Week round-up: July 28
Thanks to mega flight delays, this is a day late but a day riper. I am now back in California after 24 hours spent dealing with cancellations, deranged rural New Hampshire rideshare trips, last-minute hotel bookings, and an adventure on standby, which I've never been on before in an airport...
ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It - Matthew Gault
This article describes a situation which could have been much worse for the team involved - the feature the LLM insisted their software had was actually pretty easy for them to add. Imagine if it hadn't been? They'd be stuck dealing with hordes of people who flatly believe an easily-provable falsehood and are pissed at them for it. We're headed for a future where that's pretty common, actually.
IF Seal: I used an LLM to make IF and now I feel stressed and conflicted about it! - Harris Powell Smith
Harris does a good job demonstrating how to tell an emerging writer anxious about their LLM use that they screwed up.
LLMs are often wrong and you won't know how to fix the errors they create - it will also be hard to spot if there are errors at all if you don't understand the code you're using. This is one of many reasons why the professional narrative designers and game writers I know do not give LLMs the time of day (to put it mildly).
Indie Game Store Template - Liana
A template for setting up your own indie game store online. However:
Understand that if you use this template to run your own game store, your are running a business and responsible for maintaining its operation, including customer support, refunds, legal compliance, or any other obligations that may arise from selling your games online.
This is a template you will have to host yourself, but I have been thinking a lot this week about how hard it is to provide these kinds of convenient services to people at, essentially, cost. I appreciate how in-depth the writeups about payment, hosting, etc on this project are. I still have strong memories of what it was like for people to sell me games on independent, non-platform sites in the late 2000s, and how difficult it was for them to promote their work...