Hacker News: fluoridation

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:22:09 +0000

It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:18:47 +0000

It's not the only reason, but that does cover the vast majority of online-required games.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:15:21 +0000

A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 05:25:10 +0000

A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:49:09 +0000

It doesn't need to be public-facing. The point is not to be able to continue playing as if the game was still being supported, it's to be able to continue playing at all, in some way. You can set up a box at home and let two or three of your friends in through a VPN. Security is not a concern.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:02:31 +0000

That could change once a law comes out requiring all new developments to be designed differently. Besides, no one is talking about open sourcing the server code. Releasing binaries and patching the client to talk to a local instance is perfectly acceptable. A developer would then just need the ability to redistribute compiled builds.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:09:40 +0000

And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:48:17 +0000

It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.

New comment by fluoridation in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

fluoridation — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:21:02 +0000

Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.

New comment by fluoridation in "Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts"

fluoridation — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:30:24 +0000

"Well-unknown" questions are maybe the one situation where LLMs will say "I don't know", simply because of all the overwhelming statements in its training data referring to the question as unknown. It'd be interesting to see how LLMs would adapt to changing facts. Suppose the Collatz conjecture was proven this year, and the next the major models got retrained. Would they be able to reconcile all the new discussion with the previous data?

New comment by fluoridation in "RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?"

fluoridation — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:37:23 +0000

Non-standard parts are not about value-adding, they're about cost-cutting if you're feeling charitable, and about forcing vendor lock-in if you're not.

New comment by fluoridation in "A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous"

fluoridation — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:36:28 +0000

>How confident do you want the model to be in its answer to “why did Rome fall”?

The confidence level can be any, as long as it's reported accurately often enough. "This is my conjecture, but", "I'm not completely sure, but", and "most historians agree that" are all perfectly valid ways to start a sentence, which LLMs never use. They state mathematical truth, general consensus, hotly debated stances, and total fabrication, with the exact same assertiveness.

New comment by fluoridation in "Underwater robot tracks sperm whale conversations in real time"

fluoridation — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:08:44 +0000

The FBI had left-over budget.

New comment by fluoridation in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

fluoridation — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:06:02 +0000

Main class? Tutorial? I feel like you're leaving out important details.

New comment by fluoridation in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:04:57 +0000

You need those anyway to know how much grip to apply and how to hold on to the object. You can't determine that visually.

New comment by fluoridation in "The gay jailbreak technique (2025)"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:22:43 +0000

But a chatbot doesn't have any capabilities. It has no power to affect the real world.

New comment by fluoridation in "The gay jailbreak technique (2025)"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:45:38 +0000

The reason this kind of impersonation is illegal is because people are more likely to feel compelled to comply with an official and get taken advantage of, as well to preserve the authority the position (if anyone could claim to be an official with no repercussions, the claim would lose its weight, since the claimant could easily be an impersonator). If you pretend to be a government official with an LLM, the LLM is not going to have its opinion of people claiming to be government officials tainted, nor does it have access to any sensitive information that's not available by other means, nor is it possible to cheat it out of something that rightfully belongs to it.

Additionally, mens rea refers to the cognition that one is doing something wrong. It's not at all clear that lying to a person and lying to a computer program are subjectively equivalent or even similar to the liar, and given the previous paragraph I'd argue they are not. Why would someone feel guilty about doing something that can't possibly have repercussions?

New comment by fluoridation in "The gay jailbreak technique (2025)"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:07:22 +0000

That would make all LLM jailbreaking illegal, not specifically the FBI one.

New comment by fluoridation in "A report on burnout in open source software communities (2025) [pdf]"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:53:09 +0000

>Its so easy to fake these nowdays.

What do you mean? Do you mean that automated agents will needlessly download your code for no reason to bump up your numbers? Or do you mean that you can't compare your own project to other ones because they might be faked?

New comment by fluoridation in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

fluoridation — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:43:48 +0000

Presumably the people they're talking to agree that that's the problem.