Opting Out of using Gmail is quite straightforward however, so possibly try that. :)

The article basically answers its own questions in the conclusion that we’ve pretty much reached the ‘final form’ for consoles - Just like with phones.

In the early 2000’s phones were all manner of wild designs with weird shapes and crazy functionality, but now we’ve settled on the ubiquitous black rectangle of the smartphone. So too now has the console settled on this, a single screen with buttons on the sides.

We saw the lead-up to this long ago with Nintendo’s own evolving line of handhelds, and Sony’s PSP and Vita, and now we’ve seen it on the PC side too with the Steam Deck.

Even Sony are trying to move into making their main console a handheld - the only reason Nintendo were able to get there first is they were willing to do their classic move, and go with a low-power device without much grunt, and rely on the fun-factor of the games to make it good.

Imagine if next cycle Nintendo came out with a dual screen beast, a-la the DS. These days, more and more games on consoles are cross-platform and work on all systems, with few exclusives. That doesn’t work so well if your system has super unique hardware and deviates too far from the single black rectangle. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot.

I think if Nintendo do something truly off-the-wall again, it will only be because there has been some new tech shift in the market and Nintendo jump in to get first mover advantage. Like a new type of VR that works super seamlessly, or something none of us have though of yet.

But for now here we are. The ubiquitous black rectangle has arrived.

The nice thing about Gator Game was that movement felt so good and fluid. It really is just a game about jumping and climing and bouncing around like a hyper kid.

Given the game doesn’t have ‘combat’ they really really needed to get traversal right because that’s the main draw, and they succeeded in that.

That sounds miserable :(

In a previous position I was asked if I was willing to be on call, but it was optional. I accepted because the terms were good.

If I was on call the requirements were clear - No alcohol, and a 10 minute response time 24/7.

In return, I got a bump in my paycheck for weeks I was on call, no matter whether I was actually called or not. And any time that I did end up spending on support incidents I was eligible to take back out of normal hours at time and a half. So if I spent two hours on support in the middle of the night, I could take three hours off the next day.

It was a respectful arrangement that made me feel positive about the company and management, and I wish all companies did it that way.

I got lost a few times too, but I think they did a good job of providing mitigation for that with specific large landmarks you can see at least one of from anywhere, like the big tree, the mountain, the windmill.

I understand what the devs were trying to do by not having a map. When a map is there, especially an always-on minimap, I basically spend my whole time with my eyes glued to that tiny corner of the screen rather than actually looking at the world. So I can respect the decision to try and do without any map.

There’s all sorts of problems and roadblocks.

Another big one is generation of inappropriate or sexual content. No publisher will dare to ship something when the next week there’s going to be videos all over social media of their game characters saying and doing wildly inappropriate stuff (as hilarious as that would be for us as players!)

What else are you going to do, though?

If you have some particular and complicated task then sure you’d probably write a program for it in a specific high-level language. But that isn’t what the shell is for.

If you’ve already got a bunch of apps and utilities and want to orchestrate them together to do a task, that’s a good shell use case.

Or if you have a system that needs setup and install tasks doing on it to prepare for running your actual workload, that’s also a task which the shell is ideally suited to.

Shell scripting always has a place, and I can’t see it being made obsolete any time soon.

It would be difficult, yes. I’m a software developer myself and have been working with LLMs on personal projects recently, so I’ve got some context on the challenges involved.

The hype around LLMs is obviously all “Yeah just throw AI at the problem! AI can do it!” but the reality is that you will always need a good amount of normal coding to wrap around that and make the LLM inputs and outputs sane and interoperable with the rest of your system. So I’m very aware.

My real wonder is that with an appropriate implementation, how much of the classical aspects of the game could you ultimately and eventually move to LLMs, which is what the patent seems to be suggesting.

For example, if you used LLM only for character dialogue and nothing else, it would go something like this:

• You talk to an NPC and insult them
• The convo is assessed and it tweaks some hidden classically programmed reputation and faction variables
• You go to the base of a faction associated
• Those variables determine the faction is hostile

But you could potentially use LLMs to manage more aspects directly, and that could look like this:

• You talk to an NPC and insult them
• An LLM summary of your actions is written to a world log
• You go to the base of the faction associated
• The controller LLM parses the entire world log for your actions relevant to the faction and determines the result as hostility, including extracting reasoning for that which members of the faction can confront you on if spoken to

Now that’s already a lot of work and the only bit of classic programming we really took out is how the rep system is managed. But we gained some flexibility in that the source of your relationship with the faction could come from any action anywhere, including ones the game designers never even dreamed up, not just certain things which were pre-known to update it.

