7 ms·
You are lucky, full moon tonight
- frogulis 2y agohttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793930355617259811.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793930355617259811.html
- metadat 2y agoThanks, multi-part Twitter links are now held hostage behind a registration wall, making them unreadable and lost for most.
- aorloff 2y agoFediverse is now integrated with Threads, and Threads is bigger than Twitter. With any luck, Fediverse becomes the open source, Threads kills X, and news media continues to die the same slow death it would have anyway. If you haven't noticed, the kids don't read, they like to watch.
- metadat 2y agoI don't use any of that. Still waiting for a twitter equivalent without the political drama. Don't need fediverse complexity and confusion my friends and family can't understand.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- emsign 2y agoThank you
- 38 2y ago[flagged]
- mproud 2y agoI’ll take it over X.com
- Arrath 2y agoNot being logged in, Twitter is hostile and/or broken and only ever displays a single tweet at once, no threads and no replies. I'll take thread reader with an ad blocker over that.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- dietr1ch 2y agoThey can add more crap and it'd still be way better than getting a login page for a site you no longer have an account for.
- GeoAtreides 2y agoWhy is metadat's comment flagged and dead? It seems like a perfectly fine comment to me: "Thanks, multi-part Twitter links are now held hostage behind a registration wall, making them unreadable and lost for most."
- kybernetikos 2y agoThanks, this story would otherwise have been unreadable for me. Bit of a difference from the recent mastodon thread about writing a unix https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/112319697309218275 https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/112319697309218275 I wish people would stop using twitter as the prime host for these kinds of things.
- ghnws 2y agoThank you. Unbeliveable that twitter is apparently the best place to post these "long" stories...
- fsmv 2y agoBut it's literally not a bug at all it's a weird feature in the game they're doing machine learning on
- peddling-brink 2y agoThe bug is in their model and codes reaction to unexpected behavior. I don’t think the author is postulating that the game or lunar cycle has the bug.
- Steuard 2y agoI guess I'm not entirely clear on the background/context here. I gather that the tweet's author isn't a serious Nethack player himself, but he is trying to train a neural net to play the game, and his training system somehow takes a model created by someone else as a baseline and tries to fine tune it somehow? But despite Nethack being based on randomly generated dungeons, the other model gets a consistent score every time, somehow? But even though the reference system reliably gets the same score through all the randomization of the dungeon, the game's full moon mechanic somehow throws it off significantly. I feel like I mostly understand most of the pieces of this story when taken individually, but I'm having trouble assembling most of them into a coherent whole.
- recursivecaveat 2y agoThe score they're reporting is almost definitely the average over a set of fixed seeds I imagine. They just didn't realize that the seed is not sufficient to establish the play experience, the system clock is a factor too.
- CJefferson 2y agoI don't know exactly about this case, but when training models like this I tend to fix a small set, or even just one, seeds to use as a baseline 'quality measure' -- while this has the risk of over-tuning, always measuring quality using random seeds means you can misjudge a model's quality because you get particularly lucky, or unlucky, seeds. However (and again I've hit this), sometimes you don't fix everything enough, and still have some unexpected variation, like in this case.
- EdwardDiego 2y agoTheir model is trained only on runs it has seen before which didn't include sufficient full moon runs. So its performance degraded when it encountered a sufficiently novel variant. Which is where the I part of AI always falls down, input that sufficiently differs. E.g., train facial recognition on a corpus of predominately white American faces, African Americans suffer a horribly high false positive rate when the cops use your model on surveillance footage.
- colordrops 2y agoPretty fun story, but not that mindblowing or weird. If a piece of software takes unpredictable inputs like time and date, it's a relatively obvious source of nondeterminism. It's not common in games which is why they were befuddled for so long. But their environment was hardly hermetically sealed it seems.
- cdchn 2y agoMaking the system clock always be the same is the ultimate is hermeticity.
- iiio8 2y agoHm, but that clock likely seeds the PRNG used to create the gameplay. If that was always the same then the whole exercise would be pretty boring. So their experiments purposely vary the time. It's just that for some input value, the thing they are running dramatically (well...) differs from other times, and the model wasn't expecting that, nor were the authors.
- ufo 2y agoBy the way, don't forget to appreciate the full moon tonight. It is no coincidence that this got posted today. :)
- mmsc 2y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but didn't a friend of mine fisted/fstd/Timo "solve" this game years ago and make a bot to raep the highscore? Not saying that this isn't a cool project and information, but my understanding is that the game has bugs/"working as intended" which allow anyone to basically auto click to rack up thousands of points. P.S Timo if you're reading this I love you with all my collection))) <3
- omoikane 2y agoI remember reading about a bot that completed a NetHack ascension speedrun by hacking the random number generator, but it's probably not the one you were thinking of: https://pellsson.github.io/ https://pellsson.github.io/
- dskloet 2y agoWhy spoil the punch line in the title?
