I bought such a thing for my daughter and it's great fun but this old codger will never cease to be amazed at how much tech is available for such a small amount of money - the digital camera functions normally, takes video too, the system has basic games and a vivid LCD screen and there's a thermal printer - all in a cute moulded package. £25 ours cost.
One of my kids just got a $13 “smart watch” which has a touch screen, camera with filters/editor, microSD storage, plays MP3s, records voice memos, has games, and more I’m probably forgetting.
It absolutely blows my mind how cheap tech is these days.
Is it free of all phenols or just free of Bisphenol A? I ask because there are very similar Bisphenols (S and F) that are at least suspected of being just as bad as BPA and they are not banned or limited by REACH Annex XVII.
"...began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature."
Interesting. I guess that analogously, we might find that X years after some future AI content production ban, we could similarly start ignoring the low background token issue?
"Winter" in AI (or cryptocurrency, or any at all) ecosystems denote a period of low activity, and a focus on fundamentals instead of driven by hype.
What we're seeing now is something more like the peak of summer. If it ends up being a bubble, and it burtst, some months after that will be "AI Winter" as investors won't want to continue chucking money at problems anymore, and it'll go back to "in the background research" again, as it was before.
Could it be that everything we call mental illness is just natural variation of people's psyche, at the ends of the bell curve?
Many of the mental illnesses are of course bad, but in an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that we have these variations in a population, to optimise adaptation.
What do you mean by "natural variation?" A great many of mental health issues develop as a result of trauma. You could say that a broken leg is a natural variation of a leg, as it happens naturally as the result of physical trauma, but does that help you understand it or treat it better?
I mean natural variation as in genes. Trauma often triggers mental health problems, but there usually needs to be genetic susceptibility as a foundation for it to happen.
I also recommend getting an Apple Watch with cellular – that way you can still be reached for emergencies, while not having access to any social media or other distractions. Since I got an apple watch I find myself leaving the phone at home more often.
Agreed - I disabled all non-essential notifications (I don't need Slack pinging my wrist) and have found my watch actually helps me ditch the phone more easily.
I'm still "reachable", but the watch UX is annoying enough that I won't find myself scrolling X etc on it.
Your dumbphone can't have your actual phone number as that SIM is in your iPhone, so it's no good for emergency notifications. The reality is that the vast majority of people can't actually use a dumbphone as their daily driver. Society has pushed us past that point.
This simply isn't true. Where I live every major operator offers multisim i.e. two (e)sims with the same number. It's primarily used for smartwatches, but they support phones as well.
A dumbphone does not have imessage, dictation, voice memos, timer, and other small things that makes life more convenient. That's why I prefer apple watch.
> I also recommend getting an Apple Watch with cellular – that way you can still be reached for emergencies ...
For people who realistically could require emergency contact (parents of minor children, family members with health risks, etc.) this is a wise recommendation.
However, for those not having these very genuine concerns, an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity (or equivalent device) could engender a placebo effect and mask withdrawal.
They did show Mitchell delivering a frogger(?) arcade machine so a senior could practice for a tournament, which was nice. I think it was an extra in the dvd.
Billy to my mind is a bit annoying but he’s a mild “villain” in the documentary. I mean it’s video game high scores and very compulsive people..
You should definitely watch documentaries, as long as you first watch Orson Welles's masterpiece F for Fake as a pre-req. That or Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up. Then you are free to watch as many documentaries as you please.
Highly recommend Summoning Salt in general. I never thought I'd find video game speed runs, records, etc, interesting, but his videos end up being very entertaining. His pacing, tone, and the way he works in music are very effective.
Perhaps my favorite game of all time. I liked all of the Lucasarts adventure games, but this one was special to me. Completed it 3 times since it came out. I think it is something about the characters, the story, the world and the ambience in it.
I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
It was all written at once, during the pre-production phase. We had daily meetings to brainstorm settings, characters, goals, puzzles, etc. The next day Peter Chan would come in with sketches or storyboards. Meanwhile I tinkered on making the engine work. Once the doc was done (and some locations/puzzles/characters were cut out to reduce the production cost estimate) and the engine was able to display one character walking around one temporary room, we went into production, where the team size ramped up and we churned through the document building locations, modeling, texturing, and animating characters, etc. This doc became foundational for anyone joining the team to learn what the game was supposed to be like.
