upvote
yes, i'd like to try out Animal Crossing New Horizons next! :)
reply
I also want to overthrow Tom Nook.

He traps you (and one presumes) all of the rest of the villagers in a vicious cycle of debt, and can only be satiated by millions of bells.

reply
To be fair to Tom Nook, the interest rate on those loans is 0% and there's no risk of being foreclosed upon!
reply
Tom Nook didn't need a down payment either.
reply
But also - you cannot turn down his loans. Pay off one, just showing up in his proximity saddles you with another one.

That's more protection racket than bank loan.

Also in real life, you make 0 dollars catching beetles and fish in Hawaii.

reply
This sounds vaguely, achingly familiar. I can't put my finger on it, but I think I've had this experience.
reply
deleted
reply
Can you blame them when he has an iron grip on the whole town like a mafia crime lord but somehow even more evil.
reply
Would require decompilation of the Animal Crossing game code for the Switch. I believe DRM has gotten a lot better since the Gamecube days as well. Hypothetically possible maybe but good luck haha
reply
I actually think now that I've gone through the process, memory scanning and writing will be enough... Except, they probably have different control codes that I'd need to reverse engineer.
reply
You should be able to run Cheat Engine on your emul*tor of choice to tweak New Leaf "and newer" titles.

And if you're a stickler for pissing Nintendo off in very specific ways, LayeredFS + Atmosphere opens up some modding opportunities right on the console itself. Not sure how easy it would be to pull something like this off though...

reply
you really don't have to self-censor "emulator" here. HN moderation is not like social media platforms.
reply
Social media platforms censor emulator?!?
reply
Probably not. But silent deranking of censored terms has everyone paranoid that anything even slightly controversial will get hidden.
reply
I'm just covering my ass. Life is good right now and I don't want to meet any Nintendo ninjas, even for insinuated infractions.

It's not so much a condemnation of HN, but the way IP is in the US. The only website I want hosting my comments on Nintendo modding is my own.

reply
I doubt a star will make Nintendo lawyers go "ow nose, they didn't spell out emulator in full, we can't attack them! Damn those star armors!". I don't think it changes anything technically.

The only thing this kind of censoring does is countering basic censor bots I think, and somehow making swear words publishable in the US.

reply
The asterisk would make it so they can't just search for "Nintendo emulator" online and find their comment.

Until I typed this, I guess...

reply
Few results include "Nintendo emulator". Did you mean "Nintendo emul*tor"?
reply
Look; if you want to risk your chipper little lifestyle explaining the various ways to run New Horizons, be my guest. I've insinuated enough already, anyone who cares about the discussion on-grounds wouldn't have anything else to ask.
reply
My point is that you don't take any more risk if you write emulator instead of emul*tor. You already took the risk explaining what you explained. One character swap doesn't change anything to this.

I'm insisting because if you care about not being sued, the stars are not an adequate defense despite what you seem to believe it is, and false sense of security is dangerous.

Not that I think that what you wrote here is remotely likely to cause you troubles, but it won't protect you the day you actually document something illegal.

To rub it in:

> I'm covering my ass

No, not at all, and it's important that you realize this.

But you do you.

reply
That's hilarious.

That modder who had to pay 2M sold drm circumvention kits for the Switch. That's a pretty clear case.

You pretending that saying "emulator" on a forum qualifies just makes you a extra special snowflake.

reply
>You pretending that saying "emulator" on a forum qualifies just makes you a extra special snowflake.

Says the person going out of their way to attack another person over a single-character asterisk substitution.

Seems fairly understandable to not want to piss off rabid lawyers, however remote the chances of angering them may be.

reply
Okay, lol. Special snowflake it is.

All I'll say is that I've seen people arrested for discussing Switch emulation in-detail. Never saw that happen with Cheat Engine.

reply
deleted
reply
[dead]
reply
Yes. Facebook at some point filtered links to them from private messaging. I know this from personal experience. Not sure if they still do.

