I had a lot of fun. I think the progression curve gets boring around Boss Level 11. Introducing a prestige system could extend the runway.
I thought both Factor and Divide were interesting twists to the battle system, but neither were given enough room to breathe. With different boss numbers in the early progression, Factor can be tuned to make battles winnable that otherwise aren’t. That saves Divide for later in the progression. As it is now, they both surface around the same time and crowd each other’s debut.
It’d also be good to highlight new developments by making them unlockable in the Clubs skill tree. E.g. make an unlock or unlocks for “2-star numbers auto attack”. And “Unlock Factor where factorials of boss numbers get huge stat increases.” It mostly gives you a way to spell out and educate new mechanics, but also it pads out the Clubs skill tree which is a bit thin comped to other games like this.
I hope you keep iterating on it, it’s a really good game!
It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.
Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. I think the trajectory of LLMs will be that consciousness sensations are abundant and low value, and that will give all the non-dual territory over to the illusionists (who now have a tangible example to point to.) Emergence won't be disproven but it'll be about as interesting as a penny stock. Everyone else is going to go to ground as a dualist and argue for some entirely new unreachable aspect of human exceptionalism, but they'll have ceded qualia as they did for souls. If I had to guess, they'll focus on embodied cognition because building high-fidelity bodies still seems really hard.
I think of it like a technology checkpoint. Make sure you got as far as everyone else when they gave up, so when the next innovation in that space comes along you can start back up on even footing.
You want to have your own pathway to production that dodges competitors’ patents, is somewhat defensible itself, maybe a brand, etc.
From the outside looking in, it's an incredible waste of resources on Apple's behalf to use Vision Pro as a design exercise.
Apple would have had a much stronger position (for much cheaper) if they supported OpenXR and obsoleted the Windows Mixed Reality/Quest/Hololens brand for good. As a "15 competing standards" platform, visionOS is a net negative project when it could have been a direct shot at Microsoft and Valve.
Listed in the article are the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors and removes child sexual abuse material from the internet.
The recent Meta lawsuits also mention opposition from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Meta's own executives: Monika Bickert (head of content policy) and Antigone Davis (global head of safety). Both executives mention the danger end-to-end encryption poses to children when attached to a social media graph.
> Both executives mention the danger end-to-end encryption poses to children when attached to a social media graph
So the fact that we welded a messaging platform onto a global-child-discovery-service is bad? Sure. Not encrypting that messaging platform is sort of closing the barn door after the horse has gone walkabout
It is a considerably larger threat for anonymous strangers to be able to establish private lines of communication with children than for them to know that Lisa Simpson (8) lives in Springfield and attends Springfield Elementary. In terms of discovery, most people are already aware that children can be found in school.
I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion? The risk in being able to connect to a random victim somewhere in the world appears to be strictly less than being able to target a specific victim in your local geographical area to whom you could gain physical access
Hence why nobody up in arms (in either direction) about e2e encryption for Chatroulette
Good to see this called out. The HN echo chamber has this really terrible habit of attributing any disagreement with the prevailing opinion here to big, shadowy forces with evil motives (billionaires, corporations, three letter agencies, politicians, etc) instead of facing the reality that sometimes well meaning people just have different values and priorities than us. Very rarely does that narrative get challenged directly.
I’ve given these sorts of haystack search struggles completely over to the LLM. Whether it’s finding a bug in code or searching documentation for the answer, I view it as a near-obsolete skill. The past couple of decades it was important to know how to chase down documentation and zero in on the one line of config you were missing. Now it’s not.
I don’t view this as a hollowing out of my skill tree, I view it as freeing myself to focus on modern skills I need to develop. Such as learning how to steer LLM context windows towards maintainable solutions in large codebases.
I’m sure I’ll be thankful now and then that I know how to manually sift through stack traces for answers. But I expect those moments to be rarer and rarer. I basically never look at machine code, but I bet that used to be an important skill for programmers many decades ago.
If you search for ‘vectorization AI’ there are a handful of specialized tools and apis that can do it. It worked well for a handful of logos I wanted to convert. Nano banana generated the raster logos, and these other tools vectorized them
I haven't seen one that worked properly—can you list a couple examples? Some of the ones that say they're "AI" are just VTracer / Potrace and don't give nice control points.
I liked the results of vectorizer.ai and recraft.ai
Input image is important too. When working with the generalist LLM on the raster art, give it context that you are making a logo, direct it to use strokes and fills and minimal color palette, readable at small sizes, etc.
vectorizer.ai is amazing. It's worked great for like over 10 years (back when it had a name like vector magic or something). I'm super curious how it's implemented
I thought both Factor and Divide were interesting twists to the battle system, but neither were given enough room to breathe. With different boss numbers in the early progression, Factor can be tuned to make battles winnable that otherwise aren’t. That saves Divide for later in the progression. As it is now, they both surface around the same time and crowd each other’s debut.
It’d also be good to highlight new developments by making them unlockable in the Clubs skill tree. E.g. make an unlock or unlocks for “2-star numbers auto attack”. And “Unlock Factor where factorials of boss numbers get huge stat increases.” It mostly gives you a way to spell out and educate new mechanics, but also it pads out the Clubs skill tree which is a bit thin comped to other games like this.
I hope you keep iterating on it, it’s a really good game!