What does any of this have to do with LLMs?

I mean I agree with the conclusion but the confused people here are… people. I think if you ask an LLM about the “common name Rach,” it’ll also tell you that you probably mean Rachel.

I believe you didn’t intend to, but you did claim it, twice. Hence why the commenter I initially replied to (in which I guessed you meant the common _nick_name) was confused.

Then you replied to me saying “it’s literally from the bible [so it’s a common name]” implying that you disagreed with me about it being a nickname and you did really mean it as a given name.

Hopefully that explains the confusion.

Rachel is a very common given name. “Rach” is a fairly common nickname for it. “Rach” is not a common given name. (This matches what I said above.)

I just took a look at some baby name sites to try and find some statistics. I actually can’t find a single person named “Rach” because all the sites assume I want statistics for the long form, even when I’m on the page for “Rach” and they also have a page for “Rachel.” I’m interpreting this as being given the short form as your name is extremely rare.

Given that OP says this is a common English name (it’s not), I have to imagine that they’re referring to the common short form of Rachel. Pronounced as just the first syllable.

The LLM in the most recent case had a monumental amount of context. I then gave it a file implementing a breed of hash set, asked it to explain several of the functions which it did correctly, and then asked it to convert it to a hash map implementation (an entirely trivial, grunt change, but which is too pervasive and functionality-directed for an IDE to have a neat function for this).

It spat out the source code of the tree-based map implementation in the standard library.

I’ve only tried a handful of times, but I’ve never been able to get an LLM to do a grunt refactoring task that didn’t require me to rewrite all the output again anyway.

Did you play on original PS2? The game was computationally a bit ahead of its time and the hardware wasn’t capable enough to run it smoothly. The resulting lag and stuttering could make some really weird things happen, and I remember some people saying if the console was struggling more than usual (overheating etc) it could become impossible to properly play in some areas.

If you still own a copy, try emulating it to on a modern PC instead. PCSX2 does some wild stuff internally and can emulate PS2 code on a modern system faster than it ran on the PS2. SOTC is actually a pretty common performance benchmark. As long as you don’t try to use the emulator’s graphics upscaling (which increases computational load a ton) it runs much better than on console.

This is definitely true for code but in terms of information retrieval and explaining complex topics, they have gotten much better in the sense that they can cite real sources (with links) now.

The analysis and synthesis that they do of those sources is still often bogus though. I’ve had one explain some simple Magic the Gathering rules with real-looking words but completely bogus interpretations and conclusions, but it did cite the correct rulebook with a link. I’ve also had one give a pretty strong overview of the construction and underlying theory of a particular compiler (a specific compiler, not the language it compiles) that matches up quite well with my own fairly deep understanding of that compiler.

Overall the real information is better, but the hallucinations look more real too. And they’re still pretty unhelpful for programming in my experience.

On my menu it does say original next to one of them, but tapping on the options (any of the options) doesn’t do anything. My phone is set to french because I’m an immigrant in a french-speaking region and am making sure to engage with the language as much as possible. But this means the autodub puts a stupid robo-french voice on everything – and it’s not always a faithful translation either.

At this point I just let the creators know that YouTube is making their videos unwatchable to people with different language settings and that they can disable this when they upload videos.

I’d argue that the resulting tragedy is the moron’s fault in all of the ways that matter. The things the post are “warning” about are still alarmism.

“quantum teleportation” is the correct technical term. The problem is articles being written by people who don’t realize this is a technical term that needs explanation.

Which, to be fair, is also derived from a word which would be most accurately (with English vowels) pronounced as mah-nuh. Although at this point “manna” is definitively also a word of English whose correct pronunciation is with /æ/.

Most recently, KeyWe and modded Keep Talking with friends. Solo, still ol’ reliable slay the spire.

I have a plan to teach someone how to play schnapsen and crazyhouse chess tomorrow so that’s exciting.

I find there’s a lot less variety in my monster train runs. Most classes have a distinctly best strategy and the artifacts generally also funnel you towards that strategy. For example, I can’t remember the last time I played an Umbra run that didn’t set up a morsel engine behind a warden or alloyed construct - as far as I’m concerned, those are the same strategy, it doesn’t feel different. The only other build I think is viable is just “play Shadowsiege,” which rarely happens early enough to build for it.

Every class in STS has at least three viable archetypes and almost every run within those archetypes still feels different to me.

I almost exclusively play for A20 heart kills. I play all 4 classes but in a “whichever I feel like today” way. I tried rotating between the characters for a while and really didn’t enjoy playing silent or watcher while in the wrong mood for those classes.

My favorite deck in recent memory was probably a silent discard combo with Grand Finale as the only damage-dealing card in the deck. My favorite archetype in general is probably ice defect. A good all-you-can-eat ironclad run is great too.

I don’t think I agree that STS is especially well balanced - some regular hallway combats do irrationally more damage on average even to players much better than me (for example, floor one jaw worms or any act 3 darklings). In general, the game could be quite a bit harder on A20 and still be fun for players who want a challenge. It’s also weird to me that A1 makes the game easier compared to A0. Between the classes, there is a class which is clearly stronger than the others. However I also don’t think this is a bad thing. Imbalances create more opportunities for new experiences, and for different kinds of players to have different kinds of fun. And that certainly agrees with “infinite replayability.” I’m sure in 5 years’ time I will still be seeing interactions I’ve never seen before.

Second Shadow of the Colossus. The moments where you can just sit and look, coupled with the soundtrack, are some of the best in gaming history. Plus that bit of tension knowing what you’re about to get into…

Not only is tunic beautiful; the experience is amazing. It’s even better if you try to solve the main optional puzzle as you go.

Definitely agree that it’s one of the best.

I’ve used it to fix regressions, most recently in a register allocator for a compiler. There’s pretty much no chance I would’ve found that particular bug otherwise; it was caused by an innocuous change (one of those “this shouldn’t matter” things) clashing badly with an incorrect assumption baked into a completely different part of the allocator.

I had seen the same effect from an unrelated bug on a different program. When I added a new test and saw the same effect, I had a “didn’t I fix this already?” moment. When I saw that the previous fix was still there, I checked if an older version of the allocator exhibited the same bug on the new test, and it did not. Bisecting found the offending change relatively quickly and further conventional testing exposed the incorrect assumption.

Learning how to program in any language will make it easier to pick up any other language, because the main burden for a beginner is how to think programmatically. However once you’re enough past that wall, being an expert on one language will mostly only help pick up languages that are similar. So if you knew C++, you could pick up the syntax and probably most of the semantics of the others very quickly, because they are similar in that regard. But you’d still probably struggle to actually program in C, because C is lower level (has way fewer features) than C++.

Technically speaking, C is a subset of C++. But that doesn’t mean being a good C++ programmer automatically makes you a good C programmer.

C# is similar to the other two in syntax as well, but it’s much more like Java than either of them.

If you want to make simpler games, you could start with scratch or stencyl. These tools aren’t really programming languages per se but they let you build programs out of blocks that are much easier to visualize and play around with. There’s some research that suggests they are good entry languages and some research that suggests they aren’t, so ymmv. I’ve used both, but I knew how to program already.

For the record you shouldn’t let “usually made with” drive your decisions. Java is still popular for some games. Slay the spire, a very popular deck building game, was written in Java, which is a decently popular choice if you want to support modding. But C++ and C# are more popular simply because that’s what you use if you’re using engines like unity or unreal.

side note: C, C++, and C# are all different languages.