Patch Notes #9
Some actual game stuff, enshittification, bugfixes, and performance improvements
My friend Drew made runner, a non-combat, movement-focused roguelike for the 7DRL challenge where you make a roguelike in seven days. I helped ever so slightly by “asking him probing questions” throughout the design. You can play it here.
Yes it is all ASCII art—seven days is not a lot of time. The Ship of Theseus is a “thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced.” The original example asks if you slowly replace all the components (planks, masts, etc) of a ship over time, once all the pieces are no longer original, is it still the same ship?
Ok that’s all you need to know to appreciate this (h/t Lee):
Super Mario Maker 1 was released back in 2015, and let users create custom Mario levels for others to play. As a creator, you had to beat your own level to prove it was beatable in order to upload it, but many levels (around 41,000+ as of February 2023) were so hard that they were never cleared. Nine years later, the Super Mario Maker 1 servers are getting shut down April 8,1 resulting in the deletion of all user-generated maps, and so the community has been racing to beat all remaining “uncleared” maps (maps that have never been beaten by anyone besides the original uploader). Over the last several months, Team 0% has been whittling away at the list, and this week they completed their task.
red: remaining levels to clear, green: clears on that day (source) But since this is gaming, it of course was not without a little drama.
It turns out the very last level the team tried (and failed) to clear for a week (titled “Trimming the Herbs”) was actually an “illegal” level. It was only beaten by its creator when uploading via the use of a bot—a TAS or tool-assisted speedrun that lets a user program a perfectly precise set of inputs. While it’s theoretically possible for a human to perform the same sequence of inputs, it is usually practically impossible to execute consistently, making the level practically impossible.
In the end after 280,000 failed attempts, the original level creator Ahoyo decided to come clean. And so in a sort of anti-climactic fashion, Team 0% had actually finished fully clearing the game a week earlier when the beat what they thought was the penultimate level before Trimming the Herbs.
Here’s a video of the TAS clear Ahoyo uploaded when he created the level:The story is not quite over though as even though Trimming the Herbs was revealed to be illegal, players are still trying to beat the level manually for the ultimate cred before the servers shut down.2 (h/t Doug)
In crypto-land memecoins have been on the rise again for the past couple of months, particularly on Solana. Here is a memecoin, $ALBEMARLE, which appears to be LARPing as an official coin of the small town of Albemarle, North Carolina. Their Twitter/X page features a mix of seemingly real reposts of actual content from the town, and maybe completely made up stuff? The coin has a market cap of $1.8M, and I can not explain any of it except to say that I no longer think any of it is weird, and that we should just get used to it. (h/t Andrew)
Authors ‘excluded from Hugo awards over China concerns’ (The Guardian):
Leaked emails from the organisers of the prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy suggest several authors were excluded from shortlists last year after they were flagged for comments or works that could be viewed as sensitive in China.
In January the Hugo awards published the statistics behind the 2023 awards, which were held as part of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in the Chinese city of Chengdu in October. The data showed that the New York Times bestseller RF Kuang and the young adult author Xiran Jay Zhao were among authors who had received enough nominations to be on the ballot in their respective categories but were deemed “not eligible” by the award’s administrators, without further explanation.
I’ve only read The Poppy War trilogy by RF Kuang, but based on that series at least, I’m extremely surprised that they would leave her out due to China concerns? The series is basically a fantasy retelling of the Sino-Japanese War with obvious stand-ins for the Japanese (the “Mugenese”) and the British (the “Hesperians”), neither of which are treated favorably in the book. I wonder if the Hugo admins simply omitted her because it dealt with China at all, versus having some particular anti-Chinese message. Either way, not great!
Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI:
The fact that OpenAI was both honestly worried about negative effects, and at the same time didn’t predict the enshittification of the internet they spearheaded, should make us extremely worried they will continue to miss the negative downstream effects of their increasingly intelligent models. They failed to foresee the floating mounds of clickbait garbage, the synthetic info-trash cities, all to collect clicks and eyeballs—even from innocent children who don’t know any better.
While I think the problems and risks listed here are all very real (and more relevant than p(doom) AGI risks), I think the author’s ire is misguided. We had plenty of clickbait headlines and content farm sites designed optimized for Google SEO long before OpenAI. Enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow before the AI craze really took hold, and the original piece doesn’t mention AI at all. AI certainly makes it easier to enshittify the web, but the structural causes of things getting… shittier… already exist. The truth is, if you were paying attention, the internet was getting shitty already—maybe AI will force us to reevaluate how things work.
Placing blame for enshittification aside, there seems to be a recent feeling that technology should be inherently good, and that something has gone seriously wrong for us to find ourselves where we are with AI.3 This feels misguided. Technology has always been amoral—we built the first computers to model the hydrogen bomb. The internet started as a defense project. Will AI have costs? Yes. Will AI do nothing “good” for the world? I would not take that bet.
The sequel, Super Mario Maker 2 was released in 2019 and is still running
This video was recorded on March 19th before Trimming the Herbs was outed as illegal, but if you want to watch three and a half hours of a player (who is extremely good at Mario) fail repeatedly at the level, then here you go.
Here’s the final paragraph from the piece:
Luckily we’re on the cusp of all that incredibly futuristic technology promised by AI. Any day now, our GDP will start to rocket forward. In fact, soon we’ll cure all disease, even aging itself, and have robot butlers and Universal Basic Income and high-definition personalized entertainment. Who cares if toddlers had to watch inhuman runoff for a few billion years of viewing-time to make the future happen? It was all worth it. Right? Let’s wait a little bit longer. If we wait just a little longer utopia will surely come.