Readit NewsAmen Jack! That's why I quit my postdoc and I'm working on my own AGI research.
It seems that neither academia nor industry has much appetite for pursuing interesting, but risky, research ideas.
nsagent commented on Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? theguardian.com/books/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
> Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....
They are still racist pricks. The ones at church are just the “good ones” who do a good enough job of code switching - ie so the racists say “you’re not like most Black people”.
(yes I’m Black).
You don't win people over by singling them out.
Fun! I see Trion was involved, was that during Scott’s time?
Yeah, he joined Trion soon after we started development.
I was there.
My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.
One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.
EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.
Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.
Crazy times.
[addendum] Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)
The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.
I was right.
Interesting! I didn't realize you all experimented with an MMORTS. I was a lead engineer on a never released MMORTS [1] that was developed after WoW became big. Seems that's a tough genre to convert to MMO.
nsagent commented on Anthropic bags fair use win but faces trial for using pirated works aifray.com/claude-ai-make... · Posted by u/spenvo
Interesting take on the piracy aspect:
We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.nsagent commented on Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmi... · Posted by u/sandslash
I've seen evidence of "anyone can vibe code", but at this stage the result tends to be a 5,000-line application intricately entangled with 500,000 lines of irrelevant slop. Still, the wonder is that the bear can dance at all. That's a new thing under the sun.
Having worked with game designers writing code for their missions/levels in a scripting language, I'd say this has been the case for quite a long while.
They start with the code from another level, then modify it until it seems to do what they want. During the alpha testing phase, we'd have a programmer read through the code and remove all the useless cruft and fix any associated bugs.
In some sense that's what vibe coding with an AI is like if you don't know how to code. You have the AI make some initial set of code that you can't evaluate for correctness, then slowly modify it until it seems to behave generally like you want. You might even learn to recognize a few things in the code over time, at which point you can directly change some variables or structures in the code directly.
You can make the expert mode dialog say "Clicking this button will erase your hard drive, drain your bank account, and give your dog cancer" and people will still click it.
And to provide a counterpoint, my dad can barely navigate his iPhone. I literally spent an hour on the phone with him when he was lost and needed directions; it took 20 minutes to guide him to open the messages app so he could read the address I sent. Someone that clueless isn't searching the internet to figure out workarounds for installing anything.