Had a mapping jam with a friend today and decided to use the opportunity to try out Hammer for CS2 - I set out to make a single-bombsite Defusal map, but the end result became more of an aim duel map. We prepared by watching through Eagle One's introduction video, which was very quick - I would recommend pausing and rewatching sections liberally - but it was a good intro and covered the basics well.

Once you get past the smorgasbord of tools, blocking out levels in Hammer 2 was really nice: you can extrude things in SketchUp style very quickly, but you can also block things out in Trenchbroom style if need be.

The major speedbump we ran into is that Workshop maps still need mod approval even if you're just testing them out with friends, so setting up a dedicated server is a good idea if you're going to playtest.



strangebroadcasts
@strangebroadcasts

At the root of it, SQL injections are basically programs not distinguishing instructions from data - if your cool app passes user input as-is into your SQL database, someone might decide to change their name to have it interpreted as a query to delete every database table, which the database then dutifully proceeds to do - that's what the query said to do, after all.

With instruction-tuned language models you have the same problem in the form of prompt injection except you have no way of architecturally distinguishing between instructions and data: underneath, the instructions and user input will be treated as one big bundle of text, and the language model will just suggest a way to complete that text. It's just generating text, after all, it's the mapping layer that turns it into an email/API call/deleted database that does the actual damage.

As Simon goes into, most of the mitigations being proposed don't really attack this core problem, but boil down to phrasing more clever instructions, or trying to validate the input or output in some form.

"The program can't distinguish your instructions from the user's" feels like the explain-like-i'm-5 explanation of SQL injections, but also a simple straightforward explanation of prompt injection



Personally, I'd have looked at the wall and realized his testimony was fabricated from stuff in my office

If my drinking buddy broke off the friendship I would just have left him alone to play the fiddle

I would simply have approved the request to build a new playground before going to the doctor

I just wouldn't have translated that message or used any terms of endearment

I'm just saying, if I was there I would have left life in balance



Probably an obvious trick, but it was fun to see you actually can turn a Cellz into a limited and somewhat goofy 16-step sequencer by having it "push" itself to the next row at the end of each 4-step sequence -- i.e. set it to the unquantized mode, tune CV2 to full (right) on the south-east cells and zero in every other cell, and finally patch CV2 out to the south-west ↙ input and a clock to the south-east ↘ input.

Unfortunately this doesn't work in chromatic mode, so it's not terribly useful - at best it's a way to modulate a parameter on a loop and have it return after playing around on the touch pad, in a sort of "we have Gliss at home" deal.