Hey @Gaywallet, I was hoping I’d see you chime in given your background. I don’t have any particular expertise when it comes to this subject, so it’s somewhat reassuring to see your confidence that folks in the healthcare industry will be more careful than I assume. I work in an adjacent field and know there are a lot of folks doing really good work with ML in healthcare, and that most of those people are very cognizant of the risks. I still worry that there are a lot of spaces in healthcare and especially in areas like claims payment/processing where that care is not going to be taken and folks are going to be harmed.
The thing I’m more concerned about is “move fast and break things” techbros implementing these technologies in stupid ways without considering: A) Whether the tech is mature enough for the uses they’re putting it to B) Biases inherited from training data and methods.
LLMs inherit biases from their data because their data is shitloads of people talking and writing, and often we don’t even know or understand the biases without close examination. Trying to apply LLMs or other ML models to things like medicine, policing, or housing without being very careful about understanding the potential for incredible biases in things that seem like impartial data is reckless and just asking for negative outcomes for minorities. And the ways that I’m seeing most of these ML companies try to mitigate those biases seem very much like bandaids as they attempt to rush these products out the gate to be the first out the door.
I’m not at all concerned about the singularity, or GI, or any of that crap. But I’m quite concerned about ML models being applied in medicine without understanding the deep racial and gender inequities that are inherent in medical datasets. I’m quite concerned with any kind of application in policing or security, or anything making decisions about finance or housing or really any area with a history of systemic biases that will show up in a million ways in the datasets that these models are being trained in.
I have a couple of friend groups that are on Discord, and it works perfectly for what we use it for, which is mostly posting stupid memes a few times a day and keeping up with each other (the main discord is a group of friends from college plus a few others that have joined over time). Discord works great for our game nights and D&D sessions (this is why we started using it in the first place) but I don’t really want to engage with it for other things. I do hate it when companies try to use Discord as their primary communication, it really doesn’t work well for that.
Yeah, it’s been the one feature that I’m really missing badly. Edge was genuinely a very good UX experience as far as a daily driver browser goes, and if it weren’t for the persistent feeling that I ought to be supporting FF just so there’s a little diversity in the browser space I’d probably still be using it.
I switched back to Firefox from Edge recently (I know, dont @ me) and the only thing I’m really missing at all is the way that tab grouping works in Edge. You can just drag a tab over another tab and it will automatically create a new group for them, then you can collapse groups in the title bar if you’re not using them. That plus Edge’s tab sleeping made for some easy and intuitive tab management that I haven’t been able to recreate in Firefox yet. I know there are some tab grouping extensions but none of them let you drag/drop in the title bar, and a lot of the better ones are very focused on tree syle vertical tabs, which I don’t hate but don’t really use much. I prefer tabs being in the title bar, because that space is going to be there anyway so I might as well fill it up with something useful.
Interesting twitter thread from PopeHat about what this might indicate.
It could be just my personal preference of course
I think that’s probably the case here. I really enjoy environmental storytelling, and piecing together a story from bits of lore and clues scattered around a game world. It’s just a different way of telling a story than a more guided or linear narrative. It’s not objectively better or worse than more traditional story forms. I do think that it is a type of narrative that is easier to tell in a video game than it would be in another format, which is why it feels like such a novel experience to me. I had a very different experience of Breath of the Wild from you, incidentally. Which I think just goes to show how strongly subjective these things are. I found BotW to be incredibly engrossing, and I’ve beat it at least three times, the last of which I cleared all shrines. I mostly didn’t approach the game as a checklist of things that needed to be done, though, or as something that needed to be progressed through in order to get to a particular point. It’s not really structured that way. If you want, as soon as you get off the starting plateau you can just go fight Ganon. There’s literally nothing stopping you other than a lack of health and good gear, and from watching speedruns it doesn’t actually take that long to get pretty passable gear anyway. I constantly found myself traversing huge portions of the map in that game just out of curiosity to see what was over the next hill, or around this mountain, and I felt that the game almost always rewarded that curiousity.
I don’t think that Open World mechanics are at odds with good story-telling, I just think that they are better suited to a different type of storytelling than the traditional linear video game story.
I think the problem is more that a lot of studios want to shoehorn a traditional linear narrative into an open world and usually what that ends up meaning is one of two things. Either you have certain places that the game tells you to go to get more story, and the rest of the world is really just sidequest land (looking at you, Ubisoft), or you wind up having a lot of exposition thrown at you while you’re moving from point A to point B (Rockstar…).
I think good story-telling in an open world is possible, but to effectively use the open world it needs to be different. Environmental storytelling is a lot more important in these types of games. I think Breath of the Wild did a pretty good job of this, although it wasn’t perfect. But I think the environment was put together in a way that you could really start to understand the backstory of the world without somebody lore dumping at you. The problem with BotW is that they didn’t trust the player to pick up on the story, so they still included the lore dump. I think Elden Ring also has some really good open world storytelling. It’s opaque but very evocative. You’re given a few details about the past, but the real heavy lifting is done through the environment and the items you find throughout the world.
