MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 01100011 | 2026-03-03 17:27:41+00:00
Having recently considered playing Dwarf Fortress(and quickly rejecting it for UI issues and overall tediousness), it seemed like a game that would benefit from an LLM backend. I'm curious what sorts of world history an LLM could come up with. It likely would be a lot less efficient than the current system, but interesting nonetheless. I think it would be easy for devs/modders to add a way to supply an API key to an LLM and experiment there.

Also having recently played a run of Civ5(before burning out because the late game is tedious and the overall game so unrealistic), I thought that good AI would help 4x games remain epic while letting the user choose their level of tedium. It would be nice, for instance, to manually go through the early game when management is easy and exploration is fun, only to turn that over to an AI at some point(and you generally do with autoexploration). Same thing with other eras though. By the time I'm in the late game and have a large empire, I'd rather focus on diplomacy and moving armies, not city management or worker management. I don't want to commit to fully giving up on those aspects of the game though. It would be nice to, say, automate war mostly but be able to jump in if I want to micromanage for a few turns.
by wpm | 2026-03-03 17:27:53+00:00
Yeah I guess the only reason I stick with iTerm over some new thing is because I'm either not in the terminal all the time (I just killed an emacs process and my shell reported it was running for 191 hours, 43 min) or because I'm just a big dumb dumb for not using the same program you do, or too dumb to be aware of the "wider terminal emulator market" lmao. Ok man.

Also why would I cat a huge file? That's what less is for. Like wow, in some pretend worse case scenario where you cat out some huge binary file, Ghostty is what, how many ms quicker to paint? Wow! It saved 40MB of memory doing that too, my computer has 16GB I don't care. None of these reasons are very compelling to give up a mature terminal deeply embedded into my workflows, with great tmux integration, and a searchable scrollback buffer.
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-03 17:27:57+00:00
Because AI is not good or interesting.

I've said this before: In Mass Effect, characters are interesting because they are unique, principled, not always right, and are tested. Garrus for example is a former law enforcement official who got upsetty spaghetti about how sometimes the law fails to catch a criminal so he decides to start murdering them instead. In the course of several missions, you as the player personally experience this dynamic, hearing his story, seeing how the failure of real justice impacts people, talk with Garrus about his beliefs and how they changed, you can critique his position and point out ideals or whatever, and then after an hour of directly chewing on and mulling over the finer points of this textbook moral quandary, you are put in a position to make a snap decision whether you should kill a bad guy or let the courts handle it, including having your own motivations and incentives.

AI doesn't do that. There's no internal consistency, and certainly not consistency with the surrounding game. It won't build a character to explore a point, and also build levels and game and even background events to tie in with it. Do you remember any characters from playing AI dungeon a few years ago? People remember Garrus for decades.

Go read an AI generated book, they aren't very good. They aren't trying to say anything. They don't have a unique perspective or set of ideals they want to explore. They don't have a purpose in their content creation.

If you burn immense effort tuning a procedural generation system, it will occasionally spit out content that seems to have a story, but 95% of it will just be unconnected boring mush. Game paste.

If you want to know what a LLM produced story looks like go play a recent Call of Duty Campaign. It's just a list of 5 second Set Pieces and the entire point of the game is just to be dragged through set piece after set piece with barely the fragrance of a narrative in there. It's utterly boring and desensitizing.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-03-03 17:28:02+00:00
100%

This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled.

In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong:

-the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.”

-the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision

-the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy

-the tech gets even more unstable because no one knows how the code works
by gpvos | 2026-03-03 17:28:10+00:00
> the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker.

For less-often used, e.g., non-English language sites, these often leave a site in an unusable state, e.g., non-scrollable. I often have to go into the developer tools to fix a site manually, sometimes hunting for the element to fix if it's not body or html.
by manarth | 2026-03-03 17:28:13+00:00
There seems to be a nuance (which is missing from the title).

The initial paragraph refers to activities which are prohibited.

Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting
relationships that would not be allowed in real life.

There's perhaps a little more nuance (sexual activity with a step- partner has as an age of consent of 18, rather than the more-typical age of consent of 16)

They also agreed to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults
pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
by caseyohara | 2026-03-03 17:28:25+00:00
> third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot

You're going to be presented with ads and preyed on by marketing no matter what. The "made up story about who you are" is just even more imaginary the less they know about you. You'll simply be presented with less-targeted ads.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-03 17:29:20+00:00
I agree completely, the people who are acting like it's Ars' responsibility to assume every sentence from their journalists are lies just aren't being realistic.

