The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.
This in particular I found quite interesting:
"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "
As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
The problem is that we want, at the same time, to allow everyone to do it (by not enforcing any rules against it) AND laugh at a satire like this as if it was ridiculous. Both things cannot happen at the same time. It’ll be some time before we acknowledge that there is no research without AI, so we’ll keep pretending it doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we will be doing all research with AI anyway. And by the time we arrive at a scenario like the article’s, it won’t be so ridiculous anymore, because we will be used to the even more ridiculous situation of pretending we’re not doing it.
The text seems like it's there as a basic low effort placeholder.
Maybe it's still a one person project and they don't want to spend their time crafting reasonable marketing fluff pages, so they relied on an LLM to generate that while they focus on the tech side of things.
It could be true, but the more I look into it, the more I feel like it's not very genuine. For example, https://xonaly.com/privacy-policy/ has a very strong no third party claim, yet the actual xonaly.com homepage calls the Open-Meteo API for weather data from the user browser.
I remember how google.stanford.edu was a project by two guys, with a lot of makeshift bits. Its search quality was so much higher than of then-incumbents though, it wasn't even funny. Hence the market share growth.
Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.
The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods
(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)
Maybe they're related by blood, but the apple fell very far from the tree. the ID guys were quite vocal in their dislike of the slow pace & puzzle solving. This was when ID was all about technical advancements and repeatedly making the same game, faster & shinier. They also focused on multiplayer with Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament dictating where the market moved.
I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore.
Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.
To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.
I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
> I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.
Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.
I think it's about the first thing that got you hooked. My Macintosh LC II with a 486sx daughtercard couldn't play Doom well. By the time I sorted my PC situation out, there was Quake.
For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)
Yeah, they could do a lot more in it with true 3D maps, but the design was all brown. The bosses were boring - the first one is kinda cool, the others not (IIRC episodes 2 and 3 were just kind of standard enemies); all three of Doom's were scary, especially the Cyberdemon when you can hear it roaring and the noise of it walking around.
The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.
Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
Quake 2 multiplayer is such a blast. The cat-and-mouse chase fights in that game is what defines the genre of "arena shooter" for me, there's still nothing else really like it.
The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.
Personally I think Unreal Tournament perfected the genre when it comes to multiplayer. Q1 was a lot of spamming of grenades and so on. Q2 was better. Still a lot of chaos. UT99 was also chaos but you could combine it with perfect moves and high precision shots. Great games all of them. I used to be an elite UT99 player but as the pace kept increasing along with my age my reaction time was simple not good enough anymore. Even if tactics compensated a lot those games are not like sneaking around in CS. I mostly played CTF. Good old times.
Idk, I think UT has some really neat design elements, like the shock rifle that are really unique. It rewards predicting the enemy a lot and a lot of mechanical skill etc. Plus there's the cool factor of guns like the Redeemer :D
QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.
I think what makes Q3A seem generic nowadays is that it set the standard.
Q2 was always my favourite, that's where I started my multi-player journey. I only played against bots in the first Quake, and only played against my cousins at their place in Doom (they had multiple computers linked up back in the day).
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.
Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.
Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I had slow internet and its bots were better.
Point being: Q3A was great, but in 1999 it became clear that id Software had lost their head start over other FPS developers. They were still elite, but in the early-mid 90s they were alone at the top.
I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.
As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).
I have very fond memories of playing the quake 3 arena demo in our high school computer labs in the late 2000s. I would install it every time i sat down at a computer and sometimes half the class would be in the lobby. It was dated by the time I found it but it was still incredible fun. I particularly loved the level with the platforms out in space.
Our photo teacher got fed up with the whole class playing one day so he froze everyone’s inputs with the monitoring software and went around killing everyone before simultaneously shutting off all the computers.
I really miss simpler games without progression systems and loadouts and gimmicks. l would imagine the gameplay probably still holds up today, it was very fast paced.
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
I think the point is that Quake (1) came out within months of Activision launching Mech Warrior 2, Blizzard doing Warcraft, and even a couple years before Valve did Half Life. And Quake / Doom were so much bigger.
They had terrific success but if you were handicapping US video game companies in 1995 it would be like EA, iD (and maybe Sierra Online!). Point is they were way ahead at that point.
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.
Not just graphics but character acting and animation, interactive world elements, deliberately dramatic scenarios in the levels (Half Life pioneered this, but Doom3 had a lot of really good ones).
It was years ahead of what was on consoles at the time.
Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).
In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.
That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.
As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.
The problem with Doom 3's gameplay is it was too fucking dark and constantly having demons jump scare you or spawn behind you got stale quickly. At some point I need to give the BFG edition a try which at least addresses the "too fucking dark" aspect, but that's also now a 2012 game instead of a 2004 game.
The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
Similar. I played Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II a lot. But by the time Doom 3 came out, the gameplay just didn't interest me. I guess I got further than you, I shot a few enemies. But meh.
Same - loved those other games but Doom 3 felt miserly in comparison to the previous games where you had space to move and options to target. D3 felt like it was just random jump scares more than much else.
Quake 2 as a game was ok, but I've always just really loved the visual esthetics of the software renderer. It had this gritty, rough feel that I really enjoyed.
