I was the kid with the backpack Zip drive and Zip disks, like a weird Santa Claus of game piracy. Duke3d, Descent, Quake, you name it. All of it was in service of modem dueling each other. Wild times!
I recently replayed Warcraft II and fell out of my chair when I realized the original did not have control groups. Those were only added with the Battle.Net edition!
Not to be a patronizing old fart, but may I assume that you played II after III? If so I can understand it, but II was very special when it came out, and I never revisited it after.
I think it's a case of being better when it came out than another thing was when it came out, despite the other thing being comparatively better without the context of its time.
2 is a much harder game in my opinion. I don’t think even at the hardest difficulty level Warcraft 3 has any levels that require you to do a contested marine landing and then build a base before immediately being attacked again. The final Orc mission took me forever to beat. And the expansion? Good lord.
III has a better and more interesting story telling. But gameplay wise I really like the starcraft 1 system without the heros. I think warcraft 3 adds too much complexity and gimmickry that takes away from fun RTS gameplay.
That said, Warcraft 3 mods were the shit. There were so many fun and inventive modes of play that you could just barely do with starcraft and not at all with warcraft.
Warcraft 3 custom map mod was the birth of Defense of the Ancients Allstars which then became its own game by Valve as Dota 2 (and Blizzard was pissed and tried legal stuff to reclaim) which now became Deadlock = Dota 3.
A plea to the various lab engineering teams: please create a json format or whatever that lets me configure this with voices locally. I am a happy user as of late of the Codex app by Open AI. It would be great if I could just give it some JSON somehow and it just works. I suppose skills can do this and I will try that later on. But I think this stuff matters, and it would be nice to have it built in and encouraged.
Uh, are you sure you did? I mean it's just using the hooks API of Claude code to play a sound via the terminal itself?
Heck, they even outlined it in the readme
> peon.sh is a Claude Code hook registered for SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, Stop, and Notification events. On each event it maps to a sound category, picks a random voice line (avoiding repeats), plays it via afplay (macOS) or PowerShell MediaPlayer (WSL2), and updates your Terminal tab title.
Looking at the install script and peon.sh does not raise any over engineering flags for me. It's as simple as the functionally makes it necessary
Yes; it could be a README, a folder with subfolders of sounds, 1 or 2 files with functions totalling less than 200 loc for unix, maybe 700 total to have windows support and some extra features.
I get how they got here ; its how claude and codex approach projects, but what does the rest achieve? Your maintenance rituals shouldn't exceed your usecase at this scale.
Okay, but the install script is around 200 LOC and the peon.sh is just under 500 LOC ... So by your own numbers, it'd be expected loc size? What's exactly over engineered here?
The fact he added config files to let people create their own package?
I wrote a fun bit of code to do something like this but for bell sounds in emacs terminal sessions and other things (even using the peasant). but I agree it seems very over engineered. There is a json manifest file to explain which sounds should be used where in this repo, why not just use directories for each alert type, making it easier to modify, it seems completely unnecessary to me. having an install script seems crazy as well. The task is to play the right sound(s) that match the passed argument. the thing I did was like 23 lines and most of that was filtering and looking for ascii bell to play the sound then remove it from the stream and other options.
Extremely easy to do with sound recording software or youtube mp3 downloaders. Takes a little imagination and makes programming less onerous in a deviate kind of way.
Showing my age here, but the original samples are available too, and in MP3 or WAV format - they're in the installation directory of the game (in case of StarCraft and W3, hidden in a weird pseudo-ZIP data file (used to call it "Virtual File System")). That's where we sourced them from to set them as system sounds, back when Windows versions were still in four digits.
If you're enough of a fan to want to use these voices, chances are you still have the original installation media (or original bootleg copy) somewhere around the house :).
I don't buy that anywhere near that many people read a book in 2025. People lie and say they read because they want to sound smarter and more cultured.
I read one book in 2025. Of course I read every day: news, documentation, emails and other messages, etc. It's probably the activity I spend more time doing than anything else.