There was a GDC presentation by the iMUSE team (Michael Land, Peter McConnel and Clint Bajakian) in like 2000 or 2001 that I wish I could relive and share. They showed some of the iMUSE interface and how they would mock up the interactive soundtrack.
They started with cornering Tim and getting him to describe each area/room, including the soundscape, and then they would temp in music and sound effects and then went and got a lot of SF street musicians to record a lot of the music.
I remember them showing a build of the game that had Tim describing each scene instead of the final audio.
I’d just like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my childhood and engagement with computers all that more magical. I went on the make a career and a livelihood from them and games like yours shaped me.
You guys must have impacted thousands upon thousands of lives with your hard work and creativity.
As a funny aside, I had applied to lucas arts around 1996 and never heard back from them. I ended up getting a job at industrial light and magic (as they were both companies under lucas digital) thinking I could then transfer over to lucas arts.
But we would visit for the company store, and I would be nosy and go talk to people. This was during production of grim fandango and there was a tangible ramp up of stress in that building as the release approached. I remember one of the testers sitting there staring at the manny character on his screen and bemoaning, "I used to love playing games".
and the music! I remember saving snippets of the music that were posted online well before the soundtrack was available (and taping some of the background music). Great stuff, capitalizing on the San Francisco music scene. Great wikipedia page on it now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Grim_Fandango)
Wow, that was a great essay. It describes the process I've been using for the past 10 years to design a happy life. I had no words to describe it in a good way, but now I have.
One of my top 3 favorite games of all time. When it comes to story and characters, I cannot think of any better game. Recently finished it for the third time on Nintendo Switch.
That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.
Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
He developed a remarkable ability to perform complex calculations and visualize intricate mathematical concepts entirely in his mind. He once mentioned that his ALS diagnosis, which limited his physical abilities, led him to focus intensely on theoretical physics, as it required more intellectual than physical effort.
But sure, writing (and drawing) is a great tool to aid in deep thinking. So are AI tools.
I think you have understood "writing" in a very narrow sense. As mentioned in other replies, Stephen Hawking was a very prolific author. He did not write much, but he sure knew how to write.
PG is obviously talking about the mental process of writing, i.e. of organizing a complex network of thoughts in a linear hierarchy that others can grasp, not the physical one.
> That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.
You're correct here.
> Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.
The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.
As someone who teaches PhD students who are quite far beyond "average professional", I concur completely with PG on this one. Writing forces you to make very clear and concrete ideas that feel like they make sense but are still fuzzy. It's certainly not the only way, but it's the most common and easy way.
To use an overextended computer metaphor: serializing data structures to a wire format forces lazy evaluation, turning up any errors that were previously hidden by laziness.
I don't disagree, just want to mention that as someone married to someone who supervises Phd students, they're not by any means "far beyond average professional"... but perhaps you're on a exceptionally highly regarded faculty where that may be the case.
Reading and writing are essential for the transfer and percolation of knowledge across society.
Stephen Hawking's thinking and imagination wouldn't have meant much had he not finally penned them down for others to read, and neither would his ideas have been taken seriously had he chosen to make tiktoks or podcasts to explain them instead.
I think what he's getting at is that while you CAN use an AI to assist with "ideation," we will inevitably create new, low paying jobs where there is no ideation and the employee just operates an AI, because economics. That will in turn create a large cohort within society who are functionally illiterate. Literacy profoundly alters the brain for the better, and this won't happen to those people.
It's useful for ideation: suggesting ideas and concepts that you might not think of. A bit like a conceptual thesaurus. But it doesn't replace the hard work of thinking for yourself.
a) No / little data: Whenever you are starting to think about a subject, you can ask it to give you a structure / categories.
b) Existing data: What I do very often is to give it a lot of "raw data" like unstructured thoughts or an unstructured article, then I ask him to find suitable top categories.
I see, I don't want to shame this kind of use. It's kind of almost like talking about something briefly with an educated person.
Until it's not.
I'm not the type who'd say "don't use AI". Use whatever works. Myself I became really fascinated by transformer LLMs / GPTs in winter 2019, then again when ChatGPT was published and a good few months after that.
It's just that my interest&enthusiasm has almosted vanished by now. Surely it will reemerge at some point.
Very good point. I often use AI to see things from multiple points of view. It is a good tool to check if you have included obvious things in your argumentation. Spell checking is just one of those obvious things.
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