lambdaone

I wrote a text-based adventure game engine that implemented quite a detailed world model. The results were very engaging indeed, but after a time I realised that while its game world was hugely detailed to the point of individual characters having their own simulated thoughts, feelings and world view, the game was quite shallow in terms of conceptual depth - it very successfully rehashed genre cliches, but nothing about it felt new or fresh.

I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.

You can write about whatever you like and put it on the web, just not in Wikipedia for which, as has been said exhaustively above, there are clearly laid out admissions criteria, not just the whims of a "select group". You are entirely free to contribute to articles-for-deletion process yourself.

Wikipedia does not exist to be a soapbox, self-publishing host or advertising medium, and having a Wikipedia article is not a human right.

Actually, I see the article has already been moved to draftspace, so nothing has been lost, except visibility, for which you will have to establish notability; you have six months to work on this before it gets deleted, and you can always go back for as many tries as you like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...

The existence of EverybodyWiki demostrates the usefulness of Wikipedia's restrictions. Nothing is stopping you from either putting up your own website or writing on any of the free-access wikis; the reason people treat Wikipedia as a valuable resource is exactly because it won't publish anything indiscriminately. Having a Wikipedia article is not a right.

"They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't" is exactly the point of the notability policy in the first place.

Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.

The deletion discussion also takes time and consensus, and even then isn't irreversible; you can move the text to draftspace, [1] and try again when you do have proof of notability. Even if the article is deleted before you can respond you can always get a deletion review [0] get your article text back via temporary undeletion and move that to draftspace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review

The sad (or wonderful) fact is that anyone can write a new programming language now; I could for example use Claude create a wrapper on top of an existing languge (for example, a Python-like syntax wrapper for Scheme) in a few hours and start marketing it as a new language. So how can Wikipedia tell toy languages from real ones with actual useful adoption?

It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

What practice? I'd like to see non-trivial uses of this outside scenarios other than this [0] which even now seems to show slow but steady improvements over time.

As for the Machiavellian scheming aspect, this seems to me to be very much like the operations of some real-world human CEOs.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/claude-opus-4-6-this-ai-just-pass...

Structured thinking and deliberation are indeed important, but you can also make LLMs do structured "thinking" if you work hard enough, and generate quite plausible reasoned arguments with valid real-world results, and you can get them to write down their working as they go. But as research has shown, it's not "true" thinking, just pattern matching at a higher level, and eventually runs out of steam.[0]

But you only have to drill down a couple more layers and you are back in the void again; do you have any proof that your own thinking, no matter how structured and accurate, is anything other than pattern-matching at a sufficiently much higher level at which you are incapable of seeing it as such?

I think we will be finding some very interesting things out soon using the combination of LLMs and theorem provers, as demonstrated by Terence Tao's recent work.[1]

A cheetah is not a motorbike is not an aircraft is not a rocket.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12744

Yes, but there aren't any people in that one.

This happens all the time to me. The model emits thousands of lines of high-quality code, making vast progress very quickly, but on the way does a few very, very stupid things a human being would never have been silly enough to do.

Then it takes hours or days - sometimes weeks - to find and fix the AI-induced problems. If you very, very tightly constrain the AI by using structured processes and unit tests you can work wonders with it, but you do start to wonder to what extent this is better than if you had simply coded it yourself.

I had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.

Tesla's semi-autonomous FSD falls in the uncanny valley between being good enough to lull you into an inattentive state, but not reliable enough to be better than humans with all possible unforseen situations of the sort that cause real-world crashes and either deal with it safely without driver intervention or at least safely slow to a stop without disaster.

You either capture Level 4 autonomy or you don't, and currently Waymo are leading the way in this, not Tesla, who are Level 3 at best - curious, because with the ever-increasing rate of AI competence and their massive head start, you'd expect them to have cracked Level 4 by now.

The prospect of Level 4+ FSD and being #1 in an ever-expanding market without realistic competition were Tesla's USPs and they are in the process of losing both.

I suspect the market knows this and sees the recent better than expected results as a short-term reprieve, not a renewal of the dream.

Even asking a human being why they did a certain thing is questionable. The research on choice blindness seems like a pretty definitive debunking of post-hoc rationalization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Choice_...

I think a better way of putting this is that humans think they can accurately re-tell what their consciousness was doing. Whether they actually can, or even if consciousness exists at all as a thing outside the perception of consciousness is a philosophical question currently beyond answering.

This is the crucial point.

It has vastly increased my hobby programming "velocity", but has improved my day job performance by perhaps a quarter at most; so much in programming is not the task of programming, but mapping the problem and dealing with the outside world.

I happily go abroad and speak with my hosts in my rudimentary German, and we are all happy. Sometimes we shift to their slightly-less-rudimentary English, and that's good too. Although we sometimes resort to machine translation to look up a specific word or phrase when we are both stuck, we have never felt the need to use real-time spoken machine translation.

DMCA notices are meant to be submitted "under penalty of perjury", and false notices could in theory result in civil action being taken against those who send them. In practice, neither of these occur even if the sender is a real person, like a record company lawyer lending their name to complaint that are entirely computer generated, or, in this as in so many cases, a completely fabricated identity.

Requiring verification through government ID for takedown notices should be a minimum requirement.

This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

This is a Manhattan Project-level endeavour, and most countries would not be capable of it. China, however, is. Even though it lacks the expertise to do all these specific things to the Western cutting edge level right now, it has the resources, the overall technology and engineering base, and the determination to achieve the goal with the full power of the Chinese economy behind it. Not to mention industrial espionage.

It might take them a decade, but they'll get there. Working on the basis that you can somehow stop China rather than merely delaying them is a comforting illusion.

The problem with not learning languages is that it restricts you to computer-mediated communication. If you learn other languages than your own, even at a fairly basic level, there is a whole world of social interaction and culture out there that just can't be accessed with a machine in the way.

This isn't to say that automated translation is bad, I use it extensively, but not all interaction worth having is online.

A win that, as I understand it, did not actually set a precedent and is thus of no actual legal use to them.

Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.

Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.

As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about.

Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.

The horse has bolted some time ago on this; the "frontier" is not as inaccessible as it once was, and open models, once out there, can't be put back in the bag.

Even if the US bans opens models, the Chinese and Russians will still have them, along with the rest of the world including cybersecurity attackers, and that's probably the worst-case scenario for the US.

The only way forward now is open models and how we restructure society around them.

The article really doesn't hold back: one of the subheadings is "Picking up where phrenology left off".

> Always thought the dencrentalisation and forking of Wikipedia would be the endgame. Would allow for people to actually curate their own spaces again.

Database dumps and software for the entire enyclopedia are avaible for free, and multiple forks already exist, including two which are run on behalf of the Russian and Chinese governments. You are, and have always been, more than welcome to create your own.

Sanger did, indeed, create his own Wikipedia alternative.[0] It failed to catch on, and is currently maintaned and almost exclusively edited by just one person.

[0] https://www.citizendium.org/

Instead of having distinct tokens, you could have modifier vectors which would be added to other tokens. Think in terms of control, shift, meta etc.