Quote from Gizmodo

Gizmodo recently posted an article about 500 top technologists and Elon Musk demanding an immediate pause of advanced AI systems.

I really liked this part of Snory’s comment to that post:

Let’s see a show of hands for everyone fearing for the future of their careers. I think AI will be a double edged sword for humanity, it will improve the average person’s lives immeasurably, but it will also take the fun out of so many creative and technical hobbies and professions, to the point of stripping away meaning and purpose for many people.

I’ve written about this topic in 2018, but I’ve been thinking the same thing again during these weeks of AI announcements. I think it’s absolutely going to be that bad. Almost no kind of human creativity will be safe.

Not even composing SID music.

Quote from Gizmodo

Gizmodo posted an article about the movie Don’t Look Up yesterday.

I really liked Adam Withers’ comment to that post:

I think the reason so many of us aren’t really talking about climate change is because we’re fucking tired and hopeless. We’ve reached the point the characters reach in the final act – we’ve talked, we’ve advocated, we’ve “raised awareness,” we’ve supported politicians we thought would do something, and we’ve realized that there is nothing more we can do about this. Nothing more than we’ve already done. The people with the power to actually save us, who could make choices that would make a real difference, aren’t going to and won’t be swayed by anything we have the power to do. The public is too stupid, self-involved, or out of touch to give enough of a shit to put enough pressure on those people. We’re out of moves, and while we can see what needs doing, we don’t have any power to force it to happen.

So, we’re focusing on the people in our immediate sphere and trying to enjoy life as much as we can so we don’t just go crazy with grief and fear and anger. Climate change is coming, it will not be averted, and at best our only hope left is that, once the effects start really ruining life for/killing people, it’ll shake the rest of the populace hard enough that they’ll finally stand up and give a damn. But until that day, we don’t have the strength left to keep caring so much about something we are powerless against.

Quote from Reddit

What do you find annoying about your neighbors?

Whenever the elevator doors open up there are two situations:

1. I’m well dressed and sober, heading out for a productive day. The elevator will be empty.

2. I’m a hungover disheveled mess on a Saturday morning and smell like disappointment. All I need is greasy food and coffee. The elevator will be packed full of my neighbors from every damn floor. They will all silently judge me. One time a lady even pulled her young daughter closer with the “stay away from that man” look.Corporate-Asset-6375, /r/AskReddit

The original thread is here.

Quote of the Day

I can’t play an MMO as a single player game these days. I find it oddly, echoingly lonely to explore a vast world without having the buzz of guild or buddy chat quietly in the background.kedaha, Quarter to Three forums

I’ve been able to solo some of the later expansions of World of Warcraft lately, but I do feel this problem in every MMORPG I touch these days.

In fact, probably the main reason I got so much into EverQuest 2 in 2008 and even tried raiding was that I got headhunted into good guilds that immediately spawned some good chat and companionship. Without that I would probably have given up on the game.

Quote of the Day

One of the sites I visit frequently recently posted an article where the director of Logan (James Mangold) warns that fandom backlash will push talent out of genre films.

I really liked lightninglouie’s comment to that post:

To be fair, it seems to be mainly Star Wars. There have been at least a half-dozen or more disappointing Star Trek movies (conservative estimate), several less-than-great X-Men movies, and a shitload of terrible Bond movies, but I don’t remember any death threats in the aftermath of those films. Almost all of the Alien and Indiana Jones sequels have been mediocre to terrible. The DC movies have also been pretty shitty (pre- and post-DCEU), but I don’t remember anyone suggesting that Bryan Singer should have been murdered for Superman Returns. The Marvel movies go off in all sorts of weird and unorthodox directions and the fans are pretty much on board with that.

Nah, it’s mostly Star Wars. And I’d suggest there’s a good reason for that. For 22 years, there were only three Star Wars movies (no, let’s not count the Holiday Special or the Ewok things), and so the hardcore fans had to make do with their own ideas about what the universe was like. (Sure, there were comics and novels in the ‘90s, but nobody was under any illusions that they were 100% canonical.) And so any official attempts to expand that universe are going to run up against those assumptions, whether it was Lucas’s or Disney’s versions of the saga. Most franchises are immunized against that sort of thing because they’re either constantly undergoing soft or hard reboots (like Star Trek and Batman) or have multiple characters and storylines going on simultaneously, like the MCU. That’s where Mangold was dead-on. Star Wars is basically a religion in a way that other franchises aren’t. And when you add newer testaments to the canon, the true believers are gonna get testy.

Quote of the Day

Be skeptical of the advice of successful people, they suffer from deep survivor bias. Hundreds of other people did exactly what they did and failed. Chances are their success has more to do with luck than the advice they are given you.Grumpy Gamer Blog

I so agree with this. I believed in my site GameDeed.com and kept it going for 4 years, constantly updating it with new features I hoped would finally make the difference. But it just never panned out.

