gattsuru
11hr ago
I'd caveat that the numbers game here looks really goofy. It only takes one in a thousand people matching FCfromSSC's perspectives to more than double the number of game developers in the United States. Worse, these new people can be a lot more productive in the sheer output sense even if the median one falls behind on the actual quality side.
I'll put a marker down: I'd expect Iron Pagoda gets at least one of the games released and in an SNES/GameBoy Color-level or better quality enjoyable playable demo by the end of the year this year, and probably a playable (if alpha) release by this time next year.
Fanfic genuinely has seriously twisted a lot of fiction writing incentives and economics, and that's about the most degenerate case available and the lowest quality.
In the short term, I'm hoping that the high-profile examples tend to require some underlying skill, if only because the AI tools will quite happily produce high-effort and lovingly detailed terrible ideas, and it takes skill to recognize it. But that's still going to make modern automated content farms look like child's play.
gattsuru
11hr ago
Ironically, the necessary skills "make an X that's good" into a useful set of instructions might be 'alignment-complete' in the same sense of being a genie you can ask "I wish for you to do what I should wish for".
... or it might just be a matter of using the right prompting technique.
gattsuru
23hr ago
This is something the 2024 bill would have ameliorated somewhat.
For anyone that doesn't want to reenact the reruns.
gattsuru
1d ago
One more recent matter that's killed them off, and not listed on the FanLore, is the pivot to ISBN'd book and anthology sales on a less formal schedule. Between the Kindle market, print-on-demand services, convention sales venues, and increased shipping costs, the conventional business model stopped looking anywhere near as compelling.
Which is a pity, because what's left did lose something from it.
gattsuru
1d ago
The economics is relatively 'easy', but I'd caution that the costs are higher than you'd expect. Printing is a scale service, but shipping mostly isn't, and the point where you're spending more to ship something than to print it comes around 50-200 units depending on what service, quality, and printing type you're going for. And that's domestic; if you have to ship international, you're spending more on postage than on per-unit production day one.
((This, coincidentally, is why merch and collections get pushed so hard; after production and shipping costs are included, these things end up being the highest per-unit profit, even if the sales are seldom massive in total revenue.))
The business model is hard. Subscriptions can cover a lot, but as Substack demonstrates, there's little relationship between the quality of a writer, the utility or correctness of their output, and how many people actually subscribe. Having good access or technical chops help get an audience, but there's a tension where these are resources that can be 'spent': access gets devalued if you're not critical enough and gets pulled if you are critical, expertise invites followers-on and there's limits to the extent of domain knowledge.
Traditionally, having the information first helped, but in this era that's a lost cause. You can't beat twitter to be the first to the scene, only be the first person to realize something was important.
There's also a bit of a conflict between sales model and content:
- Subscription works best with regular content drops and constant (and reliable!) production cycle, which typically pushes people to novelty or topical current-day events, which has the benefit where you have more consistent income, but also need to keep hitting that schedule, and both secular trends or a snafu can cost you a ton. That's workable for traditional news-and-reviews, cutting-edge research, or topical focuses.
- Bulk sales favor 'timeless' content and you can eventually make a surprising amount from sales of your back catalogue or 'collections', but the competition is harder (literally everyone who published in this field ever), maintaining that back catalogue can be expensive or literally messy, and maintaining customers is a lot trickier while your revenue goes feast or famine. Great for art or fiction.
- Sponsorship is the tricky option, where your product is a side effect of something else getting the real focus. That doesn't have to be conventional advertising: a lot of prints that make this work are loss leaders for businesses that need to show customers how to use their products, or coalitions showing why the entire class of product exists. It can also be direct advertising, with the caveat that unless your magazine is literally Architectural Digest or defense industry, you probably aren't getting any real money here. It works in some domains, and often better than 'traditional' sales or subscription for them - a lot of maker electronics stuff pivoted hard to it for a reason - but for a thousand-subscriber group, it's rarely going to be worth the time chasing the leads.