And even if Ars editors had caught the fabricated quote, what then? Obviously he should still be fired. Ars could probably benifit from better editors but even so this doesn't absolve the journalist of any of his own blame, for being the one responsible for introducing these fabrications in the first place.
by empath75 | 2026-03-03 17:29:34+00:00
> Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective?

Lots of people "roleplay" with chatbots every day and it must be fun for them or they wouldn't do it.

The problem is mostly "how do you lock an LLM into the narrative context of a more structured game"?

Having an LLM roleplay as a _specific character_ in a _specific setting_ for a long period of time is a hard problem. Even maintaining consistency writing prose for more than maybe a chapter or two's worth of text is tricky.

I don't even really think the cost problem is relevant. If a game had a kickass gameplay loop that required you to put your own open ai token in to use, people would 100% do that. Maybe that wouldn't work for a AAA game, but not even an indy game has tried it or figured it out.

Claude can write and design and play games. I know this because I hooked up a MUD to an MCP server and it built a whole world and I had other agents joining and they talked to each other and solved problems together and built their own little sections of the MUD out.

It is actually fun! I have it online if people want to play -- just sign up, wait to get approved, add your mcp to claude code and tell it to play:

https://mycorrhiza.fly.dev/

Every bit of actual game content was entirely written by ai agents with veerrrry little input from me.
by JohnMakin | 2026-03-03 17:29:48+00:00
This has been discussed ad nauseum in other places here over the years, but basically I don't think the conclusions in the post are correct.

It does not make a whole lot of sense to let an AI determine story, whether it be dialogue, changing the game state, or whatever. The reason basically being a few things - one, the fundamental aspect of a game is that there are rules and boundaries these rules need to remain consistent (and testable). It is entirely jarring if an AI NPC that says something that's not consistent with the game state, or changes the game state in a way that violates the constraint of the understood rules/boundaries of the game - this isn't fun to the user at all, even if it sounds cool. If you do not believe me, you can test this out trying to play DND with these things and see how annoying it can become. If you decide ok, I'm going to try to tightly bind what the AI can do or not with branching and rules, you are basically engineering the same way that games have engineered already, so why even use AI? It's a solution looking for a problem here.

The second big issue is determinism - LLM's are fundamentally non-deterministic. In most games, you would expect an action to have the same or at least very similar reaction most of the time - RNG comes into play naturally already in a lot of games in a predictable way (dice rolls, chance to hit, etc.) LLM's bring nothing new to the table here.

For world gen, we already have games like No Man's Sky deterministically generate quadrillions of worlds. What help is an LLM here? We already have the technology.

One area that would be interesting, is agentic bot players, but that sort of leads down the same path as the above arguments - there already are extremely sophisticated bots that play a huge variety of games. What do LLM's bring here?
by Latty | 2026-03-03 17:29:53+00:00
> The issue here is that there's no such a tool to automatically validate the output of the LLM - at least, not yet, and i don't see the theoretical way to do it either.

Yeah, it's never going to be possible to validate everything automatically, but you may be able to make the tool valuable enough to justify using it if you can make errors easier to spot. In all cases you need to ask if there is actually any gain from using the LLM and checking it, or if doing so well enough actually takes enough time that it loses it's value. My point is that just blaming the user isn't a good solution.

> And you're making the punishment as being getting fired from the job - which is true, but the company making the mistake also gets punished (or should be, if regulatory capture hasn't happened...). This results in direct losses for the company and shareholders (in the form of a fine, recalls and/or replacements etc).

Yes, regulation needs to be strong because companies can accept these things as a cost of doing business and will do so, but people losing their jobs can be life destroying. If companies are going to not give people the time and tools to check this stuff, then the buck should stop with them not the employees that they are forcing to take risks.
by dirck-norman | 2026-03-03 17:30:03+00:00
As someone who suffers from a complex autoimmune disorder which has caused dysautonomia and suspected mitochondrial dysfunction, stress flares and exacerbates symptoms. This has a physiological basis in the complex way the HPA axis/cortisol affects us at the cellular level. My primary diagnosis is sarcoidosis with small fiber neuropathy, but they don’t fully understand all the mechanisms of auto-immune fatigue and dysregulation.
by darjan_dev | 2026-03-03 17:30:07+00:00
I'm Darjan, a Senior Full-Stack Web Developer with 5+ years of experience
Designing and building SaaS applications and Web Solutions for US and German markets.

