Posting this in light of Sergey Brin’s Stanford comments last week about Google under-investing after publishing the Transformer paper. Not just in scaling compute, but in actually turning that invention into first-class LLM products.
I revisited a 2015 radio interview I did (months before OpenAI existed) where I tried to reason about AI as “high-level algebra.” I didn’t have today’s vocabulary, but the underlying intuition—intelligence as inference over math and incentives—ends up looking surprisingly close to how LLMs actually work.
Curious which parts people think aged well vs. clearly wrong.
It's not leaked. It was posted publicly to YouTube, which is where I watched it. It was the first or second video in my recommended feed. I even left a comment, "Thank you, Stanford, for uploading this talk for us." which Stanford put a heart on, pinning it to the top of the YouTube comments: https://i.imgur.com/LSi6mqN.png
It was a good talk on a technical level. My guess is he ran into trouble when he briefly criticized modern Google's corporate culture when it comes to work-from-home?
The main thing is the funny anecdote about Lua that I shared over there. I'll post it here too. We used Lua for all of the visual programming for the music tracks. This was not allowed by the 2008 App Store policies. We decided to just rename all our .lua files as .cfg (.config?) to obfuscate our rule bending. After the app blew up in popularity, Apple eventually reversed course on this rule.
Seeing the creative ways developers got around Apple's rules, which were even crazier back then, was interesting. I recall downloading HandyLight, a supposed app that lit up your screen in different colours... that was actually a secret mobile hotspot app that allowed wifi tethering before Apple did. Everyone had to scramble to download it in the narrow slice of time between word getting out what it did, and Apple removing it.
I had fun Jailbreaking too and installing Cycorder so I could record video on my iPhone 3g. Good times.
One interesting fact about the game. We designed all the levels around Lua, which was officially banned from the App Store when we were making it. I remember deciding with the other main developer, that we should rename all our .lua files, .cfg (.configure) to buy us some time.
Ultimately, Apple eventually changed the rules to allow for this.
I don't recall Tap Tap Dance, but I loved Tap Tap Revenge!! One day I want to get an old iPhone or iPod Touch and jailbreak it and load up some of those old games you can't get anymore. I've always loved music games, and that was back around 2009 on my first iPhone and in the Rock Band era. It was great to be able to play a music game while on the bus.
I remember the App Store rules being even more draconian then than they are now - I recall a brief period where they tried to ban even tools that transpiled other languages into Objective-C by making a rule that all apps must be originally written in Objective-C. That insanity didn't last long, obviously. Now half of apps are React Native.
By the way if this post was supposed to be a link somewhere, it isn't working.
Loved working on those music games. And that we have a nice document of some of its creation in the video above. I have great memories of working on the series, spread out across Champaign, IL (home of UIUC), the NYU Tisch Center, even a restaurant in Montreal.
Steve Jobs even demoed Tap Tap Revenge at an iPhone keynote in 2009! Our little game!
> At the end of each difficulty tier, you unlock a new song that's accompanied by art specific to the track. Daft Punk's "Technologic," for example, has an old-school TV screen that flashes images and the band's name as notes stream down bars that are much shorter and shaped differently than the main game screen. Moby's "Disco Lies" also uses short bars that unfurl from what looks like the mouth of an alien designed by a nine-year-old using MS Paint. (And that's not a slam to the artist -- I think it's very cool.) Once you finish a boss track, that song become parts of the track list on the next tier.
> Unless you want to stab your ears when you hear techno, Tap Tap Dance is the best music game on the App Store right now. The note placement and control sensitivity is just right, making it instantly playable to anybody. But Tap Tap Dance doesn't hold its fire. By the time you reach the hard tier, you are getting a serious thumb workout. With excellent song selection and super-cool graphics, Tap Tap Dance is a pleasure to recommend.
What video are you referring to? This post is just taking me back to this same page, I'm not seeing any video link. Maybe I'm missing something.
Getting Steve Jobs personal acknowledgement must have been pretty amazing. That's a good sign you paid attention to detail. I do think I can recall the visual customization done for specific artists and tracks, was very cool. Style matters alot for the vibe in music games, the attention to it is one of the reasons I always preferred Rock Band to Guitar Hero.
Thanks for the cool game! I was actually at uni for game development at the time and as one of my major projects I made a design document for a DJ music game. The Tap Tap Revenge series was definitely an inspiration and contributor to my love of music games at the time and I had alot of fun playing it. May have been one of the first few apps I ever spent money on.
It's making me nostalgic for the time when my smartphone was a new, cool, and fun device and not the addictive attention span sucking portal to hell it is now.
Oh I think you might have an error in your submission. I don't think it's correctly linking to the youtube video, but I've just found it searching on youtube.
Unfortunately a reality if you care for vintage iPhone games. Piracy is sometimes the last line of defense for game preservation.
In our case, a group of hackers have released a fangame that is in many ways equal to a modern Tap Tap Revenge, and it can be found here: https://taptapreloaded.com/
Apple's conduct is what I'm sad about. It's shameful that their walled garden destroys legally-legitimate and easy ways to use software that they arbitrarily deem "old". They've conditioned the public to just accept this (both end users and devs), and that's ultimately what fills me with crushing sadness.
This may be technically correct, and I do have .DS_Store in my global, but I also put it in projects, because I know not everyone on my team is going to do that. I add it to the .gitignore in projects to save me from other people junking up the project. It’s a lot easier to add some lines to a file than it is to micromanage the global file for every potential future contributor.
This touches on something I've learned to be more mindful of: the "right answer" (especially to a techie) is often not the right answer in real world cases.
I’m fine with the occasional .DS_Store getting added, because you can just remove it afterwards. Most of my work is either my own projects or at work, and whether people at work commit .DS_Store files is a question that touches on code reviews, company onboarding guides, etc.
Maybe the benefits / drawbacks would be different for an open-source project with a lot of contributors.
> Our long-term goal is to produce a highly documented and complete C++ codebase for every version of Twilight Princess. Having clear and readable source code will aid speedrunners, glitch hunters, and modders curious about how particular parts of the game work.
> Our primary goal is a full decompilation of the GameCube USA version with appropriate documentation. After this is achieved, we plan to decompile the other versions of the game.
I revisited a 2015 radio interview I did (months before OpenAI existed) where I tried to reason about AI as “high-level algebra.” I didn’t have today’s vocabulary, but the underlying intuition—intelligence as inference over math and incentives—ends up looking surprisingly close to how LLMs actually work.
Curious which parts people think aged well vs. clearly wrong.