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by wincy 289 days ago
That's hilarious that you give the villagers thought and the first thing they want to do is overthrow Tom Nook. If this works in Gamecube on an emulator, surely it'd be possible to make it work on the Switch emulators as well?
5 comments

yes, i'd like to try out Animal Crossing New Horizons next! :)
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.

To be fair to Tom Nook, the interest rate on those loans is 0% and there's no risk of being foreclosed upon!
Tom Nook didn't need a down payment either.
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.

This sounds vaguely, achingly familiar. I can't put my finger on it, but I think I've had this experience.
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".
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...
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...
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.
It would be great if this evolved slowly during the progression of the game lol
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...

> Like many [human] reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions"
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.
> 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.

I would say 30s is peak Reddit, but I have no evidence for that.
It used to be Letterman jokes.
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"?
>which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems

Can they?

> 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.

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.

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.
I do agree, in about the same way as people.
So, yes?
Can you blame them when he has an iron grip on the whole town like a mafia crime lord but somehow even more evil.
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
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.
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...

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.
you really don't have to self-censor "emulator" here. HN moderation is not like social media platforms.
Social media platforms censor emulator?!?
Probably not. But silent deranking of censored terms has everyone paranoid that anything even slightly controversial will get hidden.
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.

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
I am curious. Does the kind of DRM used to prevent decompilation come with any performance costs?