aaroninsf

Oh, sure,

I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks...

...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience.

For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal.

I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc...

...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way.

Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing,

the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...

Apple's M7 comes to mind...

I would suggest that both are true!

It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic which uses cultural and social and graphical "languages" to create specific emotional impacts and effects. The lower the budget the more this is leaned into for expedient reasons but that in turn creates genre expectations! Low-poly and 8-bit are fine examples of what were once a product of technical limitations becoming their own target.

Subject matters also, and the overall aesthetic of the game; triple-A games often push towards what you're describing, that the most impactful and compelling may also be the most real...

...or at least, contain elements of it. Lots of games mess with color shading and saturation etc for the impact-reasons...

I do look forward to the era of more "photorealistic" rendering as you prefer, especially for natural landscapes like those I enjoy IRL. Some of which can have very "unnatural" feeling swings in tone and all sorts of things! I was just up in the mountains this week and saw a lot more variation in lighting and its impact on a consistent landscape (mountains across a lake) than I've ever seen in a game engine so far :)

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed>

Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.

As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.

Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...

...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.

Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.

Personal take:

I immediately liked the game and was inspired to try multiple days,

my single biggest frustration was that once a day is attempted, it's locked, and, you can't continue after a single failure.

The "single point of failure" having heavy consequences would likely make me bounce off and not return.

Might I suggest an alternate design to try:

Keep the incentive to speed, but reduce the punishment.

Proposal:

Score is points-per-word as a function of time to complete.

With a non-linear asymptomic point curve.

Bonus for very fast, long tail decreasing from 1.x points to 0.x, after 30s you get 0 points...

...but critically you are not loocked out of the game and can take as long as you like.

Bonus for caching this state so you can return later

There are variations, e.g. a total time budget for all words... perhaps you retain a sense of tier, with players able to select a "league" which gives higher reward for fastest responses but more quickly drops you to zero for the rest of the game...

You can still have a leader board (implicit or explicit) where points are fungible.

You could even then have a "no stress" league which gives a flat 0.25 points per success with no timer at all or something.

ITT the consensus is they don't actually work better, but, were royalty free.

No idea about either, myself.

In project budgeting the material cost difference may well be relatively insignificant

ah yeah, I was on desktop at the time!

I assume it's a MINI, which is made by BMW

https://zcode.z.ai/en

There's an `EN` link at top right

nostaliga is always for the last layer

Now there's a sentiment worth Jenny Holzerizing.

I wonder if this will hold as other models with different biases achieve parity.

People don't make this assumption, if you ask (or reflect);

arguments however regularly are implicitly predicated on exactly this premise.

(Infinite improvement, no; enough improvement that practically speaking the difference between effectively free and free is meaningless—that may well be the ultimate bitter lesson.)

My favorite easter egg by far in this domain, was the Apple II version of Karateka.

The game came on a floppy disk; if you inserted it in the drive upside down (the Apple II only used one side of the medium) you found (unusually) that the game would load, but was rendered upside down.

It was fully playable. Non trivial given the way those games were written!!!

True, and relevant (I live with a professional editor)... yet I immediately think of Ximm's Law:

Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed.

The K-shaped economy kontinues.

ITT a surprising lack of perspective on the fact that despite the breathless pace of the singularity, people are still necessarily figuring things out as we go and we are well off the map.

Here there be monsters, and we don't have any real way of evaluating risk; and the leverage provided by tools already available affords systemic and even existential risk in a way no one—least of all an industry committed to shareholder value—has had to navigate, let alone with a million backseat drivers each with their own substack and brand to build.

Every time Peter Watts comes up, it bears repeating:

TRIGGER WARNINGS APPLY

The Rifters series, which has some spectacular images and conceits, is also author-insert misogynist sadism gratification-porn.

Didn't have to be that way. Shame that it was as IMO it renders the series and indeed Watts un-recommendable.

Same

Thank you TIL

This reads like literal propaganda.

Every assertion of personal responsibility (sic) in the face of billion to trillion dollar industry spending is bad faith, zero exceptions.

British Petroleum invented the concept of personal climate footprint. That was bad faith and to put a point on it, evil.

Tech industry claims that engagement farming and addition manufacture should be opposed by "parenting" are even less credible.

They're passionate about style and brand, not design and sound.

I say this as someone with expertise in a domain they nominally targetted.

Very "cool" looking kit, but: missing basic features, unremarkable in those provided; serious issues rendering it fundamentally inappropriate for its nominal application.

The repetition of some phrases/statements means it's either poorly edited, machine generated, or both.

That definition is in fact the predominant one today in serious circles: consciousness proper is not itself inclusive of the things which consider to define a continuous coherent self.

I.e. the "self" is not the same as what it means to experience consciousness.

There are for example well characterized examples of memory disruption under the influence of various drugs (e.g. as used intentionally in anesthesia); and neurological conditions which produce various kinds of amnesia.

Do these conditions mean someone is not conscious? We have the luxury of asking people directly.

More unsettling edges yet include things like so-called "split brain" patients or people suffering form serious psychological conditions like so-called "multiple personalities." Psychology does get great mileage out pathology!

The conflation of concerns and synechdochal arguments are a wonder to behold.

Who in their right minds would trust this...?

Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.

On my cork board I'll paste this up and run a red string to https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05914

and put a post-it between them with COMPUTONIUM???? written on it

Can we please keep it together for a modest number of decades longer please.

This.

This is what I tell people (including non-programmers interested in vibe coding), the results you get are product of... process. Formal process.

From this naturally emerges the other thing I tell people: domain expertise (or at least, familiarity and or capacity for learning) is still determinate of outcome.

I don't touch the code. But I do push back on expedience, laziness, inconsistency, and all the other recurring unsolved problems of generated code... and continue to play whack-a-mole in pursuit of process that whacks the moles.

Very much agree that while it is is useful in description of motivation and inspiration,

it is very non-helpful—or worse—to use this language, this way.

One might as well say "need neural plasticity" which is as much an analogy and equally misleading and counterproductive in shaping the right model of the system.

One might even call this pernicious, what it encourages is already a social problem; and it doesn't aid understanding, it confounds it.

Assertion: recipient owes the person asking something.

Authenticity earned through proof of work: invest your neurons and time to demonstrate fealty! Context switch for me!

Buried lede: much of the time the person asking could do all the work suggested.

This is like LMGTFY but backwards, it shames the person whose time is being asked for.