Hey! Robotopia looks awesome, I'm excited to try it out when it launches. How do you convert the LLM output to actions? Is there more broad actions available (ie like creating any object, moving anything anywhere) exposed to the LLM or is it more specific tools it can call?
Thanks :)
It may sound insane but we convert actions to Python functions then ask the LLM to write a python script that actually runs in IronPython inside the game.
Then we have a visual Behavior Tree system to let our designer define the actions. So yeah, they got a bunch of general actions like walk, talk, follow, interact etc.
PS: I think MCP/Tool Calls are a boondoggle and LLMs yearn to just run code. It's crazy how much better this works than JSON schema etc.
Fair reaction tbh. Right now there's a time watchdog + I'm entirely disabling all I/O and import, But going forward I want to replace it with a proper sandboxing tech... things I looked into are V8 isolates, compilation to WASM, implementing our own gutted python interpreter, spinning up a locked down process, and others. I'm definitely aware of the risk here.
The good news is that unless we get pwned, LLMs are very unlikely to write malicious code for the user.
>...LLMs are very unlikely to write malicious code for the user.
Do you have any idea what the actual probability is? Because if millions of people start using the system, 'very unlikely' can turn into 'virtual certainty' pretty quickly.
During Hack Club's IRL Hackathons, teens can get their parents to sign a "freedom waiver" to allow them to leave the hackathon venue and explore the city (they usually happen in high profile cities like NYC or Boston) without supervision. I assume what happened to them was they got lost during this optional exploration period
You don't have to share any specifics or details, but could you at least share how they could end up in a life threatening situation while attending a programming event?
Do they let children sit and program for 3 days (without breaks?) at these events without a single person checking in on them?! That's absolutely bananas if true, how could something like that even happen, is it a sweatshop of programmers or what's going on?
Truly, if they're forcing children to sit and code for 3 days straight someone should call the police this moment.
There was no forcing involved. Since there seems to be a lot of interest in this, I'll go into more details. As I said, this was discussed with organizers at the time, largely it was largely a matter of "the kids'll figure it out" failure. Some specifics will be vague due to time.
This event was a camp out. They had tents for the campers, but it was, in my kids view, a free-for-all. Like a "go figure out the tent situation", and my child couldn't figure out the tent situation, so decided to sleep outside. And woke up with a bunch of bugs (I don't remember exactly what, leaches sticks in my mind). So they decided they'd caffeinate the rest of the event and not sleep.
Hey! You can probs recognize me by the username. Dunno anyone else who's open about being a fuckin dog on the slack.
During Scrapyard, Hackatime was mandatory, and was one of the biggest defining factors to HQ about the success of a satellite. So yeah, technically attendees aren't _forced_ to code, but getting the most weighted grants is still your biggest focus.
For those who don't know, HC uses a unit called "weighted grants" which supposedly equates to 10 hours of good quality work, in order to determine success. The issue is, the definition of good quality work is currently set as "most lines written", excluding R&D and the 20 other steps that it takes to design something.
The previous commentator said "could have very easily turned into life threatening" and when asked what that was about, they sent the link about that person dying after sitting playing games for 3 days.
Are you saying they're lying or are wrong about this? They seemed to have personal experience about it, and I'm assuming they're not outright lying, but I do think it sounds strange they would let children sit and code for 3 days straight.
That article has no relation to Hack Club whatsoever.
But that's beside the point - they provide rooms, plenty of food and snacks, workshops, and activities to do during breaks. Organizers are on-site at all times, and there is a live hotline for parents or kids to call at any time. "sit and code for 3 days straight" is a gross mischaracterization.
So again then, what exact "life threatening situations" could children be put in, besides the things parent already said it wasn't about, during these events? Parent themselves linked that article, I'm not 100% sure what they meant, but all I could think was that they experienced something similar, otherwise I'm not sure why they'd link that.
This user was banned from Hack Club for attempting to stage an "uprising" against the org, and has also engaged in tactics like Wikipedia vandalism. I would not take their word for being "a union organizer with Hack Club staff", although their blog does make several good points (https://place.reeseric.ci/writings/2024-05-05/)
Slack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways.
(- a hack club member)
I think it would be silly to not proceed with the migration, although hopefully there's less stress to do it quickly. Slack has shown they can't be trusted.
I assume there is a meeting going on right now at Slack where someone is asking: "So before we embarrass ourselves again, are there any other price hikes planned for educational and charitable organizations I should know about?"
I have no sympathy for Hack Club if they're caught out by this again and in 6 months Slack decide to revert back to the price increase when all the social media focus has died down.
They didn’t say they wouldn’t migrate docs etc to another solution, if I were them I’d keep it for chat only but with the attitude that if it’s burned at any moment then that’s fine, anything important is backed up or no longer there.
Oh yeesh. If I ranked chat platforms, Mattermost would barely be above Slack. It's pathetic that Discord runs circles around Mattermost, Slack, and Matrix for practical usability, features that make it possible to actually use with teams (not Teams).
Mattermost still can't do follow System Theme, (and Slack requires you impersonating Chrome). Of course neither can Gmail. Salesforce and Google are such tiny companies though, so I sympathize.
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).
I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.
Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.
Hi! I like Zulip a lot and the tech team took to it easily. The main concern is silly but I think my folks will be thrown by a few UX elements. For example, uploading a file drops a bunch of markdown in the message editor.. which to them looks like an error or something weird and technical. I wish for a editing mode that showed preview instead.
I don't think it's a blocker and we can help people understand it. Its just really about how much time I want to spend with them on the phone :)
Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms
I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden
I'm plenty familiar with Open Source and do contribute as well. But I would also be paying for Zulip if we were to move the company to it.
I think you missed my meaning.. Mattermost is open core and recently removed things from their community version. Also, it's really not cheaper given the features I need, so my concern is that I'm just jumping providers to another company that'll eventually pull the same rug. I like and want to contribute to Zulip to avoid that problem but am not sure if the product experience will work for my particular non-technical users.
Funny. Using Discord through Firefox I can't even copy links out of a conversation. Additionally, for some reason as of two weeks ago every time I click on a channel name it opens in a new tab. I'm not sure what that's running circles around, but I'm guessing not Mattermost.
The mobile app is also buggy as hell. Notifications of direct messages (when someone wants to reach you personally) work only sporadically whereas in group chats they're reliable. Then when you click one of those group ones, it opens the group chat, flashes you the message, then loads the rest of the history, scrolls you down, and marks the whole chat as read. I've eventually found that you can find it again by going out of the chat and to your in-app notifications and tapping it there again. Then iirc to reply, you need to click some "open in chat" option (while you're already literally viewing the chat) and then it seems to scroll and show you the message correctly. Or maybe that latter thing was from search results, idk
I'm also pretty sure it silently deletes old direct message chats. I'm missing some that I really thought existed. Don't fault them for deleting things btw, seeing all the (literal and figurative) shit that thousands of teenagers post in this server I was helping out on, but it shouldn't be silent
I’m more disgusted by the alleged humans at Slack when they inevitably reverse their decision like this and choose to lie about being incompetent over admitting to being malicious.
