Those rich regions are setting examples of building transit at way too high a cost for poorer regions to afford.
If we could use other parts of the world as an example - my region is richer than them and could afford it. But those places somehow are never used as the example
I think this is much better as a relative pitch training tool for people with a very basic background in piano and music in general. I would have loved something like this back in high school to use for practicing over and over.
I think "teach" is a high bar, but I do think it's a good practice tool.
My one and only complaint is that sometimes the melodies it generates are tough to play back because they don't really sound like a real melody and I have to fight my brain telling me to play back the one that would actually sound good. Sort of like having to memorize a random string of words vs memorizing a normal sentence.
Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP
Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.
When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.
These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
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[0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
Some of the coolest MUDs I played in had effectively only two useful rooms, and no mobs or items to really speak of. They were barely more than a couple of IRC chat rooms, but with the ANSI colors support and complex script languages a MUD Engine directly over telnet could provide to a good MUD client.
There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.
But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)
I’ll admit YMMV and my comment should’ve been better scoped — but it sounds like you’re not disagreeing that for those, LLMs are useful in the way I suggested.
I remember going to buy a new car in 2015. My girlfriend had a Honda Fit from a few years prior and I loved driving in it. Felt so roomy given the tiny size. Went for a test drive in one and every single button was digital. Not even a volume knob, just little touch sensitive buttons. Ended up buying a Mazda 3 and Honda eventually switched back to physical buttons for most things.
Surprising to see companies still learning this a decade later.
Reminds me of when I was looking for good workflows for note taking tools like Obsidian that would be relevant to me, but so many of the big articles on how to do various types of note organizations strategies all used theirs to organize notes on videos and conferences they had watched or gone to about note taking.
This is a very confused article, I think. The fact that people associate these extravagant roaring 20s parties with the character of Gatsby has everything to do with his character and over-the-top parties being the strongest cultural touchstone that people today have with that era, given that almost all of us (in the US at least) have to read it in high school.
The fact that the aesthetic qualities of Gatsby that are paid homage to have nothing to do with the subtext of those parties when you learn about his character is not a contradiction.
This happens all the time. Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time, despite Tony Montana being clearly depicted as a complete idiot whose lack of impulse control is his undoing. The didn't "misunderstand" Scarface. They just loved the aesthetics and power fantasy.
I feel the same about Fight Club (the movie, not necessarily the book). Many people focused almost entirely on the Tyler Durden character, either celebrating or criticizing the extreme masculinity. But the whole point of the movie was a rejection of that character.
Sure, but at the same time a whole lot of the movie is about rejecting the modern treadmill we find ourselves on -- and that appeals to many. If there were just a way to be strong and feel alive, and not worry about anything else.
Then the movie takes a turn and they hatch a scheme to blow stuff up and the viewer didn't realize what they were watching the whole time. In fact, calling it "Fight Club" is wrong if it's about the psychological drama going on in his head. It has nothing to do with the fight club, that's just one possible expression of it.
People latch on to the first 2 acts of discovering oneself when stepping out of the expectations of society. Critics of those people like to point out that there are bad things about the movie also. No shit. They don't seem to get that other people can differentiate between enjoying a fiction and blowing stuff up. Lots of people ran out to try an MMA gym, not very many started blowing up buildings. Most just watched a movie. But hey, it's really easy to feel superior saying those people are toxic idiots for liking it at all.
When parts of the general public enjoy a character that the author intended to be bad, there's often a lot going on under the surface that outside critics don't realise. This results in articles that are hilariously wrong from the perspective of readers who are more familiar with the movement.
Consider Patrick Bateman. There are at least six things going on with Bateman memes: aesthetic appreciation for the movie and/or character, comedic irony, intentional contrarianism to annoy the sort of people who write articles about how much they hate Patrick Bateman, an obscure in joke, following the format without understanding the underlying work, and genuine unironic belief that he's a good guy.
If you are not familiar with the type of people who make memes about Patrick Bateman or name sandwiches after the Great Gatsby, you might misread them as misreading the work.