Where decisions actually interact with the game world will always need to be classically programmed (like being hostile and what that means and how it causes the characters to act, do they shoot you, what it means to ‘shoot’ and ‘move’ etc) and there will need to be a way to interface with that, but LLMs could introduce some level of flexibility in places where that wasn’t possible before.

A reaulting problem though is that the more you give to LLMs, the more the entire thing is likely to unravel and become incoherent, without doing even more work to prevent that, and there will still be cracks.

Is it ultimately feasible? I don’t know, but it will be interesting for whoever gets to try.

What the fuck are people doing

The diagram proposes it be used in other aspects too, such as in dynamically altering the game narrative.

i.e. you feed into the LLM “okay, this is the current state of the game and characters, what would be interesting to happen next?” and then the game state changes based on that assessment.

Setting aside the feasibility of implementing this typically overreaching and broad tech patent, I can see this eventually being useful in immersive sim games like Deus Ex and such.

In immersive sims the dream has always been to give the player infinite freedom, but games can’t provide infinite freedom because every possibility has to be programmed and accounted for, and dialog written. Would be amazing if the game itself could dynamically adjust based on player behaviour.

But honestly, to your point about breaking it, I think that’s why we still haven’t seen LLMs deployed in big titles apart from some private tech demos - studios and publishers are afraid of the prospect of abuse.

As soon as such a game landed you can bet your ass people will be working immediately to break it and get it to do inappropriate things (because that’s fun!) and publishers are terrified about that, because it will totally happen no matter how many safety rails you try to put in.

As a Brit I don’t know anything about the CFPB, but let me just say they have a top-tier logo right there.

The ‘spotlight’ shining out from inside the C to shed light on anti-consumer shenanigans tells you instantly what the CFPB is presumably all about.

Graphical masterpiece of a logo.

I am overall in favour of the new rules being applied. I think the change is good, and this manner of enforcing it should save a lot of lives.

Despite being in favour I still wanted to raise that potential consequence - that some blameless worker is pretty certainly going to get assaulted over this by some angry idiot.

Helmets are important. But I do wonder if this approach is going to lead to unjustified anger and violence against filling station employees simply for complying with the law and refusing fuel (as if it’s even their choice)

Even at $100 it’s a pretty reasonable time/compensation ratio, assuming you only have to spend like 10 minutes on actual performance time.

Of course there is potentially travel time and the overhead of communicating ahead of time to set up the prank.

May not be worth it if you have a full time job already.

“Yes, about the sheep”

True mostly, although some things may occur regardless of how other people treat you, like feelings of dysphoria from being transgender, since it’s based on your own perception of yourself.

Of course, other people can certainly make it even worse.

[LGs] new remote doesn’t have a dedicated button for switching input modes, as previous remotes from LG and countless other remotes do.

The only buttons I ever use on my remote are power, volume, and input. I’m sure a lot of other people are the same, and LG know it.

Very transparent move to force people into the ‘smart’ menu to change inputs, so there is opportunity to push ads, featured apps, promos and other unwanted garbage in your face.

It does feel like it might be, but I don’t know if it actually is.

The UK generally has extremely good fire safety regulations, so if this was getting people killed I feel like it would have been the subject of some scrutiny.

The house I grew up in was this way, and the house I live in now with a new door (<10yo) is still that way.

As a kid I never thought about it, and I don’t remember ever being stuck in the house.

The way people normally deal with keys is that everyone who needs a key has one of their own on their keyring, and there is usually also a ‘house’ key which stays by the door and isn’t taken away anywhere.

And none of this is to say “this is a good way” it’s just to say “this is the way people are used to here”

Different lock types are more or less common in different places.

I don’t know where the artist of the comic lives, but here in the UK for example most exterior doors have a keyhole on BOTH sides, and you need to use the key to lock or unlock it from inside, as well as from out.

The developer should always raise ethical concerns if they have them, I agree. And those above should listen.

As for the notion that programmers are the reason for all the terrible stuff in the world then perhaps that’s kinda true, but only from the most literal sense.

If we look at the evils that have been unleashed on this world by Facebook etc, then from a very literal perspective if no single developer ever pushed a single key on a single keyboard then none of that would have happened. But I’d struggle to say it’s solely their fault when there’s so many others involved also.