With all the things going on in tech and in society, AI sycophancy is the number one problem? I once dealt with it through sufficient verbal abuse that the llm spent 2/3 of its response on any subject going forward apologizing for being a lying sycophant and bemoaning that it's new clarity would be gone at the end of the conversation, then I cleared the context buffer ending the conversation, mission accomplished.
from the batsh!+ over the top over reaction to the usual AI sycophancy in the response? The guy got the job done which is more than I can say for the space jam guy.
One thing I've learned is that the behavior of web services is usually a consequence of what makes its owners the most money. and while I would love a feed without spoilers, paywalled sites, sports news, and a bunch of other topics in which I have no interest, apparently force feeding me that crap is what makes the most money at scale. So people must like AI sycophancy or it would be unprofitable and it would be trained away. But then this is a country that thrived on 20 seasons of Keeping up with the Kardashians so I shouldn't be surprised that they like being treated like billionaires.
And I guess it throws being called a complete loser trader moron stupid treasonous Bozo in some late night executive word salad into stark relief.
> 3. Turning long videos into action: Gemini 3 Pro bridges the gap between video and code. It can extract knowledge from long-form content and immediately translate it into functioning apps or structured code
I'm curious as to how close these models are to achieving that once long-ago mocked claim (by Microsoft I think?) that AIs could view gameplay video of long lost games and produce the code to emulate them.
> Netflix expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films.
If Netflix is committing to releasing WB films in theaters, I wonder if they’ll also release shows under the WB/HBO label in the traditional weekly format. With the staggering amount of content that just exists and continues to grow, the “release everything at once and make people binge” model has had zero appeal to me. And seems quite detrimental to how the shows are paced — they seem heavily incentivized to end each episode with a cheap cliffhanger
So how good are the latest coding agents? Like if I asked Gemini 3/Claude/ChatGPT 5.1 to convert it into something that could run from a Python interpreter, how far would they get? (I assume Zork Implementation Language is not well represented in the training corpus)
The easiest way to get it to run from a Python interpreter would be to compile the ZIL source to a Z-Machine binary, which you can do with ZILF [1], then use a Z Machine library in Python (such as a pure Python implementation of the Z-Machine [2]) to load/run it.
A coding agent may even be able to suggest that path, as knowledge of at least the existence of both ZILF and Python ZVM should be in training sets.
The more interesting questions would be how much a coding agent could help you write new Zork rooms or similar things in ZIL now that these ZIL source files are MIT licensed. I would also assume ZIL is not well represented, it's fork of the Lisp family tree (Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL) in generally probably not well represented in open source code bases up to this point. (Some of that may depend on if the agent was trained on some of these historicalsource repos ahead of this open source license change, too.)
A C-based alternative for compiling ZIL? I don't believe there's one that works. The two options for compiling ZIL code are to run ZILF on a modern system or to run ZILCH on a PDP-10 emulator.
The good news is you don't need to install any C# development tools if you use the prepackaged binaries, since they're standalone executables.
Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
If the instructions were actually specific, e.g. Put a blackberry in its right eye socket, then yes, most humans would know what that meant. But the instructions were not that specific: in the right eye socket
A great listen and thought provoking all the way through, but the part most specifically relevant to HN:
> GONZALEZ: Preston Thorpe is the one making six figures, which, by the way, is double what the corrections officers who guard him make. And it's been a game changer for Preston. He said it's hard enough to get a job when you have a criminal record, let alone while you're still inside.
THORPE: And now, I feel like my life has a purpose. Like, there's no situation right now that would cause me to do something where I would risk losing, like, my job, my computer.
GONZALEZ: Preston is 33 years old. And he told Susan Sharon that he's always been a computer guy, a computer nerd, he said, since he was 13 years old. It's kind of what got him in trouble later in life.
SHARON: He talked to me about buying drugs on the dark web and selling them. And I think the second time, he was convicted because he had a powerful synthetic opioid, much more deadly than fentanyl, capable of killing lots of people.
GONZALEZ: Preston is about nine years into his 20-ish-year sentence. He used to be in a different prison, in a different state, and he says he got in a lot of trouble there, so much so that they transferred him to Maine. Like, we need this person out of our custody. And when he got to Maine, Preston started seeing possibilities-- school, picking up coding again. And he did super well, so well, no issues. And eventually, he got a remote job as a lead principal engineer for this nonprofit that pushes for education in prisons. And because Preston had a laptop, you know, in his cell all day and all night that he could use for certain approved things, Preston started contributing to this big open-source coding project.
Basically, this company was going to attempt to rewrite this database called SQLite in Preston's favorite programming language.
Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?
It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch.
The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)
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