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stephen_cagle

391 karmajoined 17 lat temu
stephencagle.dev

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stephen_cagle
·5 dni temu·discuss
And that worked for maybe, what... half a decade? But eventually the Illuminators all transitioned to being Arcane Scribes, the cost of spells plummeted due to increased supply, and in the end only Wizards who had invested in Arcane Sanctums had anything to show for it 50 years later.

Real Estate, it always boils down to real estate.
stephen_cagle
·8 dni temu·discuss
Is anyone seeing this?

```

Warning Suspected Phishing This website has been reported for potential phishing.

Phishing is when a site attempts to steal sensitive information by falsely presenting as a safe source.

Cloudflare Ray ID: <retracted_because_what_is_this> • Your IP: • Performance & security by Cloudflare

```

Who "reports" this? And why does cloudfare take them down? How does this even work?
stephen_cagle
·20 dni temu·discuss
Awesome, that sounds fun. I'll do as you suggest.

And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.
stephen_cagle
·20 dni temu·discuss
Context: So I have 3 friends that I have been playing video games with for over 30 years weekly. So we would be playing half (as a team) of a 4v4. Now, we are never going to be competitive, we are basically playing to socialize.

Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.

Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.

Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?

Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
stephen_cagle
·21 dni temu·discuss
I'm only partially convinced. I just can't see how you could really know if a company is using a hidden metric (or some sort of proxy for that metric so that they are not technically in violation) for figuring out what to promote. Short of having constants audits, how would you ever really know?

But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
stephen_cagle
·21 dni temu·discuss
Also, if you have expectations that future inflation may be high, the leverage of borrowing can make sense as a hedge against your cash equivalent holdings in that scenario.
stephen_cagle
·21 dni temu·discuss
Do you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I feel like this is kind of like the gambler's risk of "going bust" but applied backwards?

Feels like it would be better to spend just enough so that you have the capacity to scale up IFF LLM's end up being a big deal. You spent less than your rivals (who were competing for a supremacy that never came), but you have saved more "dry powder" to compete against them for the more likely future. The only future you exclude with this strategy is the "LLM Supremacy" future, which you only had a 1/(number_of_players) chance of winning anyway. :]

I think the real reason for the spending is that the scent of LLMs in the air causes stock values to go up. And even if everyone knows it does not make sense, they still want "NUMBER GO UP", and so they will spend more money to excite the amateur and professional investor class.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Neat article.

I think it is interesting (though I only partially agree) that microwave meals require standardization to scale. Let's say that was true, why couldn't a modern microwave have a small camera and a set of heuristics for how to cook just about anything by turning the gun on and off at particular points when it recognizes a food? Maybe without intelligence, a microwave does need standardization; but we can put intelligence (ideally offline) in just about anything these days?

I wonder if with sufficient control if a microwave could ever brown? I wonder if it could reliably bake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tg3-93jKvc - Chicken Good!
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Just to be clear, I'm visualizing the usage of world models that can consistently render visual and interactive renderings of a specified world. I think interacting with them will be markedly different than interacting with many text based LLMs (though I don't know, I have never had direct access to one).

I don't think these will create "artist" in any sense, but I do think it will lower the barrier dramatically for people creating games. Most people will interact with it like Lieutenant Barclay interacting with the holodeck, doing little more than wish fulfillment. But I think a few people will be able to interact with it in ways that create art.

In no way am I implying that the net net of AI will be good for humanity as a whole (I think that is too big a question), but I do think the power of World Models will probably result in a far more people being able to say "I have created a game".

I honestly don't have anything useful to say about what LLMs are doing to many human fields. I can understand how frustrating it must feel to see LLMs demonstrate superhuman "skill" (I don't really think they are skilled) at orders of magnitude less cost than a good artist. It isn't just that they don't seem to innovate (only permute), it is that they will literally take even the tiniest bit of creativity and novelty and immediately fine tune and create derivative works on any idea at scale. I can see how that might really demotivate any desire to push the boundaries of art for any human being.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Agreed, these aren't even games currently. I am just saying that world models will lower the barrier to entry to making games. Which might mean that 1 in 1000 of the lower-barrier-to-entry-people might someday makes a great game. So more great games in aggregate, but more bad games on average.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I feel like a circular saw is a creator tool, while a microwave is mostly a finishing tool.

I take raw material and make something out of it with a circular saw, largely unrestrained by anything other than cost, skill, and material.

With a microwave, I make things hot so I can eat them.

Aside: Also, I wonder why that is? Why do we regard the microwave as "degenerate" compared to the oven? Why is baking seen as a calling while microwaving is, well, not? Is it the ease of the microwave makes the effort less impressive? Maybe it is that you can't achieve certain effects like browning? Is it because of it's 1970's association with "radiation" and tv dinners? Is it just cultural inertia?
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I read this a while ago (https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2012-08-18-accelerando...) and I remember enjoying it a little less with every section. With that said:

This is a book of ideas!

Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.

I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.

Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Yeah, I hear you. And it is historically true.

But why can't we just say "2% over a billion, 1% over a million; 50% if you choose to move your assets out of the country". It does not seem that unreasonable to insist that you keep your monies in the country that lead to your wealth?
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I feel like I am saying regressive in the sense that it effects the poor more than the rich, full stop.

Being neutral relative to a sales tax is a confusing starting point. I consider a sales tax to be a truly bad tax, as it disproportionately effects the poor.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
Hmm, I'd never thought about the fact that a VAT tax requires two sides of a party in order to defraud. That is kind of neat and a beneficial property of VAT taxes I had never considered.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I suspect these models will be like old Gutenberg's printing press. A rapid rise in the amount of content; most of it not that great. However the sheer volume will result in even more high quality content actually being created in aggregate.

Put another way, the average game quality will go down, but the actual rate of "Great" games will go up.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I've multiple times done a minor dive into why a VAT tax is seen as a reasonable tax? It... seems as regressive as a sales tax with even more layers of intervention? I've always eventually lost interest in trying to make sense of it, but they sure seem popular in Europe so there must be something to them?

My current belief is that there should really just be a wealth tax on assets (Federal) and a land value tax on land (States); nothing else.
stephen_cagle
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
I disagree with calling this bad faith. For instance:

* I can agive you one quarter of amazing profits, if you let me dismantle and sell all the assets of a company.

* I can give you a few years of incredible food production, if you let me strip a rainforest and plant commercial crops.

* I can give you incredibly cheap energy, if you let me mine non renewing fossil fuels from the earth.

The context of why something is possible matters. In this case, because a very large and comprehensive test suite was seen as a necessity to specify a successful project (managed by humans). I do not believe a LLM coded project could ever have made such a test suite. In this case, the LLM is consuming the result of expensive human labor (the test suite) to make what ultimately is a minor variation to it (the implementation language).
stephen_cagle
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
You've almost buffer overrun Goodhart's Law into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy . :]