why it was good and Christian, actually. In Rome no one bothered, it was a clear power dynamic - we conquered you, now we own you because we have bigger dicks, simple as that.
That’s why I meant by talking about the differences.in citizen status. The Greek cities had a lot of variation, but usually had a variety of free noncitizens as well as actual slaves, so the line between citizen and slave was wider than the line between slave and “person who lives and works here.”
Also if memory serves the Roman aesthetic sensibility actually found bigger dicks weird and vulgar, but that’s not important right now.
but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves
Evidence for this is the comments we have from Athenians on the Spartans who they considered to be exceptionally cruel and bad re the treatment of their slaves. At least that is what I remember from reading Bret Devereaux blog.
Anyway, it feels really weird that ER (wait, I shouldn’t abbreviate eigenrobot to that, that is the name of an anti-semitic youtuber), imagines some moment in time when there was no slavery where it had to be invented (see also the weird modern fetishization of inventions we have), which feels to me like inventing a period before we could lift our left arm upwards. And then also conflating all various forms of slavery with chattel slavery (as you mentioned) is just fucking silly. Reasoning from first principles because nobody in your community is a history expert.
Not gonna lie, Bret was my primary source as well, particularly his two series on the civil structure of the Greek polis and the Roman republic .
basically it seems like slavery solved genocide
‘Fun’ (not fun, horrible) detail about slavery vs genocide. During the holocaust, some capitalists saw all these people in concentration camps as nice business opportunity and convinced the nazis to sell them slaves to work in some factories. These people were basically beaten to death because they didn’t work fast enough. (because they were hungry). So the statement is a bit counterfactual here (also, another point for ‘capitalists would gladly work with genocidal fascists’ for the people keeping score (also for any Jordan Peterson fans this will come as a big shock (he, as self proclaimed expert on this subject, famously said that the nazis were more evil than people thought because they didn’t work the Jewish people to death)). For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowitz_concentration_camp
Jordan Peterson fans this will come as a big shock (he, as self proclaimed expert on this subject, famously said that the nazis were more evil than people thought because they didn’t work the Jewish people to death)
jesus christ
And, it gets worse, this wasn’t a remark from his ‘crazy on benzos and attention’ period. He did this in class. (the clip itself is a bit interesting as you can see what he is trying to say (trying to make a point about Jung), but you can also see why it is failing re the analysis of the war front because imho he doesn’t understand facism and the nazis that well, so he makes it into a ‘chaos for chaos sake’ thing).
Hitler: *writes a whole ass manifesto”
JBP: hitler did all that because he was a messy bitch that lived for drama
More like JBP looking at his tool box with his hammer called Jung in it. Ah! A nail!
ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse […] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.
I remember ‘08 when Natty Ag was hot shit. Everything I’ve seen or heard of him since is just chud shit.*
last time on Nate Trek
Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I’m realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.
If I had a dollar for every time it turned out some poller influencer went off on the deep end I would have two dollars, not much but etc. In the Netherlands we have a similar type of guy called Maurice de Hond, who also got famous for doing polls (which often slightly differed from other polls) but he has gone quite nutty nowadays, a man I knew who turned into an anti-vaxer was a big fan. (The Hond is also one of those ‘I talked about polarization and nobody listened to me!’ guys when he has been a regular person on the Dutch TV for ages, thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad).
Strange how generating a slightly different type of poll causes people to go off into contrarian/bad epistemology land.
thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad
“yet”
and probably just in public. seems highly likely some of it is “just” in private at this stage, given employer and focuses
Fair enough, I just compared it to de Hond’s twitter account which is just vax doubt going on and on atm. (He doesn’t seem to be a hardcore ‘don’t vax ever’ person, but he just feeds into the anti-vax conspiracy shit fulltime, and I don’t see how he doesn’t care about the effect he has on the people who listen to him).
Compared to that Nate seems to at least be ‘normal’, or constrain himself to being private, so that is good at least.
