Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Dzugaru's commentslogin

I enjoyed doing my part as a programmer in game jams with my game designer and artist friends. Making some nice tech, AI, shaders.

Ludum Dare 60 just ended. They made a pretty cool game! I was not needed and did nothing.


> none of them has yet tried to point an AI in the direction of making an existing proof more understandable and intuitive to a human

I'm absolutely certain they've tried that. The issue is this alien intelligence cannot do it. And there are no signs that it ever will. I think way more realistic scenario is this intelligence will go further away from ours and become incomprehensible when it grounds its alien math research on top of its own, not millenia of human's.


Have you tried creating something that doesnt have HUNDREDS of existing implementations on the Web already?

Yes of course. It’s trivially easy to say “procedurally generate a mesh of description of unique shape”. If you can put it into words, the LLM can do it. Do you have any examples of something it can’t do?

Depends on the way you play can be a time sink, or session-like game. It is extremely deep and complex to learn from scratch though.

I've made some of the best friends playing it when I had time, friendship formed out of high stakes in this game (you regularly lose hours of grind or real money if you pay for the game - in seconds) and respect you have for each other skill.


Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?


Yes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.


What is the input to the ML algorithm? Does it know the surrounding context so that it has a chance to deduce "if this stroke is slightly longer then the end result will be idiomatic greek and latin"?


The input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize


Not all machine learning is generative AI.


True but like regular document scanning software there can be errors in detection.


Just as with redacted documents (consistently blocked terms) or bad OCR jobs (wrong or missing characters), even if only a certain percentage comes out unmangled it is more readable than having no data at all.

A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11642687/2449774


The problem is when you can't tell which bits are unmangled. OCR systems will happily give you plausible but wrong readings, and even some scanners/copiers will change things: https://dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are...


Yeah. There was a weird Xerox printer bug that swapped digits (turning 6s into 8s) on scanned documents caused by the JBIG2 image format [1].

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...


How much time do you lose when doing things like "verify plan with a second clean agent" instead of just reading and fixing it yourself in 5 min? How much understanding do you lose? How do you manage to treat it "as an engineer" where it's clearly not there yet? How much time do you lose when it makes almost the same mistake, invents stuff or tries to gaslight you over and over? What about blood pressure?


It's not only CTFs. I strongly believe being a programmer at a gamejam like Ludum Dare, or hackathons is pretty much over.


Ludum Dare 59 just wrapped up last week, and both first and second place were won by developers using "Agentic" coding tools, something the community there is still discussing:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/setidream/about-ai-ar...

For what it's worth, the non-AI-coded entries were still quite good relative to the winners, so it's not so obvious that AI use confers an unbeatable advantage.


I did vibe code jam 59 entry with friends, the spirit of the rules there's a lot more lax. We didn't even get to top 100, but that's mostly due to gamedesign errors, not tech. This is the first entry in years which was vibecoded 100%, and I have very mixed feelings about it. It's no doubt anymore - 1.5x-2x speedup, which makes not using it (if allowed) a complete no-go. But psychologically it's tough losing control, and changing workflow to managerial one substantially, it diminishes the craft.


But how is that less work and allows you to do that in Disneyland with your kids? For me, personally, there is little difference between "speccing out everything in excruciating detail in spec docs" and "writing actual implementation in high-level code". Speccing in detail requires deep thought, whiteboard, experimentation etc. All of this cannot be done in Disneyland, and no AI can do this at good level (that's why you "spec out everything in detail", create "beads" and so on?)


Yes, I normally draft spec docs in the office at my desk, this is true. However, when I have the spec ready for implementation with clear "beads", I can reasonably plan to leave my office and work from my phone. Its not at a point where I can just work 100% remote from my phone (I probably could but this is all still new to me too). But it does give me the option to be vastly more productive, away from my desk.


This is so far from an absolute worst-case scenario.

You could have a codebase subtly broken on so many levels that you cannot fix it without starting from scratch - losing months.

You could slowly lose your ability to think and judge.


I have a feeling this is somehow different. The tool is broad enough, that I don't have to think myself in a wide variety of tasks, not just one. Which hurts my intelligence way more.


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: