IDK man, I was just there for 2 weeks in Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and there were so few publicly accessible trashcans that I started considering photographing the handful I saw (2-3 next to drink vending machines, and one (1) large one in Shinjuku's main luxury-tourism thoroughfare) for their shiny rarity. At one point we were joined by our third member, and we warned them first thing "there are no trash cans in Japan!" and sure enough, about 2 hours later, they were clutching an empty beverage, looking around futilely for somewhere to throw it out...
I was there for a month, a year ago, but this is all just anecdata.
It's well known there isn't an abundance of public rubbish bins, but there are plenty that are adjacent to where you are likely generating rubbish (or recycling) - eg. konbibis.
I suspect spending all your time in the frustratingly tourist-dense triad likely skews your experiences of the country. I haven't been to Kobe, but it's doubtless similarly afflicted, and presumably has responded in a similar way.
Well, if Egan doesn't like it, I am happy to take the PDF down, just as I am with all documents I host. (If Egan hadn't pre-emptively blocked me on Twitter without us ever having interacted, he could have simply DMed me, but a comment here or an email would also work fine.)
As for crediting by name: the formatting is as in the original, and I am not responsible for that; I am responsible for the URL and PDF metadata, both of which credit Greg Egan (as I put a lot of work in setting correct PDF metadata in general to be a good citizen).
I think you are letting your self-interest cloud your view of the situation here, since it is very simple. It is not Greg Egan's job to chase after every person who distributes his work online and ask them to take it down. It is your job, as the would-be publisher, to contact him and obtain permission beforehand.
This is not just what the law requires, it is what ethics and good manners call for. I believe you understand this.
Well, since you seem to imply that Egan is unhappy with it, and I do not want to host such documents against anyone's wishes, I've gone ahead and removed it anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are missing the point. The goal is not to find good ways to do steganography, or get the models to do the best possible steganography. The point is to naturalistically observe their initial impulses towards weak simple cooperative steganography, to try to get an idea of where any 'steganographic left turn' would begin and what it would look like and perhaps how one would go about detecting or preventing it or looking for it out in the wild, etc. OP was perfectly clear about this:
>This could be a precursor to steganography in images. Currently, the act of decoding the hidden messages is still obvious if you monitor the tool calls of the decoding model, so we don't claim it is currently dangerous.
> Amid all this activity, a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence.
The only important prediction Kelly made was a complete rejection of the Singularity.
It is also probably the prediction that sentiment has changed on the most in the direction away from Kelly, since 2016. After a decade of evidence and updating, far more people believe in that view of our AI future now than they did then.
I wasn't thinking of the general public but other groups like AI researchers (cf. surveys) or HN - but alright, how about changes in unpopular sentiments? What group would you propose believes in the Singularity less than they did in 2016? (There are many groups now that believe it in at quite low rates and are highly hostile to the idea, but I would say they were even more hostile to it then.)
When has an ill-informed herd hungry for cash ever been led astray by people waving trillions of dollars in their faces? I for one trust the wisdom of these crowds of highly technical people who clearly understand the inner workings of the systems (both ML and economic) they’re prepared to surrender to.
Mm, most of those sound like they would just add complexity, rather than fun. You find the optimal raking and then a squirrel RNG scampers across the grid? Fluid mechanics can be fun, but I have no idea how I would integrate them...
If you have ideas, you could try vibecoding them and see if they work. The page should be fully self-contained and have everything an agentic LLM could need.
ZPG winds up not being as interesting, I think, because it doesn't figure out how to take the core idea of raking and twist it into more interesting puzzles, which is the classic puzzle approach: find a clean core mechanic, and then escalate on it.
FWIW, I wish you'd spent a few minutes cleaning up the first dozen pages of Claudespeak. You have some human text at the bottom of the post, but first you force your readers to wade through (or skim, or just close the tab) stuff like "Solver experiments show the bare rule is loose" — "is a chore with the shape of a puzzle:" — "test candidate mechanics on thousands of random gardens with an exact solver, a constraint-programming optimizer, and a deductive difficulty grader" — "the only U-turn-free raking among 12 par rakings of 6,310,226. Ripple stones and wave bands, the obvious “pattern” constraints, add texture but not tightness" — ...
You do see how that's all garbage, right? So why not just delete it? Keep the good part, delete the bad part.
The game widget itself takes up 3 pages on mobile, because of all the Claude web design.
... Wait, as I scroll down again in composing this complaint, I realize I'm wrong about there being any human text at all. It's all garbage. This makes me kind of sad for the Gwern we've lost.
> But first you force your readers to wade through (or skim, or just close the tab)
FWIW, I do not force anyone to, because the URL I shared on my Twitter/Substack/Reddit has the '#play' hash-anchor to skip to the prototype game, and leave Claude's writeup for those who care. Take it up with OP if you dislike where they pointed the submission to. I provided the necessary standardized metadata for readers to skip to the part they want (clearly hyperlinked at top), the rest is up to them.
