If you enjoy action roguelikes at all, Hades is, oh my Greek gods, a work of art. Beautiful, well-acted and voiced, with intriguing progression mechanics, and a satisfying just-one-more-run core game loop.
Also its fascinating that we're still telling new stories about the Greek gods, isn't it? And that they can be really good stories.
Trust me, you might never have had a hole in your life for millennial ironic California dude surfer Poseidon but he's amazing.
This has thoroughly eaten a weekend and the *sheer depth* of the game is so amazing. The self-referential in game nods to the power increase happening both via stats and skill. How some powers essentially transform it into a different game instantly. The tradeoffs in builds.
I got to the end (?) boss, got him to 2% health then died, and on a later undistinguished run found an artifact which makes health, the scarcest resource in the game, unscarce.
A plot immediately developed in my mind and I executed on it, and I’m saved before boss.
Waiting to put the kids to bed. “Daddy is about to face tank a laser while laughing maniacally because the boons of Ares mean that it will hurt the other guy more than it will me, while I heal rapidly through basic autoattack. Sweet dreams!”
Many games cater to power fantasies but few of them go with “I mean, you’re literally an immortal demigod. Of course your power scaling curve is ridiculous on every play through.”
Report: face tanking a Greek god not advisable.
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“I spoke with 21 billionaires” is historically the sort of flex you could only imagine in the top of tier 1 media, and ironically I think they’re probably least capable of it today, after a few years of burning karma wantonly.
Many of the emails will say “I just want to hear your side of the story” and many of them will even actually mean that and come from reporters who respect sources and promises they’ve made to them.
But other emails said the same words and then did not follow through.
One of the reasons Solana can do this is he has a persistent reputation in the ecosystem and everyone knows it. This historically was true for some institutions, but during a rough period for them they developed principle/agent problems.
Odd Lots has a really fantastic episode on why Claude Code matters, and while it is likely not directly useful for you if you follow me, it is the single best artifact I’ve seen for that smart person you want to quickly educate about this.
* How giving LLMs capability to write Unix commands gives them deterministic access to ~60 years of powerful, composable software capabilities
* LLMs are quickly becoming the “interpretation layer” and a lot of work is that, at varying levels of abstraction
* Says a really important takeaway that most of the world has not internalized: this fundamentally transforms a field/craft in a way which predictive autocomplete was not going to.
In many domains a generalist who is good at AI and puts an hour or two into something will be three to four sigma from the mean entrant into a support / escalation / etc inbox.
Mitchell has an example from bug reports; I can easily imagine examples from e.g. financial issues.
I think *once* when doing advocacy work for people with banking/credit problems I ran into someone who had an organized call / letter log and so could cleanly generate a timeline that the financial institution could match up with their own files (and obligations).
Try it if you don't believe me but if you give AI a bunch of unstructured input like most people's impressionistic account of how this has been so frustrating dealing with the bank, they will frequently redigest it into "Here's a timeline with bullet points."
Considering writing about non-coding LLM workflows a bit in December partially for personal interest and partially so people can see concrete examples of progress / usage.
The one easiest for me to talk about is just a geeky hobby: here's a plastic model and then here is ChatGPT producing a painting reference of ~that model, after a discussion on characterization, color scheme, etc.
I honestly love using it in my art projects. Hallucination rate is acceptable given ~wide acceptance criteria in art; like Bob Ross used to say, there are only happy accidents if e.g. its suggested recipe for mixing a teal paint does not actually result in teal immediately.
If I clipped every good Byrne Hobart or Matt Levine line I’d never get around to writing my own stuff but this from Byrne is too good to not share:
An extraordinary fact about finance is that there are some firms which are financial service providers specifically for scams which sometimes, almost as an industrial accident, bafflingly end up in a contractual relationship with a legitimate, successful company.
These underwriters are not necessarily that; some overlevered highly “structured” IPOs of midmarket software businesses should have a non-zero price, and a capitalist should not say they are a scam just because he is not a buyer at that price.
How much could would you write if you could one-shot 10-100 line shell scripts or similar almost all of the time, in 10 seconds? You would write a stupid amount of code. Who cares if it is disposable? Dispose of it; it's basically free.
Skill issue, code is free to you. Write a test suite too, designed to be thrown away in under a minute. Write three independent implementations and vote on the answer. etc, etc
"Have you actually done this?" Yeah, to a minor degree, and I'll recount a bit more when I do some writeups about my experience with LLM programming. After a few weeks of climbing the skill curve instead of some direct questions I'd say "Goal: *direct question* You should..."