I was wondering the same thing. There are a fair number of plants like this in the area that supply parts to Hyundai and I suspect there are similar things happening at most. I also get the impression that our AG is looking the other way as hard as he can on this. Hyundai brings a lot of jobs and money to the state and they’ve got a lot of influence here.
I don’t completely disagree, but one of the problems with smart glasses continues to be creating a clear display that is unobtrusive, clear, and doesn’t obstruct your view. What’s interesting about this smart contact is that the display is so small and so close to your eye that you basically can’t see the screen itself, but the display is supposedly very crisp. Now whether that’s true in practice I don’t know. And there are a ton of other technical hurdles to overcome. I suspect battery life is probably a big issue, but also the FoV is apparently somewhat of a problem, which they are trying to overcome using eyetracking and software. It’s at least really interesting.
I think this is probably an important part of it, but I’ve been thinking about this recently and I think there are some other factors as well. This isn’t particularly well researched, although I’ve read some interested articles about the alt-right pipelines and that sort of this, this is just my own musings especially about how the right tends to weaponize nostalgia.
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Nostalgia - Gamer communities have a strong sense of Nostalgia, looking back at some previous golden age of games as the golden age that they wish they could go back to. Like other backward looking groups, I think this leaves them vulnerable to right-wing propaganda, e.g. “Gaming was so much better before all of this woke nonsense”. It’s the start of a radicalization pipeline. When you start to think that minorities or diversity is the reason the thing you have built your identity around is getting worse, it’s a natural pipeline to right wing ideology.
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Gatekeeping - Gamer communities have always been very prone to gatekeeping. In my mind it’s not hard to connect the dots from, “you’re not a gamer if you didn’t love FF7 as a kid” to “girls can’t be gamers” to more explicit racial/gender hate and homophobia, because the people who gaming catered to in those “golden ages” were overwhelmingly white middle-class boys so the unconscious mental image of the in group “Gamers” is white and male.
I think you see these elements in play in Gamergate, which used the already existing tendency toward misogyny in gaming communities, as well as a strong sense of nostalgia, to radicalize a lot of gamers into alt-right ideologies with a paper thin veneer of defending “ethics” but actually just attacking women and minorities in gaming spaces.
Not sure how I feel about this. Seems like lots of nostalgia goggles and circlejerking about how things were so much better back in some golden age, but as somebody who lived through the good old days, there was a LOT of corporate shovelware in pretty much every era of gaming, it’s just that nobody remembers any of that crap any more.
Honestly, it strikes me as “Gamers” mad that AAA gaming isn’t laser focused on catering to their specific demographic. Sure, there are bad trends in gaming, but there have always been bad, exploitative trends in gaming. Gamers that flip out about microtransactions ruining gaming always seem to forget that the majority of the industry for decades was focused on making games that could extract quarters from kids as efficiently as possible.
But for all the crying and raging, the last decade of video games has produced some incredible games, both AAA/AA and indie. We’re IN the golden age right now, and some people are so focused on the past that they can’t see it.
It reminds me of the way people talk about Classic Rock. People act like there was only great music in the past, but if you look back at the charts there was tons of disposable, forgettable junk that has rightfully been forgotten. I think the same thing is happening with gaming. Sure, there were some real masterpieces. But I know from experience there was a ton of barely playable garbage, too.
That game looks cool, but the thrown spear isn’t really what I was thinking about. I feel like games do a slightly better job representing that.
It’s the spear as a main battle weapon that I think doesn’t get represented well in popular culture. For example, Vikings in games usually are depicted with axes, but spear and shield were probably more common.
The same goes for really any medieval or faux-medieval setting. The vast majority of fighters would have had some variation on the pointy stick as their main weapon, because they were so deadly effective.
There’s also a commonly repeated argument that spears might be the main weapon in massed battle, but in small groups or one on one combat it would be ineffective, but I’ve seen plenty of HEMA matches and recreations that show that spear users can beat sword users, often with very little experience with the weapon.
I always want it to be the spear, but I find that most games don’t really get spears right or just generally make them a worse choice than some type of sword. Spears or something in the spear family were the weapon of choice for the vast majority of human history. This is true both in contexts where fighting would have been done in tight formation and in times/places where it was not. It was more common than the sword, and in many places and times would have been considered a fighter’s main weapon, with a sword acting as a kind of sidearm. In games, however, spears are almost always less effective than swords, while reach advantage is usually very minor or negated altogether.
Yeah, I work for a company that builds and runs all kinds of healthcare related systems for state and local governments. I work on a Title XIX (Medicaid) account and while we are always looking for ways to increase access, budgets are very tight. One of my concerns is that payors in this space will look to AI as a way to cut costs, without enough understanding or care for the potential risks, and the lowest bidder model that most states are forced into will mean that the vendors that are building and running these systems won’t put in the time or expertise needed to really make sure those risks are accounted for.
When it comes to private insurance, I don’t expect anything from them but absolute commitment to profit over any other concern, and I’m deeply concerned about the ways that they may use AI to try and automate to the detriment of patients, but especially minorities. I absolutely don’t expect somebody like UHC to take the kind of care needed to mitigate those biases when applying AI to their processes and systems.