YesBox

> [I give a small introduction to myself and my own work, that I’m omitting here, as you’re on my website]

kkukshtel: You should keep that info, with links, even if its links to your site. Dont burden the reader.

Edit: I read the first half of the article then skimmed the rest (I dont use LLMs outside of occasional searches).

I've been a gamedev for five years. I have a hunch LLMs will not take over game development because of the necessity to control many, many small details to shape a great experience for the player, and because some parts of development cannot be described with words.

Small details: My hunch is when it comes time to polish and fine tune all the moving parts, this process will remain much faster to do by hand. It will be faster to update a specific field or line of code and test/iterate than to prompt your way through that process (the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time)

Describing without words: An artist with a vision can only bring that vision to life with body movements. It is not possible to communicate all the details that go into a great piece of art with words. The colors, lines, shapes, positioning, specific emotions, history... is beyond spoken language.

Thanks for the shout out!

For those of you who grew up with the city builder classics, I just announced Jerry Martin (SimCity, The Sims) and Paul Zimmermann (Space Haven, Wildfrost) are the two composers I am working with.

I've heard a quick way to determine if the UV index is dangerous is if your shadow is shorter than you. Though location matters too.

I moved from Vermont to Texas and had to purchase an umbrella with UV protection to walk around during the day. The highest the UV index hits in the Vermont's summer is 6. In Texas, it's 11+ !!! 15 minutes and you're toast

I'm openly (very) curious to hear the reasoning behind that statement, not having lived in SF.

From what I've read, George Lucas funded 100% of the project, and the Presidio trust rejected it. Then he tried building the museum in Chicago, but he was sued and blocked for a couple years and eventually gave up. Finally he found a spot in LA. IIRC the project took 12 years. The same source mentioned SF hasn't started any major museum projects since 2016.

America is falling behind on public works. We used to have the largest aquarium in the world, and now we're sitting at #5 or #6.

So I am genuinely curious why you and others are opponents of public works projects? I honestly do not understand.

<Not an AI researcher -- Just thinking out loud>

Perhaps it's getting more difficult to move the 'goal posts'?

- Train LLMs on texts -> OMG AI can write!

- Train LLMs on code -> OMG AI can code!

- Train LLMs on images -> OMG AI can generate images!

- Train LLMs on video -> OMG AI can generate videos!

- Train LLMs on math -> give free access to 100,000 researchers/scientists/mathematicians -> invest resources into Lean -> OMG AI can solve math problems!

I say 'goal posts' because that's a common argument, but the perspective that seems to not be considered is that the LLMs are doing the same thing over and over again in different domains while be fine-tuned by labeling and human review.

The emergent behavior argument is a separate consideration, but I can imagine an AI being given a list of words (a harness) that guides how it operates--not the other way around--and the difficult problem is narrowing down and filtering all the associations with the words/harness to properly align it.

And perhaps the recursive looping being discussed creates incredibly difficult (impossible) to predict behavior? If the AI could modify it's own harness, is that AGI? If we fully understood what happens in high dimensional space, and could predict the output of any combination of input tokens, then is it not AGI?

Or perhaps I just tell myself this to stop worrying about a future involving ASI (:

I doubt AI will be good enough to _scale_ many things because human language isn't sufficient to explain it (especially when not understanding what is being built). Humans invented more concise languages (math, C++) to pair with their intellectual acuity. [1]

In one extreme, we have art, which cannot be accurately reproduced or explained in any language (unless a concise language was used to create it, like math or CS art).

At the other end: 1 + 1 = 2 and PI = 3.14...

[1] It seems any language that has a binary outcome (correct/wrong) helps the AI tremendously, however when e.g. creating software, that software is not functioning in isolation. The software is an attempt to codify a fuzzy human system or need, and that information only flows in one direction: human to machine.

When I was in high school, I took a physics class. I think I scraped by but one thing the teacher said that has stuck with me ever since was "when you want to test a hypothesis, set the variables to extreme numbers". Very useful framework IMO!

If we pursued the "Most Qualified" in its truest form, then ~95%[1] of the jobs in this country would be handed over to foreigners. In isolation, this would be great for US companies. In reality, 95% of the local population would riot.

If we pursued "only hire Americans", then our growth as a country would be stunted, and we'd lose our global competitive edge.

Somewhere between is a balanced medium.

Side observation: I've noticed tech leaders/CEOs/PG have been choosing (or succumbing) to what the algorithm wants them to say or how phrase. I stopped following all of them because I can feel my emotions being manipulated whenever I read what they have to say.

[1] The USA is less than 5% of the worlds population.

My first job was working at Wendy's (c. 2006/2007). I recall the kitchen being busy enough that you had to constantly navigate around your coworkers. I worked with a bunch of Brazilians (all super nice people) and a handful of kids around my age.

IIRC lunch rush had (my memory is fuzzy..):

2 drive through positions, 2-3 people on cash registers, dining room cleaner, fry guy (sometimes 2?), 2-3 burger assemblers, one person on drinks, griller, dish washer, and the assistant manager and manager helping out everywhere. Prep team might still be working too.

I remember really enjoying the food a kid (in moderation). And everyone having a mini tantrum when someone ordered fries with no salt :D

Was also shocked to see one of my Brazilian coworkers working at the crack of dawn on my way to school, cause he typically had closing shifts.

Sorry for the confusion, the earthquake was just in my dream. When I woke up there was not one

Statistical anomaly detected: this morning I woke up from an earth quake in my dream. It was powerful enough to really sway the buildings and room I was in. Im in Texas though, but >= 7.0 earthquakes only happen a handful of times a year.

e: first time I dreamed of an earthquake

Except. . . (accept)... SaaS solves the problem of needing one piece of software to communicate between multiple (many) users and/or other pieces of software.

Can't picture a functioning world where every piece of software is custom and requires factorial amount of AI comparisons and reviews to patch the API to communicate. In fact, it's impossible! There's not enough compute to handle a factorial explosion.

I really doubt SaaS going anywhere.

As an aside, there are large portions of the US where coastal folks dont want to live. These places are 2-4x cheaper (compared to costal game industry hubs) and could be cost competitive.. but it's probably not going to happen.

Video game industry analysts are predicting the same is going to happen to their (my) industry. Contract out more and more work to SEA/China/Poland et.al. It's extra painful because games are relatively cheap to localize (fantasy is universal, it's just translating text and words), so studios based in cheaper parts of the world already have an advantage and they have access to the west markets. Global competition can be brutal.