And I’ll keep saying this: you can’t teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.

Fidelity is impossible to automate.

Yeah, I think we more or less agree, and I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game or even a bad story, just that there’s not a lot I need closure on. I think the only thing that could be done to “ruin” it would be to pile on a bunch of unsatisfying answers to the open questions about the world. I’d definitely play HL3 just to experience more of the world, I just don’t care that much about where the story goes and I don’t think that’s ever been the main draw.

It would be nice to get some explanations of the world that would extend it and allow people to tell more interesting stories within it, but I honestly doubt that those answers exist. It really feels like they’re kind of just riffing and they don’t have a bigger vision for where it all goes, if I had to guess.

I’m working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I’m a little apprehensive about all the friction they’re likely to have.

I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying “here is how this concept actually works”, or even “this is who this person is”.

We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets.

Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then… what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean?

I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it’s unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn’t make good science fiction.

I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it’s very limited.

Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it’s always been pretty thin on the ground, right?

What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there’s the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge.

The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one.

Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there’s some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they’re on our side. There’s a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us.

The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn’t tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what’s really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what’s really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond “world in peril” or “friend in peril”, which is pretty bog standard stuff.

Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad’s stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it’s always been so vague because they’re so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.

He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.

We need to go deeper.

Okay, this is a deep cut, literally, but that’s what a salt mine looks like.

The article mentions that some of the sources used to poison the models are far right, so that doesn’t support that narrative, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone on the right wanted to spin it that way anyway.

Welcome!

If anyone thought Trump’s party was the party of “the little guys” at any point in time now or before the inauguration, they shouldn’t be trusted with a pair of blunt scissors, much less a key piece of IT infrastructure.

And if you’re gullible enough to think that’s a reasonable defence, I’d put you in that category too. I’m not really interested in anything else you have to say, that was just a disqualifyingly vapid argument you just made.

Bye.

He literally said that they are now the party of the little guys. That’s what “the tables have turned” means. That says a lot about how he feels about Trump, and a lot about how much you can trust his judgement on anything.

That is in the back of my mind. God help me I may just do it.

Goddamnit, I just made an email with them, trying to get out of google’s monopoly. Does anyone know an email service that doesn’t suck?

Most commercially produced media is slop. Porn isn’t special in that regard.

That doesn’t mean porn is somehow specially devoid of artistic merit. Done well it can be beautiful and meaningful.

You’ve got a stereotype in your head that was put there by a misogynistic culture, but that’s not inherent to the genre.

Right but there was still the need in the moment to get it made, and presumably the programmer could tell it was functioning when they were testing it, and if they were let go and the system was abandoned, that kind of proves that they were necessary to make the system work.

That’s different to having a job as a box ticker, where you write reports all day that don’t ever get read, and you know they don’t get read, and you’re paid to do it anyway.

I think a lot of those jobs could be replaced with AI without anybody noticing right away. Although losing that expertise probably will have long term effects. I’m not saying they’re useless, I’m saying they know as they work that it won’t be paid attention to. That’s what I meant.

You’re not wrong that there’s a lot of waste, but even if what you’re doing is inconsequential if done right, it still carries the potential to set everything on fire if you do it wrong.

Who was that? I said sex is about interpersonal connection. I didn’t learn that from porn, I learned it from sex.

I trusted the audience to understand that good porn or erotica in general should be about portraying that connection in some form, which is what is actually hot about sex, but maybe I gave you too much credit.

But hey, if sexuality to you is really that shallow, you’re free to pity me, because I put absolutely no stock in your opinion.

Of all the desk jobs, programmers are least likely to be doing bullshit jobs that it doesn’t matter if it’s done by a glorified random number generator.

Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it.

The main complaint is that if they make one tiny mistake suddenly everybody is angry and it’s your fault.

Some managers are going to have some rude awakenings.

I’d suggest that if you think AI porn is anywhere near the real thing, that’s probably because you think porn is already slop in the same way that these AI bros think of code or creative writing or whatever other information-based thing you already know AI can’t do well.

Porn isn’t slop, people aren’t just interestingly-shaped slabs of meat. Sex is fundamentally about interpersonal connection. It might be one of the things that LLMs and robots are the worst at.