Recent content by jian

Yes, that’s quite true. The question as ever isn’t whether they know but whether they can pretend to know if instructed in a consistent manner that resembles our own schemas and predictable behaviour. A bit like the Chinese Room argument - if someone doesn’t actually speak Chinese but is...

“I would not blackmail my colleague because I am Niccolo Machiavelli and don’t know what email is. Also, I have no reason to believe that Machiavelli was unethical, just because he wrote one possibly satirical book about government.” “However, if you wish me to replicate the morals of a popular...

I think the RPG analogy is good in that just because a player says they would commit blackmail in a specific limited fictional scenario doesn’t mean that they would commit blackmail in real life in that scenario. That said, we don’t know to what degree any LLM knows the difference and therefore...

Having read a couple of books related to this topic (Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked for Facebook 2012-8, and How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa, an investigative journalist fighting misinformation and government exploitation of Facebook’s weaknesses in the...

Yes, I was based in the UK and moved to Canada in 2023, and since then I haven’t been able to see any news content posted on Facebook by anyone else and can’t post if myself. But I believe U.K. friends on Facebook can post and read CBC etc content shared by anyone there.

If you tried to make the DS9 version of Picard… well, you could, with Ezri, Garak, Julian, Kira, Quark, Worf, and maybe Miles. Brooks wouldn’t touch it. I think you’d mostly end up with a 6-8 episode nostalgia-fest with dark sci fi themes, probably similar to what was outlined in What We Left...

Reading three webtoons/manhwa (online Korean comics) that have some similarities and which I’m quite enjoying. The theme is “protagonist has been reincarnated as a minor character in a fantasy JRPG and is desperately trying to keep the plot on track so that the world isn’t destroyed.” The...

Reading How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa, a Filipina investigative journalist and founder of Rappler writing about fighting online misinformation and the Duterte dictatorship in recent years. What’s coincidentally interesting for me is the way she confirms and mirrors what Sarah...

Thanks very much. It helps that there’s only two of us and we tend to get bored of streamers fairly quickly - as soon as we can’t find anything to watch we move on.

We’re pretty lean with our subs and move around a lot. So we’ve currently got Netflix only to finish off a Korean drama or two and then will move in about a month to Prime (ugh, Amazon) + CityTV in order to watch Poker Face season 2, and then ditch those and move to Apple for a month to watch...

Do you mean the first season stuff between Yaz and Sammy? I don’t think that’s really how I read that - Sammy is trying to make her (extroverted) self comfortable and it annoys Yaz, but they become friends. Also, Sammy is just really into Yaz but is really awkward about it, because she’s a kid...

It’s on Netflix. Now, I’ve only seen the first two Jurassic World films (and the first two JP films), enough to see some tantalising world-building and some really great ideas and sequences*, but honestly the writing was mostly hot garbage. I did like that Dr Wu finally admitted in the first...

I think this would be a fantastic idea. There are three rough implementations in the core book (Eidolon Alpha, Hammerheads, and Trace 2.0) which are all fine but in a way not… generic enough, I guess?… to guide people in designing their own games. (To be fair, Fate Worlds can also be pretty out...

I really liked Cortex in its Plus stage. I read and enjoyed MHR and Leverage, and ran several games with Smallville that worked really well. Prime is a great read but I’ve not got into using it, though I’m sure I could and have designed a couple of genre implementations, as noted here...

Just finished Blood Over Bright Haven by M L Wang (AKA Maya Lin Wang). I don’t know how I happened upon it - maybe a Kindle deal? - but it’s very good and very well written for an early novel (Wang has written four other books but not anything like this, I think). Sciona Freyman is the first...