I laughed at first, but then I realized I'd have found Starfield vastly more interesting if weird stuff like this happened all the time on purpose and they leaned into it with small quests. This one bug delighted me more than any of the actual quests I can remember at this point.
It almost feels like Starfield was ambitious in the wrong ways. Bethesda trying to aim for Disco Elysium-ish oddness might not have turned out great, but I think it would have made more of a lasting impression.
Environmentalists are fond of saying that “There is no second Earth“. They are wrong! Here’s why:
There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.
Second Earth is a waterworld. It’s the vast Pacific Ocean that covers half the planet.
Well, he's a little fuzzy on the concepts of halves and wholes, but let's hear him out on colossal geoengineering projects.
[The AI]’s going to fall in love with you
Fortunately for everyone, they went out of business before a mandatory reporter had to make the weirdest call ever to CPS.
American Rounds
What, was the Circus of Values brand too expensive to license?
Oh, hey, I've run into this in the wild--the Kalendar AI people keep ineptly trying to start a conversation to sell some kind of kiosk software by referencing factoids they scraped from our latest press release. They've clearly spent more effort on evading spam filters and rotating domains than they have on anything else, but they helpfully use "human" names ending in "Kai," so creating a wildcard filter wasn't too hard.
Credit where it's due: I'd never heard of Kalendar or the software company who hired them, but this experience has told me everything I need to know about both of them. If you don't sweat the details and rate sentiment change using absolute value, that's kind of impressive.
Addressing the “in hell” response that made headlines at Sundance, Rohrer said the statement came after 85 back-and-forth exchanges in which Angel and the AI discussed long hours working in the “treatment center,” working with “mostly addicts.”
We know 85 is the upper bound, but I wonder what Rohrer would consider the minimum number of "exchanges" acceptable for telling someone their loved one is in hell? Like, is 20 in "Hey, not cool" territory, but it's all good once you get to 50? 40?
Rohrer says that when Angel asked if Cameroun was working or haunting the treatment center in heaven, the AI responded, “Nope, in hell.”
“They had already fully established that he wasn't in heaven,” Rohrer said.
Always a good sign when your best defense of the horrible thing your chatbot says is that it's in context.
I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly plausible outcome of using baseline machine learning methods to train goal-directed AIs sophisticated enough to scheme (my subjective probability on such an outcome, given these conditions, is ~25%).
Out: vibes and guesswork
In: "subjective probability"
"We're all in grave danger! What? Well no, we can't give specifics unless we risk not getting paid. Signed, Anonymous"
I mean, I wasn't exactly expecting the Einstein-Szilard letter 2.0 when I clicked that link, but this is pathetic.
lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren't fit for purpose, but he's 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:
So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?
I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.
But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?
It’s someone down the stack.
Okay.
I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.
You get medals and requisition points from playing that you can use to unlock new stratagems, which includes everything from weapons to orbital bombardment. Medals get you new weapons, cosmetics, etc. You also find samples you can collect on missions, and these unlock permanent upgrades for stratagems. There are player levels, but these just unlock new titles once you get past the basics.
The battle pass equivalent is Warbonds, which include new weapons, armor, cosmetics, etc. Unlike most games, warbonds don't expire and you can find enough premium currency while playing to get them without too much trouble.
On the whole, new warbond weapons tend to be different rather than obvious upgrades. The default assault rifle you get stays perfectly viable throughout the game.
Pitching talking to nonexistent people as a fix for dementia, as opposed to the problem you're trying to solve, is, uh, innovative. Among other things.
Kind of seems like actually providing the things people can't readily access would be more valuable than lotus-eating-as-a-service, but I guess that's why I'm not pulling down big VC bucks.
"concerned"
Who could actually talk to the older Americans in question, but are instead tasked with simulating conversations for them instead.
Look, I'm not going to pretend I call my relatives as often as I ought to. But I truly cannot imagine being one of those 60 people. I can't put myself in the mindset of someone who would want this job, who would want this effort to have been a part of their life and career.