Be honest, most Software people find utility in artifacts which are a mysterious black box with an emulated abstraction.
During a career role most have no idea "why" chips were designed and built a certain way, nor require this information to work within abstract domains.
In many ways, vibe-coders are the absurd optimization of a naive trajectory toward zero workmanship standards. =3
> In Latin America, many people take on masters and PhD while living with their parents. You are often seen as smarter than the idiot who's working.
In Latin America a very small minority of young people even get to go to a proper academic institution and not just a quasi-degree mill college. For those going to somewhat reputable institutions with post-tertiary programs it's another small minority that gets to a masters degree, with even fewer getting into a doctorate track...
Quantify "many people" because it's absolute bullshit it's any kind of representative cohort of the population with the means to achieve this.
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.
If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character
and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that
is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when
you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from
playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was
the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a
unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.
That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds.
In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.
I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back.
I put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that.
VHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
Maybe? Paramount was already deep in shuffling a lot of movies to Paramount+ exclusives, and new parent company Skydance seems to have first-look deals with both Apple TV and Netflix who may or may not ask for movie projects to be streaming exclusive.
(Apple TV is nearly as bad at theatrical runs as Netflix, though admittedly some of Apple's biggest "mistakes" are in presenting things beyond Oscar-bait such as Argyle that "box office flopped", but yet it is far better for physical theaters that they tried and as a fan of physical theaters I want to keep seeing them trying.)
I don't understand why they name everything Copilot now, it's the most confusing thing in the world. Copilot AI, Copilot 365 Copilot. GitHub Copilot makes the most sense I think because it's Copilot AI but for coding.
We've been seeing variations of the same article every week. The answer has been the same for a long time: this is great but unfortunately there are advantages in using Office and that's the reason we shouldn't expect mass migration anytime soon.
Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years. Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.
> We've been seeing variations of the same article every week.
Time has come. Over the last few years there is more and more interest from goverments and private organizations to have relieable software that does not depend of foreign entities. Software sovereignty is becoming a necesity rather than a nice to have for both nations and enterprises.
> Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years.
Excel, like many other technologies in the past can be disrupted. Like mane other commenters say, it won't come cheap. Saving costs shouldn't be the the goal here.
> Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.
This is the year of LibreOffice on the government? I'd love if you were right, but I doubt it. The chasm is enormous, and maybe you don't use Excel enough to realize it.
The chasm is enormous, but Calc doesn't need to implement 100% of Excel's functionality when most people - even business/power users - don't use all of its features.
What major commonly used features do you reckon Excel has that hasn't been implemented in LO Calc yet, that would be a deal-breaker for most businesses?
To my knowledge, Calc has implemented most of Excel's formulae (well over 500 in total count), so at least for typical spreadsheet functionality you wouldn't missing anything.
The biggest limitation I can think of is the limited support for VBA, but Microsoft have already announced VBA's deprecation[1], so no one should be relying on it even in MS World.
And whilst LO's own Basic scripting is... basic, it also supports rich scripting and full automation via Python and Javascript. It even has a full-fledged SDK for developing addins/extensions using a high-level language like C++/Java etc[2], so businesses who're dependent on some random proprietary excel COM addin or something could invest in development effort to port it over.
Heck, if businesses are so inclined, they could modify the LO source itself and build a custom version to add the features they want - that's the beauty of FOSS.
You don't use all it's feature, but if you need part of the 10% of features that Calc doesn't support, then your in a world of hurt.
When Calc gets the other 90% of the features Excel has, you also need to contend with word, Outlook, Visio and all the rest that Libre Office has a 0% solution for.
I support FLOSS... But pretending that anything else does enough for many orgs is delusional. There is work and pain to get through to even have a workable solution... And it won't be as good for a long while.
Massive cost savings are one of the bigger motivators... But that will be offset by the need for more internal staff.
I don't see why you would automatically be in "a world of hurt". Yes, you might be if you were to suddenly roll it out organisation wide without any testing, but no sane IT department would do that. This is why you have internal test groups and pilot groups. Once you identify the limitations, you scope out the missing features/issues, engage developers if need be, or look for alternate solutions. No one needs to get hurt.
No, but that's only because I hate Excel. But I'm sure developers who don't hate it but also appreciate FOSS solutions might be interested, if the pay is good.
Access = LibreOffice Base
Visio = LibreOffice Impress
Outlook = Schleswig-Holstein already switched successfully to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, I've not heard of them running into any major issues with this setup.
I find that highly unlikely given how much commercial agreements with MS costs.
But if that's the case then they should either look for a different COTS solution, and/or change their business workflow.
And in the event even that is unfeasible, then just continue to keep a few windows machines (maybe convert them to VMs or VDIs for ease of maintenance) for the few users that can't be migrated.
Have you, personally, ever had to convert an MS Access based application that took years to write to something else? It seems like all your responses either shift responsibility or hand wave it away. I'm sure migration is incredibly easy when you don't have to deal with said migration in a meaningful way.
No, I don't think LibreOffice is the answer. And I am with you here, I would love to be wrong. One issue is that it doesn't really work well online. The folks from Collabora[1] have done an amazing job at wrapping LibreOffice for the web and maybe that is a way to go?
As a sibling comment says you don't need to implement absolutely everything Excel does to _disrupt_ Excel. But you do need to provide a fantastic tool that is easy to use and solves 99% of the problems. If governments start putting their money were their mouth is I am very convinced we can create tools that supersede Excel, Word,...
Mostly agree, but I have a different complaint about the lighting... The movie theaters I go in the US don't FULLY turn the main lights off, which drives me crazy. It's 95% off, but not 100%. In addition, there's always a bit of light entering through the door, killing immersion. The only lights I accept inside a movie theater are the step lights on stairways (and certainly not cell phone screens!)
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