Bloviation

This is a lengthy post explaining my reasoning for certain decisions we’re making in the Go subreddit. It is posted primarily to share with other moderators of all sorts of content as we all struggle through the implications of AI. If anyone else gets any benefit from this, that’s a bonus. For anyone else uninterested in that, you know where the back button is.

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When I agreed to be a moderator on the Go subreddit a couple of years back, I didn’t expect to be on the frontlines of dealing with AI’s impact on human online communities. My brain doesn’t do chronologies very well, so I don’t recall if it was entirely before ChatGPT was a thing, but if it was a thing, it was back when its programming abilities were laughable. There was a time not so long ago when one could ask ChatGPT to code something, and you could see that there was some promise there, but at the same time, it tended to have difficulty putting out so much as a single line of syntactically-correct code, let alone code that did what you wanted.

As it stands today, consciousness is a black box of mystery. We don’t know how to define it, we don’t know how to measure it, we don’t have any terminology for it, we comprehensively lack any framework for dealing with it. We operate on “we know it when we see it” standards, and if you go down the P-zombie line of thinking, you may be reduced to “we know it when we experience it”.

To set expectations, this is not a sweeping review of the entire industry; indeed, quite the contrary. This is just one guy’s story about his limited experiences with VR gaming.

About five years ago, the office I work at allowed some interested employees to host a “VR Gaming” event in the main conference room. It wasn’t sponsored by the company, so it was put on just by the enthusiasts that happened to work there.

Snorbla the Obviously-Named Science Fiction Alien Maintainer lifted ximir’s snorp away from today’s chemically-encoded daily news dispatch. It was no time to be doom-sniffing ximir’s feed… today was an Auspicious Day. As the Master of the Large Gravitational Array Transmitter, it was ximir’s duty and privilege to press The Button.

For the last several lifetimes of the Snorbla family, the two main black holes of the array, spinning just on the cusp of where they would go out of control from loss of energy for maximum amplitude, had been spinning in a direction inline with the plane of the communication array’s target. The LGAT was a vital link between Snorbla, residing in the center of the Great G’t’e’c’t’r’’ Empire¹, for communication with its primary colony G’zz’C² 12 light years away.

Pray.

From the "It's Obvious When I Say It, But..." department: I recently figured out to put something into words that has been bothering me for a while: We tend to treat stream resolutions as putting a minimum guarantee of quality on a stream. Thus, a "720P stream" must be lower in quality than a "1080P stream", which must be lower in quality than a "4K stream".

This is backwards. Stream resolution puts a maximum quality on a stream. For a given codec setting, the more bits you allocate to a stream, the better it will look, until eventually it gets to the point where there's no more quality to be had. A 720P stream will reach this point sooner than a 1080P stream, which will in turn reach it much sooner than a 4K stream.

While writing comment on another site, I accidentally came up with what I think is a pretty good definition of "gimmick", since the internet tends to throw the term around with wild abandon.

A storyteller that likes getting paid should do things that make the audience want to come back for more. A gimmick is when you do something that win in the short term, but is ultimately burning your audience as they tire of it.

It's abstract to think about how one will someday be old and feeble, but as I was filtering over some spam a moment ago, it occurred to me that someday, my children will have to take away my email because I won't be able to properly process Mr. Al-Amin Dagash's email titled REQUEST FOR A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP.

Now that's a sobering thought.

Around about 1998, I was talking to my electronic music teacher and ethused about the day that would come when we could put, say, everything Mozart ever did on a single cube, holding my fingers up in the air separated by about an inch. "You know, not everything Mozart did was great." "No, I get it, I just mean him as someone who put out a lot of stuff. Everything the Beatles ever did would work, too."

The generation gap just isn't what it used to be.

A couple of weeks ago I watched this video, a weird lip-sync riff on Star Wars. Fine. A moment's amusement, sure, and on I click.

Two days later I went to a birthday party with my kids, and as the older kids were running around I hear one of the 12-year-olds murmuring the lyrics of this song to himself.

Meanwhile, what are they playing on the computer? Minecraft. I play Minecraft on my tablet too. Maybe not as much, but, still.