One very unintuitive thing is the sheer disconnect between the scope of your plausible sales audience and your plausible revenue. A periodical targeting hobbyist electronics seems like it should be able to print money on subscriptions alone, but there's a road paved with skulls: there's a million teachers who need your product and literally can't buy it for their use case, and your actual sales venue is people bored in a line at Microcenter on a shelf your small zine won't get on. The market cap, the 'success' stories and well-known cases, for scifi/fantasy review publishing, like Locus, have the sort of actual subscriber base that would disappoint a high school newspaper. You just can't do that market, period. On the flip side, there's been successful mags focused on (SFW!) niche-of-niche furry products that made great side gigs or whole one-person shops, because you can have ten thousand people show up at your table, wanting to spend money, over a weekend.
gattsuru
1d ago
Baldree's Legends and Lattes series.
Mixed feelings on it. It's very fanfic-tier, of the literally 'what if the adventurer retired and worked in a coffee shop' sense, which is what I was looking for, and in contrast to a lot of fanfic there's both a genuine grabber and a central plot arc instead of people just waffing at each other. But it's also painfully woke. I can deal with stories where I don't agree with the politics. It's annoying when it gets in the way of the rising tension, though.
Boiling your deuteragonist's backstory down to 'was discriminated against' might save us time, fair. When it's everybody's backstory, it's not really shorthand, anymore. When a threat hanging over the protagonist is defused as soon as you stop interacting with their human male flunkies and find out that she's an older woman, it's become self-parody.
Which is a pity, because there's a stronger story buried just a few steps deeper, and at points Baldree stumbles into it. What are the logistics of a new business, how does the Rules For Rulers concept apply at small locales and small gangs, what are the fantasy world ramifications of 'adventurer' being an actual job, what ramifications does retired adventurer bring, when they show up and get explored they're done well. Even the lesbian romance has tension to it, even if it's not my cup of tea. But then you get back to progress as its own byword and luck magic, and the tension just deflates again..
gattsuru
1d ago
The normal corruption is easier and thus a more common tone, but it's still present.
gattsuru
2d ago
Given your work, is it plausible that you are only going to get contracted by the sort of place that’s absolutely addicted to being Goodhart’d to start with?
gattsuru
2d ago
There's a big question of how you monetize this stuff without enshittifying it -- right now, HuggingFace's basically just selling storage and download, a space with historically not great margins, and the obvious market option of selling model inference runs into content moderation processing problems. Probably a commoditize your complement strategy.
But yeah, if you want a hand on open weights for a lot of AI-focused stuff, HuggingFace is the standard, right now, whether you're looking at LLMs, audio processing, or a lot of vision input work. ImageGen has gravitated to other areas, but even then a lot of people also upload to HF.
gattsuru
3d ago
I’d caveat that there have been some massive changes: translation is basically solved, ‘Rosie-the-robot’ style control is no longer science fiction but a creepy and dumb product, ai-assisted chip development and software engineering is a default option. Recursive self-improvement has been slow, rather than non-existent.
Some of the delay is just logistics. There’s probably over a hundred people worldwide following the AI cancer vaccine dog’s approach, but it’s going to be three or four years before we have clear and convincing academic papers even assuming it works and generalizes, just because that’s how medical trials work. AI driven assistance and funding for nuclear reactors might make building them in the US possible, but it isn’t going to make the NRC respond in less than six months. Silicon fab cycles are measured in years. Structural stuff just can’t be that fast.
Others are tooling. There’s a massive space where many small and medium businesses would benefit from custom code, for example, and AI can do it… but if your interface and sanity checks require a programmer or project manager anyway, it’s not really available yet even if the AI can do it. And Claude Code is not ready for prime time use by normies.
A lot of stuff is also just obscured when it does work. An AI-derived optimization algorithm for matrix multiplication just gets swallowed as a delta in efficiency from expected performance. An AI-built software tool just looks like a (verbose) software tool.
Can you please elaborate on these?
For the UK: until 2003, the United Kingdom's of majority for the purpose of producing or featuring in pornography was 16, sometimes including topless sixteen-year-old girls being included in regular tabloid newspapers. It was only changed to 18 as a side component to a much larger bill. It's just weird to think that, well after Eternal September, this line wasn't some universal standard even just from the US to the UK.