Location: Tuzla, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Remote: Yes (my entire career has been remote)
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: React.js, Vue.js, Node.js, Express.js, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript
Redux, Vuex, Zustand
Portfolio: https://www.darjan.dev
CV: https://bit.ly/3MGkcsl (Darjan Divkovic CV 2026)
Tools: Figma, n8n, Postman, Git, Vercel, Supabase, Claude for code

Open to interesting remote Full-Stack / Frontend-heavy roles, SaaS projects, or contract work. Happy to share more details or hop on a call!
by 1123581321 | 2026-03-03 17:30:09+00:00
What is your maximum capacity in Settings > Battery Health? What processes are running with significant CPU? What's the typical temperature of the laptop according to a stats app? (Temperature is a good proxy for general energy use.)

I'm typing this on an M3 Max; its max battery capacity is 88%. I've got some things running (laptop average temp is 50-55C, fans off), screen is half brightness, and it's projected to go from 90% to 0% in five hours. I don't usually baby it enough to test this, but 8-10 hours should be achievable.
by speedgoose | 2026-03-03 17:30:09+00:00
It’s not. I had a thinkpad with a touchscreen and while I used the touchscreen seldomly, it was useful in some applications. Notably to easily develop touch based applications.

I have a M1 MacBook Pro with the touch bar since. It’s crap. I remember the keynote where they introduced it and a DJ mixed music using it. It was ridiculous that it got approved.
by atarus | 2026-03-03 17:30:31+00:00
That's actually interesting. Is it a dependancy on user to create the HTTP endpoints for the /speak and /transcript?

One of our learnings has been to allow plugging into existing frameworks easily. Example - livekit, pipecat etc.

Happy to talk if you can reach out to me on linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarush-agarwal/
by jopsen | 2026-03-03 17:30:33+00:00
> I hope we keep making room for “luxury software”

The risk of making the source in a compiler a black box is pretty high.

Because of your program is black box compiled with a block box, things might get really sporty.

There are many platform libraries and such that we probably do not want as black boxes, ever. That doesn't mean an AI can't assist, but that you'll still rewrite and review whatever insights you got from the AI.

If latest game or instagram app is black box nobody can decipher, who cares? If such app goes to be a billion dollar success, I'll feel sorry for engineers tasked with figuring why the computer says no.
by shiandow | 2026-03-03 17:30:40+00:00
That very much isn't the only right way, and it is far to close to government tracking activities online. For one it effectively allows governments to disallow someone from accessing the internet.

All this to let you do stuff you were allowed to do anyway.

The problem is handing kids admin level access on a device with full unfiltered access to several communication networks. You do not fix that by demoting everyone's access.
by Ajakks | 2026-03-03 17:30:52+00:00
As someone who has actually studied art - right back at you.

All the most famous paintings are done like a hundred times - certain scenes were done by ALL Masters, as like a rite of passage or proof of arrival - pretty much the whole time between the OG Masters and modern art.

"Who is your favorite Sebastian?" Is a legit question, for example.
by antonvs | 2026-03-03 17:31:03+00:00
> I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie

I wouldn't be so sure of that on HN. (Also noting you're using the Marxist definition rather than the default dictionary definition, which is "middle class".)

A well-paid tech employee with a non-trivial amount of company stock is, strictly speaking, an "owner of the means of production". Even if you want to quibble with that, their interests are certainly well-aligned with that group - to the point that you generally won't hear a peep out of them as things get more and more dystopian, because of what Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

> I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?

It's much simpler than that. It's pure, unadulterated "I got mine and you ain't touchin' it". There's no real thinking that goes beyond that purely selfish position. The consequences aren't seriously considered, they're just taken as part of the natural order. Any causal connection is denied, rationalized by accusations of laziness, inferiority, etc.
by nknutalapati | 2026-03-03 17:31:12+00:00
Solid proxy architecture. The deny-by-default YAML policy engine is the right call.

One question on the audit side: decisions are logged to SQLite — is that log tamper-evident? If an operator or admin modifies a row after the fact, is there a mechanism to detect it, or does verification depend on the SQLite file being unaltered?

Asking because in regulated environments, the first thing auditors challenge is whether the log itself can be trusted independently.
by tanvesh01 | 2026-03-03 17:31:16+00:00
Location: Bengaluru, India (IST, flexible across EU/US time zones)

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: Open to short/medium-term stays; no permanent relocation for now

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Tailwind, Rust (Tauri), GPU/WebGL tooling, CI/CD

Résumé/CV: https://tanvesh.vercel.app/resume
Portfolio: https://tanvesh.vercel.app
Email: sarvetanvesh01@gmail.com

Engineer + designer who cares about how software feels and how it operates in production.

Recent:
- Follow Alice (2022–now): Built self-checkout (trip selection, payments, post-booking dashboards) and working on back office tools for adventure trips (Kilimanjaro, Everest BC, safaris).
- Nero Editor (creator, 2025): Infinite canvas for black-and-white image exploration with real-time GPU luminance mapping.
- Tickadoo (2024): High-performance map-based event discovery.
- Shundo (creator, 2023): Keyboard-first Windows productivity app (file search, calculator, recent VS Code projects) built with Tauri + Rust.

