> Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.
> If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard
Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.
> It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name.
Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)
> The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.
TFA refers to 'non-trivial compositionality' as what's novel about how humans communicate (and how it's perhaps not as novel as we thought):
> However, the team also found examples of non-trivial compositionality, the first such discovery outside of humans.
> The first non-trivial combination was high hoot-low hoot that was translated as a distress call. But it was also used to stop other individuals’ display behaviors—dramatic, exaggerated actions or gestures bonobos perform to assert dominance or attract attention. The second was either peep or yelp in the “join” meaning paired with high hoot to form a structure used for coordinating with others before traveling. Finally, the “I would like to” peep followed by “let’s stay together” whistle was used for initiating more romantically inclined interactions bonobos are famous for indulging in.
It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.
It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.
This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.
Hot take: it's a failure of democratic competition. The US doesn't have proportional representation, and it's long maintained a duopoly of two electable parties, and a first-past-the-post system that makes any vote for a 3rd party a waste. This, coupled with the Democrats not fronting up a reformist candidate when they could have (Sanders shot down twice), permitted the only anti-establishment candidate to win, and that happened to be a callous individual that aligns with minds as cruel as his own. (By his own admission, 'the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them'.) It's hard to believe that even die-hard Republican politicians are totally on-board with this reformist agenda that's going to completely decimate the economy, but most certainly, if anyone is winning by the end of it, it will be them.
That said, if there's ever another free and fair US election, the Democrats have a real opportunity to put a candidate that can actually deliver remaking the country, but in a way that lifts all boats, and without throwing out hard-won democratic freedoms. But I'm pretty certain they'll just front up another establishment candidate with a progressive face.
Makes sense to me. I've been thinking: The US was doomed from the start? Because of the laws that makes it a two party country? It was just a matter of time, and for mass manipulation tools to appear?
Are there any more doomed two party countries waiting to go authoritarian / fascist?
I think, though, that the US won't go full top-down authoritarian, because a large enough portion of the population is armed. Should some kind of coup ever be attempted, it could well spark a civil war – which is still doom, but not a subjugating kind of doom.
Numbers matter. Only a small amount of insurgents are needed to occupy the military, but if even 2% of the civilian population took up arms, the situation would become untenable. All the armed forces together constitute not much more than one million troops. And there would be also conscientious resistance within the armed forces to executive orders to shoot civilians.
The problem with free speech absolutism is that it leads to the 'paradox of tolerance'. We are now seeing the fruits of that line of thinking.
> The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.
I don't see the paradox. You can consider some people idiots and find it condemnable for idiots to be kidnapped in vans or have their visas revoked.
If anything it's a slipperly slope logic. These people are idiots -> these people deserve bad things happening. Unfortuntaely, the admin is proving all those fallacies before us.
'Considering some people idiots' is intolerance. Tolerating that kind of intolerance in the name of free speech in the marketplace of ideas or whatever can allow that intolerance to gain traction such that intolerance becomes a dominant mode of thinking, via tolerating people. Is that not the paradox?
What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch?
Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?
Physics is famously non-deterministic. Quantum physics is built on irreducible randomness, it is incompatible with determinism (except for evolutions of probability quasidistributions). And we don't even need to try to find "quantum interactions" in human brain — every physical system is quantum, for every photon that touches retina. There's enough indeterminism to hide entire universes.
Free will is the interplay between determinism and randomness, an emergent phenomenon with multiple self-recursive feedback loops and path dependence. Even if we could trace it through all these loops and find all the mixtures of quantum randomness and classical deterministic patterns it emerges from, it wouldn't make it any less magical.
Appreciate the thoughtful comment. Yes, under the hood indeed "every physical system is quantum", yet at the macro level physical systems are more or less predictable, including the brain. The brain's immensely complex structure and extensive interactivity make understanding how it works largely a mystery. The relatively simplistic models we're able to create have so far illuminate only a small part of its functionality.
The idea of free will has been a subject of eternal debate. I suspect this reflects lack of consistent definition. I would posit that free will isn't absolute but necessarily constrained by the nature of individual exercising its will. The stochastic attributes of a system or entity mean its actions are to an extent unpredictable, providing an "opening" for willful behavior.
Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action. Intuitive (vs. analytical) cognition is the operational default. By definition intuition is a computation occurring outside of the person's awareness.[0] Consequently, it augments the impression of exercising unfettered free will.
Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments. While the randomness inherent in biological systems allows volition to evolve, it also limits what an organism can will itself to do.
[0] Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 5–22
> Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments.
You might be talking about compatiblism.
> Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action.
Or more likely there’s no evolutionary fitness benefit to being able to understand this, and perhaps it’s even detrimental if it leads to nihilistic or egocentric impulses.
Except that the brain is not predictable at all, this is one of the first things you would know. You can say the definition of free will is not "consistent", but my problem is deeper and more reasonable: People just assume for no reason they can talk about free will, while they can't talk about conscience. As free will is a property of being conscious, people should shut up about free will before they can explain both causally and ontologically the consciousness phenomena.
But I'm afraid they will not.
Aren't we just saying that matter is complex enough to form an input to a model of the world and self which results in a really complex feedback loop where organisms which adjusted actions to increasingly complex projected model state had more descendants?
The self is just the only part of the model directly wired to our neurons and self awareness is just correct labeling.
In that context will is certainly a function of a how much a things internal model of self encoding the idea that its actions are moreso based on its own model than the tgings its model is built with and ability to make this distinction right or wrong and free will is basically meaningless.
Its certainly not a magical out for determinism all the qualities that we imbue with such meaning are as based on the same principals as anything else.
> Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair
> If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard
Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.