These concerns sound exaggerated. There is no way that simply being infected with microplastics can force a change in behavior like that. In fact, it is my personal opinion that we should manufacture as many microplastics as possible, and disseminate them to the environment where they can reach more biological systems and provide their many medical benefits to as many people as possible. helphelphelphelphelp This title is simply fear mongering.

How did the hipster burn his mouth?

He drank his coffee before it was cool

One of the things I hated the most on reddit was that every subreddit eventually converged to this bullcrap. TIL that go blue team. YSK that go red team. ITAP of go blue team. AITA for thinking go red team? Back stupid blue tram, win stupid prizes. And on and on and on, it’s exhausting. I care plenty about politics and current events, and when I want to be politically prostelyzed to, I go to one of the appropriate communities for that.

the question is literally, ARE YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLING SOMEONE, either by action or inaction

Consequentialism says yes, deontology can say no, depending. Consequentialism is the superior system of ethics in theory, because of course you shouldn’t do “YOUR DUTY” if it leads to crappy consequences. But deontology is superior a lot of the time in practice, because the person who says “just don’t piss off the fairies bro” often gets better consequences than the guy who uses his galaxy brain to compute a Bentham integral over seven-dimensional utility space and arrives “rationally” at the conclusion that pissing off the fairies is the optimal action.

If you’re the company CEO and you’ve spent years shouting a marketing pitch of “scooters! Scooters! Scooters instead of walking! Scooters! They’re the future!” then yes, it’s a bad look if you walk, never mind if you issue a company wide walking mandate.

This is every Atlus game. The enormous snakes and lasers are just a metaphor, but when you die metaphorically you die in real life

Reading this comment section is so strange. Skepticism about generative AI seems to have become some kind of professional sport on the internet.

Consensus in our group is that generative AI is a great tool. Maybe not perfect, but the comparison to the metaverse is absurd: no one asked for the metaverse or needed it for anything, as opposed to several cases where GPT has literally bailed us out of a difficult situation. e.g. some proof of concept needed to be written in a programming language that no one in the group had enough experience with. With no GPT, this could have easily cost someone a week. With GPT assistance – proof of concept ready in less than a day.

Generative AI does suffer from a host of problems. Hallucinations, jailbreaks, injections, reality 101 failures, believe me I’ve encountered all these intimately as I’ve had to utilize GPT for some of my day job tasks, often against its own better judgment and despite its own woefully lacking capacity to deal with the task. What I think is interesting is a candid discussion: why do these issues persist? What have we tried? What techniques can we try next? Are these issues intractable in some profound sense, and constitute a hard ceiling for where generative AI can go? Is there an “impossibility theorem for putting AI on autopilot”? Or are these limitations just artifacts we can engineer away and route around?

It seems like instead of having this discussion, it’s become in vogue to wave around the issues triumphantly and implicitly declare the field successfully dunked on, and the discussion over. That’s, to be blunt, reductive. Smartphones had issues, the early internet had issues. Sure, “they also laughed at Bozo the clown” and all that, but without a serious discussion of the landscape right now, of how far away we are from mitigating these issues and why, a lot of this “ha ha suck it AI” discourse strikes me as deeply performative. Like, suppose a year from now OpenAI solves hallucinations. The issue is just gone. Do all the cool kids who sneered at the invented legal precedents, crafted their image as knowing better than the OpenAI dweebs, elegantly implied how hallucinations are a cornerstone in how the entire field is a stupid useless dead end – do they lose any face? I think they don’t. I think this is why this sneering has become such a lucrative online professional sport.

The intellectual obsession with logical fallacies was a mistake, and you are a living proof why. People are not perfectly objective robots with infinite capacity for information processing, attention and critical thought. Caring about bad actors, and taking everything they post in the context of them being bad actors, is not an intellectual deficiency. It is a precondition for sanity.

To be quite frank this comment reads like an Ayn Rand villain monologue, the kind that Ayn Rand was rightfully laughed at for writing

Somehow I don’t feel the commitment to a blank slate and a new storyline oozing off the game’s title

If you take Putin seriously he is saying he backs an interest rate hike. As a point of comparison, in Israel they just had an interest rate hike this year, and when people started struggling with loans and mortgages the auth-right government immediately blamed the central bank’s monetary policy.

Auth-right governments can never really fail at anything: economic troubles are the fault of the central bank, military troubles – the fault of the military, and so on. The sort of people who back these governments are very thirsty for this kool-aid, Putin is just meeting the high demand with supply.

