Which brings the question, if LLMs are an asset of such strategic value, why did China allow the DeepSeek to be released?
I see two possibilities here, either that the CCP is not that all-reaching as we think, or that the value of the technology isn't critical, and that the release was further cleared with the CCP and maybe even timed to come right after Trump's announcement of American AI supremacy.
This seems more like a move designed to frighten China -- or force them to spend money making LLMs -- then an actual threat. The clues are that Trump ceremonially blessed the deal but did not promise money (SoftBank et al will, supposedly), and then Musk said that's all fake because SoftBank doesn't have the money, and Altman countered that Musk should not be butthurt and should put America first. Who does that? I'm thinking, no one who has something real on his hands.
That's interesting, it hasn't occurred to me to check his games. That said, I remember reading that Machiaveli was once given a territory to govern and he was terrible at it, despite The Prince. It may be a thing about teachers vs doers.
THAT said, there is a lot of intersting things one can learn from John Carmack, so there's an exception to every rule.
Jesse Schell's book is a great read beyond game design.
Thanks for the other links.
To leave something in return, here's something I read the other day and kept thinking about it (I'm designing on a PvP motion based game)
"In competitive games, there is little more valuable than knowing the mind of the opponent, which the Japanese call “yomi.”
As a side note, I would even argue that the “strategic depth” of a game should be defined almost entirely on its ability to support and reward yomi."
The Yomi Layer concept is a reminder that moves need to have counters. If you know what the opponent will do, you should generally have some way of dealing with that.
Another adage is "code should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute". This goes directly against code being written by machines.
I still use ChatGPT for small self-contained functions (e.g. intersection of line and triangle) but mark the inside of the function clearly as chat gpt made and what the prompt was.
> You don’t need unit tests if you have integration tests.
Which is why, as per Jim Coplien, most unit testing is waste.
But converting one type of unit tests into another is a perfect showcase for AI-generated code. They could have even kept just the prompts in the source and regenerate the tests on every run, were it not for inaccuracy, temperature, and the high cost of running.
On the internet, no one hears you being subtle. (Torvalds)
I'll add my own view: when you watch a movie, read a book, listen to a song, play a game... you CONNECT with the mind of the person who made it. When there is no mind, or the source is a dead, statistical amalgamation of countless fragments of other minds, there is nothing you'll want to connect to, nothing you'll want to squander precious hours of your life on.
And while you may be curious to see, once maybe, a movie such an imaginary AGI-LLM has created from your prompt, no one else will have the slightest interest in seeing it. And vice versa. Which means there would be absolutely NO MONEY in that market. There would be no market.
I find it draining to have to be on the lookout constantly for hallucinations, or omissions a person wouldn't make. I imagine as long as I'm walking well known paths -- well known to many but not me -- I'm safe, but the moment I need nuances I can expect that one of those nuances is completely and convincingly made up, except I don't know which one.
They probably don't. Forced ad viewing is fundamentally dishonest: they can force the user to watch the ad, but they can't force him to pony up for what is being advertised.
The best description of AGI I've seen is in Michael Crichton's Prey. He describes in a fairly plausible detail how AGI rises from the building blocks. The emotion he captures is that of dealing with a psychopath -- goal oriented with no empathy -- to the infinite degree.
That said, I think ChatGPT and LLMs trick us into seeing intelligence where there is none because we are evolutionarily wired to look for signs of intelligence as a potential threat. Our defense mechanisms are asymmetrical as they have to err on the side of being overly cautious: you may mistake a rock for a bear but you won't mistake a bear for a rock.
So it is with ChatGPT: its conversation style triggers a false alarm deep in us that there is intelligence there and we can't shake that warning off, but this software design is just exploiting the flaw (of sorts) in our wiring.
"What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"
As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).
"Most seem to think they were warrior monks, or high ranking nobles or poor peasants. In some cases that’s correct, but on the whole often not the case.
Most who fought in the holy land and there were other places where they had crusades, were usually lower nobles, knightly class or franklin, usually richer farmers. They weren’t poor peasants, but they were no rich kings either. They were often people who could barely afford to travel accross the land and have some equipment. Not for nothing did the Byzantine empire get pillaged sometimes.
Picture them as mostly young men of upper middle class background, basically comparable to your modern day average college or university brat. They were relatively well off, but not exactly rich upper class either. Basically up and coming social climbers."
How much -- not whether -- something is natural is determined by the statistical processes that make the thing. "Appeal to nature fallacy" misses that critical point.
In ancient Greece they supposedly ate meat only during festivals. That was not only better for people but also allowed animal populations to recover.
I firmly believe that the level of meat consumption today is unnaturally high, simply because people of the old did not have refrigeration, to say nothing of how the animals are raised today. I eat meat here and there, and I enjoy it, but try to limit consumption to a few times per month.
Another point of reference: the Church forbade Crusaders to eat meat from warm-blooded animals more than two times a week. If a warrior under full armor is good with two portions of meat a week, most of us should be too.
As Heissenberg said, "What we are seeing is not nature, but nature exposed to our mode of questioning."
And the mode -- we invented it as it is because of a whim of history, because it is a game, and we like the game, and it's useful for us. But as far as facts go, Nietzsche summed it up the most concisely: "there are no facts, only interpretations."
Exactly right. Most of the new engineers have nothing of the libertarian spirit of the 2600 era. It was engineers who implemented censorship at online platforms, most incredulous of which was PayPal charging customers $2,500 in damages for spreading "misinformation." I cancelled my PayPal account the moment I read the news.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
I see two possibilities here, either that the CCP is not that all-reaching as we think, or that the value of the technology isn't critical, and that the release was further cleared with the CCP and maybe even timed to come right after Trump's announcement of American AI supremacy.