Looking for product-focused roles where I can sit at the intersection of engineering, design, and product (frontend/fullstack or design engineer), ideally on small teams that care about craft, performance, and thoughtful UX.
by CyberSec86888 | 2026-03-03 17:31:21+00:00
This tackles a massive yet often overlooked gap in global communication.

A majority of professionals around the world operate in English as a second language, yet most voice technology has historically been designed with native speech patterns in mind. That imbalance creates subtle barriers in everyday conversations, from team syncs to high-stakes business calls.

Building real-time, on-device accent adaptation, without clean paired datasets, across countless speech variations, while separating pronunciation patterns from speaker identity and keeping latency ultra-low on CPU, is an extraordinary technical achievement.

Deep respect for taking on something this fundamental to inclusion and clarity in the modern workplace.
by georgemcbay | 2026-03-03 17:31:21+00:00
> He implied that people using food stamps do not respect the effort it took to provide the food.

People using food stamps in the US often work full-time jobs making insufficient living wages from highly profitable companies like Walmart

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

I imagine they probably have a better inherent understanding of real-world food production style work effort than the majority of those of us who post to sites like HN.
by Root_Denied | 2026-03-03 17:31:21+00:00
Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-03 17:31:23+00:00
> But they are fundamentally different in kind, in that those models respond to immediate sensory stimuli. Per se, they do not allow for abstract reasoning over internally generated representations

This is obviously deeply incorrect, and the kind of thing that people call "wordcel" thinking. Mathematical intelligence is highly visuospatial, and often requires constructing images and/or imagining motion (arguably invoking also either proprioceptive and/or kinaesthetic qualia).

Is it possible you are aphantasic? This seems to me to be the only way one could think that one cannot have non-verbal internally generated representations.
by drob518 | 2026-03-03 17:31:32+00:00
If you've seen one tariff study, you've seen one tariff study. There are so many factors that end up influencing the end-state of the system. It literally depends on the particular type of good, the producer, producer's market shares both in the country applying the tariff as well as globally, the number of tiers of distribution, margin structures of everybody involved, etc., etc. So, sometimes we see an increase; other times, we little to none.
by dwoldrich | 2026-03-03 17:31:33+00:00
> link I gave you

There are glaring fallacies by omission in the article you hold up as proof, don't insult my intelligence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1112950/

It never occurs to some people that systems they operate in and trust could be 1) total and 2) corrupted to some extent at every level.

Nothing I can ever say, no link nor reasoned oratory could ever change your mind because, as I said, I believe you are captured by the system. You are emotionally invested in it and you work for it for free.

To convince me, people have to work, I'm not cheap and I'm unforgiving after corruption is uncovered. Putdowns and shame have no power because power is everything, and I understand the games people play.

The money will drain away and chase the next incompatible bubble or grift like AGI. Climate alarmism will become too much work to grift off of and people on the sidelines will gradually stop worrying about it. It's a good thing.
by hirsin | 2026-03-03 17:32:29+00:00
I'd review the setup here. You're missing the critical distinction that the cryptography supports - separating entirely (in time and space) the issuance of the cred to the user and the use of that cred with a website.

Unless you're getting the device logs from the users device (in which case... All of this is moot) there is no timing attack. Six months ago you got your mobile drivers license. And then today you used it to validate your age to a website anonymously. What's the timing attack there.
by testbjjl | 2026-03-03 17:32:36+00:00
What? Somehow I think you’re overthinking this. There is no conspiracy. International students have helped to get us to where we are. Could we use some course corrections, sure, but you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. Don’t believe me, ask the CEO of your company, or any Fortune 500, or your stock portfolio about the need to have the best talent in the U.S.
by happytoexplain | 2026-03-03 17:33:08+00:00
But in the rich-poor left-right quad, only one square is strongly against importing workers, and it's on the right side. Even just looking at the right side though - it really feels like the non-rich right's opinion on this is louder than the rich right's opinion (though, of course, it is money, not volume, that directs both parties in most cases).
by bigyabai | 2026-03-03 17:33:11+00:00
Fillibustering random things because of Californian local law isn't going to fix things at the federal level. It wouldn't correct the (bipartisan!!!) manipulation of American monopolies, nor effectively combat the "think of the kids!" rhetoric that both parties love.

Free market economics and freedom of speech have been worn down for decades. The bipartisan value of this private/public sector cooperation is indeed disgusting, but very deeply entrenched.