Of course compared to the Hond (77), Silver (46) is also younger, so I think we all will be amazed at how much crazier he will get when he gets older. As older age does seem to be a big factor in this, for some reason people who get pushed forward as smart/insightful lose their entire ability to listen to critical sounds/doubt themselves when they grow older and the crazy comes out. (See also how Cornel West (71) has gone a bit of the deep end lately apparently, and this. People on bsky talked about him as an example of this issue iirc).
So the orange site is having a normal one over Python BFDL trying to skirt CoC by talking about mod actions against some old dude who caught a suspension for being precisely the sort of edgelord poaster I’d expect out of a Python maintainer, which the orange site was also not happy about. I even read a bunch of his posts in the thread, like where he calls people standing up to NixOS leadership “true villains”.
oh my god, that weird fash fucker is absolutely pulling a NixOS and trying to burn down the Python community over a well-deserved 3 month suspension
and the only reason I know about this shit even though I’m barely involved with Python in any regard is because one of his fans/alts was spamming mastodon with a blog post defending him, and fully half of it by scroll bar position was just fluffing the fucker’s previous achievements, then at almost exactly the halfway point it started describing all the shit he did and hoo boy does he deserve a lot more than a 3 month suspension
it’s fascinating how this is almost exactly the same situation as with what’s-his-face getting suspended from Nix and the project’s older maintainers pulling ranks to get the toxic fucker back
Dang it, am I going to have to learn a new programming language after 24 years of getting things done in Python because the edgelords are indulging in a fit of pique?
I mean, this is why I left during the Python 3 arguments. It was obvious that the core development team only functions to the extent that it can improve the (economic) exploitability of CPython by the consortium which has captured it, and that we’d become so technically dysfunctional that we were no longer able to implement forward-compatible syntax, something we’d had as recently as Python 2.5 but had lost by Python 2.7. The inability of the various “authority” groups like PyCA or PyPA to get things done once-and-for-all is another symptom; there is still no single holistic solution for cryptography or packaging in Python 3.
Like, I recall having dinner with Guido and Barry (and others; like ten of us at a Chinese restaurant) in Montreal. It was very obvious that Guido not only didn’t grok concepts like pure functions or capabilities or asynchrony, but fundamentally not interested in how they could improve the state of software engineering; he is forever in the mindset of making a teaching language, not a professional language. I also recall discussing with him years earlier (Portland?) about how libraries like Twisted or Django fundamentally only justify their existence by pointing to deficiencies in the standard library, and he didn’t understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all. At least he’s a nice person; at no point was there any yelling or tenseness, and I appreciate that.
That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn’t prefer it, and I only choose it when there’s a clear developer-time tradeoff, because I know that its maintainers are contemptuous of me merely for using Python 2.7 and PyPy.
and he didn’t understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all
screams in mime, datetime, yaml, The Long Road To Py3.7+, and more
That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn’t prefer it, and I only choose it when there’s a clear developer-time tradeoff
not a week goes by that I am not still awestruck by still how many places there are to stub one’s toe with py3-cluster things
samesies on still using python in some places. god I wish I could find something else that filled the same first-reach gaps as nicely.
god I hope Python of all things has enough eyes on it that this throw yourself on the ground in agonizing pain and flood the community with a bunch of fash assholes because you got a 3-month suspension shit won’t work, but I’m still astonished it works at all given how obvious it is when it happens
what’s really lol is how this whole arc is developing
at the start, the announcement about peters being canned for 3 months was really rather obtuse, not even naming the person or pointing at specific threads (just enumerating repeat problems). why, i have no idea
so now mcdipshit et co are doing their utter best to publicise themselves as crybabies who just got told “no, bad, don’t do that” and did not like it one bit. but the friends they’re choosing… oi.
My conspiracy theory is that they’re all deep cover agents for MathWorks.
Tim defended neither of these, only engaging in a conversation with someone who had, noting that in globally diverse communities that the required narrative may be more complex than oppressor-oppressed by simple binary color of skin.
With no link to any additional context
So it’s entirely unclear from that HN thread, but where did this dumbassery start?
it probably isn’t exactly where it started as the entire thing’s in bad faith, but I’ve found the blog post being spammed absolutely everywhere at the time that went into excruciating detail on tim’s history with python then tried its best (and absolutely failed) to paper over and misrepresent the shit Tim did that got him temporarily ejected
e: my strong personal impression is that Tim’s just been like this for 30 years, and nobody managed to call him out before cause he’s the Timsort guy and open source projects always seem to think technical achievement should absolve you of all the other shit you do, regardless of how much that shit damages the project technically
Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”,
lol yeah this was the line at which the post revealed its entire ass
it’s remarkable that the post spends so many paragraphs priming the reader into thinking Tim’s an irreplaceable part of the Python community and should never have been suspended, and now at least two people have gotten to that exact sentence and gone “no actually fuck Tim”
if memory serves, it gets much more mask off from there, but I remember I didn’t finish the entire thing before I closed the tab and started blocking Tim’s fans
this guy was IIRC also furiously defending the totally not nazis at Nix
still this post is a glorious example of a defense brief that would work even better for the prosecution
i did stumble over a worse one just now: a guy banned from the Mesa community for being a Nazi defends himself by saying he only said that:
if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
that is inclusivity
and writing a prosecution brief about himself in his defense
a guy banned from the Mesa community for being a Nazi
lol I learned about this the other day when marcan posted about it, and I had a good giggle
iirc: poor l’il fashbaby has some kind of problems with his thing, but he can’t turn anywhere because the linux graphics community is kinda small and enough people went “lol get fucked” that it effectively closed doors everywhere
the world’s smallest violin, etc etc
Yes, you unfortunately are seeing right. A person (name of whom I will censor even though you can find their name easily by going to the issue page) went onto the Hyprland bug tracker, to call me, a Nazi.
ah, this is the part of the Wayland community that’s now notorious for being a Nazi bar, specifically because their discord and every other community space did in fact have a gigantic number of nazis (some of whom were moderators) “joking” about, among other things, gassing people
e: (and also just a fuckton of outright bigotry, see Drew’s posts on this for a sample of what I mean)
here’s Drew Devault’s take on that blog post and also his first blog post that covered the ways in which Hyprland is a Nazi bar
Actually reading the python discussion boards, what’s striking is the immense volume of chatter produced by Tim, always in couched in:
- “Hypothetically”
- “Everyone tells me they are terrified of inclusivity, you wouldn’t know because they are terrified of admitting it to YOU”
- “I’m not saying that you are an awful person 😉” (YMMV: But I find his use of the winking face emoji truly egregious)
- “Hey I’m liberal like you, let me explain everything wrong with it”
- “Hey we were inclusive before any of this PC bullshit” proceeds to use unpleasant descriptors of marginalized individuals, and how very welcome they were, despite what he seems to see as “shortcomings”
In his heart he must understand how bad he his, or he wouldn’t couch his discourse in so much bad faith, and he wouldn’t make so much of a stink out of making removing Python Fellow status more easy to remove.
There certainly is a pattern of people who used to be helpful and productive in the past who then turn into edgelords in the community later, and nobody dares to go after them because past achievements pattern.
Lol, of course the edgelords (I think there were 2, not really clear to me atm) have Dutch names. Typisch.
Anyway, we tech people really need to learn that being good in tech, and getting tech changes approved is different from being good at modern community management and avoiding the pitfalls of those.
That’d require them to be decent human beings, but from what I’ve seen I’m not counting on it
Yup I refused to even post that nonsense because I did the exact same scroll through it and was nonplussed by the amount of preamble this dude absolutely did not merit in defense of his terminal poaster syndrome.
preamble
more like preramble, eh?
stealing that for the next time I make a naughty lorawan module
These are not “Python community guidelines”. These are the guidelines of a tyrannical clique who have grabbed power and control the access to the infrastructure.
