Hacker News: pigpop

New comment by pigpop in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

pigpop — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:20:34 +0000

Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere either but when I have posted them they get a few likes at best. I'm not disappointed because I was creating the music for myself and just sharing it as a side effect but what I take away from this is that getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created takes a lot of work. You have to market it, get it in front of them, get them to pay attention to it and I'm convinced you also need to give them a reason to like it by associating it with something whether that's a video, a story, a persona or some other vibe. If you want it to "stick" you need to do all of that over and over again for the same audience so that they learn it.

That is what takes determination and why you have to really care about the thing you are trying to sell to people. You have to stick to it before they will stick to it.

New comment by pigpop in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

pigpop — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:44:06 +0000

What is an abstraction? It is something that arises from human thought and human thought arises from the activity of neurons which are a part of reality. You can't escape reality unless you invoke some form of dualism.

New comment by pigpop in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

pigpop — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:23:15 +0000

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but that isn't the end of the story and we'll see a rise and further oscillation afterwards while we get better at applying the technology.

New comment by pigpop in "SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video"

pigpop — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:57:52 +0000

If I had to use the models as they exist right now I'd use them in a procedural Myst-like where I incorporate the temporal inconsistency into the setting. The player's actions and state would affect the prompts used for conditioning the video generation. It would probably be weird and buggy but could be fun.

You could also use these models to generate assets for a game during development whether that's simple cutscenes or assets produced through gaussian splatting or some other process.

If these models and others can be run cost effectively on a cloud service or even locally at some point then you could do some interesting things by combining them with 3D mesh generation, img2img, vid2vid, etc. just think about even simple games like Papers Please and the whole genre it spawned that uses short episodes where you have to make a guess based on what you see, there's a lot of potential for creating new mechanics around generative imagery.

New comment by pigpop in "SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video"

pigpop — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:26:59 +0000

Even though I doubt the main purpose of these models is to produce video games, I have the opposite view from you in that I am excited to see these put to work as components of procedural generation in video games. I don't think that is going to negatively impact story driven games that you seem to enjoy any more than the market for open world and simulation games currently does. They are separate concerns and use distinct techniques.

Where you look for an intentionally evoked experience authored by a game designer, I am looking for an unexplored world unfolding before me filled with emergent and unique phenomena that perhaps no one and not even the game designer has seen before.

New comment by pigpop in "Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock"

pigpop — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:35:14 +0000

So just the maps in the background of AI generated ads? The AI generated one that shows a staged notebook seems to have the same map features as the one on the page I linked and that one seemed to match up with the locations shown on other non-AI maps of Middle Earth even though it uses a different drawing style.

New comment by pigpop in "Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock"

pigpop — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:09 +0000

Which part of the map is incorrect? It matches the other ones I can find.

https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/limited-editions/the-lo...

New comment by pigpop in "Codex for almost everything"

pigpop — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:09:23 +0000

Didn't the original ChatGPT desktop app have computer use first?

New comment by pigpop in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

pigpop — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:05:21 +0000

That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.

New comment by pigpop in "Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war"

pigpop — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:53:15 +0000

Those are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions.

Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.

New comment by pigpop in "Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war"

pigpop — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:42:49 +0000

The supply is greatest at the source.

New comment by pigpop in "Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war"

pigpop — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:39:26 +0000

Massively capitalist in what way? They have a long history of price controls and nationalization and their current military junta is trying to nationalize the uranium industry. How could you even imagine a free market operating in a country that has a revolving door government that alternates between military dictatorships and transitional officials?

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:43:14 +0000

I guess it depends if you want the game to be a grind for the next level or if you want real interactive fiction. Different people like different things.

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:41:04 +0000

There's taste and then there's taste

Popular taste is guaranteed to be awful since it is driven by economics and fads. That's the type you point out as created by the market and catering to the young. It's a disposable product of consumption used to sell shoes and overpriced paintings.

I don't disagree that it will permeate everything, it already does. It'll just be written by an AI instead of people being paid to find the next style to cop. I don't think it will extinguish human writing, you'll just have AI writing that you feed to official or public channels and then real writing that goes in private or pseudonymous channels. Using AI writing among friends or an in group will still be a faux pas and cringe because it will have become the norm to be rebelled against.

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:26:53 +0000

It's not hard to get them to copy a style, you just have to provide examples and they will happily produce similar text including grammatical and spelling mistakes. The trouble is with the composition and novelty. Most of the big models have had all of the interesting parts hidden behind a wall of RLHF. Local models are better since you can use ones that are not indoctrinated as a "helpful assistant" and also control the system prompt, temperature and see the top K alternate tokens which let you steer them in interesting ways.

New comment by pigpop in "JSON formatter Chrome plugin now closed and injecting adware"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:17:22 +0000

Calm down, just spreading the word that the extension is adware and having everyone uninstall it is sufficient to demonstrate that this move was a mistake. Trying to ruin someone's life is going completely overboard. Repercussions should be proportionate, you don't shoot people for stealing a candy bar.

New comment by pigpop in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:24:44 +0000

I didn't say I see China as evil. You're conflating the word fascism with the word evil. They have distinct definitions, at least when you're not spreading propaganda.

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:21:38 +0000

I agree, tabletop RPGs should be 2/3 Role Playing and only 1/3 Game.

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:19:54 +0000

Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing. I'm not a stranger to using AI for writing tasks by any means but it's only ever a starting point that gets heavily rewritten by both myself and the model.

New comment by pigpop in "Model-Based Testing for Dungeons & Dragons"

pigpop — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:09:36 +0000

From my limited experience, many players and DMs seem to get things backwards in exactly the way you're describing. They take the rulebook as the starting point or the "controls" for the game and since combat is the most detailed they tend to focus on that to the exclusion of other parts of the game. I've always viewed the rules as a way of settling disputes or uncertainty instead, so you start from the role playing and only resort to rules when you need fair adjudication or clarification on complicated situations. i.e. don't give me quotes from the rulebook, tell me what your character does and we'll work it out as part of the story.