Hetare King

I think synthetic fuels might be good for situations where there are no feasible alternatives for now, like airplanes. But while they may not increase the net amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, they would still produce pollution locally, so I don’t think they would be desirable for things like cars. Also, we need to reduce the number of cars irrespective of whether they’re electric or not (for many reasons, but in the context of climate change, because manufacturing a car also generates a lot of greenhouse gasses and is an inefficient use of resources), so I don’t think that trying to soothe people’s irrational fears* by having synthetic fuels as an in-between so that they can ultimately be convinced to go electric is the right approach. In a world where most cars are capital assets instead of many people’s sole lifeline out of suburban purgatory, it would be a lot easier to say “you’ll use an electric car from now on and you’ll LIKE it!”, so I think it would it would be more fruitful to try to get closer to that world.

But my impression of this research is that the goal of it is having something that can be installed in people’s homes. I doubt we’re ever going to be producing synthetic fuels in people’s homes at a large scale.

*EDIT: I think I came off as too dismissive here, so I’d like to rephrase this and expand upon it. For the vast majority of people, range anxiety is an unfounded fear. That doesn’t change that the fear is real, but it does mean that it can dispelled by having a sufficient number of people in their community show that it is unfounded. But having synthetic fuels as an off-ramp, even though it can at best be a temporary measure that still has many of the problems of fossil fuels, would significantly slow down this process. There are, of course, also rational reasons not to get an EV; not being able to afford one, living somewhere with a flaky electrical grid etc., but those are things that need to be solved regardless and the very institutions that are incentivising EV can do something about (of course, the best reason to not get an EV is to not need a car to begin with).

It’s kind of hard to tell because it’s a low-poly model at a low resolution, but it looks like they’re wearing the mask kuroko wear, who are stagehands in Japanese theater that you’re expected to pretend aren’t there while they move things around on the stage.

This is from Tomodachi Life, right? I haven’t actually played it, but from what I know of the game, all the characters are Miis. So if the store staff were also Miis, there would be nothing to distinguish them from regular characters, so maybe they’re trying to avoid giving the impression that you can interact with them in the same way as you can with regular characters.

I see a couple of major practical reasons why game (engine) devs are under no threat from this even if it gets better in the future:

1. Scale. Like all things AI, this is not going to scale well. This doesn’t generate code, 3D models and textures, both making games and playing them requires running the model. So if you want a game to have a persistent environment where the world behind you doesn’t get regenerated into something different after taking 8 steps, the context window is going to get real large real fast. And unlike programmed games, you can’t make choices about what’s worth remembering and what isn’t, what can be kept on persistent storage and is only loaded when it becomes relevant etc., because it’s all one big, opaque blob of context, generated by a black box; you either have it remember everything or it becomes amnesiac in a way that makes it useless. Memory availability also isn’t increasing at a rate where this becomes a non-issue any time soon.

2. Control. Manipulating the world though a text prompt gives a lot of control, but it’s also very course. It’s easy enough to tell it that you want a character that can run and jump, but how fast does it run? Does it accelerate and decelerate or start and stop instantly? Does it jump in a fixed arc or based on the running speed and duration of the jump button being pressed? How far and how high? You’re going to run in the limits both of what you can convey and what the language model will understand pretty quickly. And even when you can get it to do exactly what you want, it would have been faster and more practical to manipulate values directly or use a gizmo place things. But there’s no way to extract and manipulate those values, because again: big, opaque blob of context.

I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. What it boils down to is that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

I’m not sure I entirely buy that. For cloud gaming to be any good at all, you need a high-speed, low-latency internet connection. Yes, nowadays having an internet connection is pretty much a requirement in the industrialised world and even someone of lesser means will probably have one good enough to watch streaming video at a decent enough quality (unless they live in the middle of nowhere), but that’s not good enough. So with the expensive internet connection and the monthly subscription, cloud gaming doesn’t strike me as a very economical.

We’ve also been living in a period of diminishing returns when it comes to visual fidelity improving as hardware power does for a while now, so you can buy older, more affordable hardware and still have games look great on them. Meanwhile, I don’t think someone who insists on being able to see the surroundings accurately reflected in every window and puddle is going to accept the compression artifacts and latency of cloud gaming.

I do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between something being attributed to a real person and a fictional character being loosely based on real people, though. Like, I think we can be pretty confident that the events in the Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t really happen (at least not literally), but if Gilgamesh was, like is generally accepted, a real person, the Gilgamesh in the Epic is most likely supposed to be that guy. Whereas Robin Hood was probably never meant to be any particular person.

That said, do we actually know whether all the stories in the Bible about Jesus were originally about the same individual? The new testament was written decades and centuries after the death of historical Jesus, by people who didn’t even live in the region, right? So all the stories the authors heard would have come from traders and missionaries of Christian cults with vocal traditions. That alone is very long game of telephone, but I imagine every town at the time would have at least one person claiming to be messiah, and if one of them became a big enough deal that rumours around him spread beyond town, there would also be bunch of copycats. So a lot of room for mix-ups.

“I am Jesus, your king!” “I heard Jesus was buried like three days ago!” “I uh- I have come back from the dead!” And then he skipped town ASAP.