- peddling-brink 2y agoIt wasn’t spoiled unless you already knew that particular fact.
- klyrs 2y agoEvery damned time a computer scientist approaches the problems of an unfamiliar discipline, I swear.
- cperciva 2y agoRelated story for people who haven't heard about it: At one point CERN had problems which seemed to be related to the phase of the moon. After much head scratching, it turned out that the problem -- with an underground particle accelerator -- was indeed related to the moon phase, since the moon's gravitational pull was deforming the path of the particle beam.
- p4bl0 2y agoGenuine question: how does the moon phase influence its gravity effect?
- schrectacular 2y agoI'm guessing it's more to do with the interaction of the gravitational vectors of sun and moon. During a half-moon it is pulling at a right angle to the sun, during a new-moon with the sun, and during a full-moon against the sun.
- cgriswald 2y agoWhen the moon is full it is opposite the sun and reduces the effect of the sun’s gravity. When it is new it is in the same direction as the sun and increases the pull toward the sun.
- p51-remorse 2y agoProbably the same cause of tide supercycles - when moon and sun line up, the pull is additive. When they oppose, the moon detracts from the sun’s pull by a bit. Writing that out I’m not sure it makes sense, but someone smarter will be along to correct me shortly.
- andresgottlieb 2y agoI guess they probably meant moon position in orbit, in general
- robocat 2y agoI've heard the same story about a telephone line in Marlborough: back in the black&white analogue times. The story being that king tides were getting a connection wet near the shore and causing problems.
- emsign 2y agoPeople on X don't realize people can't read their stories if they're not logged in? I hope this cancer called X finally dies.
- cgriswald 2y agoTiktok has stopped allowing me to view videos when not registered and logged in. I only view them when they are sent to me. I’m never going to register but they’ve made it less useful to the registered people who send me links.
- hunter2_ 2y agoI want to agree, except that I believe when people authenticate to a particular site and post something, they're only really concerned with readership by other people who authenticate to that same site. Like if I have a car problem and post about it on a car forum, the ability for anonymous users to read my post is of little concern because they're not nearly as likely to reply to me as someone who's already logged in. If my goal was to spread information more widely instead of soliciting in-band participation, then in that specific scenario yes of course I need to find some other way to do that, but I don't think that's a typical goal with sites that strongly favor authentication; the goal is to get likes, replies, and so forth.
- sureglymop 2y agoWhy shouldn't they instead just get the ability to control that? Give them options to set who can or can't see their content.
- p4bl0 2y agoI submitted this link yesterday, I hesitated on the title because the nethack reference would have been a good one but decided against it to avoid spoiling the bug, but as a result it didn't get traction. Too bad for HN readers that the title which worked here is the one with the spoiler! Still a fun story though, glad it made it to the front page one way or another :).
- cdchn 2y agoThey mention something called Singularity which makes their environment "one file". That sounded kind of interesting but totally ungoogleable just based on the name.
- __lm__ 2y agoSingularity (now called Apptainer - https://apptainer.org/ https://apptainer.org/) is a container system generally used in HPC environments that has some nice features, like having your container as single .sif file, automatically mounting your home directory, using the same user inside and outside the container, and the ability to import from the docker registry. The approach is less about isolation and more about “packaging up” an entire environment in a easy-to-use way.
- cdchn 2y agoAhh thats what I was hoping to see. Thanks!
- neilv 2y ago"Full moon" (or "phase of moon") used to be right up there with "solar flares", as a joke explanation for a computer system problem.
- robocat 2y agoWhat do you blame your heisenbugs on now?
- neilv 2y agoLooks like we still have a few good explanations in reserve: https://gist.github.com/chuckwagoncomputing/ff980f81482b5894c824 https://gist.github.com/chuckwagoncomputing/ff980f81482b5894...
- taneq 2y agoEMI (Edit: electromagnetic interference) mostly. :D Or poor cable terminations.
- 23B1 2y agoLLM autophagy
- CGamesPlay 2y agoA few years ago I added these banners to my shell prompt. It shows like the MOTD when opening a terminal on a full moon, new moon, or Friday the 13th (these are the special dates used in Nethack). https://github.com/CGamesPlay/dotfiles/blob/master/files/.config/fish/functions/fish_greeting.fish https://github.com/CGamesPlay/dotfiles/blob/master/files/.co...
- iiio8 2y agoSo the bug is in ... their deterministic execution environment not stubbing out the current time, so that different runs are not actually deterministic but dependent on that non-deterministic input called the clock. Well, and that they are side-loading some library which can change.
- rvnx 2y agoTL;DR: "NetHack is a game where real-world date and time can affect the game" https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Time https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Time like Animal Crossing, Pokemon, The Sims, Stardew Valley, World of Warcraft, Terraria, etc.
- huhuhu111 2y ago[dead]