> You do see how that's all garbage, right?
I don't, because that's not true. There's a lot of interesting stuff in just the parts you quote as 'garbage'. For example, I was surprised by the exact solver and constraint optimization that Claude chose to do, which led to some of the more interesting features of the puzzle like the hinting feature or the 'par' challenge (and the existence of multiple solutions but some of which are optimal, and challenging you to reach optimal rakes, is one of the things that distinguishes it most from similar puzzles like 'Cardinal Chains' or ZPG). And this is one reason the title is 'Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle', as opposed to just 'A Zen Garden Raking Puzzle', because Claude/Astra took it in some interesting directions compared to my original proposal, due to their coding and algorithmic prowess. Had it just been me, I probably would've gone for a unique-solution approach like everyone else.
> The game widget itself takes up 3 pages on mobile, because of all the Claude web design.
Not sure what you mean. I just opened it up on my Pixel phone and it looks entirely playable on one screen to me. Are you referring to the level table of contents at the bottom or the poems...? Obviously there's no problem with those taking up more than 1 page because you don't need to consult them to play. (Anyway, I'll note for the record I've been tweaking it since the first uploaded version to streamline the UI/UX a bit based on Said Achmiz's feedback, so the latest version may be more to your taste.)
> This makes me kind of sad for the Gwern we've lost.
I'll fetch the smelling salts, but I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had.
I think that because you made your name through the quality of your writing and the excellence of your web design, an unrefined output like this jeopardizes your brand. Perhaps there should be a link saying, "I didn't have the time to do a full writeup of this, but click this link to show some Claudeslop explaining it in further detail."
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed this submission and looked at it for a while with my son last night. Yes, it's AI-generated, but I think there's quite a bit to extract that's interesting, so I appreciate you posting it.
For what it’s worth, I too was a little surprised and disappointed by the quality of the prose, until I double-checked the url and realised this was more like “a design doc artifact hosted on gwern.net” than “an article posted on gwern.net”.
> I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had.
Just ignore it Gwern.
There is a vocal minority here who like to complain about any output generated by AI as if all writing is some sanctified art form rather than a means of communication.
I love your writings. I also found the AI writeup of the project well structured and easy to read.
> I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had
Seeing a gwern comment get downvoted is a first for me. An odd sight.
I feel like I might have a unique perspective here. I absolutely hate slop, but I've also experimented a lot this year with AI game dev. I was shocked at the negativity (being told snidely to "learn to code" despite having made games for decades).
This seems like a clash of an extremely AI pilled person coming into contact with the often irrational and overwhelming backlash against AI, which is common even on HN these days.
Slop is only an issue is when it's implied to be handwritten. Because then someone is asking me to waste my time reading something they didn't spend time writing. That's not the case here since you've called out the AI contribution, but I bet a lot of people are skimming over it.
The real problem I see here is that Claude often doesn't have a sense of what's interesting. In the 30,000 word write up, I don't see anything particularly new and interesting about the prototype.
I see: using turns as a score, Hamiltonian paths, and a reference to a "wide rake" and "no u-turns" which either I don't understand or doesn't show up until late into the game. If there is something interesting in there, Claude hasn't convinced me of it!
Where the audience starts getting rightly annoyed is an irreverence to the existing prior art and an overestimation of how unique/interesting this prototype is (presumably fueled by discussions with Claude), particularly these statements:
> I came up with the original idea entirely independently [an idea that is predated by 20 years]
> ZPG winds up not being as interesting, I think
Let me state: you've made something neat! I like the concept, I like the heightmap aesthetic. Fwiw, most of my vibe coding experiments were about digging in sand using voxels.
However, people are hypersensitive to anyone easily impressed by AI output while simultaneously downplaying the value of human creativity.
I know we're all shocked that a 1-page web app with the author byline "Gwern, Claude-5.5-opus" (and matching HTML metadata) may have had LLMs involved; good work by Pangram there exposing the imposture.
This has been a perennial problem with my own generated comics with both Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT (all generations). I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature. It is annoying and I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.
Despite what all the clickwrap warnings and "AI can make mistakes" subtitles might lead you to believe, the service offering of AI is explicitly designed to be as "one and done" as possible. The inherent nature of these tools is to service laziness, and disincentivize too much scrutiny.
I am not reading that. XKCD, one of the most popular web comics of all time, is STILL stick figures. There's no excuse not to make the entire thing yours.
> I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature.
Given that they can reliably do this, I'd think it should be trivial for the harness to automatically insert a "review the image for anything that looks like an artist's signature or other blatant indicator of plagiarism, and fix it" pass.
Yes, but that could double the cost by default! Which is probably why they don't. On reflection, coding bots do implement something like this with the verification tic they seem to have.
And then people wonder why the default mood of AI is so pessimistic. It's just revealing all of society's broken windows and adding a few more in the process.
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