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There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

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441–450 of 518 posts

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#441
post #4

> So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt. They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm. > The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the ava…

>The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.

Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b

Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me. I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that A…

> And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever. I'm strongly skeptical of this argument, as there's only a few things you can not build a rough version and get something to ideate upon. Even with 3d games you can do design with blocks and buy models to have something to pinpoint the design.

This is still an incomplete model, in my opinion. You're still holding up what is possible as a non ai assisted developer as equal to the assisted one in the abstract, before adding in real world things like tedium, boredom, distraction, the ephemeral nature of novelty, frustration, and everything else that has derailed human software development, but inference engines are perfectly impervious to.

I can give you a concrete example: this week at work, it occurred to me that the 16 channels of expected and measured binary on or off test data I need to collect could benefit from a visualization because matching expectations will have visual properties that failures will not. So I had my AI agent create a script that encodes 16 channels of expected and measured binary wave forms over time, as a 32 channel 1Hz sampling frequency wav file, which I can view with audacity, which also has the necessary controls to measure time between transitions in the waveformms.

From hindsight, one could argue that since all of that solution consisted of rudiments of perfectly normal software that didnt need AI to be written or integrated, it was equally possible to create without AI. But knowing that could do it with the greatest of ease, for the total price of naming it, converted this from a project that required the motivation to figure out all of the necessary steps to one that just needed a good description.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you under the impression that you have a choice? Those that are violent will always exist, and will always attempt to leverage their willingness for violence, and those that are able to - through luck or circumstance - gain leverage will be able to use that leverage to consolidate more until they have a hegemony on violence. That's simply an observational fact of human history. Governments are a way of occupy…

Americans have exerted control over their society before, of course. It's usually through embarrassment of the people in power, with an implied capacity for violence waiting in the wings. "So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing wi…

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Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#444
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the…

> Over time the gems will rise to the top I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse. Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.

while SEO has made search worse, i don't think it's the core reason why things are impossible to find, i think it's simply the fact that, over time, google has been butchering the ability to search for exact terms in favour of "natural language" searching, which makes simple things like "how do i make an orange cake" or whatever return useful results, but makes any actually technical query return a lot of pure garbage

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#445
post #365
post #21

> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and…

My bet is working through an abstraction layer (LLMs) will make crafting a fun game more difficult. The art of designing a (great) game is in the details. English is not sufficient to communicate the individual strokes of a brush on canvas. Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.

You have to have the models the create tools for you to paint.

I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.

I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.

So I told Codex:

- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)

- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh

- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need

- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things

And I got my desired look within a few seconds.

The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#446
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely can impose sanctions on foreign companies by restricting their access to US markets, investments and penalizing US banks doing business with them. For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.

So did they stop any Iranian companies doing business with Iran? Did they stop China or Russia doing business with Iran? If Google Deepmind has to stop doing business with non-US citizens what will they do with their R & D in the UK and other countries? Will Mistral stop doing business in France? Will the Chinese AI companies stop doing business with everyone else (including China?) to retain access to US markets and…

There is an example of this and you can probably dig deeper if you're truly curious instead of just assuming things.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-forces-raid-ship-s...

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. There is a spectrum of good and bad. If you truly believed all government is bad, then please feel free to move to a banana republic.

Name a good government.

Australia has a good government. It's extremely middle of the road due to Mandatory voting attendance and preferential voting. It's very much wisdom of the crowd. It's a good system and the results across the board from wealth inequality, GDP per capita, human development pretty much speak for themselves. it basically forces a really centrist approach because everyone preferences all of the candidates you never want to use outrage politics or it will backfire. It also has an independent body that defines where the electorate borders are so gerrymandering is not really a thing.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a good government.

Australia has a good government. It's extremely middle of the road due to Mandatory voting attendance and preferential voting. It's very much wisdom of the crowd. It's a good system and the results across the board from wealth inequality, GDP per capita, human development pretty much speak for themselves. it basically forces a really centrist approach because everyone preferences all of the candidates you never want…

The Australian government enforced assimilation policies that systematically removed Aboriginal children from their families. The Australian Human Rights Commission concluded that this state-sanctioned policy constituted an act of genocide. During early colonization, government troops and police forces were directly involved in the planned and calculated mass slaughter of Indigenous communities. Archival records frequently referred to these indiscriminate killings using the codeword "dispersal". In Afghanistan, Australian special forces were involved in the unlawful killing of Afghan prisoners and civilians. In 2025, laws were passed allowing bans on protests for up to three months, and activists face arrest and imprisonment for demonstrations relating to climate change and the Gaza conflict.

If any group other than the state did any of these things they would be rightfully disbanded, instead people praise mandatory voting???

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#449
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.

Right, but the widespread literacy took generations to take hold. But, the threat was immediate. I think, in the long run, of course AI is a boon. But I’m not immortal, and right now it’s a threat to all our livelihoods. We should put ourselves first, and be selfish, while we’re still alive to be selfish.

Interesting perspective but don't you think it's too late? Opus 4.8 can already replace most developers. Companies are already cutting the bottom half of the work force, since Opus on a cron can churn out bug fixes.

Maybe there's some hope that if we stop here, we'll still need senior level developers to guide the models and step in where they (occasionally) fall short? Maybe Mythos/Fable was the first time where that was no longer really true?

I'd disagree. I saw plenty of really mediocre work from Fable, especially in various niche programing endeavors (graphics comes to mind). It doesn't strike me as the "end to all programmers" yet... though fast forward 10 years and it seems inevitable that all of our salaries will be halved, if not more.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be m…

I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic. Also your argument is along the lines of thinking I argue for: You say I shouldn't lobby for regulation I believe is beneficial because a future government might change the regulations to make them not beneficial. This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't d…

> This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones

No, there is another case you haven't covered. The situation in which regulation, made in the best of its ability to combat a problem at the time, now hinders progress more than it helps. Either the incentives were malformed and misaligned from the start, or the solution was targeting an ephemeral problem and written in a way where interpretations can be abused to target newer solutions for newer problems.

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