FaceDeer

Satire wouldn’t be satire if it wasn’t based on reality.

Ironically, one of the nice uses I’m finding for AI is auto-summaries of exactly that sort of overly verbose article (or more often, Youtube video).

And another thing! Kids these days aren’t learning cursive handwriting. It’s the death of culture, I tell you.

Indeed. And after generating the summary, there’s a chat field below that where you can ask the AI to elaborate on particular subjects. This is really nice.

I think it’s more that you’re overestimating video game AI, here. If your definition of “abstract thought” doesn’t include what LLMs do then it definitely shouldn’t include video game AI. It’s even more illusory.

Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I’m going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.

I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the “summarize transcript” button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I’ve reluctantly watched with a constant “get to the point, man!” Frustration. Now I’ll know if it’s worth it.

"The term “AI” has been in use since 1956 for a wide range of computer science techniques. LLMs most certainly qualify as AI. You may be thinking of the science-fiction kind of “artificial people” AI, which is a subset of AI called Artificial General Intelligence when researchers want to be specific about that kind.

By the time intergalactic navigation is relevant we’ll have likely dismantled Earth. The vast majority of it is just sitting there generating gravity, a huge waste of its potential.

I was going to suggest the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster, but I think your suggestion is better. It’s more point-like and since it’s farther away (well outside of the reachable universe) it results in a more uniform set of directions over long distances.

Of course, cultural influence will be big. If these explorers are Terragen then most likely the Milky Way’s north/south direction will be pretty deeply ingrained in their coordinate systems. They might keep on using that, since it’s not like manual astrolabe-style navigation will ever be relevant at that level of technology.

If it was completely sterile and artificial then I’d expect mummies instead of skeletons, there must have been some kind of bugs to munch up the leathery meat layer.

Kudos to the artist for putting clothing on the skeletons. So often pictures like this just have a skeleton sitting there and I’m left wondering why they were naked when they died.

You do need to think about the economy, though. People aren’t going to accept environmental regulations that will significantly impact their quality of life, that has to be taken into account if you are in a democracy.

If this isn’t a military battle then that makes Israel’s actions look even worse.

They were triggered indiscriminately. Israel had no way of knowing who was holding each pager or where it was located when it went off.

See, reusable.

Microsoft is not going to be running the reactor. You didn’t read the article.

You didn’t read the article. Microsoft is not going to be running the reactor.

Until people stop mindlessly clicking on bait about Microsoft, nuclear power, and AI being bad.

The implicit guardrails these companies are going to add which will complicate things.

That’ll just have to be part of evaluating whether a game is “good” or not, I guess. If game companies hobble their NPCs with all sorts of limitations on what they can talk about then it’ll harm the reception of the game and drop its metacritic score.

I do see some interesting hurdles that were likely never imagined when the rules were written. How do you come up with an ESRB rating for a game where you don’t know what topics your NPCs might talk about or what sorts of quest lines might ultimately be generated?

Numerous game-breaking states because you’re risking a more traditional Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master problem where your party somehow has failed to ask an NPC the right kind of questions or even consider that they might have information relevant to the campaign. How do you get this information across if the player isn’t somehow prompted to attempt it?

That seems like something that an AI-driven game might actually be better at, if properly done. The AI could review the dialogue the character has participated in so far and ask itself “has the player found out the location of the cave with Necklace of Frinn yet?” And if it sees that the player just keeps on missing that vital clue somehow it could start coming up with new ways to slip that information into future dialogues. Drop hints and clues, maybe even invent a letter to have delivered to the player, that sort of thing.

Whereas in a pre-scripted game if a player misses a vital clue they might end up frustrated and stuck, not knowing they need to backtrack to find what they overlooked.

I think this AI stuff is a cheap cop-out that uses way too much energy for a weak result.

If the games using AI aren’t good then they won’t sell well. This is a self-correcting problem.

Yeah. IIRC the only out-of-pocket costs from my whole experience was the occasional cafeteria food and the parking fees.

Of course, none of this is to say that we shouldn’t always strive to be better. There’s always room to improve, if only because medical technology itself is steadily improving so we need to keep up with that. But it’s good to recognize that the situation’s really not all that bad as it is right now.

I feel like I could probably join in on the roast and have fun.