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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

    I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

    But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

    Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

    But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

    I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

    But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

    If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

    I did like Sim City a fair bit.



  • I was pretty impressed with Flux, plan to use it more. For a Tarot deck, which has a bunch of nude figures, it was pretty determined to clothe them; I eventually just left the woman in The World wearing something. Describing the image as “NSFW” helped; I’m sure that people have their own techniques that I just don’t know about.

    I’m used to being able to use regional prompting in Stable Diffusion to stick specific things at specific places in the image. I don’t know yet if there’s a regional prompting analog compatible with Flux; the Stable Diffusion and Flux workflows are (unexpectedly to me) quite different in ComfyUI. Flux does understand some level of English-like description of the layout of the image, which is cool, but I wasn’t always able to get the output I wanted with that, so I expect that there’s still more digging.




  • Tales-like

    I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?

    You mention “depth of story”, so maybe something with a similar level of storytelling?







  • I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

    The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.








  • using an admin portal’s default credentials on an IBM AIX server.

    I think that there are two ways to solve that.

    The first is to have the admins actually complete setups.

    But, humans being humans, maybe the second is a better approach:

    When creating a computer system, don’t let a system be used, at all, until all default credentials have been replaced with real ones. If you do, someone is invariably gonna screw it up.

    Your directions may say “Before pulling lever 2, pull lever 1 so that machine does not explode”. And maybe you feel that as the manufacturer, that’s covered your hind end; you can say that the user ignored your setup instructions if they get into trouble. But instead of doing that, maybe it’s better to not permit for a situation where the machine explodes in the first place; have pulling lever 2 also trigger lever 1.



  • wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

    Now Twitter is gone anyway, its public APIs have shut down,

    Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay.

    There’s still the Fediverse.

    I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…