I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!
It's sad that reading has become that way for you.
I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
It’s hard to find good new literature - it may be out there, but it’s hard to find. But there’s lifetimes worth of good older literature, that’s much easier to find, that you haven’t read yet.
As multiple people posted 5 hours before you asked, that's 36% and 11% of international Berkeley students, not 36% and 11% of Berkeley students. International is around 15% total.
This has very little to do with public amenities. It has everything to do with toleration of homelessness and drug use. I don't understand why the west tolerates it at all.
I'm genuinely concerned to ask what you're proposing?
Drug use is already unlawful, and the homeless are routinely criminalized for existing - so if that is "tolerate" then what proposals are you trying to promote?
I'm sure he meant removing the profit incentives from the pharmaceutical and housing industries, disentangling cartels like the Sacklers from the politicians they own, in general tolerating the Epstein class
So they can have cancer and not work... I guess that's better then working and having cancer. Or the people just starve instead so we don't have to worry about the pollution.
Hmm. When playing online, I feel like Pathfinder/DnD5e put a lot on the game master in terms of lots of prep, battle maps, tokens, etc. B/X etc can be played much more theater of mind, and so would seem to require less work. In person, probably less of a distinction.
Personally, I have tired of the modern 5e/Pathfinder type games where the play often revolves around combat that takes way too long, where playes don't interact much, spend their time waiting to roll the dice and gazing at their character sheets trying to find an answer rather than by interacting with the world.
OSR systems have a ton of already published modules and campaigns to draw from, if you want zero prep (beyond reading, and maybe drawing out maps or something). Otherwise, it's about the same as running any other system in my experience. Easier than some, harder than others. The Dolmenwood campaign provides a lot of information for the DM, too.
At least for me now, I'm quite older than I used to be, and I don't want to have to read a lot of information or setting details ahead of time to be able to run a game as a GM.
> I don't want to have to read a lot of information or setting details ahead of time to be able to run a game as a GM.
That's not something you need to do for OSR, though, at least not in general. Dolmenwood is obviously based on that, it's a complete setting paired with a game system. But you can grab an OSR game system without paying much (if any) attention to the setting it may provide. Hell, even for Dolmenwood, I can't be bothered to read it all (it has a lot) and I enjoy making up my own things, so I'll still use the system and just use the setting as inspiration.
Half of my sessions are, "What monster piqued my curiosity this week on my skim through some system's monster manual? Can I create a scenario around it or a bunch of them?" The other half are "I wonder what the river pirates are up to this week, maybe they raided a nearby town and there's an award out for their capture. But what if they were actually hired to do this raid by someone even more nefarious than them..."
No real setting concerns, drop the PCs in a random place and the players will figure it out.
In both old-school and OSR RPGs, I've GMed quite a few (various early D&D/AD&D versions, DCC, OSE, Shadowdark, Mausritter), there's an enormous amount of work a GM needs to put into it ahead of time to make it fun for players. Even for published modules! It's too much for me
But if a game has lots of material and rules, you have to read and remember a lot. I'm not sure I understand what you want. Can you give examples of easy systems?
99.9% of people complaining about AI making the world a worse place would be fully happy with AI if they shared in the economic benefits of automation.
I don't see why AI would deskill what you love to do. People still do embroidery even though mass manufacturing exists. If you love something you would continue doing it irrespective of automation.
For better or worse this round of "automation" will hit harder than most others because it comes for what makes you you. Your brain, not your body. The industrial revolution replaced your body, this one could in theory replace you entirely. And it isn't coming for some job, it comes for most. It's not just a hobby but being able to do the job. You are replacing 10000 types of jobs with 1 type: AI prompter. We'll probably have an AI just to help ask for the right thing.
You have transferred all the skills and knowledge to the AI. When the skills are gone, who's going to teach you to do any non-trivial job? What will give you any sense of accomplishment when all you do is ask the AI but have no capability yourself?
Even if you have a guaranteed income, because "your AI" is getting paid for the work, where will you be with close to 0 contribution to anything? Maybe we're overreacting and this will never be an issue. I know we shouldn't take cues from fiction to predict reality but it's hard not to picture a world with a combination of Idiocracy and Wall-e (or the famous "Paradise" Matrix) where we decay because the change is so fundamental that we aren't ready to adapt.
For a lot of people it’s not the job that is rewarding it the role having a job gives them in life and home life. Financially contributing to the household through earning it through work is a meaningful and rewarding thing that can define the near total of how good you feel about yourself thing even if you don’t like the job?
The bonuses SK Hynix staff are getting might vindicate that point of view. Of course, that's from AI investment, not revenue itself. They are the extremely successful shovel manufacturers, who for once have managed to leverage their power collectively as employees to benefit from a one-off like this.
Perhaps it has always been the case that people would be happy if they shared the benefits, but that is not how the world run by billionaires works.
A skill which is now done better by a machine is no longer a skill, it is technology. It is just a matter of time before most of our logical and language reasoning skills are replaced by frontier model-agents, which will at some point be far superior (if not already) to human capability.
So I totally disagree with this premise that human skills are being ruined by the use of AI technology. No, many human skills are being made obsolete. That's a good thing for economic productivity as a whole, but for those who only have skills that are being automated, their labor value decreases (which is usually bad for them as individuals).
You miss the point, the point is that by using AI, our skills (let say "coding in Rust") are diminishing and even without reading this article, we can feel it to some extent already if we aren't lying to ourselves, especially very heavy AI users.
We do however create new skills, skills that might be more relevant for the future, but still, it is controversial.
I think you missed the core point of my post. Writing software, like most sorts of logical and language reasoning, is diminishing in value as a skill in this world. Technology is making these skills obsolete.
For example, being able to efficiently plow a field, or harvest crops by hand, or use a scythe to trim grass all used to be skills. These skills are no longer useful to society because we do them much faster and efficient with modern technology. Is it bad that people's skills in being able to perform these manual agricultural tasks diminished? I'd argue no, it isn't bad; it's extremely good for almost everyone that we have the knowledge and means through which this labor can be automated.
Nothing new. Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added, people say it's worse and will never be as good as the old way. Though it's a totally biased opinion, we just have issues with giving up things we like as human being.
99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer) almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and virtually no one even bothers to understand the magic at layers 1 & 2. These all represent successful, effective abstractions for developers.
In contrast, unless you believe 99% of "software development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding", it's off the mark to describe LLMs as a new layer of abstraction.
And because of that, we check in the generated code, not the high-level abstraction. So to understand your program, you have to read the output, not the input.
Totally possible and we can already do it ! Simply put, just set the temperature to 0 and reuse the same seed. But it's just not what people really want, and providers are reluctant because they cost up to 5x more to generate.
It's also not 100% non-deterministic, because cloud providers don't run on the same hardware, with the same conditions required for producing the same output. So, in practice, not so good, but in theory if you need it and can afford it, you can.
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