Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.
Just last Friday I was doing some cut&paste proof of concept of "Gemini plays Genesis MUD".
I gave Gemini a little prompt and just started pasting the game output into Gemini and the commands from Gemini back into the MUD. It managed to create a character, do the tutorial and started doing some initial skill training before I got tired of all the cut&paste.
Would be fun and interesting to let it completely loose in a similar environment.
I had ChatGPT play The Two Towers and have screenshots. It was surprisingly good at it, but after the first session (max message limit reached), it was unable to pick up where it left off. It started describing rooms TO me instead of responding to rooms I was describing to it...
You are right, it will certainly be used for evil, but the reason is not because AI is evil but because the people who use it are evil - will AI allow worse atrocities that we have seen in the past? Probably, new technology always enables new capability for good or for bad but we should strive to combat the evil in this world and not put our heads down and hope the world isn't changing. AI can also be used for good and let's focus on more of that.
Yes you really do lose your wealth. Managing wealth is an active and very difficult thing. People all around the world are trying to steal your wealth and they are super motivated to do it. Everyday there is someone saying "you have to buy this next big thing - give me your money." This is how the luxury market works.
Even if you were very frugal and stuck your money in the bank you would lose that money to inflation. Even if you were smart and put it in real estate or Bitcoin or something else you still have to manage it and manage yourself to not make mistakes with it. Managing wealth is a very hard problem.
And we are actually talking about at a country level here - if a powerful country doesn't innovate and continue growing they become england. Then eventually a bigger more powerful country like china eats them if they don't have powerful friends.
This seems be a prevailing sentiment on hackernews.
It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good.
This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.
These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.
Ok, maybe i'm too old or experienced with these type of things to really enjoy this article. The author might honestly be sincere as he wrote this but I felt it was a bit overblown and coming from negative feelings of being brushed off and rightfully so being upset that his code was stolen. It could just be there are some cultural misunderstandings as well.
He mentioned this "VIP" is a "Developer and dtrace expert". But reading that and the other details, I think this is probably not the reality and maybe was communicated incorrectly to him. I really doubt this guy was a "VIP" as he says.
My guess is this "VIP" was actually a pretty normal member on the dtrace project, could be a little senior and got the opportunity to go around and talk about it. I am sure they had a team somewhere who put together most of the software, maybe he was involved a little bit, but probably he was just as confused as everyone else about using that open source software - he probably knew enough to teach it, and how it worked, but so many people work on these type of projects, unless they sent the lead engineer he probably didn't know it deeply except enough to evangelize and teach how it works.
He mentions about being slighted by this guy a lot, saying things like "He wasn't impressed", "gave me a look like he didn't really believe me" etc. This might be true, but i suspect it's coming from his negative interpretation of the situation. This guy just traveled all the way around the world, was super exhausted, was possibly honestly confused what's going on - i certainly have been in that situation before.
The author also mentions he felt it odd that he (the author) was producing more dtrace tools than Sun was. This almost sounds a bit like indirect boasting. Large companies are slow. A dedicated passionate developer who is working alone or with a small team will always run laps around huge companies. This isn't odd at all. Companies often get distracted, can't focus on what's important, or decide not to do what is important for a product due to other business reasons.
In fact, as he found out, some engineer somewhere just ripped his stuff cause it was faster and easier for them to do it. Sun's team was not professional at all, even possibly breaking the law, which I think is the point of the article but the descriptions of the Dtrace guy who's job was to show Dtrace around the world lessened my enjoyment of the article.
I have said this elsewhere on this thread, but just to reemphasize: the person that Brendan met had absolutely nothing to do with DTrace -- to the point that when he told this story to me, I didn't even recognize the name. (And can't now remember it.) The DTrace team was very small (there were three of us), and the community of early DTrace users inside of Sun -- the earliest folks who could rightfully call themselves DTrace experts -- can be seen in the acknowledgements section of our 2004 USENIX paper.[0]
I am not saying it's factually incorrect. My point is that it includes a lot of Gregg's personal feelings (and maybe was informed incorrectly about the situation) and I'm just not sold that the guy who was assigned to show off Dtrace was the bad guy here
In the article I included my guess about real cause for this: Sun's assumption that any good work had to be from a Sun employee. I'd guess the sequence of events was:
- DTrace is the new hotness, we need it in our UI.
