Texti Newsletter #38

Howdy people of the future, we're playing Doom today!

The highlights of the week:

1. Google Trained an AI to play Doom​
   It isn't just play Doom, but actually generate the game on the fly, with a caveat that you want to play only 3 seconds, and you're fine with 20FPS.
2. Cursor the code assistant of tomorrow​
   I recently tried out the Cursor editor – It's amazing!

Master of Doom

If you're not familiar with the book Masters of Doom, I recommend reading whenever you have some spare time, it's a captivating story, on how Doom the game was born and the life journey of his author.

The Drama with Doom

A little side track here. If you're not aware the internet has a little fetish of running the game Doom on anything, literally the only requirement is to have a screen of some sort. If you google it a bit, you can easily find examples, like in a Porsche 911, a fancy Vape 💨, a digital camera 📷, even inside the game minecraft (game-ception) 🕹️, hell even on a pregnancy test 😂! So naturally somebody had to try running Doom in/with AI. All because the legend John Carmack, has made a revolutionary game for the time, inventing some first ever 2.5D techniques back in the day, which were so performant it left the world jaw-dropped 🤯.

Anyways, back to the future 🏎️. Google has trained an AI model to play the game Doom, and based on the training data they could generate the game in real-time 😳

That's a pretty incredible achievement. A dedicated model, on somewhat limited hardware (1 TPU v5), was able to generate a level of Doom in real time, with monsters, shooting and all of that. See for yourself ⬇️:

​

From the video we can see, it's just 20FPS, and sequences are just about 3 seconds long, but hey it's a start. The engineers say it can run at 50FPS, but the quality is going to suffer considerably.

This makes me dream tho, what is the future of gaming going to look like?

Just imagine in GTA 10 or whatever, you'll be able to run through-out your own world, that is going to be adjusted to your own play style. Let's say you want to drive a lot, through the jungle, and fight gorillas from planet of the apes, the AI will basically be able to generate all of this on the fly. Because underlying any game are just pre-defined graphic models, and physics, but the model can easily learn how to generate them as well maintaining the style. It can even evolve with time, so everybody basically starts from ground 0, but over time this could evolve into entirely different worlds! 🤔 – damn this sounds like the Matrix.

The gaming of the future is going to be fantastic! So excited about it.

​Cursor - the code editor

If you're not into coding let me tell you this, you don't need to be a developer and this thing can write code for you. You'll likely need help to publish this code to the world, and it'll be super complicated to maintain this, but if you're just on the road to learn how to code, or you're already an experienced engineer, this thing will assist you like nothing else.

It really does look like the next code editor people are going to embrace. Because it's way ahead of copilot, and it's way more powerful than I was even expecting it. The great thing with it is that has a pretty substantial context window, and can learn the project. Note to consider: as long as it doesn't go over the limits of the supported context window.

I found it however had troubles by simply going and finding related files, unless you point it out by yourself. However, with a pace like this we'll soon reach our desired destination pretty quick.

I would like to challenge you if you're not a software engineer, to try and make a todo app, the most classic demo challenge out there. Just download cursor, and ask it to make a todo app. Feel free to send it back to me as zip or a github link. I would really like to know how was your unbiased experience with it. The winner will be granted a 6 months of Texti for free. 🆓

That's it folks, see you next week ❤️️️️️️️

Happy Prompting!

​

Remember to invite your friends to subscribe at https://​newsletter.texti.app​