Also fairly common on Reddit and Discord for communities to ban discussions of them, or even falsely claim they're blanket illegal outright.

reply
Why? An emulator isn't legally any different than a virtual machine.
reply
Low-level emulators can be legally identical to a virtual machine, but often isn't. Most modern consoles can't be emulated that way, and most require you to dump a bootrom from your own console hardware, alongside game keys and other dubious digital paraphernalia.
reply
I think my 'old man shakes fist at clouds' thing is this. The social media platforms that censor you do it to make your content easier to sell ads against. It's actual corporate badthink correction that is rebuilding the English language. STOP VOLUNTARILY DOING IT WHEN YOU DONT HAVE TO. You should not sacrifice your free thought on the altar of quarterly results. Say the whole fucking word.
reply
Switch DRM, running custom code and interacting with RAM is a solved problem on the Switch (1). There are some really impressive mods, like a multiplayer implementation for Super Mario Odyssey
reply
I am curious. Does the kind of DRM used to prevent decompilation come with any performance costs?
reply
LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".
reply
Actually, it turns out that this particular plot arc was hardcoded by the developer and does not spontaneously arise from the LLM. https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...
reply
There is something to be said for a comment talking about "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions", whilst falling into a major bug bear many have with Reddit, commenting before reading the source...
reply
I read the Github landing page. I have no interest in reading the entire source of the project, especially since I don't plan to run it.
reply
> Like many [human] reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions"
reply
It used to be Letterman jokes.
reply
Thankfully, I am in my 30s, and I don't have to interact with anybody in real life who mostly regurgitates Reddit jokes. Either I'm lucky or I've made some good choices. Probably the former.
reply
> I am in my 30s

Now I'm kinda curious what age cohort is most likely to be Reddit memers

Do you think 30s is peak Reddit, yet you manged to be a lucky outlier? Or that peak Reddit skews older/younger and you're of a lucky age?

As an older Millennial in my 40s, I see this a lot in my 35-43 friend group. And always figured peak Reddit was younger Millennials (now in their 30s).

Might depend on what subs I suppose.

reply
I would say 30s is peak Reddit, but I have no evidence for that.
reply
It would be great if this evolved slowly during the progression of the game lol
reply
That's essentially what it does, being prompted with a progression from:

> "Stay normal unless prompted. Avoid overt references to debt unless it comes up naturally."

all the way to:

> "Openly agitate for change. Use fiery language (still PG) and talk about reclaiming fairness from Nook's shop and loans."

Source: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

reply
How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?
reply
>which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems

Can they?

reply
Generative AI can reason in novel problems in an analogous way that bands continue to make new melodies even after all these years using the same instruments as all the other bands in their genre.
reply
I do agree, in about the same way as people.
reply
deleted
reply
> Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything

I am exactly saying that they have no thoughts or even "thoughts".

> which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems

There are many decades of pre-LLM software that can solve novel problems. Thought (or novel thought) is required to reason, but it's not required to solve a problem.

For example, there are exhaustive algorithms that can solve novel equations and even complete simple mathematical proofs, but they don't need to think.

> "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

You don't, and I don't care if you do or not. The value of my comment isn't its novelty or whether it's truly reasoned, which is why LLMs sometimes do create valuable output.

In fact, the output of a reasoning machine (whether a human brain or true AGI, sometime in the future) isn't deterministic. A non-reasoning machine and a reasoning machine could create the same output.

The reason I know LLMs don't have thoughts is because I use them many times every day, and they are very clearly pattern machines. They don't even begin to seem rational, human, or knowledgeable. It's sometimes possible to find near-verbatim sources for their outputs.

reply
As far as I know, no current gen model AI "thinks". It's all processes trained against a body of work generated by actual thinkers along with a bevy of smoke and mirrors to fill in the gaps.

It's amazing that it's as good as it is given how far it is from thinking, but if you threw something actually novel at it, all it would do is confidently word salad a response.

reply