- Everyone's using Brendan's tools, let's add them (so far, so good).
- Oh, why do they say copyright Brendan? He made a mistake: Sun employees should be putting copyright Sun on them. (THIS is the mistake, as I wasn't a Sun employee).
- I'll just delete his name and stick copyright Sun on them all.
- Developer gets picked to go do a world tour (and may genuinely not know what happened).
As for how I was treated: I guessed why in the article as well, the low-key introduction as is the norm in Australia.
As for how you were treated - I don't think the low-key introduction can be fully blamed. The VIP should have known that smart people exist in various places around the world, and sooner or later one does bump into them. When you meet someone knowing absolutely nothing about them (and an introduction doesn't count), and then they start talking intelligently about a topic, then you have one data point (that they have talked intelligently), and you should draw an appropriate conclusion from that. It sounds like the VIP had serious preconception issues.
I worked for a government research lab and it was the same, only work coming from inside the lab was respected and contractor work was looked down upon.
That's really interesting, since you were so close to Sun they actually thought you were a Sun employee!
The example in the article is an exception but, companies (including Sun) are generally very careful about using open source, and using it without attribution would be the exception not the rule.
Large companies are slow, indeed. In the late 90s I wrote a few operating system plugins (nss_ldap, pam_ldap, GSS SASL plugin for the Netscape directory server) which were eventually obsoleted by native Solaris equivalents. The Sun versions were on the whole better engineered, if less flexible, because their OS team had a depth of experience that I didn't have at the time.
i was reading another thread where people were saying homeless and surfers, people who spend a lot of time outside, often have low vitamin D when they get tested. I have NO idea how true that is, but might be an interesting data point.
Being outdoors isn't the same as sun exposure though. In particular, I can imagine that homeless people cover up more to prevent sunburn. Additionally, just being homeless might cause a depletion of vitamin D.
In general, I can imagine that people who spend a lot of time outdoors could get very little sun exposure since they would be more cognizant of the effects of the sun and more likely to wear sunscreen and protective clothing.
That's easy. Crappy diet and alcoholism. Something like 68% of single adult homeless credit substance abuse with their homelessness[1], with alcohol being the most commonly abused substance. Alcoholism and vitamin D deficiency has definitely been linked.[2]
I can't vouch for the veracity of this claim, but I once read somewhere that it takes a while for the vitamin D, which is apparently created in the upper layers of the skin, to work its way down into the bloodstream, and that if you spend a lot of time in the water, it doesn't make it through. Maybe because being wet a lot tends to dehydrate the skin? I don't know.
How much skin is exposed when wearing a wet suit? There's your answer. Just depends on whether the study took place in California (which has chilly water) or Hawaii (which doesn't).
You make a good point. Assuming you are correct on the scope creep issues, ironically if they actually were a scam and instead of building out an entirely new studio, hiring hundreds of people (which is what leads to so many delays and complications) if they just funneled the money out and hired a small team of developers to perpetuate the scam they probably would actually have more concrete Development done.
I know this has been discussed a million times but seems the consensus is that Chris is actively trying to scam people and not just biting off more than he can chew, running into massive scope creep, and being incompetent?
I'm very peripherally following this story, mainly because it is the Duke Nukem Forever of this age, but my take on this is that after this much time and money how could he not have figured it out?
He's making vastly more money NOT shipping a product than he would have actually completing the the thing, it actually would make a great biz school study. On the scale of tech industry scams, it's also been overshadowed by the many VC busts that delivered even less and pulled in even more funding (looking at you, Magic Leap).
But it has shipped product? This is release notes from a playable build that players are actually playing. It's nothing like Duke Nukem Forever that people are jockeying up only for the latest screenshots, it has a live community of sorts already. Sure, it's not complete, but in the "continuously deployed living game model" and "early access game model" we're starting to see a an even more huge variety in what "complete" even means than ever before.
I don't know in Hong Kong but it's blocked already in the mainland since a week ago. There are currently workarounds but they will probably get around to blocking those as well.
I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.