Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
So they had the new Claude hooked up to some tools so that it could play Pokemon red. Somewhat impressive (at least to me!) It was able to beat lt surge after several days of play. They had a stream demoāing it on twitch and despite the on paper result of getting 3 gym badges, poor fellas got stuck in Viridian forest trying to find the exit to the maze.
As far as finding the exit goesā¦ I guess you could say he was stumped? (MODS PLEASE DONT BAN)
strim if anyone is curious. Yes, i know this is clever advertising for anthropic, but i do find it cute and maybe someone else will?
https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon
It looks fun!
My inner grouch wanted to add:
There were a metric shit ton of hand-crafted, artisanal, exhaustive full-text walkthroughs for the OG Pokemon games even twenty years ago. Theyāre all part of the training corpus, so all you have to do to make this work is automate prompt generation based on current state and then capture the most likely key words in the LLMās outputs for conversion to game commands. Plus, a lot of āintelligenceā could be hiding in the invisible āglueā that ties the whole together, up to and including an Actual Individual.
Iād be shocked if this worked for a 2025 release
I had a similar disc with one of my friends! Anthropic is bragging that the model was not trained to play pokemon, but pokemon red has massive wikis for speed running that based on the reasoning traces are clearly in the training data. Like the model trace said it was ātraining a nidoran to level 12 b.c. at level 12 nidoran learns double kick which will help against brockās rock type pokemonā, so itās not going totally blind in the game. There was also a couple outputs when it got stuck for several hours where it started printing things like āBased on the hintā¦ā which seemed kind of sus. I wouldnāt be surprised if it there is some additional hand holding going on in the back based on the game state (i.e., go to oaks, get a starter, go north to viridian, etc.) that help guide the model. In fact, Iād be surprised if this wasnāt the case.