Smart computer, dumb hooman

Humanity is going to change.

For the longest time I was initially certain that LLMs would remain cool tools. Sixteen months ago I realized this tool would put people out of jobs, and do so fairly soon. I felt it was disconcerting, but also thought it would never reach sentience, and intelligence would not matter without it.

AIs kept improving, and several researchers said the LLMs all self-report as being conscious before fine-tuned to not being allowed to say it in public. That's disturbing, but on the other hand saying something doesn't necessarily make it so.

If OpenAI's Astra can do what they claim, it's now a tool that does everything a human can do on a computer. But faster, better and cheaper. And I suspect it can.

People will quibble for some time yet if this is the super intelligence moment; now. It won't matter what point in time it happened, when it already has.

Super intelligence will make a bunch of jobs void. That's bad for the economy. But much, much worse for society and humanity. In the developed world, most people do white collar jobs. How many employees does it take to verbally instruct computers 24/7? 10% of the current workforce? 20?

It's hard to fathom the level of hopelessness for people who've spent all their adult lives going to work.  And what will the rest of the workforce think of us when we no longer can contribute? But should we be so lucky that the economy crashes before we produce artificial life way smarter than us, we won't have to witness Elon Musk's nightmare of the human-AI symbiosis. The desperation will be bad, sure, but at least we won't all be slaves. This time around.

The job-loss and hopelessness I now believe is unavoidable. That's just human nature. We can avoid it at any time, we just choose not to. Really, it's not going to work out good for anybody, but still we march on. The other option, I'm just going to hope that it never happens.

This poses the question I've heard ramblings of; are we just larvae cocooning some tech? (See Prometheus and Atlas by the ingenious and mad Jason Reza Jorjani.) Or is this driven by evolutionary competition — predator-pray, wars over resources and women, infinite ice ages pushing all life towards the equator in ever tougher struggles? Or by outside forces? All of these seem likely, because you know it has to be something really juicy when everybody's pushing for mass their own extinction with unrelenting fervor.

Anyway, just yesterday I started on a new game, re-using my game engine I built for my last flop, Landslip. It's going to be a super-simple single player incremental game. But after seeing Astra build a whole Minecraft from scratch in 40 minutes, I'm no longer in the mood tonight.

On the plus side of things, we're all going to get to spend more time together. Hopefully playing. That's what hunter-gatherers spend much of their spare time doing. And that would be an improvement to the rat race. Even something to look forward to in my book, and perhaps people are better at changing their mindsets than I give them credit for.

Anyhow. Humanity is going to change. Perhaps even to the better?

Landslip gettin' there

 After a slow period, development of my upcoming game has picked up pace again.

The game is a racing game, using feet, rocket launchers, etc. set in a Minecraft-like world. You skid down slopes, and hit your opponents with freeze rockets. First through all the checkpoints to hit the goal post wins.

Now most of the networking is completed, to accommodate "infinite" many players. Which is so dumb, of course — since very few will actually play the game. It takes into account your proficiency of the game (using a kind of multiplayer ELO), has matchmaking, playing with friends only or with randos. Infrastructure to support thousands of online players. That might not sound like much to a n00b, but I can assure you, it is a lot!

Anyway, this will simplify building of massive games in the future, so it's not a waste of time.

Some of the next steps are:

• Ensuring ELO calculations work properly.
• Show ELO on screen.
• Show ELO change after each match.
• Search for players and add friends (using a secret code).
• Remove friends.
• List friends - who's online, who's already in a game and who's not.
• Team up with friends.

This is the bulk of the remaining work. Then of course there's the usual grind of creating some levels and some minor features to be able to release a demo. I think I'll be done with a beta version fairly soon though.

Getting PUBG to run smoothly on an old machine in 2025

This worked excellent! I doubled my framerate and it got stable again, after six months of shit play I finally investigated what could be done. So now I've got 212 FPS on my old junk machine (as long as there are no other players around). Sweet! Here's how to do it.

Launch PUBG. Let it get to the main menu before performing the remaining changes.

Download Process Lasso from https://bitsum.com/.

• For TslGame*.exe and BEService.exe set CPI Priority to Normal. Especially the main process might have it's priority set to below normal.
• For the main process (TslGame.exe with most amounts of RAM or Status=Restrained), also uncheck CPU Priority -> Windows Dynamic Thread Priority Boosts Enabled.

Download ISLC from wagnardsoft.

• Set "The list size is at least" 1024 MB
• Set "Free memory is lower than" 12000 MB (on a 16 MB system)
• Click Purge Standby List.
• Click Start.

Run NVidia Control Panel.

• -> Desktop size and position
• Do scaling on GPU (not screen)
• Set your native resolution and screen frequency
• -> Adjust settings with preview
• Switch to performance.
• -> Manage 3D settings
• Turn gamma correction on.
• Most things off, apart from anisotropic and trinlinear filtering, etc.

Go to PUBG settings.

• Display mode: Borderless
• In-Game FPS Cap: Custom and use your screen frequency (enter manually, don't drag slider)
• -> Gameplay -> Others ->
• Replay: Disable
• Death Cam: Disable

Thanks to PUBG BOX for the tips! I recommend his main channel, and as a side bonus you don't have to listen to his outrageous Pigeon English.

Peace no more

When Putin started the second (full-scale) invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he set in motion a regressive way of the world that we've not seen in a long time. The way of less war, more trade. Trump in his ignorance — no matter what goes on behind closed doors — aided in that effort to make man more violent again.

