It may sound absurd, but that doesn't make it so. There are good reasons to believe that at least in many cases (some of them being complex decisions), the conscious thought process is either ineffective or counterproductive.
Obligatory reference to Peter Watts' Blindsight, as well.
> The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.
> Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license.
And the Echopraxia sequel too. Anyway, consciousness shouldn't be so bad in the real world of we as a species were successful so far despite of it. Of course with the hindsight of the next million years some future species could say that we were doomed by our consciousness, but we can't know that right now.
The last century has involved the fastest reduction in severe poverty ever seen in human history, and it's not stopping anytime soon. We're allowed to also do other things.
The context windows of LLMs are now significantly larger than 2048 tokens, and there are clever ways to autopopulate context window to remind it of things.
There are sunni and shia arabs too, that's a separate distinction.
It's more that Iranians and Arabs are two distinct cultures with different languages and histories (though a lot of the more recent history is common or shared). It's like confusing Spain and Poland, yes, they're both European nations that use the latin alphabet, but you'd be wrong to call them both Iberian because of that
The golden age of moddable games ended a long time ago, and it's a major shame. Mods for Starcraft, Warcraft III, Half Life, etc. spawned thousands of sophisticated game modes that turned into dozens of independent games.
There's plenty of moddable games still available though. Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Beat Saber. Even Dota 2 has what they call "custom games".
Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
The mods for modern games involve making those games better for a specific audience. I've played a bunch of Stardew Valley and Minecraft mods. High-end Minecraft graphics and massive content packs make for an interesting (if buggy) experience.
On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
I wish any of those hit the levels that Warcraft 3 did. Having infinite, sophisticated game modes to play online with others was so fun. Unfortunately Fortnite, Roblox, and Dota 2 have not been able to do this nearly as well.
I remember playing the brainy tekkit modpacks (which tend to have 300+ mods inside) that add a whole bunch of new mechanics to the game to the point where you're designing each piece of a factory and trying to put it together to automate resource collection. Then after a week once you finally have all the pieces created, and fuel refined, you can launch off in a rocket to the moon and beyond.
I remember playing the competitive UHC (ultra hardcore) servers. These were the inspiration for pubg/fortnight. Once you die, you're out, last-man-standing wins. 350 players would be randomly dispersed in a 10x10km world. And after 1 hour the world border would shrink in 1km every 10 minutes. If you were outside the border you would be teleported to a random space inside the playzone. What do you do to win? Create alliances? Head for the center to try and build fortifications to get the drop on players who are teleported near the center? Collect resources to build the best weapons and defences to fight people coming in with the ever shifting border? Sneak around to backstab a player and steal their resources? etc... etc... (Badlion UHC was my server of choice, there's some great youtube videos out there)
I remember playing in the casual fun mario-party style minigame servers.
I remember try to survive in the hardcore survival modpacks like the one where you're in a plane that's crashed in the desert next to an abandoned city, and you have to very carefully manage your heat/water while trying to scratch enough to survive while being assaulted by extremely difficult enemies.
I remember playing the nostalgia filled pixelcraft (literally just pokemon in minecraft).
I remember playing the challenging skyblock. This is where you're on a tiny island with a single tree floating in an infinite void, and you need to very carefully use your resources to expand your island to create your own world.
I remember the enhancement mods that just added new features to the game (biomes, creatures, dimensions, technology, magic, etc...)
I remember playing the adventure maps that creators would upload. These are worlds that are essentially read-only, and you're only allowed to interact with what the creator lets you. Essentially an adventure game like Legend of Zelda or Tomb Raider.
I remember just playing the base game with friends.
There's so much to love in minecraft and its mods expand the game so much further.
The people that would have made mods for those games are still able to make mods for TES, Witcher, GTA, Stardew valley (off the top of my head), but the people who made full blown mods like DOTA in WC3 are now using tools like Unity or js frameworks like pixi and publishing on itch.io instead.
It's a shame that some studios are extremely against modding. Take for example Riot Games, I love their games but no modding support at all for League of Legends or Valorant. Considering their competition (Dota2 and CS:GO respectively) have an active community of producers and consumers of custom game content (maps, skins, game modes, etc), it's a real disappointment. I know leadership must believe the benefit isn't worth the cost, but a small part of me believes it's because the studio doesn't want to be "shown up" by the community getting excited about content they didn't make. I'm reminded of the Replay system in League of Legends. The community requested it for many years and was always told it wasn't going to happen, but once a third party releases a web app that allows you to download your previous games, suddenly the studio allocates a huge effort into getting an official version out the door.
I don't think so. Steam, for example, supports mods directly from the Steam client. Many of the games I play specifically support mods from within the game itself, integrated with this Steam mod functionality, and it even takes care of upgrades, dependencies and such.
There's a thriving ecosystem of games and mods out there, no such thing as a golden age that has ended.
Starcraft II for example has a host of excellent mods. My group doesn't even play the original Starcraft game, and I don't have any interest in it either, but we have sunk many hours into different custom maps.
I am compelled to point out that in one of the info pages, the site includes screenshots of a conversation with ChatGPT where the author claims to trick AI detection by generating text with a lower temperature. But asking ChatGPT, through the LLM interface, to lower the temperature doesn't lower the temperature. There's no mechanism for it to do so. It may have some (nevertheless real) placebo effect, because the LLM thinks it should behave different and assigns some vague "meaning" to "temperature" -- but this isn't a technical change to the model operation.
It does mention a hope for long-term durable immune response, but the point about being able to pre-emptively roll out a universal vaccine is probably more important. This would lower the total rate of infections by a lot and allow people to reliably get a useful vaccine without waiting to see which strains are dominant that year. (Also, an immune response doesn't mean complete immunity. mRNA Covid vaccines don't prevent you from getting Covid. It lowers the severity and spread.)
Don't look at me. I was screaming about COVID in January 2020. The lib moral panic changing directions on a dime without a change in intensity was disorienting.
Jan 2020 club checking in :-) I remember joking about a big pandemic being around the corner at my families New Year's party. Back then it was a few vague rumors from Chinese doctors that I was keeping an eye on but not taking seriously yet.
It's been crazy how much "always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia" I've seen people around me engage in.
Social media delenda est. Reputation systems, politico-cultural tribalism, and human cognitive vulnerability w/r/t viral information have turned the entire cultural landscape into anarcho-1984.
Obligatory reference to Peter Watts' Blindsight, as well.