Blue Is The Warmest Color is a French coming-of-age story, originally a comic and eventually turned into a well-recognized live-action film. It also features lesbian sex between an 'college student' and a 15-year-old. I haven't watched it, so I can't tell you what the protagonist's age is during the full-frontal six minute sex scene in the film version, but the story's pretty clear that they start hooking up while the protagonist is an early high school equivalent. It's mostly noteworthy because it received a pretty mainstream coverage and applause.
The general paradox applies more broadly: any coming of age story recognizing the initiation of sexual desire has to straddle the simultaneous recognition that most people start having it happen at teenage age ranges, and actually presenting it as happening at those age ranges can be a felony. Like, in reality, no, the law's never enforced that way, and probably can't be prosecuted in the United States. But also in practice, yes, because if you try to do it payment processors will treat it as illegal activity, most vendors won't accept it because it's illegal, and in most social environments it's worse than untreated leprosy. Unless they don't react that way, in which case it can be lauded by mainstream publications.
Shield's own The Blue Lagoon, 1980, is a heterosexual version. Even in written form, see the infamous underage orgy scene in Stephen King's It or various literary fiction, it's something we just accept. While not anywhere near as explicit, see Holden Caufield can hire a prostitute at the age of 16, the prostitute herself can be 16 and not new to the work, and it's assigned reading that most teachers just gloss over. Or for an extreme version, the various outstanding support of Harry Potter fanfic as a route for self-discovery that was extremely popular back before the author made her stance of transgender stuff public, and had (and has) an staggering amount of stuff that I hope you have good blocklists for.
You can avoid the paradox -- a lot of early furry fandom works handled it by having their characters wait until college to have their sexual awakening, leading to the establishment of the Off I Go To Gay Furry College genre; others by carefully not mentioning the age of their characters at all -- but this typically results or requires characters that have an unhealthy relationship with their sexuality at the start of the story, and kinda dodges the matter rather than resolving it.
... the obvious problem with this issue is that the sexualization of both male and female children and adolescents that did take place after 1968 or so was only ever supported ideologically by liberal leftists...
I think that explains stuff like the Breendoggle being so heavily buried - even today, Marion Zimmer Bradley's stocked in stores that wouldn't consider keeping a monster like Orson Scott Card and be very cautious about Piers Anthony - but there's a pretty large faction of Red Tribers that do recognize 16-17 age sexuality as something that happens and is acceptable within their local cultural expectations. You just don't see many Borderer norms discussed as meaningful outside of their own environment.
gattsuru
5d ago
The Bulverist take is just the occlusion of small-d democracy-as-a-voting-thing, and large-D Democratic as a member of the Democratic Party. It's... pretty explicit in the interview:
And I think for many years, their democratic alignment was mostly self-interest because we had democratic presidents who had important contracts, government contracts, who had power.
The Tech Industry now includes any open support for The Wrong People, and that means the entire sphere is an enemy. No hidden agenda, no complex story.
The more practical take is just that it's wrong, and it's not intended to be something interacted with on a factual level. The summary of The Sovereign Individual is missing the point, the analysis of Thiel's position and logic is a parody, the Balaji 'secede' call comes from media reporting rather than the actual speech. I'm not going to speak about whether it's intentional or a mistake: I'd consider myself duty-bound to check my central claims before publishing a book or going on NPR, but that doesn't speak anything to NPR and Duran's morals or capabilities.
At the risk of borrowing from nydwracus, it's the fnords. The Bulverist take is, if any, too slow behind the power curve: the goal here is solely to produce and reinforce the belief that anyone in the Tech World not slavering at the bit over today's Everything Politics is a moral mutant, and, downstream of that, a valid target.
Why do you think "The Nerd Reich" is the title, when the book's aimed and written by people who fashion themselves as intellectuals and demonstrate themselves to be incapable of checking their own claims?
gattsuru
5d ago
There's pretty recent data, and the most recent runs are close to human parity, but they're also least well-documented.