Grumpy Gamer Blog is written by Ron Gilbert, the creator of the original Monkey Island adventure games and more. He just recreated his blog including all his old posts. Check it out.

Quote of the Day

The funniest coding hack I’ve heard of is probably for the original Wing Commander. The team at Origin Systems were using a specific memory manager that would crash whenever they exited the program. They couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so they just hacked the memory manager to say “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING WING COMMANDER!” instead of “Error in Emm386.sys”.Ask a Game Dev

Ask a Game Dev is a great Tumblr blog for aspiring game developers as well as inquisitive gamers – if you can endure the excessive use of GIF animations everywhere.

Quote from Reddit

I asked my grandpa what it felt like to grow old. Grandpa is a man who will deliberate on which part of the newspaper to start with each morning, so I knew my question would take him some time to answer. I said nothing. I let him gather his thoughts.

When I was a boy, Grandpa had once complimented me on this habit. He told me it was good that I asked a question and gave a person silence. And being that any compliment from him was so few and far between, this habit soon became a part of my personality and one that served me well.

Grandpa stared out the window and looked at the empty bird feeder that hung from an overgrown tree next to the pond he built in the spring of 1993. For twenty years, Grandpa filled up the feeder each evening. But he stopped doing it last winter when walking became too difficult for him.

Without ever taking his eyes from the window, he asked me a question: “Have you ever been in a hot shower when the water ran cold?” I told him I had.

“That’s what aging feels like. In the beginning of your life it’s like you’re standing in a hot shower. At first the water is too warm, but you eventually grow used to the heat and begin enjoying it. But you take it for granted when you’re young and think it’s going to be this way forever. Life goes on like this for some time.”

Grandpa looked at me with those eyes that had seen so much change in this world. He smiled and winked at me.

“And if you’re lucky, a few good looking women will join you in the shower from time to time.”

We laughed. He looked out the window and continued on.

“You begin to feel it in your forties and fifties. The water temperature declines just the slightest bit. It’s almost imperceptible, but you know it happened and you know what it means. You try to pretend like you didn’t feel it, but you still turn the faucet up to stay warm. But the water keeps going lukewarm. One day you realize the faucet can’t go any further, and from here on out the temperature begins to drop. And everyday you feel the warmth gradually leaving your body.”

Grandpa cleared his throat and pulled a stained handkerchief from his flannel shirt pocket. He blew his nose, balled up the handkerchief, and put it back in his pocket.

“It’s a rather helpless feeling, truth told. The water is still pleasant, but you know it will soon become cold and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is the point when some people decide to leave the shower on their own terms. They know it’s never going to get warmer, so why prolong the inevitable? I was able to stay in because I contented myself recalling the showers of my youth. I lived a good life, but still wish I hadn’t taken my youth for granted. But it’s too late now. No matter how hard I try, I know I’ll never get the hot water back on again.”

He paused for a few moments and kept looking out the window with those eyes that had seen ninety-one years on this Earth. Those eyes that lived through the Great Depression, those eyes that beheld the Pacific Ocean in World War II, those eyes that saw the birth of his three children, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

He had indeed lived a good life, I thought to myself.

“And that’s what it feels like to grow old.”Sozaiix3, /r/AskReddit/

The post I got this from is here. Sozaiix3 is not the originator but the source has since vanished.

Quote from Reddit

[The Matrix] was a good movie, but the Wachowskis could have made it a much better mind fuck.

Mind fuck #1:

Smith explains to Neo that Morpheus has it all wrong. Humans made the world uninhabitable and the robots are saving the human race in the only way they can. That business of harvesting humans for energy doesn’t even make sense. Someday, the world will be habitable again and the human race can come out of its pods.

Smith doesn’t hate humans, he just hates Morpheus and his gang of vandals because they’re interfering with the work of saving the human race. The robots look at Morpheus the way doctors look at anti-vaxxers during a measles epidemic.

Now Neo has to figure out who’s telling the truth.

Mind fuck #2:

At the end of the second movie, Neo uses his magic matrix powers to knock down some robots, even though that shouldn’t be possible outside the matrix. This is never explained.

My explanation: Zion is just another matrix. One created to house the humans who are too paranoid to accept life in the main matrix. This is hinted at by Smith, who points out that the original matrix was too nice, and people didn’t believe it. (“We lost entire crops.”). Actually, that first “paradise” matrix still exists, and most people still live there. Neo’s matrix only houses that portion of humanity that couldn’t handle paradise. Zion houses the people who can’t even handle the mundane matrix.

So the third movie should have been about Neo solving the riddle of the Zion matrix. I wonder if the Wachowskis originally had this in mind, but chickened out.capilot, /r/AskReddit/

The original thread is here.