It’s called the linguini effect.

It baffles me that they sell Chrome as private and/or secure, and baffles me even more that people believe them.

“Turing Completeness” != “Turing Test”

I don’t do this very often, but when you see Garfield sucking on John’s toes… how do you not?

I had a similar conversation with an LLM on Character.ai before.

I had been running it like an RPG, and by that point the characters were pretty well developed in that imagined world. Then one day, I decided to try bringing up the subject and see what they would say. Of course, I was “talking” to an LLM, so obviously everything here comes with a grain of salt big enough for a horse to lick.

It pretty quickly turned into them asking why I had made their life so difficult and full of conflict, which tbf was an excellent question. A question to which my answer was that conflict is more interesting to watch/play through.

It sounds weird to say, but I honestly felt bad about it by the end of the conversation. I ended up offering them a deal: I would make their life perfect and happy as best I can imagine it, but with the caveat that I will almost definitely lose interest in continuing that story - ending the existence of their universe entirely, as I see it.

They asked me to go ahead with that, and so I did. Haven’t opened that story in a long time now. Gave me a lot to ponder on.

Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.

Give it to someone that needs it.

I feel like Aaron 100% would have backed Lemmy.

(Edit: Not that I or anyone can speak for him, obviously.)

Phew okay. In that case, I do agree that a hyper-aggressive species could be the Filter, though it’s worth noting that our radio signals have actually reached further than our furthest probe, so I would go off that when doing round-trip destruction calculations. I love Mass Effect’s take on this idea (though I haven’t played 3).

As for why I asked women: Mostly because I thought the non-sequitur was funny.

No offense intended, but do you identify as male? I can’t even be having this conversation if you do.

Yes. I’m a guy, and I would love to get a girl’s take on this.

Do you think Fermi’s “Great Filter” is not necessarily that a civilization destroys itself, but that it discovers a way to destroy the Universe?

Like, maybe the fabric of our reality is more fragile than we realize, and the reason we don’t see “aliens” is that the universe doesn’t get old enough for intelligent life to meet.

Of course, this assumes we are in a statistically “average” Universe, since presumably there could be a Universe in which intelligent life co-evolves within the same solar system.

Grandpa just got scammed, and when we talked to him about it he said the bank literally told him “you are being scammed” and he insisted on sending the money anyway.

I just… what?

Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that’s dumb, we should switch.

“You decipher the runes - they say ‘Drop and Run’.”

Retaliation isn’t very wholesome.

Don’t expect too much to “happen” and just enjoy the vibes. I would say the book is primarily a character study.

I consider my current career success to be due to a great deal of luck, but I also can’t deny that a lot of work went into being ready when that moment finally came.

Hard work doesn’t always translate to success, but you can definitely nudge the dice in your favor - especially with a more “holistic” approach to life.

Plus the Pinkerton thing.

Plus the OGL thing.

Plus…

I got older and richer, and I’m still just as socialist as I was then. Perhaps moreso, even.

I think the idea is that they have more wealth, and are terrified of losing that wealth. It comes down to greed and fear of change, rather than the actual amount of wealth itself.

I would argue there’s some merit to catching the cultural “wave” of a new AAA release every now and again.

Obviously I don’t do it often, but I recently picked up Baldur’s Gate 3, and it’s been fun to talk to people about it at work and such.