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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Time to repeat my topical story.

    I worked for a startup that prided itself on being “data driven”. They’d talk about how other startups were doing stupid things because they followed their feelings instead of data.

    One day in one of those all hands meetings, the CEO was taking questions. Someone said, “Studies are showing that four day work weeks are more effective on like every metric. Can we look into that?”

    The CEO said "No, we’re not doing that ". Didn’t read the linked studies. Didn’t entertain it at all. His mind was made up, and the data was irrelevant.

    Because he doesn’t really care about data. He cares about feeling smart and irreverent. He cares about being seen as a cool disruptive startup guy who’s going to grind his way to success.

    The dishonesty makes me want to puke.

    But you know what also makes me sick? All the sycophantic boot lickers that would gather round and tell him his every idea was great. The people who would work unpaid long hours to “get shit done”. Bunch of fucking wormtongues who would sell out their coworkers for crumbs.

    Maybe he was a real person once who really did care about data. But by the time I met him, he was an empty suit








  • Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!

    My intended point was the LLM at run time taking user input wouldn’t be able to do “make a speech” if the game engine doesn’t have that concept already encoded. And if the game is presented as “take user input and respond believably” then users are going to ask for stuff the engine can’t do. Maybe there’s no animations for climbing. Maybe they did some shortcuts and the graphics look bizarre when stuff is elevated.

    I wasn’t talking about Skyrim specifically.

    But also you’re being unpleasant in this exchange, so you can win.





  • LLM generated code is notoriously bad. Like, “call this function that doesn’t exist” is common. Maybe a more specialized model would do better, but I don’t think it would ever be completely reliable.

    But even aside from that, it’s not going to be able to map the free form user input to behavior that isn’t already defined. If there’s nothing written to handle “stand on the table and make a speech”, or “climb over that wall” it’s not going to be able to make the NPC do that even if the player is telling them too.

    But maybe you’re more right than I am. I don’t know. I don’t do game development. I find it hard to imagine it won’t frequently run into situations where natural language input demands stuff the engine doesn’t know how to do.