I think LLMs in particular would actually not be good at a lot of Zachtronics games. They often involve spatial reasoning which LLMs are incredibly poor at. A more bespoke, specially trained model might be able to do well, but would represent a vanishingly small portion of leaderboard submissions - you only get one submission per user.
I'd say regardless of how fit an LLM is for these games, we can more or less assume people will be able to point an LLM at a puzzle game, and have it outperform humans some time in the near future. And naturally, there'll be people who send their agents to min-max the leaderboards.
I'm personally not sure to what extent it's interesting to see what AI accomplished on this level, as compared to what we see now: within some reasonable time bound, what were other players able to come up with, and am I missing something obvious? (where mass of players on a lower score suggests they found some simple solution)
I think looking up level solutions may also get replaced with asking your agent to solve it, or to nudge you, but I don't think that'll warp the leaderboards as much.
SponsorBlock was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the article title! Thank you for both of these extensions, they’re almost as important as uBlock for my experience of the web.
The last few weeks have made me feel very good about my policy of zero internet-accessible ssh ports, ever. On AWS, use SSM. For a VPS or home server, access everything over WireGuard.
Such solutions always felt like swapping one risk for another. With good separation (running the VPN on a separate host from the SSH login, otherwise a bug in the VPN solution still might result in a shell on the box), at best you'd need two vulnerabilities before someone gets in, but it's not fundamentally different unless you find a way simpler protocol where you can be more certain that it's secure than ssh is (for all its scrutiny and track record of no pre-auth bugs for decades)
Putting services behind ssh forwarding was the way to secure something you're worried about rather than the other way around, but Wireguard actually makes a good argument nowadays. Iirc they did proofs for the cryptography and it has good design in terms of attack surface, and it's old/mature enough now that I'll say it's probably better than exposing SSH. On the other hand, when this thing running in your kernel gets compromised, you're slightly worse off than with someone logging into a passwordless service account as in the current bug
One thing that makes me feel a lot more confident about exposing a WireGuard port is it’s completely invisible unless you have the host’s public key. Nothing will show up on a port scan.
Its security model doesn’t rely on that fact of course, but it’s the cherry on top.
On a lot of London Underground lines, 5 minutes is considered poor service in rush hour. Every 2 minutes is required to handle the sheer volume of passengers
Just because you personally can't spot it, doesn't mean other people can't. There are a lot of very clear tells of AI writing, and this site is full of them.
Count yourself lucky that you haven't read enough LLM generated text to spot these. Each one individually might not be a clear signal, but all together it's extremely obvious.
> Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale
> Real mountains. Real valleys. All of it walkable.
> Every block is one metre
> Every block is one metre
> Your browser loads the aerial image directly from swisstopo, only once you move the slider
> If it runs on your computer, all of Switzerland will too.
> the game builds the distant view itself on first launch
> the game builds the blocks from the world package
> You pay for the licence to the world package, the world calculated from geodata
> The world, however, fills the whole rectangle around Switzerland, including parts of the neighbouring countries
> the world is built by a program from open data, not by hand
I have been playing Zelda games since the late 80s. I have never felt the need to try to weave a cohesive timeline out of the entire series.
Instead, I view the games as a combination of re-imaginings and direct sequels. However, the games really are not story-driven enough to care which one is which. Any of the games can be played standalone or in any order, and it doesn't matter.
In my view, the story of these games is mostly a pretext and the real reason is the gameplay. Some of the games lean a bit harder into the story angles, and they really suffer for it (too many cutscenes make those games frustrating to play).
I feel this way too. A huge trend in general I have noticed with younger generations, as gaming has modernized and matured, is the overall importance of story and cohesion. Plumber fell in a pipe and discovered weirdness was all we needed. I don’t play a lot these days but when I do I still just tend to skip over the story part or get annoyed when it won’t let me.
I don't consider it canon when a different group of people decades later make a timeline, just because they happen to work for the same company. It might as well be fanfic.
There is a 2003 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that suggests an "enormous" timeline document existed since at least 2002 and they took it into account when writing Wind Waker if not earlier games[1]:
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
You'd have an understandable point for a western company who likely had a revolving door of key developers and leadershhip. But Japanese companies have pretty high retention rates, and Nintendo has some of the highest of all Japanese companies, period. Not just in games.
So in this case, I imagine almost all the writing staff present for Zelda in 1986 were present to establish such a timeline some 15 years later. And much of them were probably still around 20 years after that working on the upcoming remake. I'm truly envious.
It's a fair point, but Nintendo is the only entity that can decide canonicity, and retconning continuity is far from uncommon especially when a franchise transitions from being a single entry to multiple installments.
Nintendo just never did that until the speculation about the topic became noticeable enough that they felt they had to address it (at which point everything was so inconsistent that only the timeline split could reconcile it). And even then, the unified timeline was published years before BoTW, and it adds the wrinkle that... (waves hands) all of the timelines sort of became the same thing.
That sort of hand waving is unavoidable as BoTW has elements from all three of the timelines, it literally cannot be on one of the three legs-- and if it's not, the only other logical place it would fit is before Skyward Sword (meaning an entirely separate ancient founding of Hyrule) or just after the Imprisoning War which would butt up against A Link To The Past. But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Never mind the strange notion that a fish people evolved into bird people under the pressure of a worldwide flood... you'd think that wouldn't be necessary or helpful, but hey, Zelda's weird.
Haha yes-- in this case for BoTW to be at the beginning of the timeline, the Rito wouldn't exist yet, as they are only present in Wind Waker and beyond, not that it's impossible for both to exist.
The Rito are fundamentally different though, right? WW Rito are humans with bird beaks, but BotW/TotK Rito are actual birds in humanoid stature. Personally I always assumed they were Loftwings that became sentient.
I mean it's not like it's a different group of people now. Out of the development team for the original game, only one person definitely doesn't work at Nintendo anymore (Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo CEO that retired in 2002 and died in 2013), and possibly I. Marui (who doesn't have much info online in general). And Eiji Aonuma has been producer since Ocarina of Time in 1998.
So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.
Just to add to your point, I’ve deliberately avoided home-assistant since this kerfuffle where frenck was quite rude to the NixOS maintainers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
I avoided HA due to some technical issues published and the further development, but that quote absolutely cemented the decision in me:
> It made me decide to request for complete removal.
> I suggest you honor that request and sit on your wounds.
What a.... colourful persona! I wonder if he was alluding to the potential and baseless C&D request or his opinion that one person's wish revokes MIT licence just because.
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