roryokane

Also, if you hold off on sweeping all the mines, you’ll hear more dialogue over time that parodies other aspects of these games.

Algolia is a generic search provider. I didn’t say otherwise. They “launched a search tool for Hacker News”; they didn’t launch as a search tool.

If you liked FF-Shrine, there are some active successor sites. Search for Sitting on Clouds (which is like FFShrine’s Galbadia Hotel) and SquidBoard (a forum).

If anyone’s curious about games like this, the Scribblenauts series also has games that allow you to type the name of an object and spawn it in with game-like properties.

Scribblenauts is not LLM-based – its first game was released in 2009. The creators just spent a lot of time making a database of objects that people might ask for, their game properties, and what they look like in the game’s simple art style. Scribblenauts is also different in that it is a 2D puzzle platformer set in small levels that have their own goals, rather than a top-down MMORPG like Asciidia.

While I found the concept of Scribblenauts cool, I quickly grew bored of the puzzle levels and the shallow combat mechanics. It didn’t help that a Black Hole could solve almost any problem by destroying an obstacle. This game’s monetary cost for casting solves that, at least, though I don’t know if the economy would be a significant limitation in the long term.

Cool idea for sure, but at this point, it’s more confusing than fun for a new player trying to learn the systems and goals of game.

Some people have griefed the starting area by placing turrets that kill your character when you’re in range. It makes for a confusing first 10 minutes when you wander around and aren’t sure why you’re dying. Even after that, it’s not clear to me how to interact with hostile structures, or how to tell which structure is on my team and will therefore attack me.

I tried creating a few weapons, but neither worked. I had a Short Bow equipped and Arrows in my inventory, but the Short Bow kept saying “out of ammo”. Same with a Torpedo Launcher when I had Photon Torpedoes in my inventory. When I created a plain Torpedo, I could shoot it, but it just flew off and disappeared without affecting the structure I aimed at.

There is an NPC asking for a boat, which is a cool idea for using the conjuring system, but I can’t get near him for long without dying to a griefer’s turret, so I don’t feel like trying to solve his quest.

In history, why did scientists research gravity for so long? Were they too stupid to realize that they were obviously being pulled towards the ground? No. They hoped to learn about the details. Eventually they learned details that were not apparent from everyday experience, such as the formula for how gravity scales with mass.

It’s the same here. For example, this study concluded that most changes are safe and some are very bad, as opposed to most changes being slightly bad. That is not obvious, especially to infrequent LLM users.

Also, even “obvious” conclusions are within the scope of science. I’ve spent too long writing this already to look up an example, but I bet there have been countries in the past whose leaders chose “obviously-good” monetary policies that economic research could have shown was counterproductive. The world is complicated, and without systems of communication such as academia, it’s hard to be sure if what you see is what everyone else sees.

While larger icons might be ideal, note that (according to those linked discussions) those icons also have associated keyboard shortcuts, which are displayed when you hover over each icon. If you memorized those shortcuts, you would no longer have to “pixel hunt” to switch modes.

I like most of Djot’s simplifications, but its requirement to write nested lists with blank lines between every change in indentation is a dealbreaker for me:

  - Djot requires
  
    - writing nested lists
  
      - with blank lines in between
  
    - successive list items at the same level
    - can skip the blank line
  
      - but not this list item

Yes, supporting indented list items without blank lines in between would make Djot’s parser more complicated. But I write nested lists all the time in my notes, and extra blank lines would distract from the content. For me, it’s not worth it to make my raw text ugly just to make the file easier to parse.

Djot could have avoided the blank line requirement by not trying to join hard-wrapped lines back into one paragraph / list item. That would work for me because I only soft wrap my text. Djot’s choice to support hard wrapping caused all of its users (including those who hard wrap) to have worse nested list syntax.