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Welcome to Gas City

steve-yegge.medium.com

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#41
I feel like this should have had a warning like the one on the Epiphyte business plan in Cryptonomicon.

"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING: Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets."

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire thing is an obvious LARP Eh, plenty of people play with Sims. Having them do something that feels even tangentially useful has an understandable appeal.

That's fine, I also have side projects that do absolutely nothing useful. Most people are taking issue with the deluded "it's all so obvious" rhetoric used in Yegge's writing.

> Most people are taking issue with the deluded "it's all so obvious" rhetoric used in Yegge's writing

Thanks. This is helpful.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#43

Is this just urbit all over again? Making up a bunch of terms and abstractions to make a mundane thing seem novel? At least in this case it seems more like psychosis than grift. In any case, I will be interested to see if this tooling yields any actual results, doesn't seem like it so far (except maybe more tooling lol).

The Acting Ambassador will telegraph the Nurse to summon a Pharaoh to the Barracks if it finds the Smoke Stack empty.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#44
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's foolish to even start listing, but here's one: physics bound to FPS

Are the quake, goldsource, source, etc engines jank? Because they all did this, to some extent. It might be harder to find an engine from the early 2010's that didn't tie at least some physics to FPS.

Your examples are from 10 or more years earlier that Skyrim's creation engine.

That is to say, the older engines could have been limited by hardware requirements, or maybe decoupling physics from fps is an innovation that appeared between 2004 and 2011. Or maybe they are also jank.

Notably, the source 2 engine (2015) decoupled physics from fps (as I understand).

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#45

Is this just urbit all over again? Making up a bunch of terms and abstractions to make a mundane thing seem novel? At least in this case it seems more like psychosis than grift. In any case, I will be interested to see if this tooling yields any actual results, doesn't seem like it so far (except maybe more tooling lol).

Basically.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#47
post #32

Came here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.

I think it's because LLM output tends to be snippets of truth, connected in such a way as to be subtly false. It leaves you disoriented because it is in the uncanny valley of truth: you know it's not right, but can't put your finger on why it is not right. It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What jank does Skyrim have. The whole thing is like 6 GB.

It's foolish to even start listing, but here's one: physics bound to FPS

Speaking of physics, the giant striking you with a hammer and launching your body into orbit.

And of course, can’t forget the classic Skyrim pathfinding jank. The number of enemies that would go aggro only to get stuck on a bush or a slight change in elevation while you stand there at a distance peppering their face with arrows until they die.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What jank does Skyrim have. The whole thing is like 6 GB.

You're thinking of bloat, jank is things like putting a cauldron on your head and the physics engine firing you into the stratosphere.

The bucket on an NPC's head while you rob them blind is my favorite example of a shining success of the line-of-sight system while simultaneously being a spectacular failure of basic AI.

Re: Welcome to Gas City

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to make the phrase "AI DDOSing" happen. ex. someone's GitHub repo with a ton of code and a README written by AI claiming fantastical features not present in the code. Or, more subtle someone, "self-DDOS'ing via AI" - thats for when "LLM psychosis" is too strong, i.e. for "I went too far down a rabbit hole with the interactive chatbot for a month and now I have 1M LOC and 95% test coverage and an app that I…

Someone has to be bleeding edge

This is true, without people trying, we wouldn't know what doesn't work yet - for all I know he's cracked something big and in a month we'll see the first AI-built operating system (I'm not being sarcastic)
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