What to be worried about? Technical progress will happen, sometimes by sudden jumps. Some company will become a leader, competitors will catch up after a while.
"Technical progress" has been destroying our habitat for centuries, causing lots of other species to go extinct. Pretty much the entire planet surface has been 'technically progressed', spreading plastics, climate change and whatnot over the entirety of it.
Are you assuming that this particular "progress" would be relatively innocent?
On the other hand, the same "technical progress" (if we're putting machine learning, deforestation, and mining in the same bag) gave you medicine, which turns many otherwise deadly diseases into inconveniences and allows you to work less than 12 hrs/7 days per week to not die from hunger in a large portion of the world. A few hundred years ago, unless you were born into the lucky 0.01% of the ruling population, working from dawn to sunset was the norm for a lot more people than now.
I'm not assuming that something 10k x better than GPT-4 will be good or bad; I don't know. I was just curious what exactly to be worried about. I think in the current state, LLMs are already advanced enough for bad uses like article generation for SEO, spam, scams, etc., and I wonder if an order of magnitude better model would allow for something worse.
I had a European peasant in the 1600-1700s in mind when I wrote about the amount of work. During the season, they worked all day; off-season, they had "free time" that went into taking care of the household, inventory, etc., so it's still work. Can't quickly find a reliable source in English I could link, so I can be wrong here.
"Better" was referring to what OP wrote in the top comment. I guess 10x faster, 10x longer context, and 100x less prone to hallucinations would make a good "10k x better" than GPT-4.
Sorry, I can't fit that with what you wrote earlier:
"12 hrs/7 days per week to not die from hunger".
Those peasants payed taxes, i.e. some of their work was exploited by an army or a priest rather than hunger, and as you mention, they did not work "12 hrs/7 days per week".
I mean 6mian. He hand-waved non-data (badly) disguised as historical facts to make a point. Then you came around and asked for actual facts. It's clear you won't get them, because he got nothing to begin with.
Many species went extinct during Earth's history. Evolution requires quite aggressive competition.
The way the habitat got destroyed by humans is stupid because it might put us in danger. You can call me "speciesist" but I do care more for humans rather than for a particular other specie.
So I think progress should be geared towards human species survival and if possible preventing other species extinction. Some of the current developments are a bit too much on the side of "I don't care about anyone's survival" (which is stupid and inefficient).
If other species die, we follow shortly. This anthropocentric view really ignore how much of our food chain exists because of other animals surviving despite human activities.
Evolution is the result of catastrophies and atrocities. You use the word as if it has positive connotations, which I find weird.
How do you come to the conclusion "stupid" rather than evil? Aren't we very aware of the consequences of how we are currently organising human societies, and have been for a long time?
It's astonishing they managed to debug and fix this, given how old and how far away Voyager is. I wonder if currently created designs are so robust in terms of repairability. Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails?
I'm glad to see so many senior engineers on the team; it must be an exciting lifelong journey to work on the mission.
> Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails?
I have a feeling that code for NASA spacecrafts is not so high-level, for a reason.
From what I understand current flight control systems are still written in relatively low level languages like C++, with extremely careful memory management strategies.
Let's not be overly pessimistic. Even today's phones have a low-level debug backdoor. I imagine Voyager3 with today's tech would provide much more interesting data, but it's a matter of time, who wants to wait another 50 years
If you want to play with ray tracing implementation, it's surprisingly easy to write one by yourself. There's a great free book (https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...) or, if you know a bit of Unity a very nice GPU-based tutorial (https://medium.com/@jcowles/gpu-ray-tracing-in-one-weekend-3...). The Unity version is easier to tinker with, because you have scene preview and other GUI that makes moving camera around so much easier. There are many implementations based of these sources if you don't want to write one from scratch, although doing so is definitely worth it.
I spent some great time playing with the base implementation. Making the rays act as particles* that bend their path to/away from objects, making them "remember" the last angle of bounce and use it in the next material hit etc. Most of them looked bad, but I still got some intuition what I was looking at. Moving the camera by a notch was also very helpful.
