Goodbye Zachtronics, Developers of Very Cool Video Games

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: On July 5, Zachtronics will be releasing Last Call BBS, a collection of stylish little puzzle games wrapped up in a retro PC gaming vibe. After 11 years in business (and even longer outside of commercial releases), a time which has seen the studio develop a cult following almost unrivaled in indie gaming, it will be the last new game Zachtronics will ever release. We spoke to founder Zach Barth to find out why.

Named for founder Zach Barth, Zachtronics has spent most of those 11 years specializing in puzzle games (or variations on the theme). And pretty much every single one of them has been great (or at least interesting). […] The result has been a succession of games that may not have been to everyone’s tastes, but for those with whom they resonated, it was their shit. It’s not hard seeing why: most of Zachtronics’ games involved challenging puzzles, but also a deeply cool and interesting presentation surrounding them, such as the grimy hacker aesthetic of Exapunks, or the Advance Wars-like Mobius Front 83. Given those initial and superficial differences, it can sometimes be hard pinpointing exactly what makes a game so clearly a Zachtronics joint, but like love and art, when you see it you just know it.

So it’s sad, but also awesome in its own way, that 2022 will see the end of Zachtronics. Not because their publisher shuttered them, or because their venture capital funding ran out, or because Activision made them work on Call of Duty, or any other number of reasons (bankruptcy! scandal!) game developers usually close their doors. No, Zachtronics is closing because…they want to. “We’re wrapping things up!” Barth tells Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett. “Zachtronics will release Last Call BBS next month. We’re also working on a long-awaited solitaire collection that we’re hoping to have out by the end of the year. After that, the team will disband. We all have different ideas, interests, tolerances for risk, and so on, so we’re still figuring out what we want to do next.”

“We felt it was time for a change. This might sound weird, but while we got very good at making ‘Zachtronics games’ over the last twelve years, it was hard for us to make anything else. We were fortunate enough to carve out a special niche, and I’m thankful that we’ve been able to occupy it and survive in it, but it also kept us locked into doing something we didn’t feel like doing forever.”

Last Call BBS will be released on July 5 on Steam. You can view the trailer here.

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On NetHack’s 35th Anniversary, It’s Displayed at Museum of Modern Art

Switzerland-based software developer Jean-Christophe Collet writes:
A long time ago I got involved with the development of NetHack, a very early computer role playing game, and soon joined the DevTeam, as we’ve been known since the early days. I was very active for the first 10 years then progressively faded out even though I am still officially (or semi-officially as there is nothing much really “official” about NetHack, but more on that later) part of the team.

This is how, as we were closing on the 35th anniversary of the project, I learned that NetHack was being added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of New York. It had been selected by the Architecture and Design department for its small collection of video games, and was going to be displayed as part of the Never Alone exhibition this fall.

From its humble beginnings as a fork of the 1982 dungeon-exploring game “Hack” (based on the 1980 game Rogue), Nethack influenced both Diablo and Torchlight, Collet writes. But that’s just the beginning:

It is one of the oldest open-source projects still in activity. It actually predates the term “open-source” (it was “free software” back then) and even the GPL by a few years. It is also one of the first, if not the first software project to be developed entirely over the Internet by a team distributed across the globe (hence the “Net” in “NetHack”).
In the same spirit, it is one of the first projects to take feedback, suggestions, bug reports and bug fixes from the online community (mostly over UseNet at the time) long, long before tools like GitHub (or Git for that matter), BugZilla or Discord were even a glimmer of an idea in the minds of their creators….

So what did I learn working as part of the NetHack DevTeam?

First, I learned that you should always write clean code that you won’t be embarrassed by, 35 years later, when it ends up in a museum….

Collet praises things like asynchronous communication and distributed teams, before closing with the final lesson he learned. “Having fun is the best way to boost your creativity and productivity to the highest levels.

“There is no substitute…. I am incredibly grateful to have been part of that adventure.”

