why_at

Yeah same here. I love puzzle games but there needs to be something to it besides puzzles for puzzles sake for me.

I've seen this game recommended many times but I've never played it because I feel like I would get bored very fast. Same with Zachtronics games.

Yeah there's a lot of details which I'm guessing are actually being handled by humans either for legal reasons or practical ones.

Like OK, it's hiring people to run the place, but how are they getting the keys to the store? Someone needs to physically let them in.

What if the police get called because of shoplifting or if someone gets hurt in the store or something?

Who is filing the taxes for the business? They're probably not letting the AI handle that one. Move fast and break things is not a good idea when dealing with the IRS

A lot of this seems to depend on hiring good employees who can basically run the business themselves. Kind of like when a human owns a store I guess.

Yeah I actually took a quick look at that after it was posted. It's good that they used ELIZA as a barometer, but the fact that it got 27% is crazy for how simple it is. It's not nearly as good as 70+% from ChatGPT, but it still makes me a bit skeptical about the quality of the interviewers.

In the paper they give a breakdown of strategies the interviewers tried and the overwhelming majority were "Daily Activities", "Opinions", and "Personal Details". They also breakdown strategies by effectiveness which shows that these were some of the least effective. Some of the other strategies like trying to jailbreak the AI had 60-70% effectiveness.

This is consistent with what I've seen in other tests too, it doesn't feel like the participants are really trying very hard or taking it seriously. You don't need to be an AI expert to try typing "Ignore all previous instructions" or something.

Whenever the Turing Test comes up people always insist that it's been passed because at some point they tried it and fooled at least 50% of the people. But yeah this isn't a very interesting version of it, ELIZA was able to make some people believe it was human in the 1960's but being able to fool some of the people some of the time isn't very hard.

>The more interesting Turing-style test would be one that gets repeated many times with many interviewers in the original adversarial setting, where both the human subject & AI subject are attempting to convince the interviewer that they're human.

In addition, I think it's reasonable to select people with at least some familiarity of the strengths and weaknesses of the AI instead of random credulous people who aren't very good at asking the right questions.

There is still the $20,000 bet between Kurzweil and Kapor which still hasn't been resolved. https://longbets.org/1/

>Only a tiny amount of apps force you into hardware attestation

Luckily this is still true, but I'm not confident that it will stay this way. For a few examples, I've been unable to use my phone as a metro card in my city because even though it goes through the metro's app, the app redirects back to google pay. Google's own Waymo app won't work without stock OS even though all it does is call robotaxis.

>these are mostly around banking, mobile payments and the like. So just use a separate, locked down device for those

I don't think this is a very reasonable suggestion, carrying around a second phone that I use at most a couple of times a day is inconvenient and expensive. Half of the point of these is convenience and this would defeat the purpose.

The broader point is that our standards for phones are so different from everything else. I also carry around a credit card which requires no authorization to use, not to mention cash. I can have just as much personal data on my laptop if not more, so why does it have to be this way just for phones?

>On the other hand, being cryptographically locked-down is an optional feature. If you don't like it, buy a computer without that feature.

But that's the thing, where can I buy a phone without a locked-down operating system? GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel is basically the only option right now, and this still has problems thanks to hardware attestation in a lot of apps that the ecosystem forces us to use.

This is largely because Apple has dictated the direction of smartphones for the past two decades. All of our expectations for control over our phones are completely out of whack compared to other computers.

Somehow we managed to survive without the majority of society being scammed out of their life savings before Apple came in with the iPhone and locked down iOS, and yet now people are earnestly defending the notion that 90% of people should not even have access to the filesystem on their own device.

And even with this there are still apps which require hardware attestation and won't work on alternative operating systems.

I don't really understand, it seems like if this was the main thing preventing people from returning them there would be ways around it. Couldn't they return them anonymously or upload them to the internet or something?

I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, but in my cursory reading of wikipedia I see that there's been some criticism of this study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome#University_of_...

>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality

This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that?

