NLeseul

Never attribute to malice or stupidity what can be adequately explained by fallible humans trying their best to navigate a confusing and broken world that they were never meant to inhabit.

@exQUIZitely @ultimadragons Super Mario World. Final Fantasy 6. Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. All games that set the standards for their respective genres and still feel totally polished when compared to modern games in the same genres.

I've been thinking about games that feel truly ageless - ones that are essentially as enjoyable and satisfying today as they were when they first released. You can go back to classics like Pong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man, but it’s hard to deny that you can see (and feel) their age now. They’re still fun, but time hasn’t passed them by unnoticed. I would argue that Tetris is the most ageless game ever made. It never relied on flashy graphics or impressive sound; its strength lies in one of the simplest and most brilliant concepts in gaming history. I'm confident it will still be played in 100 years - and that it will have exactly the same addictive appeal then as it does now. Can you think of any other games that fit this pretty rare category?

@exQUIZitely Where are these studies?

Studies have shown that older games with simpler graphics had a much more stimulating effect on a gamer's brain - actively "training" creative skills and imagination, with positive impact on memory building and abstraction skills. If that sounded to scientific, have a look at the 4 images. The older ones among you will recognize some classic games. In the first one your brain would turn that into a "Rambo" style scenario, dropped in the jungle fighting against hordes of enemies. Have a closer look at the main character - that's 3 colors and a pile of pixels. Your mind does the rest. In the second image your brain converts the image into an epic space battle against aliens, with you sitting in a spaceship, fighting wave after wave. Again, have a closer look at the aliens. One (!) color, 2 animation phases. Now look at your "spaceship". In the third image you are teleported by your creative mind into a fantastic world with heroes, battles, an open world, portals and so on. A magic world, that was created aong the way, by your mind. The fourth picture turns you into Bruce Lee. The common thing in all of those examples is your brain "filling in the blanks" - and that's EXACTLY the part that's positively stimulating it. Now think of hyper-realistic modern games with graphics so good that your brain doesn't need to do any "imagining" anymore... instead it turns into pure consumption mode. Brain waves look entirely different then. No creative areas will fire up. The reason why many retro gamers have fond memories of old games is not just nostalgia. It is connected to what those games have done to our brains and imaginative minds at the time. They didn't oversaturate us - they merely hinted at the right direction and our brains did the rest. Old games were similar to books - the world was created by the reader/player. And those worlds looked different for each and everyone of us.

Commercial airlines crash at a rate of 7 per 41 million flights. Current top LLMs hallucinate (by one estimate) 4.6% of the time, about once in 25 prompts. On a known benchmark (usually things are worse on new benchmarks). Comparing them, like the guy below does, is ludicrous. If commercial airlines crashed at the rate that LLMs hallucinated it would be 1.87 million crashes per 41 million flights. Around a quarter million times greater.

Progress is happening! youtu.be/nzbyRcQJV7c

@GaryMarcus @NewYorker Wait, is this a description of Altman or a description of ChatGPT?? 🤔

Sam Altman in a nutshell, @newyorker:

"This class contains an array of string constants." ❌ "This class contains an array of strings constant." ✅

People wouldn't hate taxes so much if the government just sent you a bill saying what you owe them like any other service provider. What makes people dread taxes is that the government expects you to figure out what you owe (and punishes you if they don't like your math).

People have debated the accuracy of this chart's data, but even taken at face value... isn't this exactly what you'd expect after most of the left panicked and fled the site? "Site not used by the left has few left-leaning accounts" doesn't really strike me as breaking news.

Vibe coders debugging an app they built with Claude Code:

We have achieved AGI internally. (AGI stands for "adjusted gross income.")

In a more civilized culture, humiliating an enemy this badly would earn you so much ji that the enemy would immediately surrender and serve you for a year in order to repay the toh incurred. Sadly, wetlanders remain disappointingly blind to the ways of ji'e'toh.

@Shmojii Even offline in a suburban society, you mostly experience all the other people around you as other cars that you need to navigate your car around. That probably has some kind of dissociative effect as well.

i feel like most people dont get to experience such a tangible embodiment of the size of society We get the dissociated version online. But actually being in a crowd the size of multiple blocks of nonstop movement of people... Society embodied

i love how tiny you feel walking through crowds and crowds of incredibly unique people in Tokyo. Just nonstop on my hour walk Feels similar to the effect astronauts get looking back at Earth Makes me feel tiny...yet also empowering

Peak oil, but not the one you were expecting.

@mt_east @cmdrsho @threecreepio The only thing I haven't been able to reproduce yet is the weird high-pitched music playing outside the house.

@mt_east @cmdrsho @threecreepio A lot of the other bugs seen in the video can be recreated by overwriting memory in the same area. $EB causes the game to start a crown warp immediately. $100~$140 contain the state of the HUD, and overwriting some of those can recreate the pattern blue squares seen there.

So. Um. I don't think that was supposed to happen. 😕

ドラゴンスレイヤー4にて、 実機RTA走者・NL氏が遭遇した奇妙な現象。 本体に軽いショックが加わり、オープニング後のデモプレイでバグって宝冠ワープが発生してリルルvsディルギオス戦が始まった貴重な映像。おそらくエミュレータでは再現できないでしょう。

@allTheYud Is the drowning child wearing an expensive suit, by any chance?

Suppose you run across a drowning child and you're *not* wearing an expensive suit. Should you (1) walk on and leave the child to drown; (2) run home and put on an expensive suit and run back, hoping the child is still alive?

Actually, it's simpler than I thought. If RAM address $EC is set to a nonzero value during the title screen, the dragon fight starts immediately. I'm discussing with @threecreepio, and it seems like something probably went wrong while the boot routine was copying the initial state of RAM out of PRG.

@cmdrsho It might be possible to examine the assembly, figure out what change in memory could cause it to take the code path that leads to a warp during the demo, and replicate that change in an emulator with a cheat, but it would probably require a lot of investigation.

@nikitabier Is the third secret thing... paperclips?? 🖇️

We’re a few weeks away from where there will be no designers or engineers, but a third secret thing