I guess the pivot out of gaming meant they continued to trade for 20 years after their last video game project. Good on them.

It’s tough though, I have played a few games I used to love back in the day over the last few years that are not what I remember at all. Can’t help but feel like my struggle is with going back to a gameplay style that’s evolved far past the games that are locked in time. I beat Dune 2 with all 3 factions as a teenager, struggled to play it for an hour last year. It’s hard to go back to one of the grand daddies of the RTS genre when you have gotten used to modern interfaces, controls, and features.

Yeah, long before those days.

There’s also a healthy dose of survivorship bias. The truly terrible games have faded into obscurity back when I got my first Amiga I played “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” for a few weeks, because that was one of the two pack in games. Guess how many times I have revisited that steaming pile of Tiertex shit since then?

Ahh to be a techno optimist.

Things could get a whole lot more authoritarian than you think. It’s very early here and I can’t be bothered writing out the whole response, but we have governments around the world currently trying to make using a computer require ID. We are thin edge of the wedge here with age verification to “protect the kids”. Looked at from an authoritarian perspective a country with the power to dictate terms of trade says LLMs are actually military tech and need to be controlled, implement laws to restrict them or else…

If your country having access to international markets means you lose access to certain software… Now let’s complicate the situation by assuming a bubble burst leads to the world heading into a mass depression, do you really think the US has the wherewithal to retain its top spot? Times of mass political and financial upheaval can, and arguably almost always do, lead to radical changes to the living circumstances of people.

In 10 years time your phone won’t be running shit that the government/corporation in control doesn’t explicitly approve of and monitor.

Eventually we are bound to take steps to mitigate it. Like Radium, or Asbestos, or Lead in bloody everything, or cigarettes. Eventually the winds of change blow and the shitheels in power pivot to something new. It will be imperfect and it won’t reach everywhere and we will be pulling it out of places we never suspected we would find it in 50 years.

I can even imagine some far fetched scenarios where people start seeing Dune as a prophetic vision, especially with the idea of LLMs targeting weaponry in conflict zones. We seems to have a fairly accepting view on people committing genocide… Will we be so open minded about LLMs doing a bit of genocide… Especially if it’s gets its target wrong, maybe engages in a bit of friendly genocide on the aggressor countries own civilian populace.

Ahh but you are falling into a common fallacy, you probably think that because there is enough money to go around everyone should have a enough to meet their needs, then the excess can be an incentive for people who make outsized contributions to society, like a not sociopathic member of the human race.

The bloodsucking leech class view the existence of other people with needs as a personal insult. They feel every cent of money should be theirs personally, or as a barely acceptable compromise maybe shared around an “elite” class.

If Bezos for instance could have all the money and just issue Amazon Bucks™ based on how useful you are to him he would love that.

Honestly the reason we know Elon isn’t a real gamer is that he doesn’t have a bunch of four “agents” in trenchcoats with neuralinks and miniguns running around cities as he directs them to from an airship overhead. Otherwise that game would be as close to a masturbatory fantasy as someone who can’t get hard after all the Special K would get.

You gotta admit though the tempo of the music is getting pretty fast these days.

Predictable as clockwork… Sure, there’s no way we say, “fuck this shit is cancer maybe I should stop handing my cognitive capabilities over to a machine and start thinking again.”

I had a whole big screed written out about the myriad ways that the implementation of this technology is corrosive at a societal level. But it’s all just so exhausting to have the same arguments time and again.

So let’s just leave it at, sure buddy, you and your ilk have the mandate of heaven to topple the world. Have fun, but please don’t be surprised where the road you’re on takes you.

I feel like in a few years we will look back on this whole era and realise that our politicians and business leaders fell for a not so elaborate scam. LLM usage will be severely curtailed because of the scammy stank on them and they will slowly migrate back into the niches they should have been confined to in the first place.

Rightly or wrongly people got scared off widespread nuclear after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, LLMs will be much the same. The damage they have done to economies will take decades to resolve and it will be interesting to see if the US public can muster the unity and wherewithal to hold the oligarchs, kleptocrats and their enablers responsible.

Even more interesting if some laws can get put in place to limit the powers of the executive and or introduce some safeguards with teeth to prevent this sort of catastrophe again.

Imagine if worldwide we treated the criminals with power and money like criminals.

I fear we will have a generational loss of intellectual from people who have rapidly learned to farm all their higher cognition off to the liar box, and then got excited and cheered about the liar box getting better at lying. But hopefully we can move past this.

Of course the other scenario is that China waits until the US economy is so intrinsically linked to LLMs that there is no extrication, then they start pulling investment. I guarantee you the Chinese government will remain in control of their population longer than the US government controls theirs once an economic freefall kicks off towards a recession that makes the great depression look like a blip in the accounts books.

Its a trillion dollar game of musical chairs with roughly 8.3 billion people playing and only a few thousand chairs.

Prioritising search with the right result almost always on the first page. Stripped back interface. Back in the day search engines could be and often were a crapshoot, then along comes Google and surfaces what you are after first time the vast majority of times you used it. Plus the Google search page was a logo a text box and 2 buttons, you had to go looking for a weather report, a stock ticker, a news feed, an entertainment feed, etcetera etcetera. It was the disruptive tech upstart, now it’s the incumbent, basically all the evangelist algorithm nerds took their stock options and bailed. Now we have advertising obsessed business majors and cryptobros piloting the zombie husk of Google around.

My first thought was that there is a gulf of difference between display, and display respectfully… But seriously how does anyone take their religion so seriously when it’s so obviously a fragile veneer, if your beliefs are that brittle maybe time to start challenging some assumptions.

Oh when I see AI shilling I see them as tools.

I always thought the decision was made a lot earlier than that. Wasn’t it largely due to Westinghouse that America settled on 60hz 110v? Where AEG pushed 50hz 220v in Europe? That was late 1800s early 1900s from memory. World war 2 may have resulted in some rebuilding but they rebuilt along lines that were already established, the bump up to 230-240v with time and gained efficiencies is mirrored in the US with the move towards 120v at least that’s what I recall, but I must admit that outside of some Technology Connections videos I haven’t delved too deeply in recent years (and yes I know Alec would say the US technically already sends 240v but that’s not what your general appliances are rated to).

Takes a couple of litres of water before we get hot water. I have filled the kettle twice before the water was too hot to hold my hand under before. That’s roughly 3.5 litres of water just to get to the hot stuff. Luckily boiling water was a key consideration in our voltage level (actually that’s something I made up on the spot 😜) but more power equals good so… Its weird that this is a field that the US apparently just decided to let a large portion of the world be more “powerful” almost expect that if there were parts of the world settling on 240v the US would arbitarily decide they needed 500v.

Different country and all, but both are 240v in my neck of the woods, and since I live on tank water with mains water supply as a back up. Coupled with what I believe may be the most circuitous route from hot water cylinder to kitchen tap on earth (3 meters point to point yet seeming out to the local post office and back based on how long it takes to get hot water out of the tap) we use the Dishwasher to heat our water.

Which is all a very verbose way of saying “It depends on your circumstance…”

It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”