((I'd also argue that Pokemon is intended more for the 10-16 range, but the general problem remains for them, too.))
gattsuru
5d ago
Ah, sorry, underspecified the thought experiment. The goal for the 'almost half' is to show that some people aren't persuaded or reseated in their positions. In the case of the oracle being asked about homeopathy and picking a pro-homeopathy side, it would be genuinely limited to incredibly weak arguments because no stronger honest ones exist, and a petitioner would only be confronted with a slightly clearly idea of what 'water memory' is supposed to be, and at most a slight 'isn't it weird' evidence that didn't have medical ramifications.
Similarly, the oracle can't persuade a homeopathy advocate who commits by having himself deafened before asking the question.
But those are a bit of a waste of a question. At best, you'd now be able to tell yourself you can out-think the oracle, or have slightly better arguments for a position you reasonably believe is already extremely strong. In these cases, you have no benefit to asking the question.
The thought experiment is more for questions in the middle, where you might have some confidence, but there are plausible arguments on each side. I don't, personally, like gun control, but there are sane arguments in its favor. If I asked this thought experiment's oracle, it could blast me with the most persuasive form of every verifiable argument for or against the policy. I might plausibly not comply, because there are underlying values assessments. Not optimistic -- I've changed my mind on this topic before -- but I'll recognize it as a possibility for the sake of the thought experiment.
The question is whether I should ask. The oracle is only providing information, and it's even information I can verify, so from that perspective it's totally beneficial. But it's also incredibly biased information, provided by something built to be as persuasive with that biased information as possible, and it demonstratably does change the beliefs of many people who speak to it and get a counterargument, or reduce the ability to doubt for many who it reinforces.
gattsuru
5d ago
Yeah, there's a small array of that type of incident. While Shields's mother put her into sketchy stuff disturbingly far under the age range of Lords, by the time of the infamous 'nothing comes between me and my jeans' ad, she was 15 and... it seems like it was just social conservatives and some second wave feminists who even found it noteworthy? And that's only got press coverage because it could show up as a surprise in a magazine ad; far more explicit content was just getting commercial review as a product. She ended up in a lengthy court battle started when she was 16, trying to keep photos from six years before out of a Playboy Press publication. What the hell.
Which would be awkward enough if she were the only case, but nope.
There's a joke about the past being a foreign country, but it's weird to see how recently things can be so foreign. You hear about one-pants families in pre-1992 China (caveat: not sure I believe them, even as extreme outliers) or actually look at the Shakespeare-era Romeo and Juliet age ranges and shake them off as a distant. Then you look at this stuff and see 2003 in the United Kingdom or Brookes's 1980 filmography, and that's not so distant.
And then there's the broader Blue Is The Warmest Color problem, so we don't really object to the idea, so much as what's downstream of it. But then you start to see the reasons, and it's not exactly an arbitrary division.
I dunno. I don't really like thinking about this topic, so I really don't want to turn it into my 'beat'. But it's also probably important as to how we understand the world's norms, and about how new generations form romantic relationships, and there are recent court cases touching on its intersection with law and policy.
gattsuru
6d ago
Huh. I know Motif's gotten mixed reviews, but even assuming it benchmaxxed a little, that's still well outside my intuitions. And A lot of the South Korea stuff is explicitly competitive to get government support, so that excludes the free electricity option. Guess I'm behind the power curve, here.
gattsuru
6d ago
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Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan. And different people react to stress differently: my boss tends to crack jokes, and I've seen people who tend to freeze up even for topics they could normally recite in their sleep.
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We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes. A lot of well-meaning high school courses form teaching presentation skills as small series of one-and-done tests with feedback, rather than improving the same presentation over time, which just reinforces whatever bad habits someone came in with.
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Sometimes we're training for something else. There's something going on with a lot of US federal government and especially DoD spaces where overcrowded text is mandatory, rather than a failure mode. My guess from unrelated engineering world stuff is that the slidedeck is supposed to act as a distributable record for review later, and the conversation an invitation for discussion, but when that transfers over to one-to-very-many presentations the whole thing falls apart.
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There's a difficult tension between good presentation and good storytelling, and most people naturally gravitate more toward the latter. Great presenters can interleave a story, but it's hard to tease a key idea when you want to leave your big conclusion for the climax.