Lmao, fucking armchair revolutionaries at it again with interpreting a list of rules which essentially boils down to “don’t be an asshole” as the literal end of civilization because it’s attacking their
assumed right to use slurs and insultsfree speech.Makes you think that it’s always the same kind of people who seem to have a problem with not being a racist twat in a public space. Feels like I’ve seen similar discussions a dozen times in the Rust community too whenever the term inclusivity comes up.
FYI, Python is named after Monty Python
NO? Really?! Educate me, hackernews!
condescending Wonka.jpg
I wanted to torture myself so I looked into that person’s posting history. They have made the exact same point that “Monty Python in fact used to mock the gays, how ironic huh?!?” three times in a row in different threads, really showing it to them wokes
But does he know that one of the Pythons was a member of the UK Gay Liberation Front?
Graham Chapman was, ironically enough, impeccable as the straight man of the group.
I prefer the Jimmy Wales version of authority. The project operates democratically, but Jimmy always retains the ultimate authority to act as a sovereign at the end of the day because he built it, has the reputation of the project to protect, and it’s his legacy. The option to fork the project will always be there if the people want new leadership.
Setting aside the blithe just-fork-it-ism and the insult to the people who actually write the articles… Isn’t Wales just one of a dozen people on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees now?
also, isn’t this congruent to how Iran works?
Ayatollah Jimmy has some zazz, admittedly
Our c-suite has announced an “AI workshop” for next Wednesday where we all work towards “increasing productivity in the age of AI”. The email was full of terribad Midjourney too which should’ve flagged it as spam.
Totes looking forward to discussing why I don’t let ChatGPT vomit out production-critical code and instead write it myself like some fucking Luddite with the marketing team next week.
https://www.404media.co/this-is-doom-running-on-a-diffusion-model/
We can boil the oceans to run a worse version of a game that can run at 60fps on a potato, but the really cool part is that we need the better version of the game to exist in the first place and also the new version only runs at 20fps.
These videos are, of course, suspiciously cut to avoid showing all the times it completely fucked up, and still shows the engine completely fucking up.
- “This door requires a blue key” stays on screen forever
- the walls randomly get bullet damage for no reason
- the imp teleports around, getting lost in the warehouse brown
- the level geometry fucks up and morphs
- it has no idea how to apply damage floors
- enemies resurrect randomly because how do you train the model to know about arch-viles and/or Nightmare difficulty
- finally: it seems like they cannot die because I bet it was trained on demos of successful runs of levels and not the player dying.
The training data was definitely stolen from https://dsdarchive.com/, right?
it’s interesting that the only real “hallucination” I can see in the video pops up when the player shoots an enemy, which results in some blurry feedback animations
Well, good news for the author, it’s time for him to replay doom because it’s clearly been too long.
The poison floor not hurting the player trapping him forever was a good thing to end on.
Achieving a visual quality comparable to that of the original game.
Uhhh about that…
only real gamers want to shoot Thongmonster Pro. coming soon to a doom WAD near you
Man, that looks like ass.Sorry, looks like an ass.
Oh it’s definitely comparable. See, I’ll compare:
The visual quality of GameNGen is worse than that of the original game.
Oh god is this the first time we have to sneer at a 404 article? Let’s hope it will be the last.
It’s running at frames per second, not seconds per frame. so it’s not too energy intensive compared with the generative versions.
it’s interesting that the only real “hallucination” I can see in the video pops up when the player shoots an enemy, which results in some blurry feedback animations
Ah yes, issues appear when shooting an enemy, in a shooter game. Definitely not proof that the technology falls apart when it’s made to do the thing that it was created to do.
Oh god is this the first time we have to sneer at a 404 article? Let’s hope it will be the last.
