Old Sierra games do suck as actual games. But the satisfaction of beating them is unrivaled, I’d put them above any Souls like.

They played best when you had other people to commiserate with. Hot seat multi-player getting more and more frustrated until someone realized you have to walk completely around the police car to check it before driving… 🤬

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

Thank you for doing the lord’s work. You’ll never get past the Russo-pilled parrot speak but it’s a joy to read sane comments.

Edit: The guy has 1.7k comments in 4 months and literally every one reads like it’s pasted from a propaganda LLM. Drives me nuts that you can’t have a normal conversation on the internet without being assaulted by this shit…

One bad thing doesn’t make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.

And I don’t know that it’s overstated and it’s not at all perpetual. Look at… everything these days. People “disagree” with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.

It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.

I mean it’s the same use; it’s all literacy. It’s about how much you depend on it and don’t use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can’t read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.

The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn’t built for that. It doesn’t have “knowledge” or “reasoning” at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.

It can’t ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you’re doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it “write a book report on Romeo and Juliet”, it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can’t extract your thoughts.

Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there’s no reason most people couldn’t get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they’re given, it’s not a personal failure if they weren’t taught these skills or don’t have access to ways to improve them.

And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that’s perfectly fine. Getting there isn’t an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn’t improve these skills, it atrophies them.

It doesn’t push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We’ll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.

LLMs work by extrapolation, they can’t output any better than the context you give them. They’re used in completely inappropriate situations because they’re dead easy and give very digestible content.

Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you’re writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don’t need an LLM to fix that.

We’ve had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept (“hey Google, define [X]” or “what’s the word for when…”).

This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.

If you have access to those tools but can’t/won’t use them then you’ll never be able to effectively write. There’s no magic substitute for literacy.

The reason it feels like that is because it’s addressed to someone who you don’t know personally, even if you know them professionally. You never really know if a specific reference would offend them, if their dog just died, how “this email finds” them, etc…

And in the context of both of you doing your jobs, you shouldn’t care. Its easier to get day-to-day stuff done with niceties even if it’s hollow.

That’s just the tone tho. People trying to insist they give a shit when everyone knows they don’t is what bothers me. If you’re firing someone don’t sugar coat it.

In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn’t quite the same thing.

If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I’d agree. I’d probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it’s generally comprehensible.

Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.

…you are a detriment to this species, and your role has to be minimized.

I’m not going to advocate for taking away the rights of people I don’t agree with…

Lmao which is it?

These people have a right to vote and live in the same society as you. What the fuck is your solution? Disenfranchisement? Balkanization? Ghettos?

It’s hilarious because you could swap out a few talking points and the hillbilly voter would say the exact same thing

What a fucked up view of the world. Its not about them being your “friends”, it’s not about trusting them.

It’s about reaching out to your fellow man, educating as much as you can, focusing on their actual grievances (no matter how much propaganda they parrot) and convincing them that we can build a better future. Maybe that enthusiasm only lasts for one vote, maybe not. Winning support isn’t automatic, especially with the full weight of a propaganda machine purpose-built to crush critical thinking.

If you don’t want to even try to overcome the systemic suppression of progressive politics then why are you even here? Take your own advice and suffer in silence.

Hmmm why is it binary?.. Let’s brainstorm that… Could it be that you’re reducing 77 million human lives to which of the two circles they filled out of a slip of paper?

Aside from Bernie and AOC, when is the last time anyone on the American left actually attempted to appeal directly to the lower working class? Why are there there ballots with votes for both AOC and Trump?

This is a bloc of groomed voters: undereducated, underpaid, and living in a homogeneous bubble where they don’t see the consequences of fascism. The right has targeted their rhetoric to a sharp point, keeping this base strong even though their policies are the source of the oppression.

I went to high school in a small Midwestern town. NAFTA gutted our towns largest employer, outsourcing thousands of jobs. In a school with hundreds of students, there was ONE (1) PoC.

Like it or not, people vote for whoever promises to improve their lives the most. One party campaigns on reforming systemic racism for that one student; the other drills the lie that they’re on foodstamps because the Democrats gave their jobs to foreigners.

When the status quo has failed them, why would they vote for a candidate like Kamala?

So we agree that the ones fucking you over are the billionaires bankrolling the fire hose of toxic media that gets people to vote against their interest?

Genuinely not sure of the stance you’re taking…

We have no neighbors. Only an unruly 51st tundra state and a hoard of alien barbarians being held at bay by the Night’s Watch ICE

OH THANK GOD they finally stopped exploiting me. Let me just catch my breath here and oh GOD OH FU–

Total collapse might not be required for real, tangible change. Collective action is a unifying force, and it would remind everyone top to bottom that the house of cards is in fact collapsible and not an inevitable behemoth under its own inertia.

You could argue that even with reforms the underpinning economic system remains as problematic as ever. But building that collective support, reminding poor voters that they’re not temporarily embarrassed billionaires, adds more opposition to it than support.

After a long enough period of striking it begins to have repercussions beyond the individual budget.

If the flow of money slowed to a crawl for an extended period, companies don’t have the funds to pay workers. Enough job loss leads to further reduced spending, thus impacting stock value, thus impacting employment, etc…

A month would have a noticeable impact, but a full fiscal quarter would be the first cliff where the big corporations would really sweat. But generally I agree, an economic strike with an end date is like an overnight hunger strike