Gatsby isn't supposed to be bad. He's supposed to be tragic.
The bad guys in Gatsby are Tom Buchanan and, to a lesser extent, Daisy. One might make a case that Nick is not a good person, but he's telling the story as a salve for his guilt. He's mostly just a hypocrite who doesn't want to admit he's the same kind of wealth that grinds non-wealthy people up for pleasure.
But Gatsby is a man who became obsessed with a woman and did everything he could to win her heart, including fraud. Yes, that's not good behavior, but he's not meant to be taken as a bad guy so much as someone who made some mistakes because of higher emotions.
Tom OTOH is just toxic masculinity. Fucks other women, can't stand any other guy getting attention, doesn't give a crap about people who die, etc.
>Rappers loved Scarface and mob movies back in the 90s/00s and used to imitate those aesthetics all the time
This has always bothered me, and I don't think it's some subtle aesthetic/ironic/contrarian take either. People who I asked at the time (00s) usually had something to say about him being "self made", or something else similar. Did you (royal you) actually watch the whole movie?
This is a situation in which a government would typically step in and force companies to stop ratfucking end users in favor of business partners, but the problem here is that (a) it's an international problem that would require cooperation with China and (b) the US has the most venal administration in history and has already taken bribes from AI and hardware companies.
These companies going all in on purely AI partnership sales are foolish because the aforementioned user ratfucking is step two of Doctorow's original description of enshittification:
1. Attract users and partners with market disrupting quality of service
2. Screw over users in favor of partners, knowing that users are less likely to be critical and more likely to be locked in
3. Screw over partners once you've achieved enough market dominance that they are also locked in
4. Use rent seeking behavior (government bribes, etc.) now that you've exhausted your users and partners for growth
This is an announcement of increased competition in a market with acute supply shortages. That’s exactly what is supposed to happen.
Jumping to regulating the global RAM market this early sounds like the worst of all solutions. You want people to get cross-government approval every time they want to buy or sell RAM? American companies will call up Korea to get their RAM rations.
Note that the company in question is specifically sanctioned by the US, so this is not exactly a glowing example of the utopia of the free market you seem to be holding it up as.
Rationing chips makes sense to me. You don't have to set the ration at a low enough level that it would ever impact legitimate businesses. You could just set a ration level that prevents a company that is losing hundreds of billions of dollars from spending imaginary money buying 40% of the annual raw material supply despite lacking the capability to refine the raw materials into a working product, for the sole purpose of denying it to their competition. You strawmanned the opposition as requiring cross-government approval "every time anyone wants to buy RAM", but maybe we could just start with requiring cross-government approval to buy 40% of the global supply.
>We do allow them to use LLMs, it would be stupid not to.
I'm not sure why you're saying this so confidently. Using LLMs on school work is like using a forklift at the gym. You'll technically finish the task you set out to do, and it will be much easier. So why not use a forklift at the gym?
>But the key reason was the following: research has shown that human interviewers are actually worse when they get tired, and that AI is actually better for conducting more standardized and more fair interviews. That result was a major reason for us to trust a final exam on a voice agent.
I think that in an "AI class" for MBA students, the material is probably not complex enough to require much more than a Zork interpreter, but if you tried this on something in which nuance is required, that comparison would change dramatically. For something like this, which is likely going to be little more than knowledge spot checks to catch the most blatant cheaters, why not just have students do multiple choice questions at a kiosk?
I agree that I am not yet confident to use this approach for my technical classes. I am still very unhappy with any option for assessment for technical classes, but I would not trust an LLM to come up with good questions. NotebooksLM does come up with decent quizzes, but nothing super hard.
For the use of LLM in classes: I understand the reasoning, but I found LLMs to be extremely educational for parsing through dense material (eg parsing an NTSB report for an Uber self-driving crash). Prohibiting students from using LLMs would be counterproductive.
But I still want students to use LLMs responsibly, hence the oral exam.
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