My intention was more to sneer at the research:
The tone of the article was unusual, putting way too large of a quote from the researchers and taking them at their word. Maybe it’s sarcasm i’m not getting, but either way, the “research” is just a bit of fun if the only goal was getting Doom to run
yeah, this is weirdly sneerable for a 404 article, and I hope this isn’t an early sign they’ve enshittifying. let’s do what they should have and take a critical look at, ah, GameNGen, a name for their research they surely won’t regret
Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines
wow! it’s a shame that creating this model involved plagiarizing every bit of recorded doom footage that’s ever existed, exploited an uncounted number of laborers from the global south for RLHF, and burned an amount of rainforest in energy that also won’t be counted. but fuck it, sometimes I shop at Walmart so I can’t throw stones and this sounds cool, so let’s grab the source and see how it works!
just kidding, this thing’s hosted on github but there’s no source. it’s just a static marketing page, a selection of videos, and a link to their paper on arXiv, which comes in at a positively ultralight 10 LaTeX-formatted letter-sized pages when you ignore the many unhelpful screenshots and graphs they included
so we can’t play with it, but it’s a model implementing a game engine, right? so the evaluation strategy given in the paper has to involve the innovative input mechanism they’ve discovered that enables the model to simulate a gameplay loop (and therefore a game engine), right? surely that’s what convinced a pool of observers with more-than-random-chance certainty that the model was accurately simulating doom?
Human Evaluation. As another measurement of simulation quality, we provided 10 human raters with 130 random short clips (of lengths 1.6 seconds and 3.2 seconds) of our simulation side by side with the real game. The raters were tasked with recognizing the real game (see Figure 14 in Appendix A.6). The raters only choose the actual game over the simulation in 58% or 60% of the time (for the 1.6 seconds and 3.2 seconds clips, respectively).
of course not. nowhere in this paper is their supposed innovation in input actually evaluated — at no point is this work treated experimentally like a real-time game engine. also, and you pointed this out already — were the human raters drunk? (honestly, I couldn’t blame them — I wouldn’t give a shit either if my mturk was “which of these 1.6 second clips is doom”) the fucking thing doesn’t even simulate doom’s main gameplay loop right; dead possessed marines just turn to a blurry mess, health and armor don’t make sense in any but the loosest sense, it doesn’t seem to think imps exist at all but does randomly place their fireballs where they should be, and sometimes the geometry it’s simulating just casually turns into a visual paradox. chances are this experimental setup was tuned for the result they wanted — they managed to trick 40% of a group of people who absolutely don’t give a fuck that the incredibly short clip video clip they were looking at was probably a video game. amazing!
if we ever get our hands on the code for this thing, I’m gonna make a prediction: it barely listens to input, if at all. the video clips they’ve released on their site and YouTube are the most coherent this thing gets, and it instantly falls apart the instant you do anything that wasn’t in its training set (aka, the instant you use this real-time game engine to play a game and do something unremarkably weird, like try to ram yourself through a wall)
Where’s the part where they have people play with the game engine? Isn’t that what they supposedly are running, a game engine? Sounds like what they really managed to do was recreate the video of someone playing Doom which is yawn.
right! without that, all they can show they’re outputting is averaged, imperfect video fragments of a bunch of doom runs. and maybe it’s cool (for somebody) that they can output those at a relatively high frame rate? but that’s sure as fuck not the conclusion they forced — the “an AI model can simulate doom’s engine” bullshit that ended up blowing up my notifications for a couple days when the people in my life who know I like games but don’t know I hate horseshit decided I’d love to hear about this revolutionary research they saw on YouTube
The paper is so bad…
the agent’s policy π … the environment ε
What is up with AI papers using fancy symbols to notate abstract concepts when there isn’t a single other instance of the concept to be referred to
They offer a bunch of tables with numbers in a metric that isn’t explained, showing that they are exactly the same for “random” and “agent” policy, in other words, inputs don’t actually matter! And they say they want to use these metrics for training future versions. Good luck.
