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Using an expensive AI model to run a textual version of a game made for a portable console that came out 2 decades ago is some dystopian shit.

scrollaway 4y ago
Why?
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I don't know if I agree that it's "dystopian" but I do somewhat feel it's strange to be "wasting" the massive amount of compute that GPT4 has in order to play a text based version of a Pokemon game that ran on a Gameboy Advance decades ago. It's just funny our priorities with this stuff.
  - minimaxir 4y ago
    Nothing in the original thread asserts that this is more than an intellectual curiosity, which is the ethos of Hacker News. GPT-4 is not going to replace emulating GBA games.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    “Write my civil war essay” “Write a poem about farts” “Write a JavaScript wrapper for this API” 99% of the usage is a “waste”. Who cares. Some of us are poking around to find that other 1% and some of us are just entertaining ourselves.
    - anthk 4y ago
      If you think about it... people has been emulating the GBA and Pokémon itself on book sized machines faster than a Cray back in the day.
  - dangond 4y ago
    Oh it is absolutely a waste of compute practically speaking. I just find it incredibly interesting that it's even possible for GPT to convincingly recreate many aspects of the original game, including the rules about what is and is not possible at various points, and I haven't seen many others exploring in this direction. I'm very curious as to what Pokemon-simulation-adjacent things GPT is capable of.
  - anthk 4y ago
    The 90% of the tecnology used in the internet and even in your pocket was born because some guys wanted to play Space War under a PDP-8 machine with no OS. The technology to draw "widgets" in your Unix console was born to play computer games depending on them.
  - ricardolopes 4y ago
    Do you believe the amount of time developers have spent building hello worlds is a waste because those are useless applications? Should go without saying, but the interesting thing about this thread is not that you can now play a flawed text version of an old game. It's that this example toy use case manages to explore the new capabilities and limitations of this new promising tool. This improves our understanding of this technology, and helps us make better use of it in the future, for more productive and innovative applications that we may not be able to predict yet at this point.
- sockaddr 4y ago
  Because they live in a future where they don't know what dystopian means
rationalist 4y ago
Consider that you're using an even more expensive network to share your comment.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Depends on how you measure it. Per request the comment is thousands of times cheaper.
anthk 4y ago
The OS being shipped for lots of firewalls and the base of OpenSSH still ships today games in base such as a near 50 year old text adventure inside a cave, tetris, an air trafic controller sim, an RPG and a crude MMORPG, among others such as monopoly, mille or boggle. Not so weird. Nerds have been playing with computers and making games for them since early ages.
userbinator 4y ago
I wouldn't call it dystopian, but merely the next level in inefficiency, somewhat like Super Mario as an Electron App and other similar amusements that have made it here on HN.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
snickerbockers 4y ago
You don't like Pokemon?

scrollaway 4y ago

Why?

bluefirebrand 4y ago
I don't know if I agree that it's "dystopian" but I do somewhat feel it's strange to be "wasting" the massive amount of compute that GPT4 has in order to play a text based version of a Pokemon game that ran on a Gameboy Advance decades ago. It's just funny our priorities with this stuff.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Nothing in the original thread asserts that this is more than an intellectual curiosity, which is the ethos of Hacker News. GPT-4 is not going to replace emulating GBA games.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  “Write my civil war essay” “Write a poem about farts” “Write a JavaScript wrapper for this API” 99% of the usage is a “waste”. Who cares. Some of us are poking around to find that other 1% and some of us are just entertaining ourselves.
  - anthk 4y ago
    If you think about it... people has been emulating the GBA and Pokémon itself on book sized machines faster than a Cray back in the day.
- dangond 4y ago
  Oh it is absolutely a waste of compute practically speaking. I just find it incredibly interesting that it's even possible for GPT to convincingly recreate many aspects of the original game, including the rules about what is and is not possible at various points, and I haven't seen many others exploring in this direction. I'm very curious as to what Pokemon-simulation-adjacent things GPT is capable of.
- anthk 4y ago
  The 90% of the tecnology used in the internet and even in your pocket was born because some guys wanted to play Space War under a PDP-8 machine with no OS. The technology to draw "widgets" in your Unix console was born to play computer games depending on them.
- ricardolopes 4y ago
  Do you believe the amount of time developers have spent building hello worlds is a waste because those are useless applications? Should go without saying, but the interesting thing about this thread is not that you can now play a flawed text version of an old game. It's that this example toy use case manages to explore the new capabilities and limitations of this new promising tool. This improves our understanding of this technology, and helps us make better use of it in the future, for more productive and innovative applications that we may not be able to predict yet at this point.
sockaddr 4y ago
Because they live in a future where they don't know what dystopian means

rationalist 4y ago

Consider that you're using an even more expensive network to share your comment.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Depends on how you measure it. Per request the comment is thousands of times cheaper.

anthk 4y ago

The OS being shipped for lots of firewalls and the base of OpenSSH still ships today games in base such as a near 50 year old text adventure inside a cave, tetris, an air trafic controller sim, an RPG and a crude MMORPG, among others such as monopoly, mille or boggle. Not so weird. Nerds have been playing with computers and making games for them since early ages.

userbinator 4y ago

I wouldn't call it dystopian, but merely the next level in inefficiency, somewhat like Super Mario as an Electron App and other similar amusements that have made it here on HN.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

snickerbockers 4y ago

You don't like Pokemon?