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The AI Race Just Got Awkward

412 points · 463 comments · allisdust

  1. jgrahamc · · focus · HN ↗

    [dead]

    1. emilecantin · · focus · HN ↗
      It's from video games, where a player "camps" near the spawn point and kills newly-spawned players, presumably with better equipment.

      It's not that niche, if you've been online a little bit you'd know this expression.

      1. jgrahamc · · focus · HN ↗
        I dunno, man, I first got on the Internet in 1986 and was Cloudflare's CTO for years. I've been online quite a bit.
        1. off_with_their_ · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

        2. johnthescott · · focus · HN ↗
          jgc, you made my day, one 86'er to another.
        3. pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
          Due to shifting definitions, I believe that makes you a boomer[0] so you'd be readily excused for not knowing.

          Sarcasm aside, gaming and FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture that it's just assumed everyone knows it. Spawn camping is among the oldest examples of gaming terms that broke out into common online usage and it dates back to Quake some time around 1997.

          [0] anyone older than 39 at this point

          1. tejohnso · · focus · HN ↗
            > FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture

            What is online culture? Is someone who is heavily into instagram for fashion, facebook for family contact and news, maybe Google for mail and search, part of online culture? Because I know people who are like that and there's no way they know what "spawn" or "camping" mean in gamer context and certainly wouldn't be able to piece together what "spawn camping" is.

            1. pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
              Those things seem fairly obviously not online culture but parts of "real life" culture that have an online presence, obvious to me at least. Video games and especially multiplayer video games are a core part of what you could call the indigenous online culture and serve the role of sport and to a large degree casual socialization. Their equivalents in the real world are team sports, board games and party games. These things aren't mutually exclusive and they certainly bleed over both ways but you can easily say that a game like Counter Strike is primarily online and a game like Basketball is primarily offline even though there are Basketball themed video games and Counter Strike themed in-person events.

              To put it simply, it's a Venn diagram with two overlapping, non-coincident circles. The amount of overlap has varied with time but that doesn't mean online culture doesn't exist or conversely that everything is part of online culture.

          2. khazhoux · · focus · HN ↗
            > gaming and FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture that it's just assumed everyone knows it

            Strong consensus bias in this statement. I have no doubt it is true in your circle (and to a lot of people). But there are plenty of online-24/7 cultures that don’t have any overlap with gaming.

        4. VGHN7XDuOXPAzol · · focus · HN ↗
          (tongue-in-cheek) In that long time you've been online, have you not come across the concept of a search engine?
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