For the sample size they are using 60% seems like a statistically significant rate, and they only tested at most 3 seconds after real gameplay footage.
Sidenote: Auto-regressive models for much shorter periods are really useful for when audio is cutting out. Those use really simple math, they aren’t burning any rainforests
I’m willing to retract my statement that these guys don’t have any ulterior motives.
There are serious problems with how easy it is to adopt the aesthetic of serious academic work without adopting the substance. Just throw a bunch of meaningless graphs and equations and pretend some of the things you’re talking about are represented by Greek letters and it’s close enough for even journalists who should really know better (to say nothing of VCs who hold the purse strings) to take you seriously and adopt the "it doesn’t make sense because I’m missing something* attitude.
The paper starts with a weirdly bad definition of “computer game” too. It almost makes me think that (gasp) the paper was written by non-gamers.
Computer games are manually crafted software systems centered around the following game loop: (1) gather user inputs, (2) update the game state, and (3) render it to screen pixels. This game loop, running at high frame rates, creates the illusion of an interactive virtual world for the player.
No rendering: Myst
No frame rate: Zork
No pixels: Asteroids
No virtual world: Wordle
No screen: Soundvoyager, Audio Defense (well these examples have a vestigial screen, but they supposedly don’t really need it)
Excel is a game.
things that are games:
- the control circuitry for a $1 solar-powered calculator
- my car
- X11
things that aren’t games:
- pinball, unless it has an electronic score display
- Quake-style dedicated servers
- rogue (nethack)
More computer games:
- web browsers
- stock market trackers
- election watch
More computer non-games:
- hangman on a paper teletype
- ARGs
- anything on the Vectrex
were the human raters drunk? (honestly, I couldn’t blame them — I wouldn’t give a shit either if my mturk was “which of these 1.6 second clips is doom”)
“I’unno, I’m fuckin’ wasted and guessin’ at random.”
“So, your P(doom) is 50%.”
Fuck, you beat me to the P(doom) joke. Well done.
I was just watching the vid! I was like, oh wow all of these levels look really familiar… it’s not imagining new “Doom” locations, its literally a complete memorization the levels. Then I saw their training scheme involved an agent playing the game and suddenly I’m like oh, you literally had the robot navigate every level and look around 360 to get an image of all locations and povs didnt you?
and yet, with zero evidence to support the claim, the paper’s authors are confident that their model can be used to create new game logic and assets:
Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code. GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware. While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images. A small part of this vision, namely creating modifications or novel behaviors for existing games, might be achievable in the shorter term. For example, we might be able to convert a set of frames into a new playable level or create a new character just based on example images, without having to author code.
the objective is, as always, to union-bust an industry that only recently found its voice
Which is funny, as creating new levels in an interesting way is very hard. What made John Romero great is that he was very good at level design. He made it look easy. People have been making new levels for ages but only few of them are good. (Of course also because you cannot recreate the experience of playing doom for the first time, so new experiences will need to be ‘my house’ levels of complexity.
I can allow one (1) implementation of Doom on GenAI, in the spirit of the “port Doom on everything” stunt. Now that it’s been done, I hope I don’t have to condone any more.
I can’t remember seeing an AI take on Bad Apple, but I assume the quota’s already filled on that one ages ago as well.
I love it when I randomly get a DM from some dude on Reddit because of a post I made six months ago mansplaining to me why I’m wrong about clowning on AI doomsters.
‘the fact is they are right about some things’
Yes, which is a thing we agree on, as Rationalwiki says “The good bits are not original and the original bits are not good”, problem is that none of the things mentioned before their last statement hold up. We don’t know 1 is possible. (Also note that 1 isn’t just 1, but actually 5+ points).
Anyway unhinged reddit DM’s are always something.
e: eurgh, looked into their post history. They are into making AI porn games. Also they are quite dumb., yes lets ask the magical AI if a thing is true. Ah turns out it told me that OpenAI is the greatest company in the world and there have been no controversies ever.
