Unless you’re willing to put in some kind of response that basically says “I’m not going to respond to that” (and that’s a sure way to break immersion) this is effectively impossible to do well, because the writer has to anticipate every possible thing a player could say and craft a response to it. If you don’t, you’ll end up finding a “nearest fit” that is not at all what the player was trying to say, and the reaction is going to be nonsensical from the player’s perspective

LA Noire is a great example of this, although from the side of the player character: the dialogue was written with the “Doubt” option as “Press” (as in, put pressure on the other party). As a result, a suspect can say something, the player selects “Doubt”, and Phelps goes nuts making wild accusations instead of pointing out an inconsistency.

Except worse, because in this case, the player says something like “Why didn’t you say something to your boss about feeling sick?” and the game interpreted it as “Accuse them of trying to sabotage the business.”

Plenty of people live in areas where monkeys raid their garbage.

Depending on your use case, if you want something stiffer you could brush each sheet with slow curing epoxy resin, then layer and press it to create some DIY micarta (yes, micarta technically uses phenolic resin, but epoxy should work fine for most uses).

You can also do this in Gmail natively by using a plus sign instead of the hyphen. E.g. myemail+newsletter@gmail.com will deliver, as the plus and everything between it and the @ are ignored. This may work on other platforms too.

Or, as mentioned in another comment, you can do this easily with a domain you own. Although you may get the occasional call from a merchant validating that StoreName@mydomain.com is an actual order.

Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.

I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I’d love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80’s/90’s (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn’t need to be reflected in EVs, but it’s what all the major automakers are doing.

Usually that’s an “and”, not an “or”.

Thanks for clarifying. There are a lot of misconceptions about how this technology works, and I think it’s worth making sure that everyone in these thorny conversations has the right information.

I completely agree with your larger point about culture; to the best of my knowledge we haven’t seen any real ability to innovate, because the current models are built to replicate the form and structure of what they’ve seen before. They’re getting extremely good at combining those elements, but they can’t really create anything new without a person involved. There’s a risk of significant stagnation if we leave art to the machines, especially since we’re already seeing issues with new models including the output of existing models in their training data. I don’t know how likely that is; I think it’s much more likely that we see these tools used to replace humans for more mundane, “boring” tasks, not really creative work.

And you’re absolutely right that these are not artificial minds; the language models remind me of a quote from David Langford in his short story Answering Machine: “It’s so very hard to realize something that talks is not intelligent.” But we are getting to the point where the question of “how will we know” isn’t purely theoretical anymore.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.

I have a suspicion that all of the layers of “Elon management” at Tesla and SpaceX have given him the idea that he’s a brilliant innovator; he gives them all his outlandish ideas and they get filtered into (normally) reasonable plans, and they guide him down the path they want him to go down while he thinks the good idea is his. And those companies are both doing well, so clearly his style works, at least in his mind.

But then he bought twitter, which didn’t have anyone devoted to protecting the company from him, and it’s all going to shit.

Ahh, so less “hard to believe” and more “unpleasant to believe”, that’s fair.

The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.

Why is that hard to believe? The mega-rich are not notably more intelligent than anyone else, they just started decades ago with inherited wealth and got lucky early.

Apple cider vinegar in a bowl with a drop of dish soap will be a lot more effective.

There’s a very specific type of “free speech” that he’s fighting for.

Your second question answers your first. The more he leaves Tesla alone, the better for them. It’s probably pretty hard to determine how much having his name associated with Tesla is hurting the company vs how much it would help/hurt to get rid of him, but if he’s attached but absent, it’s very much a “devil you know” situation.

Working on building a modern style barn door, although I doubt I’ll be able to paint it this weekend.

Beyond that, it’ll try to summarize a book, but it often can’t do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can’t really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that’s in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.

One thing I found that’s really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like “Are you sure about that?” It’ll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It’ll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like “Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob” and it will very frequently say you’re right and make up a story along those lines that’s plausible within the text. It doesn’t work on really popular stuff; you can’t convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it’ll tell you details that it’s making up whole cloth with complete confidence.

There are three drinks you can call a martini:

• A martini is gin and vermouth, maybe with some bitters if you like
• A vodka martini is vodka and vermouth, bitters again optional
• A vesper martini is gin, vodka, and lillet blanc
• Any of the above can be made “dirty” with olive brine if you want

Anything else is a cocktail in a martini glass. No shade if you like apple schnapps, lemon juice, and vodka, drink what you like, but it’s not a martini.

It’s one of the few things you can’t buy outright. And I don’t believe you can amass and keep a billion dollars without having some kind of fundamental need that can’t be filled, and once they realize that the money isn’t doing it, they go for whatever else they can.

Yeah, as one of the people giving you “heat”, I think it’s great that you put forward this proposal and took feedback on it, and my goal was a productive discussion, not shaming. Not every idea is good, and very, very few of them are good right from the jump, but you never find good ideas without putting them out there.