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OpenAI Has Trained a Neural Network To Competently Play Minecraft

In a blog post today, OpenAI says they’ve “trained a neural network to play Minecraft by Video PreTraining (VPT) on a massive unlabeled video dataset of human Minecraft play, while using only a small amount of labeled contractor data.” The model can reportedly learn to craft diamond tools, “a task that usually takes proficient humans over 20 minutes (24,000 actions),” they note. From the post: In order to utilize the wealth of unlabeled video data available on the internet, we introduce a novel, yet simple, semi-supervised imitation learning method: Video PreTraining (VPT). We start by gathering a small dataset from contractors where we record not only their video, but also the actions they took, which in our case are keypresses and mouse movements. With this data we train an inverse dynamics model (IDM), which predicts the action being taken at each step in the video. Importantly, the IDM can use past and future information to guess the action at each step. This task is much easier and thus requires far less data than the behavioral cloning task of predicting actions given past video frames only, which requires inferring what the person wants to do and how to accomplish it. We can then use the trained IDM to label a much larger dataset of online videos and learn to act via behavioral cloning.

We chose to validate our method in Minecraft because it (1) is one of the most actively played video games in the world and thus has a wealth of freely available video data and (2) is open-ended with a wide variety of things to do, similar to real-world applications such as computer usage. Unlike prior works in Minecraft that use simplified action spaces aimed at easing exploration, our AI uses the much more generally applicable, though also much more difficult, native human interface: 20Hz framerate with the mouse and keyboard.

Trained on 70,000 hours of IDM-labeled online video, our behavioral cloning model (the âoeVPT foundation modelâ) accomplishes tasks in Minecraft that are nearly impossible to achieve with reinforcement learning from scratch. It learns to chop down trees to collect logs, craft those logs into planks, and then craft those planks into a crafting table; this sequence takes a human proficient in Minecraft approximately 50 seconds or 1,000 consecutive game actions. Additionally, the model performs other complex skills humans often do in the game, such as swimming, hunting animals for food, and eating that food. It also learned the skill of “pillar jumping,” a common behavior in Minecraft of elevating yourself by repeatedly jumping and placing a block underneath yourself. For more information, OpenAI has a paper (PDF) about the project.

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New Linux Foundation Podcast: ‘Untold Stories of Open Source’

The nonprofit Linux Foundation pays Linus Torvalds’ salary and supports many other open source projects. But they also launched a new podcast series this week covering “The Untold Stories of Open Source.”

“Each week we explore the people who are supporting Open Source projects, how they became involved with it, and the problems they faced along the way,” explains the podcast’s GitHub page (where you can put in a pull request to suggest future episodes or track the project’s progress.)

The podcast is available on its official web page, as well as on Spotify, Apple, Google, or “wherever you listen to your podcasts,” according to an announcement from the Linux Foundation. An introductory page says the podcast will be “used to inform the Linux and Open Source communities as to the current state in development of open source initiatives and Linux Foundation Projects. It is vendor neutral, with no interviews of commercial product vendors or sales teams.”

Here’s the first four episodes:

Balancing Priorities at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, with Priyanka Sharma, general manager
A Life in Open Source, with Brian Behlendorf, general manager at Open Source Security Foundation
A New Model for Technical Training, with Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president of the Linux Foundation’s training/certification project
The Business Side of Open Source, with Patrick Debois, “godfather of DevOps”

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US Proposes New Rules to Curb ‘Meme Stock’ Rallies

America’s Securities and Exchange Commission “is considering broad changes to curb the frenetic trading of stocks based on social media activity,” reports Reuters:

The proposed overhaul would be the biggest change to Wall Street’s rules since 2005 and would affect nearly every corner of the market, from commission-free brokerages to market makers and exchanges. The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on Friday called for the SEC, along with other regulators, to do more to protect the markets from similar events….

The U.S. House Financial Services Committee on Friday urged Congress to adopt legislation mandating the SEC study how its rules need to change to address new technological developments, such as digital engagement practices and social media-driven market activity.

