Why not just bet heavily against and then inform maintainers? By just betting on it instead it makes you look like you, or someone you know planted the malware
That is what I meant to say, that you'd inform the maintainers along with your bet against the commit. In this thought experiment I assumed that the maintainers are already being spammed by AI so heavily that the bet is necessary to get their attention. (Neal Stephenson had something similar going in in Anathem, he called them "bogons".)
In the case where you're betting heavily in favor of a commit, maybe because you've reviewed it and think it's good, maybe because it contains malware you want to inject... you'd be attracting reviewer attention to that commit because if they can talk the maintainers out of it they end up with more of your money.
Probably the best strategy for a malicious committer would be to sneak through a low value nothing-to-see-here commit, because the low bet would not attract extra reviewer attention, so the maintainers have to set it high enough that it still incentivizes review.
I don't want to live in this world, by the way, I'm just afraid we might have to.
> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do.
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
There is definitely tribalism. I think a lot of the negativity is people who recognize the long term goals of these companies, not just to tech workers. Right now, these models are a threat to people who worked hard and invested their time, while it lets inexperienced or lazy people appear more competent. I think that less experienced developers (or people who don't care anymore or maybe ever) see what an LLM can do and immediately believe it will solve all their problems. That if you are not embracing this with full force you are going to be left behind.
You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides.
Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech.
Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression.
This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?
No need to go that far. I bounced off weekend projects many times because I lost interest the moment I had to relive fighting the "modern" frontend ecosystem set up (or whatever else unrelated to the actual building), which is what I was already doing at the day job. In the end I just gave up because I'd rather get some rest and fun out of my time off. Now I can just skip that part entirely instead of tanning in front of <insert_webpack_or_equivalent> errors for hours on Saturday afternoon.
No, but if something is going to be close to free to produce the consequence will be that no commercial piece of music will be incentivized to be produced by humans.
Commercial music isn't the only way to make music, but it pays people that want to professionally work as musicians.
In other words, the current system allows a select few artists to make money/fame from doing something they want to do (opposed to have to do to make a living). Or also, AI music will lessen the good feeling some people get when they believe that musicians can make money producing music.
I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
> Or also, AI music will lessen the good feeling some people get when they believe that musicians can make money producing music.
If that is your way of saying that AI will remove the possibility for humans to create music full time due to there being no money anymore in music then sure.
> I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
The same dynamic that propped up blacksmiths, potters, tailors, etc.: the absense of scaling/automating technology. There is still demand for authentic artisanal crafts and the "good feeling" that these people can earn money, but the magnitude has been reduced to the farmer's markets.
I can see a similar thing playing out with music. There will still be some token demand, but people will not pay the same when they can have a magic, infinitely producing on-demand, tailored-to-their-taste music machine, at vanishingly small marginal costs.
Just a realistic thing. Or, a good thing for consumers, a bad thing for producers (and a bad thing for producers who are actually consumers in disguise of a desired lifestyle and/or status).
Good for consumers is highly debatable since we'd lose one more social connection in life. Something we are running a very high debt tab for already.
We would also lose musical knowledge since all the full-time musicians would have to stop playing. Only amateur musicians would remain.
And the "desired lifestyle" / "desired status" would be transferred to the already very, very rich and powerful AI company CEOs. Such an improvement ...
Looking at the surface, it is true, but there are caveats:
- Not all musicians are in the field because it pays, some of them haven't earned a cent
- There are talented people who would like to create music but are forced to work long hours, which leaves them drained. Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much, which will allow them to pursue creative hobbies such as music making
- Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular because of it. A lot of assumptions here, I know
> Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much,
I think that this is the fairytale part that I have trouble accepting.
Coming from a country that has a very limited social welfare system I don't believe that the political or social climate is adapted to take such steps in a future where a lot of things are automated.
It goes against everything that we've seen in the last 150 years.
> Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Or AI "musicians" will play live events as holograms.
> Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular behind it.
Sure, they might not be the most affected by AI, but they would still be affected which is the reason I'm not a fan of AI in music. This pushback doesn't need to be reserved to the most impacted activities.