The elite temporal rescue task force emerges out a portal. The commander picks up a dirtied “Berenstain Bears” book off the floor and heaves a great sigh. “Abort mission… We are too late, it’s too far gone”

Christ, that game. Coming into it I’d just played Dragon Age: Inquisition and took one big lesson from that previous experience – no more filler quests. Is the quest part of the main plot? No? Do I actually predict a good payoff, and not just imagine it could maybe be there? Also no? Then skip the quest. That approach would have saved me like a 100 hours on DA:I that were entertaining but ultimately, in retrospect, wasted. I thought it would serve me well coming into this new game.

Imagine my surprise discovering that after the first act Pathfinder: Kingmaker becomes “wander and stumble upon side quests to pass the time, the game”, crossed with some kind of painfully elaborate toy version of Crusader Kings that I found I had zero enthusiasm to play. Once the main quest became officially gated by in-game time I was tempted to quit right then. In spite of myself I said “fine let’s explore” and tried going to four different places, only to get rekt each time due to ‘not supposed to be here yet’ underleveling. That’s when I shook my head sadly and threw in the towel. I suddenly gained an unexpected appreciation for DA:I, which at least did entertain me for those 100 wasted hours.

I try to play games on their intended difficulty. Difficulty level wise this usually means “normal”, unless “normal” = “a chore in early game without any items or skills, then at the exact moment your arsenal becomes viable you obtain the pointy acid sword and the ‘double all acid damage’ skill, which trivializes the rest of the game”. In that case I pick “hard”.

Why is this relevant? Because the industry has developed a standard protocol to prevent save scumming, such that when a game starts I instantly know where the devs stand. You know the drill: ‘this game features an auto-save system; when you see the spinning circle, first don’t turn off your system, and second take note that your fuck-up right now has been recorded for posterity and cannot be undone’.

As far as I’m concerned, nowadays if the game lets you save scum, then this is an intended part of the experience. The most blatant example of this is immersive sims (Deus Ex, Cyberpunk 2077, Dishonored) that hand you a bazillion save slots with manual saves, auto-saves and quick saves, all but outright telling you “go ahead, ‘Life is Strange’ your way through this shit”. Conversely, we have games that don’t let you save scum and this is also a part of the experience – Soulslikes, Choose-Your-Own-QTEs (Until Dawn, Detroit: Become Human, etc), roguelikes, and a great many other genres where save scumming abolitionists can celebrate their successful conquest. The devs pick carefully, and I believe they usually know best.

It’s reached the point where when I see an overpowered save system in a game, I don’t only feel zero guilt about taking advantage of it, I actually interpret it as a necessary concession from the devs – an essential feature to be ignored at my own peril (think of Al Lowe, designer of ye olde sadistic point and click quests, who said the quiet part out loud: “Save Early and Save Often!”). If the devs chose to allow save scumming, this must be because they knew a lot of game scenarios are frustrating, counter-intuitive and capricious when encountered the first time, to a degree that can make the game not fun. I’m just not up for that.

Hercules and Atlas

When Hercules visited King Eurystheus, he told Hercules he would need to complete 12 difficult labors for him. One of those labors was to steal the golden apples that belonged to Zeus. These apples were in a garden and guarded by a hundred-headed dragon and the Hesperides sea nymphs. Hercules did not know how he was going to get past these guards to steal the golden apples, so he sought the help of Atlas at the advice of Prometheus.

Hercules visited Atlas and proposed a deal: if Atlas fetched the golden apples, Hercules would hold up the earth. Atlas hated holding up the earth, so he willfully agreed. After Atlas had retrieved the apples, he returned to Hercules and told him that he would take the apples to King Eurystheus himself. After all, Atlas did not want to return to holding up the earth.

Hercules could not let Atlas do that but also didn’t know how to give him back the earth, so Hercules came up with a plan. Hercules asked Atlas to take the earth for a moment while he placed some soft padding on his shoulders to help him hold the earth. When Atlas agreed and took the earth back on his shoulders, Hercules grabbed the apples and left Atlas at the edge of the earth holding the world like he had done for so many years before.

An old anecdote from my alma mater – in an introductory course to discrete math, the professor was teaching combinatorics and began: “Suppose you have an urn with three balls inside colored red, green and blue…” At this point one of the students interjected: “Half the class are electrical engineering majors, how is any of this relevant to our studies?” there was a beat and the professor corrected himself: “Suppose you have an urn with three resistors inside colored red, green and blue…”

Wait, this was not originally a meme about the invasion of Ukraine? Huh.

Reining in Reviewer Two: How to Uphold Epistemic Respect in Academia

I want to post a useful comment but I can’t get over the title and its very specific “come, Watson, the game is afoot” vibe

Reviewer 2 walks into a bar, takes a look around and shouts, “this is the worst library I’ve ever seen”