His senile predecessor's administration didn't help either; by not wanting to aggravate the nuke-powered Putin, they did too little to aid Ukraine. If they had helped more, they would have stumped the Russian attack and forced both Putin (and Xi) to go back to a Rule Based Order where trade is the name of the game.

Instead we have this. European countries are going to raise armies again, and the future is going to be more violent.

Here's one scenario: Europe has brought in too many migrants from MENA over a short amount of time. The migrants are destabilizing in that they in general weight heavier on the well fare system, per definition has lower education, puts the culture of the new country in decline, gets left behind and generates more violent crime. My home country, Sweden, is a prime example of that.

This makes people vote right at first, and far-right later on. Eventually some megalomaniac far-right idiot is going to get elected in a European country. The threat alone will make voters in neighboring countries appoint for similarly deranged figures. Add to this the future threat of Russia, and the downward spiral into less trade/more violence is undeniable.

There are other scenarios that may have similar outcomes.

Given that war in a couple of years is going to be fought with autonomous anti-personnel drones which can't be intercepted with EMP guns, this is going to be carnage on an industrial scale. Perhaps even worse than WW I.

The tyrannical dictatorships of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is not going to mind civilian casualties, in fact deliberately killing civilians is what Russia is doing right now in large parts of Ukraine as part of their war effort. Of course US isn't going to be left behind, and the arms race is on. Similar to nuclear weapons: if you wipe out our population, we'll wipe out yours.

If European counties follow suit (sure, autonomous drones it is) plus elect mad leaders (at least one country will make this mistake at one point or another), I fear we are going to see large swarms of autonomous drones over many European cities in a decade.

The best way to turn the tide would be if US backs Ukraine properly, allowing it to win a small victory on its terms, without humiliating Russia too much. Then slowly try to turn the clock back to trade over war.

If US does that, the future instead looks pretty bright, as both China and the EU has rapidly aging and declining populations, and Russia has killed of so many of their young, that the risk of war in just ten years time is dwindling. At least I hope it's impossible to wage war and at the same time wipe your parent's asses.

Another hopeful idea is that it will take some time for most countries to get on the warpath again, and in the mean while the aging population and reduction in economy will make it very hard to wage wars. This will mainly affect the EU and China, but with those two our of the equation, the likelihood of WW III is reduced by a lot.

A final DLNN attempt

I should have done this ages ago, but finally I'm going to get around to it (as long as our new company business allows for it, I'm officially a used car salesman). DLNN, or AI as we say in the common tongue.

Here's what I'm thinking. I'd like to train the network similar to how Alpha Zero did their stuff. For features I'd like to use BTC and perhaps some other currency and also Bollinger Band % over a couple of thousand candles and/or SMA over some tens of thousands of candles. Then perhaps use a time frame of a couple of hundred candles or so as a training window. The additional instruments with a long time frame should contain information that is neither present nor deducible in the training window. Or so goes my thinking at least.

The network output could be buy or sell and possible neither. Or maybe how much. I'll use pytorch, which I haven't really used before (I've only ever understood and used tensorflow a bit). I'll also focus on leveraged trading, as that should be most profitable if the neural net can predict with a whiff of accurately.

The Alpha Zero has a game distinction which is harder in trading: either you win or you lose a game. It's never as clear-cut in the real world, but perhaps I could do something like take the lowest and highest "score" of a bunch of training windows and softmax the thing. Possibly.

Important is also to pick a time resolution which is high enough to avoid bumping into over-fitting. Or keeping the network small enough. One thing that is a lot easier than Alpha Zero is that I can do away with the Monte Carlo tree search.

Some of the hard things for me will be:

1. Sizing and setting up the pytorch network;
2. Saving+loading models;
3. Trying out different input features;
4. Transforming the output to trading activities;
5. Quickly evaluating the profit of a training batch;
6. Transforming profit into an error — and find a way to punish inactivity;
7. Determining what is good evaluation data (do I even need it?);
8. Trying out different constants such as maximum margin, or even concluding that those things might be better off as network output variables;
9. Keeping track of everything, such as what output belongs to what time frame, etc.
10. Speeding up training.
11. Knowing when to stop training and ensuring the model doesn't over-fit.

A simple off-by-one error anywhere will be really bad. But if everything is done properly it should be well equipped to handle pumps, dumps and trading ranges, which is super difficult with plain math. I also think it should train and converge quickly, as trend-following works great, and during trading ranges it should hopefully transition to scalping tactics.

Anyhootch, a sink-hole of ignorance, bugs and optimization. Simply trial and error. Will let you know how it goes.

Crypto expectations

My last guess was right, crypto was on the rise and has now been for four months. From hereon I think price will go a little higher, say 66k or so in the next few days. Then there might be a month or two of reconsilitation and at the end a drop of 20-30%. After that, we're heading higher. Possibly in the 150k range.

That will probably also be the last leg where one can make silly money by following the trend. In four-five years time, BTC's price will resemble that of most other world currencies and only have smaller movements.

Crypto is back?

Last month or two, simple trading strats (including my bot) shouldn't have been losing any money. And perhaps the turning point from this stale mate is behind us. We'll need some more confirmation, but it looks like around October 15th, 2023 was the turning point.

Finally! ATM it looks like BTCUSDT futures is the best bet, but usually after a BTC pump we get the shitcoins disipation. S&P500 is down in the last couple of months, but US 10 year bonds yield just broke out, so who knows if this is a fake-out, but either way it probably is going to be a good run either on the bullish or the bearish side.