That’s a weird place to have some opinions about jewish and trans people. I like to look at the sinfest subreddit every now and then and that sub really likes to sneer at people who have weird opinions on those topics (such as the author of the titular webcomic).
It seems a bit of a contrarian sinfest defender. Which causes them to mention some iffy things. Which the r/sinfest admins then delete after downvotes it seems.
Oh man, anyone who runs on such existential maximalism has such infinite power to state things as if their conclusion has only one possible meaning.
How about invoking Monkey Paw – what if every statement is true but just not in the way they think.
- A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.
- In fact, we’re already there today, because it is, quite literally the sum of nature. The question for tomorrow is, “so like, what else is possible?”
- And it might not even have to try or do anything at all, especially if we don’t bother to save ourselves from ecological disaster.
- What we don’t know can literally be anything. That’s why it’s important not to project fantasy, but to conserve of the fragile beauty of what you have, regardless of whether things will “one day fall apart”. Death and Taxes mate.
And yud can both one day technically right and whose interpretations today are dumb and worthy of mockery.
A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.
A map is not the territory, but every territory is, in a sense, a map of itself.
“we are likely… fact” is just a special kind of stupid
Writing “fact” after a statement doesn’t magically make it one, bub
my mental voice for the DM sender keeps switching between “board game store inhabitant who spent way too much on warhammer shit and noticed you’re 3D printing your miniatures” and “flat earth convention keynote speaker” but it’s Reddit so a cursory investigation might reveal they’re both
- Only this $25 box of space marines can be used in sanctioned tournaments and therefore you can’t possibly derive enjoyment from your resin miniatures (is that a squad of tiny masters chief?) - fact.
- You can’t prove that the earth is round because you’ve never seen it curve - fact.
- What do you mean you’re not here to listen to me talk? I’m not moving so you can play with your masters chief (and is that — are you going to make them fight Gandalf?) - fact.
- The mere fact that the terrain on the board game table I’m not letting you use is flat and has an edge proves me right - fact.
I just enjoy that masters chief is like attorneys general.
Do you think tiny master chief is a Flat Ringer? Like if he’s so smol, maybe it’s hard for him to see the curve (fact)
My mental voice for DM guy is Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.
the moon could get mad - fact.
“HPMoR is canon - fact”
- What if being perfectly copyable is actually like, idk, a huge disadvantage? If this AI is a program in machine code, being able to be run exactly by its human adversaries allows us to perfectly predict how the AI responses.
- kek
- Tell us more about the elusive will of programs :) Also just love,love,love the idea that by being able to run computations faster it’s game over for humankind. Much how like the 0IQ Corona virus/mosquitos/and small pox stood no chance against our Monkey Brain super intelligence.
- Fellas, it’s been 0 days since Rationalist have reinvented the halting problem.
New piece from The Atlantic: A New Tool to Warp Reality (archive)
Turns out the bullshit firehoses undeservedly called chatbots have some capacity to generate a reality distortion field of sorts around them.
LAION reckons it’s finally dealt with the CSAM
and I’m sure everyone who trained on that can easily integrate this change, right. right?
oh, right, they can’t, because none of the chucklefuck shit works that way. but I’m sure they’ll totes jump right onto a full retraining cycle, because they’re such good and ethical people who totally live the values they claim
You already know I can’t get enough of Cyberstuck, but this is too good to not share: https://www.reddit.com/r/CyberStuck/comments/1f59lj8/david_attenborough_explains_cybertruck_behavior/
a quick follow-up tying in with our previous post about Kroger planning AI-driven demand pricing for groceries: of course they got caught red handed price gouging
this thread about the spare tire placement on the cyber truck made me lol https://web.archive.org/web/20240828180114/https://www.reddit.com/r/cybertruck/comments/1f0chzk/spare_tire_installation/?rdt=49951
The Cybertruck guy using nostr for image hosting is the kind of brand consistency you can expect from this crowd.