The original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag
Except kids already voluntarily gave up their own privacy to such an extent that they don't value it whatsoever. The government is lagging here. Kids will record you without consent anywhere and everywhere, post it online, live stream everything they do, overshare with no limits. They don't understand the idea of privacy. They don't even like the idea of privacy.
> Except kids already voluntarily gave up their own privacy to such an extent that they don't value it whatsoever.
kids don't get privacy in the first place. thats something we give them and they LEARN to value it. thats the goal of this kind of legislation. prevent them from ever having it in the first place.
I feel sorry for this guy. His Reddit inbox is probably fucked, and he's absolutely going to get doxxed and hounded by news people, and I wouldn't be surprised if even worse things happened to him.
Good on him for reporting what he saw. He also went to the police the next day and reported it directly. But now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything, which is unfortunate.
He’s already public, but he can make a new Reddit account.
> Now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything
We’ll see how it turns out, but I don’t see why even the internet mob would hate him. He probably can’t live in Brown’s basement anymore, but maybe with the reward money and recognition he can find a real place.
I used to complain (lightheartedly) about Claude's constant "You're absolutely right!" statements, yet oddly found myself missing them when using Codex. Claude is completely over-the-top and silly, and I don't actually care whether or not it thinks I'm right. Working with Codex feels so dry in comparison.
To quote Oliver Babish, "In my entire life, I've never found anything charming." Yet I miss Claude's excessive attempts to try.
And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool and that constant praise fulfills that goal, even as many of us say it's annoying and over-the-top.
My own experience is that it gets too annoying to keep adding "stop the engagement-driving behavior" to the prompt, so it creeps in and I just try to ignore it. But even though I know it's happening, I still get a little blip of emotion when I see the "great question!" come through as the first two words of the response.
> And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool
Is this actually true? Would appreciate further reading on this if you have it.
I think this is an emergent property of the RLHF process, not a social media-style engagement optimization campaign. I don't think there is an incentive for LLM creators to optimize for engagement; there aren't ads (yet), inference is not free, and maximizing time spent querying ChatGPT doesn't really do much for OpenAI's bottom line.
They still want people to stick around and 'bond' for lack of a better term with their particular style of chat bot. Like so many venture funded money pits of old the cash burn now is about customer acquisition while they develop and improve their tech. They're all racing toward a cliff hoping to either make the jump to the stratosphere and start turning massive profits or to fall off and splat on the rocks of bankruptcy. If they don't get the engagement loop right now they won't have the customers if the tech and use case catch up with the hype and you can only tweak these models so much after they're created so they have to refine the engagement hooks now along side the core tech.
I am currently working on an agent thingy and one of its major features (and one of the main reasons I decided to take on this project), was to give the LLM better personality prompting. LLMs sound repetitive and sycophantic. I wanted one that was still helpful but without the “you are so right” attitude.
While doing some testing I asked it to tell me a joke. Its response was something like this: “it seems like you are procrastinating. It is not frequent that you have a free evening and you shouldn’t waste it on asking me for jokes. Go spend time with [partner] and [child].” (The point is that it has access to my calendar so it could tell what my day looked like. And yes I did spend time with them).
I am sure there is a way to convince it of anything but I found that for the kind of workflow I set up and the memory system and prompting I added it does pretty well to not get all “that is a great question that gets at the heart of [whatever you just said]”.
Claude at times feels like it's mildly manic and has ADHD... I absolutely prefers that to Codex...
Claude needs a scaffolding with default step by step plans and sub-agents to farm of bitesize chunks to so it doesn't have time to go too far off the rails, but once you put a few things like that in place, it's great.
You're only seeing those ads because the ad algorithm knows you. My family aren't getting Claude ads. They wouldn't know the first thing about it even if it were explained to them.
This isn't a wild theory or a novel one. It's well-established that endogenous retroviruses alter DNA and are inherited. In addition to the primary genome being modified this way, all mitochondria are symbiotic organisms inside plant and animal cells, with their own DNA, and are vital to life. Same thing for chloroplasts in plants. And then there are gut bacteria, which are vital to life, symbiotic, and directly influence evolution and the genome.
reply