Never liked the modern renderer versions, none of them look good to me, too flat, too polished.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
Yes I do have something to hide. my face. I don't want you to own it in a data base of yours that you have a bad track record of knowing how to secure.
unless of course, you are willing to take ownership and accountability of my data and promise me minimum of $100k in compensation for data breaches and leaks indefinitely from your storage of my face. You can figure out how to pay for insurance to pay for this.
/oh you're not interested in even talking about this? Sounds like you have something to hide. (this fun conversation would not be well perceived when you that you ask for accountability for their actions and propose a solution. making a contract for this surely can't be super hard, but getting them to sign it and be accountable to it would be blocked hard)
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.
Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.
How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?
That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.
Also using codex as a full time partner these days. What do you think happens in a year or so that changes the way it works around the tools? It becomes the only tool we interact with, and it assumes control over the others?
The US' limitations in its ability to project power have been exposed. Having American bases in the middle east has been shown to be nothing but a liability for host countries. And Iran has proven that it can withstand anything the US is willing to throw at it, and hit back hard, over a relatively prolonged period.
And Iran has shown that its constitution is strong and power succession is effective even after a massive decapitation strike. There was seemingly zero turmoil, control appears to have been maintained without issue.
And Iran's non nuclear option of controlling the strait has been tested andd shown to be highly effective.
And Iran has gained significant operational experience with its massive stores of drones and missles.
And the US has lost multiple billion dollar intelligence installations in the region.
And Americans have been made aware of the Israel lobby like never before, and Trump is in a very difficult position heading into the midterms.
> And Iran has proven that it can withstand anything the US is willing to throw at it, and hit back hard, over a relatively prolonged period.
Absolutely not. But Trump made two huge mistakes: 1) not imposing the naval blockade from the very start, 2) stopping the military offensive after only roughly a month, when about 50% of the Iranian missile stockpile was still intact. We must resume combat operations, bomb Iran until they are unable to fire back, and use their frozen funds to pay for damages to neighboring countries. It is absurd to offer Iran sanctions relief or "reparations," and makes Trump look incredibly weak.
Other things should also be done in parallel, such as actively hunting down and sinking Iran's "shadow fleet" of vessels, around the world and relentlessly until they are unable to export a single drop of oil by sea. We could also take their bridges and railroads and further deal a huge blow to trade with other nations by land. An invading force isn't needed for any of this.
That example flowed well and didn't stand out to me.
But what happens when you no longer feel that you have a decent chance of being able to determine that something might have been created with LLM assistance? Do you not mind because you can't tell anyway, or do you refuse to read anything at all for fear of potentially consuming some LLM assisted work?
I'm fine with it as long as it's not full of the usual signals, because that's just bad writing that I don't enjoy.
I had exactly the same thought yesterday. For now the "its not Y, its X" idiom is a strong LLM marker. It should be fairly simple for the brain trust at the labs to get rid of it, and I'm sure they eventually will when prose writers becomes a relevant enough customer base.
It already is very hard to identify AI text, and we probably consume a lot of it unbeknownst to ourselves. Its like microplastics now -- you can find it everywhere (or so the propaganda goes).
I don't have a solution for when they fix that stupid idiom. I'm already reading less current things in general because of this, and might just do more of that. Even if its impossible to distinguish, I think people will pro-actively mark their stuff as LLM-free. There isn't a tech to support/prove that rn, but there might be in the future.
I believe that canonically the tunnel painting is made by the coyote, the problem is that because it's a cartoon the bird can run into the non-existent tunnel anyway and the coyote cannot because that's funnier.
It is interesting that e.g. "Coyote time" was copied into platform games but in real life if you're not stood on solid ground you fall immediately 'cos Mother Nature doesn't give a shit what's more fun.
How is it so different from, I don't know, directly grabbing it and tearing it apart? There are only so many ways they have to kill something (or injure it enough to allow killing it).
A lot of crow hunting stories feel cruel to read about, though I wonder why that is.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Maybe something like this: Most animals hunt in a way that minimizes their odds of getting hurt, to the best of their ability. Crows are pretty smart, and not very strong in the grand scheme of things. So they engage in tactics that look like cruel manipulative pranks; causing the prey to somehow kill itself or get killed by something stronger.
In the end, I think a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck and say “Ah well, got me fair and square!”
> a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
Humans used to hunt animals by chasing them into pits and then punching holes into them with sticks until they bled out not to mention the many kinds of horrible traps for smaller prey animals.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
I didn't have a slightly panicked moment, but sometime in the last year my approach to programming changed.
When starting a project, I used to think about how I was going to structure it, how the large pieces would interact, how some of the details would work out, and then I'd work through alternatives and consequences on my own.
Now I don't think about it on my own so much as have a conversation with an LLM about it. And it's great because it can quickly gather information from various sources, I can ask it for links to canonical sources, I can ask it about trade-offs between alternatives that I might not have considered, and through conversation, I end up with a more detailed analysis.
Then as I work through the development, I keep my new agent partner in the loop for discussion, suggestions, and troubleshooting. It can't be trusted completely, but it's certainly reliable enough to be considered a useful tool for my purposes.
I went from thinking it was an interesting toy to play around with, to completely integrating it into my work flow, and that change seems to have happened very quickly.
This in particular I found quite interesting:
"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "
As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
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