EncomLab

Wonder if this winter will see another blizzard of 1888 event?

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody?

AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

It's not the technology that is bad - it's the extreme anthropomorphizing language that's used to describe it.

My photoresistor nightlight can "see" that it is dark and it "knows" to turn on the light - not only does it not have training, it does not have any code!

And if you think that is amazing, my bi-metallic strip thermostat "feels" the temperature and then modifies the environment because it "knows" if it's hot to turn on the A/C, and if it's cold to turn on the heat - no training or code!

All of this AI stuff is just unbelievably incredible - what a brave new world (of word games)!

I thought everyone knew that Atlantis is just another name for the Richat Structure.

I spent hours playing with mine in the mid 80's! The key takeaway - then and now - is that you can generate an incredible variety of motion with a single motor and a well designed gear-box; no software required!

As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in St. Louis - nitrous "whippets" were sold in every grocery and convenience store. I never considered myself a drug user when I was a teen - because every drug I enjoyed (nitrous, cough syrup, caffeine pills) were all legally available....unlike those dirty hippies and their marijuana!

It's been decades since I hit a balloon - but man those moments when I did were incredible.

I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.

Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...

This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.

It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.

The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform.

The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.

Even during the video game/satanic panic of the 80's, it was acknowledged that video games - even at that early stage - allowed children who are introverted or less physically adept to experience "winning" and the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles. It seems the ability to acknowledge that there are also benefits to these new emerging systems of interaction has been lost.

Kids (and humans) are wired to follow individuals who express themselves with authority and confidence - hence the long history of "confidence-men" and politicians throughout history.

If you place that ability to communicate with confidence and authority in an individual with male gender traits who is tall, fit, socially attractive, and has a deep voice - nearly everyone around them will do what they say; even to the extent that doing so many be against the best interest of the individuals listening.

AI speaks with utmost confidence in every interaction - not just kids, but all humans will have a preference for it.

We live in an ex-urban area of SW Ohio and after years of nearly zero outages, in the last two years we have had several 12+ hour outage events following pretty standard spring storms. We are experiencing a boom in new construction around us as farms are converting to new subdivisions, and have been told that electrical infrastructure is less stable while construction activities are occurring. All of the subdivisions have buried utilities - but they also all tie to a pole near the entrance, the poles all follow roads, and inevitably a car takes out a pole and entire neighborhoods go dark.

"Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way - remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as word salad.

This paper just reads like an attempt at sounding smart while actually saying little.

Fascinating! I love when people see and appreciate a simple skill, then take it to the most extreme level of refinement possible.

The generations in my family are full of people who had dementia/Alzheimer's/auto-immune disorders. They all had anxiety, and they all had sleep disorders - I'm certain there is a connection among it all.

I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(

More impressed that it's a Westinghouse escalator - which means it's not been updated since at least 1989.

Not sure what you mean by this - it's not as if steam engines are an extensive technology today, and certainly no university is teaching "steam science", while nearly every school is teaching "computer science".

Perhaps this is just the attitude that drives Mr. Kay's point home - do individuals who are interested in CS have little value for who and what has come before them?

Alan Kay has promulgated many famous truths about computer science - one of them being that among all fields of study, it has the least regard for the people and discoveries that brought it to where it is today. Maybe it's just my own sense of history as I move into my 4th and likely last decade of working with computers, but I find this to be both true and lamentable.

This was a great article - thanks for sharing!

I - like ~20% of the humans of planet earth - have a bridged LAD coronary artery. The vast majority of those who have this congenital deformity will never know it and remain asymptomatic; a small cohort of those will, like me, have a minor heart attack and fully recover - a smaller cohort will die of sudden cardiac arrest, many of them males in their teens while practicing football or performing similar cardiac stressing events. Unfortunately determining this congenital deformity requires invasive radiological imaging - hopefully this technology will assist in it's identification sooner.

This is like claiming a photorestor controlled night light "understands when it is dark" or that a bimetallic strip thermostat "understands temperature". You can say those words, and it's syntactically correct but entirely incorrect semantically.

The use of highly anthropomorphic language is always problematic- Does a photo resistor controlled nightlight have a chain of thought? Does it reason about its threshold value? Does it have an internal model of what is light, what is dark, and the role it plays in demarcation between the two?

Are the transistors executing the code within the confines even capable of intentionality? If so - where is it derived from?

As someone who lives with this reality moment to moment (thanks to a deeply bridged LAD coronary artery) it is interesting to see a visual representation of these effects.

It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.

Your assertion that sodium channel logic and silicon trace logic are 100% identical is the primary problem. It's like claiming that a hydraulic cylinder and a bicep are 100% equivalent because they both lift things - they are not the same in any way.

DNA is the instruction set for protein composition- not thinking.

No one says that a thermostat is "thinking" of turning on the furnace, or that a nightlight is "thinking it is dark enough to turn the light on". You are just being obtuse.

The entire paper is riddled with anthropomorphic terms - it's part of AI culture unfortunately. When they start talking about "planning", "choosing", "reasoning" it biases the perception of their analysis. One could certainly talk about a night light equipped with a photoresistor as "planning to turn on the light when it is dark", "choosing to turn on the light because it is dark, and "reasoning that since it is dark, it turned on the light"- but is that accurate?