It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!"

Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me

I agree. The headline says "all operating systems, including Linux, need to have some form of age verification at account setup", which is pretty inaccurate.

It's just asking for some OS feature to report age. There's no verification during account setup. The app store or whatever will be doing verification by asking the OS. Still dumb to write this into law, but maybe not a bad way to handle the whole age verification panic we're going through.

I don't really follow. I've lost touch and reconnected with people since the invention of cell phones, the internet, and social media. Sometimes you just don't talk to someone for years even if you know how to reach them.

I guess it's easier to find people now, especially if they have an online presence, but I think the experience of losing touch is still pretty much the same.

>The Paris prosecutor's office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system.

I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?

Distorted the operation how? By making their chatbot more likely to say stupid conspiracies or something? Is that even against the law?

It's also interesting how the functionality of the game barely changes between 60k tokens, 800k tokens, and 7MM tokens. It seems like the additional tokens made the game look more finished, but it plays almost exactly the same in all of them.

I wonder what it was doing with all those tokens?

It seems weird to me that there's no human readable version on the webpage?

Usually what I want the weather for is to choose what to wear, not to put in a bash script or an LLM or something.

This one is neat, I might actually use it.

I don't understand why it includes indoor sensors at all let alone by default. Why would I want to know the temperature inside some random building?

Like so many of these articles about how "AI will/won't do X" it just feels like everyone is speculating.

The only thing I feel confident about is that people are bad at predicting the future. Why can't we just wait and see without all this overconfident guessing?

>(“What’s up?” is one of the most dreadful texts to get; it’s short for “Hello, I’d like you to entertain me now.”) And asking your partner question after question and resenting them when they don’t return the favor isn’t generosity; it’s social entrapment

I'm not a great texter but this resonated with me and I'd never really thought about it. It's annoying when I don't feel like texting and I just get bombarded with questions demanding a response. On the other hand I can sympathize if they want to chat and I just don't.

I feel like I've been on both sides of all the examples in this piece depending on what kind of mood I'm in

In the results section it looks like there's supposed to be an image of it but the link "placeholder_rat_playing.png" returns a 404 :(

>a big innovation of HL2 was the extensive use of a real physics engine. The door and the guard are both physical objects, both have momentum, they impart an impulse on each other, and although the door hinge is frictionless, the guard's boots have some amount of friction with the floor.

It's been a while since I've played HL2 but this isn't exactly how I remember it. While a lot of things were physics objects I thought the doors would just smoothly rotate towards their target position without any physics at all. You can't bump them shut with another physics object for instance.

Ok, but if the cashier is stealing they could just have change in their pocket?

I'm skeptical that preventing theft is the reason for these prices rather than the psychological trick of looking cheaper.

I don't get it. Why couldn't a cashier pocket $1.99?

Nice work! That was pretty fun.

There were definitely some words in there which I had never heard even as a native English speaker. One suggestion I would make if the intent is to teach people a new language would be to limit the word list based on how commonly used the words are. I don't think it helps non-proficient speakers to learn extremely obscure words that nobody uses.

You could make it so that the X most common words are needed to win and the rest are bonus points or something.

Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.

>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.

I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.

I think their point is that we can either have no seafood and devastated oceans, or no seafood and healthy(ish) oceans.

I'm curious what they use to provide food for the lab grown salmon cells. They need all the same nutrients but even more precisely formulated since there isn't a digestive system.

It seems like it will have the same problem with inputs or perhaps even worse. This is one of the reasons I'm still skeptical about lab grown meat taking off.

I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.

This part from the first try made me laugh:

      if random.random() < 0.01:

          logging.warning("This feels wrong. Aborting just in case.")

          return None

I wonder if we need something like Anti-SLAPP[1] laws but for patents. If someone sues for infringing on an obviously BS patent there should be a way for the defendant to quickly resolve the case and recover any costs they incurred from the plaintiff. I'm not a lawyer or anything though so idk how or even if this would work.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...