mikenew

I have around 15k games in SC2 and I can honestly say; this is awful. I love it.

I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.

I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.

There is no one left at Blizzard with any RTS experience. They've long since left for smaller studios.

SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.

That's true, but if you wanted to boil down the art of acting to one sentence it would be "do not pretend; actually do".

Jobs was a great actor in that he did not pretend to be excited. Whatever coaching is being given here is exactly in the opposite direction of acting.

Ha, well that's good because I would hate to be labeled an "LLM advocate". I've been on the negative side of the conversation many times, and I think the downsides are very real and often ignored. But calling them useless is just not reality.

As far as system prompts and skills, my approach has been to start with nothing and add very specific instructions as I notice issues or feel like I need them. Mostly around trying to keep it terse, kill the obnoxious rhetoric ("It's not X. It's Y"), and give specific guidance on how to write code. Skills are things like "use edge-tts to generate spoken audio for this answer and send it to me" kind of thing.

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do

The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.

Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.

Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

I've decided that the main thing I'm building is my own mental model. You can take notes, create docs, put graphs and websites together, but unless I'm just trying to generate some reference material the only real objective is to develop the understanding and intuitions inside my own brain.

So I have the LLM offer a very short explanation of something, and from there's it's just me asking questions. Anything that feels fuzzy or not fully internalized is something I poke at until I'm satisfied.

It really has helped me develop a sensitivity to what I understand vs what I don't, and the ability to drill into any part of it is amazing.

It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.

Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private".

If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.

Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time.

I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.

Current top 5 played games on the Steam Deck are: Slay the Spire 2, The Binding of Isaac, Dave the Diver, Stardew Valley, and Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 is the only one you can consider AAA, but Larian is hardly an EA or Blizzard.

The big AAA studios recycle the same formulas and push graphical quality (mostly downstream of Unreal Engine improvements) because they are risk averse. Similar to big comic-book-hero films. It's not what consumers want and it's increasingly starting to show. AAA is struggling badly while indie has been on an absolute tear the past few years.

Arcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.

That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.

Authenticity requires vulnerability and that's not something Apple can do.