Who Would Dream In The Sausage?

Go to Steam page. Scroll to bottom. Filter out negative reviews. Read 5-10. Update filers to only show negative reviews. Read 5-10.

That’s never let me down when it comes to determining whether or not a game is one I’ll enjoy.

There’s a few replies talking about humans misrepresenting the news. This is true, but part of the problem here is that most people understand the concept of bias - even if only to the extent of “my people neutral, your people biased”. But this is less true for LLMs. There’s research which shows that because LLMs present information authoritatively that not only do people tend to trust them, but they’re actually less likely to check the sources that the LLM provides than they would be with other forms of being presented with information.

And it’s not just news. I’ve seen people seriously argue that fringe pseudo-science is correct because they fed a very leading prompt into a chatbot and got exactly the answer they were looking for.

Okay, firstly, if we’re going to get superintelligent AIs, it’s not going to happen from better LLMs. Secondly, we seem to have already reached the limits of LLMs, so even if that were how to get there it doesn’t seem possible. Thirdly, this is an odd problem to list: “human economic obsolescence”.

What does that actually mean? Feels difficult to read it any way other than saying that money will become obsolete. Which…good? But I suppose not if you’re already a billionaire. Because how else would people know that you won capitalism?

I certainly hope you’re right. But let’s not forget that when the industrial revolution eliminated a lot of jobs for a lot of people, those people were allowed to just starve to death in the street. It took a full generation before new jobs were created.

Basically what you’re saying is that this time round the wealth disparity is so much worse and there are so many more people living in or near poverty that the entire global economy couldn’t withstand the poorest being out of work. That feels like a weird thing to say that you hope someone is right about but…I hope you’re right about it.

But, I dunno, we’re talking about the same attitude that saw several large corporations try out a 4-day/32 hour working week, discover that productivity stayed the same or even went up…and then went right back to the 5-day working week. The same attitude that sees people seriously suggesting that people who work from home should work extra hours unpaid because otherwise they’ll be able to have the time they otherwise would have spent commuting for themselves.

Also, of course, there’s the fact that a large number of people live in poverty and already can’t afford basics like 3 meals a day, let alone buying take-out, or a TV, or going on holiday. And Jeff Bezos isn’t campaigning to end child poverty even though doing so would enable people to spend more on Amazon.

I really think the only way that we’ll ever truly get something like UBI is if one of two things happen - governments who are genuienly invested in the welfare of their people introduce it, or there is enough mobilisation to put enough political pressure on governments to force them to introduce it. At least there are places that are trialling it, so it’s not unthinkable, but I don’t think the “there will be nobody to buy goods” argument really holds up, because those that that affects already demonstrably don’t give a shit.

He hasn’t apologised, but he did make a gaslighting clarification. Nemo roasted him for it, so he blocked her.

But here’s the true mark of when you know you’ve acted like a complete dick - Anna Cramling, of all people, has (politely, of course) called him out.

Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.

FIDE chief Emil Sutovsky released a reprehensible statement on twitter (which I’m not going to link) where he briefly mentioned Danya and briefly said that Kramnik had behaved badly, and then spent a few paragraphs berating Naroditsky’s friends and family for not supporting him enough, while simultaneously admitting that he wasn’t friends with him and hadn’t spoken to him in 4 years.

Nemo Zhou is going scorched-earth on him over it, and Levi “GothamChess” Rozman also released a video where he calls out Sutovsky: https://youtu.be/zY3P9Hx8Ep0

It’s difficult to know what the fallout of all of this is going to be, but it certainly seems like we’ve reached some kind of tipping point.

It’s worth pointing out that nobody yet knows the cause of death, but everybody - including those who knew Danya best - seems to unanimously agree that whatever the direct cause, Kramnik’s baseless accusations played a significant role.

There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:

Tweet 1:

Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT

Tweet 2:

Bro just discovered “thinking”

I downloaded Comet to give it a fair go, loaded it up, and then went “…now what?” Couldn’t think of a single thing i could use the AI interface for.

My personal favourite with Atlas is when he demonstrates searching your history. It takes him longer to type out the command than it would to open your history and search manually, and then it takes It like 10 seconds to find a result, when a manual search would be instantaneous.

The future is here!

Yeah, robots doing drudge work is exactly the future we were promised. It’s just that that’s supposed to allow humans to have more free time to pursue their interests, not die in a ditch from starvation.

If this means you can ask it to pretend to be a busty nurse with a limp, that already exists. If it means that you can say “what’s the name of that video with the busty nurse with a lisp?” and it’ll give you a link, then that’s potential, right there. I can imagine them right now torrenting every porn video they can and getting one llm to transcribe it to create training data for another llm while a third llm does image/scene analysis.

Office chairs are designed to be sat in for long periods. Gaming chairs are designed to look cool on twitch.

The group’s called Film Is Fabulous, and here’s the statement they made:

As mentioned by Sue Malden at our RECOVERED event in May, we are aware of several missing episodes of Doctor Who (Sue stated one [or] two, but there are more than this) in private film collections in the UK. We are liaising with the individuals about cataloguing and preserving their entire collection, including the missing Doctor Who episodes, and ensuring that copies are returned to the BBC. We expect to make a detailed announcement shortly.

The Daily Star doesn’t give a source for this information, and has a somewhat spotty reremovedtion with this kind of thing, but their suggestions for what’s in private hands are: Episode 4 of The Tenth Planet, Episode 3 of The Web Of Fear, and all of Marco Polo.

I’m suspicious because, apart from Power Of The Daleks, those are all the most-wanted finds. And if someone’s telling you everything you want to hear, then you should always pause to go “hmmm”.

Marco Polo, though. It’s a great story, even just presented as a series of telesnaps with bad audio. Imagine if we actually get to see Ping Cho’s dance! And it’s Warris Hussain, so you know that it’s going to be a story which makes the absolute most of its limited resources. People moan about episodes 2-4 of An Unearthly Child, but I think they’re gorgeous. And look at how dynamic the filmed inserts are.

Again, not getting my hopes up, but just imagine if we actually got to see Marco Polo in all its glory.

The group that find old episodes have kind of announced that there’s going to be an announcement soon. People connected to the group but not actually in the group have essentially said that a private collector has died, that they have at least one lost episode and that it’ll be returned to the BBC soon, plus that they’re in negotiation with other collectors who have yet more episodes to acquire them before they die, too.

I blame google. Seriously.

I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.

But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.

Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.

So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.

It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.

I love how the photo of the inside of the place looks like it’s ai generated

UBI doesn’t prevent you from earning money. It’s just that, no matter what, you get x amount of money every week/month.

Ireland is not part of the UK

Awesome! Be prepared, though: it’ll break your heart. They had the story worked out. Was going to be 4 seasons. We got 2.