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Meme-Stock Probe Finds Robinhood Woes Were Worse Than It Let On

Bloomberg writes that the makers of the Robinhood app “faced a more dire situation during the height of last year’s meme-stock frenzy than executives at the online brokerage let on publicly, according to a report from top Democrats on a key congressional committee.”

A more-than-yearlong investigation by staff on the House Financial Services Committee concluded Friday that the frenzied trading in GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. posed a significant threat to the online brokerage. Robinhood avoided defaulting on its regulatory collateral obligations in late January 2021 only because it received a waiver from its clearinghouse, according to the findings… “The company was only saved from defaulting on its daily collateral deposit requirement by a discretionary and unexplained waiver,” according to the report. “Robinhood’s risk-management processes did not work well to predict and avert the risk of default that materialized….”

The 138-page document released on Friday provides the most detailed look yet at how alarmed Robinhood executives grew over the situation in late January 2021. According to the findings, those actions didn’t match the firm’s public assertions.

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Engineers Demonstrate Quantum Integrated Circuit Made Up of Just a Few Atoms

Engineers in Sydney have demonstrated a quantum integrated circuit made up of just a few atoms. By precisely controlling the quantum states of the atoms, the new processor can simulate the structure and properties of molecules in a way that could unlock new materials and catalysts. New Atlas reports: The new quantum circuit comes from researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a start-up company called Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC). It’s essentially made up of 10 carbon-based quantum dots embedded in silicon, with six metallic gates that control the flow of electrons through the circuit. It sounds simple enough, but the key lies in the arrangement of these carbon atoms down to the sub-nanometer scale. Relative to each other, they’re precisely positioned to mimic the atomic structure of a particular molecule, allowing scientists to simulate and study the structure and energy states of that molecule more accurately than ever before.

In this case, they arranged the carbon atoms into the shape of the organic compound polyacetylene, which is made up of a repeating chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms with an alternating pattern of single and double carbon bonds between them. To simulate those bonds, the team placed the carbon atoms at different distances apart. Next, the researchers ran an electrical current through the circuit to check whether it would match the signature of a natural polyacetylene molecule — and sure enough, it did. In other tests, the team created two different versions of the chain by cutting bonds at different places, and the resulting currents matched theoretical predictions perfectly. The significance of this new quantum circuit, the team says, is that it could be used to study more complicated molecules, which could eventually yield new materials, pharmaceuticals, or catalysts. This 10-atom version is right on the limit of what classical computers can simulate, so the team’s plans for a 20-atom quantum circuit would allow for simulation of more complex molecules for the first time. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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Goldman Sachs Raising Funds to Buy Celsius Assets

Goldman Sachs is looking to raise $2 billion from investors to buy up distressed assets from troubled crypto lender Celsius, according to two people familiar with the matter. CoinDesk reports: The proposed deal would allow investors to buy up Celsius’ assets at potentially big discounts in the event of a bankruptcy filing, the people said. Goldman Sachs appears to be gauging interest and soliciting commitments from Web3 crypto funds, funds specializing in distressed assets and traditional financial institutions with ample cash on hand, according to a person familiar with the situation. The assets, most likely cryptocurrencies having to be sold on the cheap, would then likely be managed by participants in the fundraising push. Celsius has tapped restructuring advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday afternoon. Earlier this month, Celsius abruptly paused withdrawals, swaps, and transfers between accounts, citing “extreme market conditions.” The disclosure sent bitcoin’s price below $20,000 and prompted the firm’s token to take a 60% tumble.

As of Monday, the company said it’s still working on “stabilizing [their] liquidity and operations.”

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The Mars Express Spacecraft Is Finally Getting a Windows 98 Upgrade

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars. The Verge reports: The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98. Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet’s sake, the ESA isn’t upgrading its systems to Windows ME. The MARSIS instrument on ESA’s Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software upgrade “will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before,” according to the ESA. The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet’s surface.

MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves that bounce off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the Red Planet’s atmosphere. The instrument’s 130-foot antenna is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrades will enhance the signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data that’s sent back to Earth. “We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the upgrade. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”

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