A lot of fun, great for a small recreational programming project.
* Unless there's an intersection with an object, then set the maximum length of the ray to some small amount, then shoot many rays from that point around and for each hit apply something similar to the gravity equation. Of course this is slow and just an approximation, but it's easy and you can implement a "black hole" type of object that will bend light in the scene.
since then i've written raytracers in clojure and lua and a raymarcher in js; they can be very small and simple
last night i was looking at Spongy by mentor/TBC https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871 which is a fractal animation raytracer with fog in 65 machine instructions. the ms-dos executable is 128 bytes
i think it's easy to get overwhelmed by how stunning raytraced images look and decide that the algorithms and data structures to generate them must be very difficult, but actually they're very simple, at least if you already know about three-dimensional vectors. i feel like sdf raymarching is even simpler than the traditional whitted-style raytracer, because it replaces most of the hairy math needed to solve for precise intersections with scene geometry with very simple successive approximation algorithms
the very smallest raytracers like spongy and Oscar Toledo G.'s bootsector raytracer https://github.com/nanochess/RayTracer are often a bit harder to understand than slightly bigger ones, because you have to use a lot of tricks to get that small, and the tricks are harder to understand than a dumber piece of code would be
> when i wrote my very first ray tracer it didn't take me an entire weekend
It’s just a catchy title. You can implement the book in an hour or two, if you’re uncurious, or a month if you like reading the research first. Also maybe there are meaningful differences in the feature set such that it’s better not to try to compare the time taken? The Ray Tracing in One Weekend book does start the reader off with a pretty strong footing in physically based rendering, and includes global illumination, dielectric materials, and depth of field. It also spends a lot of time building an extensible and robust foundation that can scale to a more serious renderer.
For me 3brown1blue series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk was an excellent introduction that made Andrej's videos understandable. Then I did 3 first chapters of fastai book, but found it too high level, while I was interested in how things works under the hood.
Going through Andrej's makemore tutorials required quite a lot of time but it's definitely worth it. I used free tier of Google Colab until the last one.
Pausing the video a lot after he explains what he plans to do and trying to do it by myself was a very rewarding way to learn, with a lot of "aha" moments.
https://pixeldungeon.fandom.com/wiki/Shattered_Pixel_Dungeon is a great resource if you are new to the game and genre, although I suggest first trying discovering everything by yourself (prepare to die a lot) and start reading the wiki after getting through the first boss on lvl 5.
I've been playing SPD for years now and for me the best strategy to win the game is to keep Scrolls of Upgrade until you get a hold of a weapon of at least tier 4, same goes for armor. This makes the initial levels much more risky, but if you survive it's a matter of not making mistakes or getting yourself into high risk situations. Using this method I get to the Amulet in about 30% of the runs.
Since the recent updates getting back to the ground has become a much more fun challenge.
Besides postponing the use of Scrolls of Upgrade, here are a few things that work for me:
* You don't have to identify potions and scrolls right away, often you can keep them until you gather more information. For example, killed flies sometimes drop health potion and they are on early levels, so you can learn the color without using it.
* Before you get the Scroll Holder that protects the scrolls from fire, it's a good idea to stash all the scrolls in water at the beginning of each level and retrieve them back before going to the next one.
* Scrolls of Mapping are absolutely crucial on levels >20 because of the traps and they are relatively cheap in the first two shops.
* Summoning trap rooms are great to gather a lot of xp if you have potions of paralytic gas and fire/toxic gas. After the level is cleared, you just open the doors by throwing something at it, go as far away as possible, throw paralytic and then fire/toxic potions. And run to the next level.
If you like the game, consider donating to the project, you can do this directly in the game, at least in the Android version.
HN markdown doesn't want you to indent bullet lists.
> killed flies sometimes drop health potion and they are on early levels,
Stuff like this feels a little game breaking. Maybe potions should have no color until consumed (though this conflicts with the (arguably maldesigned) inventory system where duplicate objects have 0 encumbrance).
There's a delicate line between "learning how to play the game" and bypassing the intentional design that certain facts are not supposed to be known before a run starts.
