I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

Myst can be a bit esoteric, especially the older versions.

Did they rewrite it in later ports? Also curious as to where you stand on Zork.

He appeared in little snippets over the course of several HOURS, so it is hard to catch just him. It was not a direct copyright infringement of Ezio or Arno or any other Ubisoft property because the costume included a fencing mask and had different details, but yeah, the first thing I thought was “Assassin’s Creed”.

The band was Gojira and I posted translated lyrics here: https://beehaw.org/post/15211295 and @squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de kindly posted a streamable link.

Oooh. Personally, I don’t mind that, but now that you mention it, yes, there totally ought to be search/queue options to let us hide demos.

I can’t argue with you on that.

Sweet! I like the idea of allowing for demos to have their own page instead of being part of the full/finished game page. Not sure if demos should have reviews. That seems kinda beside the point.

I actually DO have some hope it will be rewritten, but I figure we know about it and maybe contact someone? https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/ ?

Yay!!!

I can’t get myself to click a twitter link, so in case others feel the same, here’s an alternate piece that basically says the same thing (I can’t yet find an article with detailed info): https://www.ign.com/articles/bethesda-game-studios-microsoft-game-studios

Mount a flatscreen to the ceiling?

A Theramin?

Ceiling medallion? They aren’t much of anything but they do look nicer than an empty outlet.

A GOBO projector would probably be a hassle to reach/change.

Something like this? Not sure how you’d get it up there and maybe it’d just be annoying: https://www.haines.com.au/cathode-ray-tube-paddle-wheel.html (see: Crookes tube)

Any motion sensor driven item.

i’m chilling slo mo to Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator. No adrenaline needed.

I heard a strange take on this story. I know someone whose spouse worked at that very school and has heard the gossip about the incident. While the hen clutch has been gossiping in private conversations rather than internet posts for the world to see, their speculations about the Principal are almost as slanderous – and have been for years.

Long story short: the hens felt this wouldn’t have happened if the Principal didn’t let the kids run amok and instead provided consistent disciple.

I misunderstood regarding those games, sorry.

See? That’s the thing. I don’t want to support future in-app purchases that get tacked on after they got me to PAY THEM for the ‘privilege’ of doing their beta testing for them. That seems like a special kind of evil that must not be encouraged.

I don’t understand how anyone buys Early Access games. Yes, I understand that the creators need to make a living before the game launches, but big companies should have the reserves and small companies may just take the money and run.

A couple days ago I looked at pcgamer’s summer steam deals list, and since Manor Lords topped the list I went over to Steam to check it out. Early Access. Nevermind.

I forgot about it entirely until looking at this article. Went to Steam and: Oh. Right. Early Access. Nevermind.

I do agree that it is too early to expect more updates. It only became available in April. I don’t expect it to have improvements worth integrating yet. That said, I’m not spending $30 (regular price $40) on something that may or may not end up being any good – that might always be too buggy to play, or too cringe-y to enjoy, or go so far from the initial demo that it isn’t the same game (I will never forgive you, Spore, and I will never buy you).