The boy finally gets government regulation he's been begging for, in the form of total government control, becomes subservient to the corrupt, evil interests at the helm of that government, and ends up loving exactly none of it?
Hard disagree. I use 3.8 flash in Antigravity a lot, and thoroughly prefer it to most Pro-class models. It's really fast, and I've had it make crazy progress on compiler-like problems that previous models including Opus simply failed at. On ultra plan you can have it going for hours, and make incremental progress with good prompting for review interrupts. It solved a problem I couldn't solve for weeks in under 6 hours. 10k LOC total. The harness and test suite is key.
Not to mention they are still at the forefront of materials science and industrial design, and just so happen to manufacture bespoke CPU & server platforms that run circles around all the hyperscalers...
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
They aren't, they're one of the people who latch on longstanding and neutral syntax (em-dashes, "it's not $foo") as a proof of LLM text. I don't blame them because HN has a lot of people trying to pass gen AI stuff as their own, and you need quick heuristics... but I'd encourage people at least do it right. Pay for Pangram or something.
"HN: Professionally identifying 230% of posts from 2017 as LLM generated".
That said Panagram is trash for the opposite reason. Not that some people talked like LLMs before LLMs, but now a lot of people talk like LLMs because of LLMs.
Maybe bc it completely sidesteps the question? I have a nephew who is 7yrs old who only has an iPad and i can play with him due to geysermc, which is the correct answer.
It has roughly the same features, much worse moddability, and better performance.
At some point it was a weaker clone, but it developed into a very high quality clone, and has graduated into being a co-production with the Java version.
Get a refund from wherever you got your facts.
I'll give you half a point for "iPad kids" since that term implies a lot of incorrect things but it does run on iPads.
I run Bedrock even though we have hardware and licenses for everyone in the house - because I can use my iPad Pro with a controller, and my kids can do the same, and they play in the car all the time.
When bedrock was announced I was sure Microsoft had won the os arms race and had everything they needed to make an impenetrable monopoly:
* They could make bedrock moddable using .net, and make it so basically every kid interested in programming learned .net
* They could then drop the Java version and get more control over the game with it being harder to mod in un-sanctioned ways while still enabling the content most people want from mods
* And gain a powerful platform they can use to treat Windows/Xbox players better.
* With everyone writing .net it makes more sense to use Windows to develop, effectively reducing the number of fresh developers with posix experience. Stopping the mass exodus to posix since the 2010s MacBook air sublime text nodejs days.
But alas. Microsoft are incompetent. Minecraft was THE tool to turn the future in their favour and they completely overlooked it.
Bedrock exists to make more money. They don't like the Java free modding. They want a marketplace. They want to make money off all content in the game. They want to sell DLC. Make no mistake, they aren't platforming modders to make money because they are charitable. It is because they want to profit, and they can profit at scale by outsourcing the work.
That is in my opinion why most people are against bedrock, including myself. Bedrock is capitalist Minecraft. Enshittified Minecraft, with much more enshittification potential not yet realized. Java version is the only thing protecting bedrock from not being milked further, because it is competition.
They know most people prefer Java. Content creators mostly use Java. But it sells bedrock, and bedrock makes money. And if they can get enough people over, they can kill Java and finally milk bedrock
Java edition is also proprietary, and I don't see what stops them from milking it. They did DCMA-takedown Bukkit and lock a ton of paid accounts out of the game, but nothing further. Like they could drop Mac/Linux support, and I'm surprised/relieved they didn't. Despite it being mostly Java, it does rely on some natives, but even if it didn't...
Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo.
There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want this, but it is so trivial to do with the Java edition they don't really have a choice but to either accept it or legal it.
I am also surprised they didn't drop mac/linux support, but as long as maintaining it is free I don't think they will. They have lost a lot of market share to mac after all - that's a lot of customers to miss out on.
Ok I had to look this up because last time I did MC modding was when I was in high school... It used to be obfuscated. Someone used to manually map those to human-readable names (didn't know this back then and thought the names were somehow hidden in the bytecode). But recently MS has started deliberately shipping unobfuscated builds.
So I'm getting the feeling they actually want JE to be moddable. Which makes sense because they're already successfully pushing Bedrock on a majority who don't care about modding, especially on locked down platforms, and the remaining JE players are a different segment. But that could change just as easily as their leadership changes.
But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
Sorry for the long wait, I wasn't ignoring you, just busy.
Yes, symbols were obfuscated, but Java software with obfuscated symbols is trivial to reverse, at least compared to its native counterparts. My understanding is that the biggest change when releasing symbols was that the MCP team no longer had to manually update symbols for every update. Java also has great reflection features that make it a lot easier to make mods - you don't need to patch binaries like you do with native code.
I think you are right in that Bedrock and JE players are different segments. I think the main goal of Bedrock is to target the casual market, maybe not by intention but by the fact that the community itself is mostly stuck on JE. I still think the long term wish is to get everyone over and kill Java, as Java inherently is less suited for the microtransaction model I am sure they want.
Then again with the rise of LLM-based RE, I guess the largest hurdle for modding bedrock is somewhat lower now, as you can automate a lot of the skill-heavy but not difficult work required.
> But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
For anyone confused about timelines, they started releasing un-obfuscated builds in 2025.
In 2019 they started releasing Obfuscation mappings.
Before that it was all Minecraft wizards with excellent tooling.
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