I don’t say this to be mean but if you think Pixel Dungeon is “Ultra Nightmare” mode, games like Nethack or Caves of Qud would probably cause you actual physical pain.
Pixel Dungeon is one of the most beginner friendly roguelikes, widely considered the “next step” in difficulty after the Mystery Dungeon series. (I often recommend it to people that enjoyed Pokémon Mystery Dungeon but find Nethack and DCSS too intense)
I see it as a different model of building knowledge about the game than most other genres. Dying early is part of the process, because each time you die you got to this point in a bit different way, learning other things on the way.
If you were hand-held to the very end you'd only see a a narrow path you went through, which is also ok. It's just a difference in the journey, similar to Breadth-First Search and Deep-First Search in graphs.
Another thing is game fairness. In my opinion, SPD is fair, there's no "you stepped on something you couldn't detect if you tried and died". If you pay attention you will see enough information to identify threats after the initial die-a-lot period :)
Sounds like Elden Ring. I started playing it recently and got annoyed at how often I died. But I realized that's part of the learning process. It's still annoying but at least I can see it for what it is.
The traps just happen randomly throughout. The best run I had going ended instantly when I hit an alarm trap. It's impossible to recover. I cannot even escape lone enemies without a ring of haste.
Yeah, I could have detected that on a search, but I'm usually struggling to stay fed in the first place.
* Don’t eat right away when the game says you’re hungry. Wait until you’re starving and below 50% health. This makes each food ration last way longer!
* Don’t eat pasties or meat. When you find an alchemy pot, use the recipe that combines one food ration, one piece of meat, and one pasty to make a meat pie. The meat pie is way more nourishing and gives you a “well fed” health regeneration buff.
* Try to be efficient with your movement and exploration. If you’re not careful you can end up wasting a huge amount of time wandering around not accomplishing anything. This also leads to more monsters being generated which means you take more damage, taxing your resources.
* Along those same lines: always try to fight dirty. If you see an enemy coming towards you try to hit them a bit at range (throw stuff or zap wands) then retreat behind a closed door or around some tall grass. When the enemy comes through the door or around/through the grass, hit them with an attack. You should see a yellow ! mark on the enemy indicating a surprise attack. Now retreat behind another obstacle and repeat. As long as you keep breaking line-of-sight and then hitting the enemy immediately when they reestablish line-of-sight (this also works with ranged attacks) you’ll get guaranteed surprise hits. This lets you defeat enemies more quickly without taking as much damage standing there missing all the time.
* Don’t overdo it though. After you’ve gained some levels and find you easily outclass an enemy then kill them quickly. Leading enemies all over the place takes more time (costing food) and can end up getting you surrounded, causing even more damage!
* Throw stuff down pits instead of carrying it around. This applies mostly to weapons, armour, and scrolls (before you get the scroll holder). Anything you throw down a pit will show up on the next level. This is a great way to avoid running back and forth swapping items when you’re low on inventory space and you want to sell things or do alchemy. Don’t throw potions though, they break (but do throw them at enemies or obstacles when the situation calls for it!)
In addition to brewing pies, you can also prepare excess meat easily by freezing or burning it. Throw it at traps, use wands, or even potions if you're using one anyway (otherwise don't waste a potion like this.) If you can easily kill fish (archer class) then you can get a lot of excess meat.
Yes, traps are put in random places. At least they can't be placed on water, grass or ash, so are safer sections to go through without doing search before each step.
That's why it's a really good idea to collect 4 Scrolls of Mapping for levels 1-24.
With the exception of NetHack, which is famous for it, current roguelikes generally don't end the run for stupid shit (e.g. instead of killing you if you accidentally step into lava, they just don't let you do it), but more for wrong strategy or tactics.
Wow, the part of your life story is identical to mine. 8 years, childhood friend, Chernobyl. I admit this this experience learned me to do proper backups.
Hi Mark! Fullstack seems to be focusing on MEAN stack, is there a requirement for the startups to be based on that technology or do projects using e.g. Golang have a chance as well?
