h0l0cube

See also Dragon's Lair:

Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair

If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard

Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.

It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name.

Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)

The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-b...

TFA refers to 'non-trivial compositionality' as what's novel about how humans communicate (and how it's perhaps not as novel as we thought):

However, the team also found examples of non-trivial compositionality, the first such discovery outside of humans.

The first non-trivial combination was high hoot-low hoot that was translated as a distress call. But it was also used to stop other individuals’ display behaviors—dramatic, exaggerated actions or gestures bonobos perform to assert dominance or attract attention. The second was either peep or yelp in the “join” meaning paired with high hoot to form a structure used for coordinating with others before traveling. Finally, the “I would like to” peep followed by “let’s stay together” whistle was used for initiating more romantically inclined interactions bonobos are famous for indulging in.

It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.

It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.

Numbers matter. Only a small amount of insurgents are needed to occupy the military, but if even 2% of the civilian population took up arms, the situation would become untenable. All the armed forces together constitute not much more than one million troops. And there would be also conscientious resistance within the armed forces to executive orders to shoot civilians.

In-group value is a kind of MLM scheme :)

'Considering some people idiots' is intolerance. Tolerating that kind of intolerance in the name of free speech in the marketplace of ideas or whatever can allow that intolerance to gain traction such that intolerance becomes a dominant mode of thinking, via tolerating people. Is that not the paradox?

Maybe. I'm not sure if FPTP necessarily leads to authoritarianism, but there's a whole bunch of countries that sill use the system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Cou...

I think, though, that the US won't go full top-down authoritarian, because a large enough portion of the population is armed. Should some kind of coup ever be attempted, it could well spark a civil war – which is still doom, but not a subjugating kind of doom.

This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.

P-zombies, conceptually, actually have no ghost in the machine, but are indistinguishable from sentient beings. Sentience and free will are two different things.

they may have measurable effects in our physical reality

If there’s something external that interfaces with the physical universe, such an externality could be observed. It’s strange that we haven’t found such a force. But if it were to exist, in some parallel universe, that external force would have its own mechanics and its own chain of causality – its own physics so to speak. Dualism doesn’t get you to free will, it just means there’s physics we can’t observe. (Or perhaps there’s some superset universe that interfaces with that universe, and then it’s still determinism or stochastic processes all the way down.)

Hot take: it's a failure of democratic competition. The US doesn't have proportional representation, and it's long maintained a duopoly of two electable parties, and a first-past-the-post system that makes any vote for a 3rd party a waste. This, coupled with the Democrats not fronting up a reformist candidate when they could have (Sanders shot down twice), permitted the only anti-establishment candidate to win, and that happened to be a callous individual that aligns with minds as cruel as his own. (By his own admission, 'the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them'.) It's hard to believe that even die-hard Republican politicians are totally on-board with this reformist agenda that's going to completely decimate the economy, but most certainly, if anyone is winning by the end of it, it will be them.

That said, if there's ever another free and fair US election, the Democrats have a real opportunity to put a candidate that can actually deliver remaking the country, but in a way that lifts all boats, and without throwing out hard-won democratic freedoms. But I'm pretty certain they'll just front up another establishment candidate with a progressive face.

anti-Israeli campus posters as idiots

The problem with free speech absolutism is that it leads to the 'paradox of tolerance'. We are now seeing the fruits of that line of thinking.

The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments.

You might be talking about compatiblism.

Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action.

Or more likely there’s no evolutionary fitness benefit to being able to understand this, and perhaps it’s even detrimental if it leads to nihilistic or egocentric impulses.

Fashion is an MLM scheme in the sense that it only works if those most invested in fashion can convince those less invested that it has value

I’ll repeat the question you might have missed

If it’s random how is it free will?

Stochastic processes won’t get you to free will any more than determinism.

processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality

If it can't be measured in reality, how can it be relevant to reality?

a random number generator in base reality?

How does randomness pertain to free will?

I sympathize with your point of view, but they stated opinion based on faith, which is wholly (holy?) different from stating truth

computers can and will have free will too

What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch?

Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?

Even quantum space can be described by both deterministic and stochastic elements. The stochastic elements of quantum uncertainty are about as much free will as a PRNG – though even more predictable as they don't have a flat statistical distribution. And there are also known exploitable and predictable mechanisms behind quantum mechanics (emphasis added), so much so, that they can be leveraged for computation.

I think when most people say free will they mean dualism, in that there's some sentience in the spiritual plane that directs their bodies in the physical plane. But if this spiritual plane has no observable effect on the physical plane, it's completely incompatible with free will. And if it is observable, then it is indeed a measurable part of physical reality, but yet we haven't measured it - not even stochastic effects (which can still be observed statistically).

Sabine Hossenfelder has a much better informed take on this, and it's worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU

Also of interest, a study where fMRI readings were used to predict a persons decisions well in advance of them executing the decision. The success rate was only 60%, but still better than chance, and this study was way back in 2008:

fMRI machine learning of brain activity (multivariate pattern analysis) has been used to predict the user choice of a button (left/right) up to 7 seconds before their reported will of having done so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neur...

No downvotes from me, but where do you think the free will lives? What mechanism produces it? What about that mechanism, if not purely stochastic, is not predictable? If free will can have a real measurable physical effect on this universe, then why can't it be isolated?

My pedantry—like most pedantry—was focused on the problem, not the solution. Ergo, you could accurately say "AI lipsyncing nonsense" is a highly-technical solution to a practical problem, and subtitles a pragmatic low-tech solution.

While it could be said that LLMs are in the 'peak of inflated expectations', blockchain is definitely still in the 'trough of disillusionment'. Even if there was a way for blockchain to affordably facilitate everyday transactions without destroying the planet and somehow sideloading into government acceptance, it's not clear that there would be anything novel enough to motivate people to use it vs a bank - beyond a complete collapse of the banking system.

David Simon went into great detail in his blog about why they had to completely re-edit The Wire scene-by-scene from source material to suit the HD format. There were scenes where the meaning was changed and details lost if they simply cropped without discretion.

https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

I think you mean it's a technical problem. Language translation and screen size translation are both solving for the practical problem of reaching a wider audience and on more devices.

The impact can only be measured by how it negatively affects one's living standards or societal participation, both of which can be attended to by society-at-large by making society the problem, not the person. Though it's interesting to see, in the OP, an AI solution to facilitate executive functioning. And perhaps AI will be what liberates many people from the difficult and unnatural requirements that are imposed by modern lifestyles.

The calculation about whether to repair something or not usually hinges around labor and material costs vs replacement cost. The more difficult something is to repair, and the more expensive the components are, the less like it is to be repaired.

It's probably also true that high turnover of goods across brands due to early replacement allows for slimmer margins and higher yields, and hence lower cost of purchase. So on the other extreme, make things break more often and sell them cheaper and more often, which seems to be the status quo.

The economic problem to solve, then, is how to encourage brands to increase the durability of their goods. There are some review publications that perform stress-testing, but few keep metrics on long-term durability in a real-world setting. At a minimum, I check consumer review sites before I buy just to avoid the worst brands, and there you do see some people coming back after a few years to leave a warning to other people. And perhaps this kind of feedback has some effect.

Hopefully people start prizing 'dumb' products, and start leaving bad reviews on products that rely on an internet connection, when they're left stranded after the connection drops out.

Once it's at this level of prevalence, can it really be considered neurologically atypical?

The broader point that's often missed is that this is a naturally occurring and common phenotype that doesn't gel well with office-work culture and the modern regimented schooling system, forcing people to sit for unnaturally long times focusing on anxiety-inducing problem solving all day. It's not normal, and it's a recipe for burnout, and our only answer, is not to change the system, but to try and medicate it away, with sometimes devastating consequences.

Perhaps there's an opening in the market for an appliance company that brands itself on self-repair and self-hosted connectivity? All most people want is "push button and do the thing as long as I live".

Not really the point. The modern "practices during dressing and butchering" highlighted by the GGP were based on the understanding of the germ theory of disease.