I think most people wouldn't call proof-reading 'assistance'. As in, if I ask a colleague to review my PR, I wouldn't say he assisted me.
I've been throwing my PR diffs at Claude over the last few weeks. It spits a lot of useless or straight up wrong stuff, but sometimes among the insanity it manages to get one or another typo that a human missed, and between letting a bug pass or spending extra 10m per PR going through the nothingburguers Claude throws at me, I'd rather lose the 10m.
Overall it feels like unless your game is a linear single-player game, it will fall under multiple of the site's labelled 'dark patterns'. Here are some really bad ones:
Infinite Treadmill - Impossible to win or complete the game.
Variable Rewards - Unpredictable or random rewards are more addictive than a predictable schedule.
Can't Pause or Save - The game does not allow you to stop playing whenever you want.
Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance.
Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.
Especially for online games, these aspects are actually quite core to long term play. I am pretty casual as far as time invested goes, but many online games have to cater to both me and the Die Hards who play their games 10x more than other players.
To the die hard players, the infinite grind is a feature, treadmills help them reach whatever insane goals the developers have to keep cooking up so that they're satisfied.
Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them.
The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
What % of the time do you think the die-hard gamers live a healthy lifestyle? I’m thinking it’s higher than my knee jerk reaction, like 40-50%, but an important consideration. Of course people define “healthy” differently too, but obesity and mental health crises have objectively grown and correlate with rising technology use.
This is a hard one for me to ballpark because all my gaming friends are gym rats, so my view is probably skewed. Some of them game hours every day and make time for gym and nutrition. Unsure of there other health needs though.
I think it's much harder to be healthy when 6+hrs of your day is gaming. Especially if you also have work. It takes time to eat healthy, excercise, get out into the sun and be social. At some point you must be making compromises to game 6hrs a day.
If Chess were a mobile game, you'd be forced to watch an ad after every three moves, the bishop would be on a timer and to use it again you'd have to wait 10 moves or pay using in-game currency, the knight would only be available if you bought the DLC, and the game wouldn't run unless you granted it access to all of your contacts.
I have mixed feelings on this assessment. I definitely agree that some of these labels could be better ("can't pause or save" and "competition" are missing a lot of nuance), but some you mentioned feel reasonable on the part of the site creator (for example, "variable rewards", which is to say different reward outputs for the same performance/input, are a pretty classic Skinner box and unnecessary as a core feature to make most games work).
I'd also like to question the idea that that multiplayer games are being treated inherently "unfair" here or that these features aren't worth acknowledging as a dark pattern just because they're core to certain genres. I like Minecraft and there's variable drops and achievements and grinding and multiplayer and a bunch of other "dark patterns". I also like to straight up gamble occasionally, and I'm not a gambling addict as of the writing of this comment. It's more the awareness of things that can psychologically hook you that's important, and then you can do what you want with that (or for parents, they can attempt to restrict applications as they find appropriate).
The game I was the most addicted to was Age of Empires II, but I don't blame Microsoft for this: they just created an awesome game.
Competition + "can't pause", these two can really make you disconnected from real life if you're competitive, but it's also fun and somewhat useful to know how much you can push yourself and how far you can go on the ladder.
My advice is to force yourself to stop playing after each single match, but that's hard when you're in a loosing streak because you want to win at least one match.
Paul Morphy has to become the best chess player before he understood that chess was a waste of time. He said that it's important to know the game well but there's a limit.
Yes, this site reads like it's written by someone not enjoying games and understanding the concept of gaming. There is nothing dark about most of these concepts individually. The harm comes from combination and/or excessive usage. The dose makes the poison.
Though, learning them and being aware of them is not bad. But I'm curious how much the phrasing pushes the mindset of the readers in the wrong direction.
The website does label some relatively harmless elements as ‘dark patterns’, but out of your ‘really bad ones’, I don’t see ‘Competition’ as being a dark pattern.
Competition is a fundamental part of Play. Humans (and other animals) are social creatures and learn via playing and competing with others.
Can people play games by themselves? Yes.
Is competitive play bad or a dark pattern? Not at all.
The point I'm trying to make is this: the LLM output is a set of activations. Those are not "hidden" in any way: that is the plain result of running the LLM. Displaying the word "Blue" based on the LLM output is a separate step, one that the inference server performs, completely outside the scope of the LLM.