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A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level. This tends to be the sort of thing that (at least outside of government slide decks) seems to be what results in giant fifty-point slides or explanations that keep getting interrupted by 'first I gotta explain X'.
gattsuru
6d ago
Ah, thanks for the correction. I took the first value off Google, and should have known better. 30m still feels low for the core costs of V4, even with the architecture benefits, but that's plausible low rather than 'not cost of electricity'.
gattsuru
6d ago
Part 2 is funnier and more damning, somehow, despite there at least being no question of the study actually having happened.
In his defense, Wertenbroch does seem to have genuinely and enthusiastically provided information that could be plumbed to show the manipulation. Still not sure what he did on the study, but I guess that's a good thing for him right now.
gattsuru
6d ago
You can make a tiny model pretty cheap - I've toyed with a 200m one for specialized purposes - but the bigger the model, and the longer the training, the more expensive it gets. There's been a lot of tricks developed so that training costs aren't exponential or super-exponential, and there's more to a model's intelligence than how many parameters it has, but the costs scale quickly.
DeepSeek's costs are also... probably not comparable. They say about 6m for DeepSeek v4, and it's probably not a lie, but it depends on a training architecture built for specialized silicon that you or I can't get, and highly optimized decisions about power costs. Meta 4 Scout at 12m for 109B parameters is probably more representative for anyone not directly supported by a major world power (which, tbf, is not a matter specific to Moonshot or China). Plus the whole MOE thing can make comparison to the real dense models
That said, while smaller models do fine for constrained projects, most have struggled pretty badly with things like tool-calling or multi-step problem solving. Mistral7b's pretty out-of-date as small models go, but Gemma4-12B is still stuck at 'well-read but not-bright intern'. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next can do some amazing stuff, but it's about Opus 4.6-grade if you're being generous. For a lot of purposes, that's fine -- the only one of these items it can't do is the 3d modeling one -- but users tend to notice where the model is brain-damaged as much or more than the broad areas it succeeds.
((I'm not convinced that the small models are safe, but they're probably not capable of hacking the NSA and definitely aren't close to serious self-improvement.))
gattsuru
7d ago
Detailed analysis from a nonstandard view providing information not available to someone without your experience is pretty much a central case for an AAQC.
gattsuru
8d ago
Reasonably well. It does spoil the second and third Young Wizards books, but it's just a 'the same characters are alive' sense, and they're not important to the plot of BoNwM. The book's own sequel definitely isn't required, and it's a return to 'not bad' rather than the amazing interlocking pieces from Book Of Night With Moon.
gattsuru
8d ago
gattsuru
8d ago
Some fun additional thoughts:
- The experimental protocol is described as producing three "postmodernist" (parody generated) texts of 10 pages each, inserting 100 errors per text, and giving it to 60 participants. That's 18,000 spot-checks across 180 papers. There are jigs that can make this easier, but it's not a matter of throwing things into a scantron. Still, that's what RAs are for. The acknowledgments section seems light, though.
- Participants were offered 10 cents per error compensation. It's unclear if the students knew the quality of the papers or total number of errors available to catch. If they did know, that gives a cap of 30 dollars. If they didn't, a more plausible range is closer to 10 dollars. College students will do a lot for beer money, but homework?
- According to the data supplied to Hyndman, only 16 / 60 made more than Massachusetts current minimum wage, according to self-reported time series.
- Zero participants dropped out, or gave no or token effort on the last paper or on any paper.
- The paper describes recruitment as "In MIT’s newspaper and on bulletin boards, we placed an ad looking for “native English speakers to help us proofread papers by other students to evaluate writing skills.”" There are two papers I could find that could fit that criteria: the student-run The Tech and the official Tech Talk. I've downloaded 1998-2002's full archives from both sources, and run them through an OCR toolkit. I can find other Ariely outreach in Tech Talk, including "Subjects needed for experiment in decision making, $10/hour. Contact: ariely@mit.edu." I can't find anything matching the study procedure. There may be other, unarchived sources.
DataColada is going to focus on the data manipulation, because the proof there is undeniable and they don't need to make a 90% bet.
Or, alternatively, they simply don’t like or play the genre well enough to engage with a game, à la the infamous Cuphead review.
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