Recently, there was an outrage when "Claire Obscur: Expedition 33" grabbed record-breaking amount of game awards (deservingly so, it's an excellent game) and somehow it surfaced that some minor development placeholder assets (which devs forgot to replace with actual ones due to QA oversight) were AI generated. Suddenly the entire game became "AI slop" and even got some of the awards revoked.
A lot of people complaining are doing it just for the sake of complaining, because anti-AI virtue signaling nets them clout, meanwhile they will happily scroll entire timelines of edited photos, movies which are nothing else than fake reality "slop".
You're inventing groups of people composed of the worst qualities of your "enemies" and insisting they are large in number, based on nothing. This is common low-quality internet "those people" complaining - the polar opposite of giving the benefit of the doubt.
People generally have nuanced opinions not represented solely by whatever Tweets are popular, and this is true of basically every single topic.
"Enemies" is your word, not mine. I would say "hypocrisy" is a better fit. A pinch of AI content is bad, while photoshopping/postprocessing/etc. is normalized. It's all converging into the same thing, only the process is different
There is a difference between an AI critic who dislikes the AI output based on their sense of taste/aesthetic/soullessness and someone who likes something until they learn that there's 0.0001% of AI content in it, which suddenly turns it into abomination. I agree that the latter tends to be the louder group, but it is a group nonetheless and I clearly did not invent jumping on a bandwagon.
Both are fabulous community efforts, and I agree with the sister comment by HN user klaussilveira. Now, they are very different things:
- The Black Parade is a single experience: one campaign with a beginning and end, on the oldschool Thief I foundations. Nothing more, nothing less.
- The Dark Project as of today is more of a “platform”: a modern base engine for creators and players who want a shinier Thief, and who acknowledge that with today’s graphical standards comes extra effort to create a satisfying map/campaign (need bigger assets, less “blunt” architecture, etc). To add to the “platform-ness”: as of today, out-of the box TDP has only a couple built-in missions and no meaty story arc. There are many excellent 3rd-party Fan Missions (maps in Thief lingo, go visit https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/ ) for TDP, but it’s not “a game” the way Black Parade is clearly a game. This is not a judgement call and I had an excellent time with many TDP maps, and community members do discuss expanding the campaign & story... but for now it’s more of a technical foundation to download maps and tinker with, than “a game” :) . You can do some spelunking on the TDP forums if you want more details, the maintainers make no mystery of this.
Gaaaah, words. Yes thank you ! Coz in another thread I was mentioning both.
The above post -which I can no longer edit- compares The Black Parade / TBP (a mod for Thief I / The Dark Project / TDP) to The Dark Mod (TDM, a mod for the doom3 engine). Phew :D
As for the original question of comparing TBP to TDP: I’m personally not fond of Thief I and prefer Thief II, as it focuses on what works: stealth! Thief I is wildly creative, but also full of muddy combat with unconvincing monsters & zombies, and annoying maps / missions. So, to me, TBP (which is pleasingly weird and avoids TDP gameplay pitfalls) kinda beats its parent game TDP at its own game.
Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k. The Steam version worked for me almost out of the box, after patching it with TFix
The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.
The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.
Really a shame they gutted the franchise with the 2014 game and the very recent VR one.
Thief pretty much defined the stealth game genre, at least it did for me, where it's game over basically if you try to go all out on enemies. I may be wrong but I don't believe cleaning a level of enemies is the way forward in later levels.
You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed
For the rest, you're limited by supplies you buy or find but I believe it's possible to clear mostly everything if you don't miss. I know because I found myself running around the entire map to find the remaining 1% of the loot goal
> You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed
I can't recall if they're in Thief 1, but in Thief 2 at least there are guards with helmets which are immune to the blackjack, but afaik none of them are immune to gas arrows/mines.
TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.
TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.
You probably meant The Black Parade (a mod for Thief I), not to be confused with The Dark Mod (a standalone thief-inspired game based on the Doom3 engine)
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