coderenegade (u/coderenegade)

coderenegade commented on Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs marianogappa.github.io/so... · Posted by u/maloga

pton_xd · a day ago

There are some game systems that lend themselves to unit testing, like say map generation to ensure that the expected landmarks are placed reasonably, or rooms are connected, or whatever. But most game interactions are just not easily "unit testable" since they happen across frames (eg over time). How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks?

I'm sure you could conjure up any number of ways to do that, but they won't be trivial, and maintaining those tests while you iterate will only slow you down. And what's the point? Even if the unit-move-and-attack test passes, it's not going to tell you if it looks good, or if it's fun.

Ultimately you just have to play the game, constantly, to make sure the interactions are fun and working as you expect.

coderenegade · a day ago

It would depend on how things are architected, but you could definitely test the components of your example in isolation (e.g. spawn test, get the movement vector in response to an enemy within a certain proximity, test that the state is set to attacking, whatever that looks like). I don't disagree that it's a hard problem. I run into similar issues with systems that use ML as some part of their core, and I've never come up with a satisfying solution. My strategy these days is to test the things that it makes sense to test, and accept that for some things (especially dynamic behavior of the system) you just have to use it and test it that way.

coderenegade commented on The rising returns to R&D: Ideas are not getting harder to find papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pape... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

TheOtherHobbes · 7 days ago

Einstein, Ramanujan, and Newton were boosted by existing networks of review and promotion. A lot of core engineering math was invented by aristocrats and government functionaries around the French Academy. Germany developed its own equivalent scene somewhat later.

All of these followed the model of a relatively small number of smart people bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing them, building on them, and promoting the good ones.

The difference between that and modern R&D is that modern R&D tries to be industrial rather than academic. Academia is trapped in a bullshit job make-work cycle, where quantity gets more rewards than quality and creativity. There isn't room for mavericks like Einstein. Even if they're out there having great ideas, there's no way for them to be discovered and promoted.

Industry focuses more on fill-in developments than game changer mathematical insights, which are the real drivers of scientific progress.

So there's a lot of R&D-like activity in CS, and occasionally something interesting falls out, like LLMs. But fundamental physics has stagnated.

One of the biggest reasons is that the smartest people don't work in research. They work in finance, developing gambling algorithms.

coderenegade · 7 days ago

I'm not discounting the benefit of having additional networks in place, I just think they're a facilitating factor rather than a causative one. They're important for educational development and spreading ideas, but they can also result in homogeneity. The biggest two factors to me are time and interest. You yourself point out that most modern math and engineering was invented by aristocrats; the main reason for this was that they were the only ones with the luxury of being able to think about such abstract topics. They had the time to spend, so those with the interest and aptitude pushed the boundaries. You occasionally saw members of the working class do the same (Heaviside, for example), but they had a more difficult road.

I disagree that the smartest people work in finance. Some very smart people do. From what I've seen, the ones at the very farthest edge of human ability typically aren't motivated by money.

coderenegade commented on The rising returns to R&D: Ideas are not getting harder to find papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pape... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

9rx · 7 days ago

> some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.

Is it that they deny the entire possibility of a creative genius working in isolation, or deny that a creative genius working in isolation, without a supporting community to spread the good word, will still see his work make it out into the world?

coderenegade · 7 days ago

I think it's more that creative genius requires both the time invested to attain mastery, and time to push the boundaries on paths that may or may not work out.

Ramanujan would have still been Ramanujan had he not worked with Littlewood and Hardy (though the world might not have witnessed both his genius and his contributions), but by all accounts he invested an enormous amount of time and effort in mathematics, to the point that his family urged him to do other things. Einstein worked a job that was so trivial for him that he spent most of his time thinking about other things. Newton invented calculus while his classes were halted because everyone was isolating from the plague. Bukowski famously quipped that his choices were to earn a wage, or to write and starve, and he'd chosen to starve.

In the same way that you probably don't get garage startups in a society where no one has a garage, you probably don't get many creative geniuses without good family structures and some level of slack in the system.

coderenegade commented on A general Fortran code for solutions of problems in space mechanics [pdf] jonathanadams.pro/blog-ar... · Posted by u/keepamovin

coderenegade · 7 days ago

Love seeing stuff like this. The corrections for an oblate spheroid threw me for a loop at first, until I realized "yeah, of course". I've only ever played around with ideal bodies when simulating the n-body problem (sounds a bit raunchy...) so never even considered the fact that a rotating planet isn't perfectly spherical.

coderenegade commented on How much do electric car batteries degrade? sustainabilitybynumbers.c... · Posted by u/xnx

gwbas1c · 7 days ago

There are some cars with panels, but they can only get about 10ish miles a day with good sunshine. Stationary panels work much, much better.

> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)

> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.

Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.

coderenegade · 7 days ago

I don't think the bottleneck for charging is in the batteries, it's in electricity as an energy vector. By its very nature, someone is either instantaneously dispatching it from somewhere, or it's already being generated and curtailed. I just don't see that being cheaper than even biofuels in the long run, because time arbitrage matters. Making fuel with overcapacity that is worth zero (or less!) probably scales better than trying to store it all in batteries, because holes and containers will always be cheaper and easier to expand.

coderenegade commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder

alexjplant · 7 days ago

I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years without DLC meant that people got good at it on their own merit without worrying about dropping money on upgrades or grinding long hours to get drops or whatever.

Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.

coderenegade · 7 days ago

When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.

I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.

I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.

coderenegade commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete

didibus · 13 days ago

You seem possibly more knowledgeable then me on the matter.

My impression is that LLMs predict the next token based on the prior context. They do that by having learned a probability distribution from tokens -> next-token.

Then as I understand, the models are never reasoning about the problem, but always about what the next token should be given the context.

The chain of thought is just rewarding them so that the next token isn't predicting the token of the final answer directly, but instead predicting the token of the reasoning to the solution.

Since human language in the dataset contains text that describes many concepts and offers many solutions to problems. It turns out that predicting the text that describes the solution to a problem often ends up being the correct solution to the problem. That this was true was kind of a lucky accident and is where all the "intelligence" comes from.

coderenegade · 13 days ago

I think the intuitive leap (or at least, what I believe) is that meaning is encoded in the media. A given context and input encodes a particular meaning that the model is able to map to an output, and because the output is also in the same medium (tokens, text), it also has meaning. Even reasoning can fit in with this, because the model generates additional meaningful context that allows it to better map to an output.

How you find the function that does the mapping probably doesn't matter. We use probability theory and information theory, because they're the best tools for the job, but there's nothing to say you couldn't handcraft it from scratch if you were some transcendent creature.

coderenegade commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete

ijidak · 13 days ago

For me, the way humans finish each other's sentences and often think of quotes from the same movies at the same time in conversation (when there is no clear reason for that quote to be a part of the conversation), indicates that there is a probabilistic element to human thinking.

Is it entirely probabilistic? I don't think so. But, it does seem that a chunk of our speech generation and processing is similar to LLMs. (e.g. given the words I've heard so far, my brain is guessing words x y z should come next.)

I feel like the conscious, executive mind humans have exercises some active control over our underlying probabilistic element. And LLMs lack the conscious executive.

e.g. They have our probabilistic capabilities, without some additional governing layer that humans have.

coderenegade · 13 days ago

I think the better way to look at it is that probabilistic models seem to be an accurate model for human thought. We don't really know how humans think, but we know that they probably aren't violating information theoretic principles, and we observe similar phenomena when we compare humans with LLMs.

coderenegade commented on Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience myvolvoex90.com/... · Posted by u/prova_modena

jorvi · a month ago

To be honest, it has never been about pure brand. Every brand has had clunkers and has had great models.

Having said that, Toyota is known for their reliability, and Volvo (+ Polestar) was / are known for their safety.

Just to emphasize the point: Nissan is doomed because generally no one wants their cars, but they have perhaps one of the greatest bang-for-buck EVs outside of Chinese brands: the Leaf 2.

coderenegade · a month ago

Nissan makes fantastic cars that develop a following, and then proceeds to change everything about the car that created a following in the first place. Mitsubishi seem to be learning this skill from them. Toyota still sells cars that have a direct lineage to the original model 40 years ago, and charges a fortune for them.

coderenegade commented on The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015) washingtonpost.com/news/w... · Posted by u/roktonos

bradley13 · a month ago

My parents "retrained" me to be right-handed. All primary-school things like writing, using scissors, etc. I do right-handed. For the rest? All I am is confused - some things I do right-handed, others left-handed. FWIW I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid, which...may be related?

coderenegade · a month ago

Plenty of us righties out there like this. I write, catch, throw, kick etc. as a right hander, but surf, play the drums, jump etc. like a left hander. When I learned to box as a teenager I settled for orthodox, but it could have gone either way. Never had a problem with coordination.

I think it's genetic, and probably a spectrum. My mom's family has a few lefties, and a number of righties that play traditionally left handed positions in team sports.