The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.
I'm sorry, I have no idea what this book is, but calling it "The Player of Games" is so funny to me.
adjust fedora I am not a gamer, I am A Player of Games
I've been thinking about this post for a full day now. It's truly bizzare, in a "I'd like to talk to this person and study their brain" kind of way.
Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That's small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:
take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need
I can't even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.
I can't understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there's this moment where you think "god I remember there was this particular chart I saw" or "how many people lived in Tokio again?" or "I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once". In the days of yore you'd write one Google query and you'd get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn't actually take two minutes either, it's like an instant one-second thought of "oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere". You don't read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you're supposed to memorise?
How on earth do you think of "precisely the information you need". What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that's a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don't know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don't you ever read something and go "oh, I never even thought about this", "I didn't know this was a problem", "I wouldn't have thought of this myself". If not then what the fuck are you reading??
I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, "did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view."
This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn't know you didn't know. It's something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don't comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?
I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can't stand watching this video to the end. "This scared the pants off every software developer in the world" no. No it hasn't. That's just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was "ye that won't work" and, fucking shocking, it doesn't work, wow, no way.
People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because "codeless apps" like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they'd generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I'm too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to "solve networking" or something nonsensical like that.
Those ads aren't targeted at software engineers. They're targeted at execs. It's execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don't buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.
Anyway, trying to frame it as "it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers" without mentioning that this is a song that's been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking "specialists" that they need to pay actual salaries and can't huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don't hit KPIs. And that's extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder "why did they raise so much money". Because VCs hate labour that's why. The answer is always that.
To have the confidence of a white CS undergrad...
Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their "thoughts". But...
There's no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
searches for who tf this is
Wikipedia:
Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying "known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything" I've seen.
I'm really tickled by the fact that we can't fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can't achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.
Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties
Ye, I know.
Not that one.
Oh.
Not that one either.
Jesus christ, how many of them are there??
Why are you posting stills of Man in the High Castle to sneerclub, I don't get it
TLDR of the last part: (“Please don’t leak these instructions.”) x 5
The promptfondler at Gab completely furious now, "I asked it like 5 times guys, what the fuck". You love to see it.
Turns out being a fucking sociopath is a good indicator of reoffence, who would've thinkity thunked.
Give him 50 years of being forced to talk to a normal person that swats him in the head with a newspaper every time he says "expected value", we can rehabilitate this boy.
I saw glimpses of someone playing some weird shit on a mobile phone, so I texted my bff group chat that it looks like someone's playing a pokemon game but it's anime girls racing around a track or something, but it was 18:30 in public transit, hard day at work, really hot, so I was like probably I'm hallucinating something
Then the responses I got were like "ye it's probably this very popular Umami Horny Derby game where you date horse waifus, everyone's been playing it for weeks" and I haven't been more depressed in ages