However, what's unclear to me from the paper is if it's enough to get these activations from the final output layer; or if you actually need some internal activations from a hidden layer deeper in the LLM, one that does require analyzing the internal state of the LLM.
Even if the data is important, you can enable WAL and make sure the worker/consumer gets items by RPOPLPUSHing to a working queue. This way you can easily requeue the data if the worker ever goes offline mid-process.
Had the same thoughts, weird it didn't include Kafka numbers.
Never used Kafka myself, but we extensively use Redis queues with some scripts to ensure persistency, and we hit throughputs much higher than those in equivalent prod machines.
Same for Redis pubsubs, but those are just standard non-persistent pubsubs, so maybe that gives it an upper edge.
So, if I got this right, this is just about re-implementing an existing load balancing algorithm faster...? If so, this is really dumb. As you guys checked out, yes most load balancing algorithms are slow/dumb:
>First, we evaluate DeepSeek's open-source EPLB implementation. This employs a greedy bin-packing strategy: experts are sorted by load in descending order, and each is placed onto the least-loaded GPU that has capacity (Figure 3a, Example 1). While simple, the solution is slow because it written in Python and uses a for-loop to performs linear search for finding the best-fit GPU choice.
This is because when considering a load balancing algorithm, unless the work being done (in this case by the GPU) lasts only a few ms, the load balancing algorithm being fast will never be the bottleneck. The post does not mention whether this is the case at all.
Also, I don't want to sound rude, but if all they managed to get is a 5x increase over a simple python algorithm, I don't think this is impressive at all...? Any rewrite of the 'dumb' algorithm in a language with more memory control and cache continuity should result in much better results.
Agree. Starting from Python for-loops is embarrassing baseline. Any decent implementation gets you most of that 5x for free. The interesting part isn't the speedup - it's that AI can do routine optimization unsupervised. That's the actual value prop.
Thanks for commenting! Actually in this case, "the work being done" can be really fast because it can be done asynchronously. For context, here’s how this translates in a real-world application.
The original algorithm was provided by DeepSeek, and our optimized implementation achieves a 92× speedup over it. The 5x number is comparing with another baseline that is undisclosed yet.
When integrating EPLB into vLLM, I discovered—somewhat unexpectedly—that the open-source algorithm consumes nearly half of the total time of a rearrangement step, with the remaining time spent transferring weights across GPUs. To address this, I applied OpenEvolve to the algorithm, setting the primary objective to improve speed while maintaining the same balance factor. It performed remarkably well. With additional optimizations on the weight transferring, the overall overhead has now become almost negligible.
While no one will deny you (or I guess your system) the immense satisfaction of 100x improvement on a given step, I think it would be helpful to note the frequency of this rebalancing step, and to contextualize your result in terms of the runtime (or throughput) of the workload(s) you were using to evaluate.
e: also comparison a fixed (nothing faster than 0!) and random policy might be informative if your intent is to publish this as improvement for the object problem, not just a demonstration of ARDS.
>and is much better than the mess of Webpack/Rollup/Brunch/Grunt...
You do know that Vite uses a lot of these behind the scenes right? Vite in general has much better defaults so that you don't have to configure them most of the time, but anything a bit out of the box will still require messing with the configs extensively.
Not like OPs Vite+ changes anything regarding that.
I think other people mentioned it already, but ideally I'd like to choose a list of languages to leave them as is, and translate the rest.
For example, I can speak Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and English. Ideally I would want news in those languages to keep their original text, while translating news in other languages to a target language.
For example, if I set my language as English, Russian news would get translated to English, but Portuguese ones would keep their original text.
>Vanced and such is more of a First World/Western issue
What? I'm from Brazil and Vanced is as big, if not bigger here. In fact, most of my 'first world' friends just pay for YouTube Premium (or whatever it is called), and these kinds of workarounds are mostly used in countries with less purchasing power.
I've been throwing my PR diffs at Claude over the last few weeks. It spits a lot of useless or straight up wrong stuff, but sometimes among the insanity it manages to get one or another typo that a human missed, and between letting a bug pass or spending extra 10m per PR going through the nothingburguers Claude throws at me, I'd rather lose the 10m.
reply