Which is exactly what the paper recommends! As long as you have something that isn’t an LLM in the pipeline to vet the output and you’re aware is the tech’s limitations, they can be useful tools. But some of those limitations might be a more solid barrier than some sales departments would like us to believe.

For those of you who didn’t read the paper, the argument they’re making is similar to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem: no matter how you build your LLM, there will be a significant number of prompts that make that LLM hallucinate. If the proof holds up then hallucinations aren’t a limitation of the training data or the structure of your particular model, they’re a limitation of the very concept of an LLM. That doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does mean you shouldn’t ever use one as a source of truth.

I started up a new city in Cities Skylines 2. Trying to build a city mate up of little pit stops along the highway with no industrial zones at all. It’s been an interesting experiment so far! The game does track the jobs generated by retail and city services, so if you balance it just right you can have enough work to attract residents and use the highway connections to just barely generate enough sales for the commercial zones to stay profitable. And the city as a whole is getting closer and closer to a positive balance in the budget, so I might just pull this off…

Most of these companies are just arguing that they shouldn’t have to license the works they’re using because that would be hard and inconvenient, which isn’t terribly compelling to me. But Adobe actually has a novel take I hadn’t heard before: they equate AI development to reverse engineering software, which also involves copying things you don’t own in order to create a compatible thing you do own. They even cited a related legal case, which is unusual in this pile of sour grapes. I don’t know that I’m convinced by Adobe’s argument, I still think the artists should have a say in whether their works go into an AI and a chance to get paid for it, but it’s the first argument I’ve seen for a long while that’s actually given me something to think about.

Mostly Cities Skylines 2. The performance is not great, but it’s passable with the settings turned down and the actual city building is really good. Right now I’m working on a big expansion to my city further down the highway, just got the water/power lines run between them so it’s one big happy grid exporting the extra to other cities. Already looking forward to the things I’ll do differently in my second city!

Also playing some Super Mario Wonder on the side, which is fantastic. Great mix of easy fun levels and hard-as-nails secret special levels. Very fun!

I actually use M365 and OneDrive. I still get periodic pushes to use these services on Windows 11. The upsell pressure from my OS is getting really bad.

It’s there a major anniversary for The 7th Guest coming up or something? Between this article resurfacing, the VR Remake, and the industrial rock cover album on vinyl I’m seeing a lot of T7G content lately. And I’m here for it!

Agreed! Especially since the behavior on clicking a thumbnail isn’t very consistent on mobile. Sometimes I click the thumbnail and it expands the image. Sometimes it follows a link. Sometimes going back from a link takes me back to the same Lemmy page I was on, but other times it reloads the page and I can’t find the post I was looking at anymore. An option to open all links in a new tab would really help me not lose the post I was looking at when I clicked.

Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.

Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.

As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.

The full soundtracks to both games are on the Fat Man’s Bandcamp, which I linked up above. Also, the “greatest hits” collection album 7/11 is on Spotify. It’s surprisingly easy to listen to these days!

The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour remain top-tier for me. The music was half the experience, turn it up and just enjoy that creepy vibe while solving puzzles. And they’re all on The Fat Man’s Bandcamp now!

Also, there’s an industrial rock cover album on vinyl currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. I’m super excited!

Nope. I quit cold turkey on June 30 and haven’t been back. Well, not on purpose, at least. Sometimes a Google result sends me to Reddit, but when it loads I just close it and move to the next result. Lemmy works fine for everything I used Reddit for.

Agreed. I find Bing chat is really good when I know almost nothing about what I’m searching, or when I know a whole lot about what I’m searching. Like in your example, if I know exactly what I need but can’t remember its name Bing will read all the spammy beginners’ guides for me and get the answer. And on the opposite end, if I’m looking to buy a gift in a hobby I don’t remotely understand Bing does a pretty good job of holding my hand through the search process.

Weirdly, medium knowledge questions seem to still do better as a basic Google search. If I need to fix an appliance I’ve fixed before, but it’s been a long time so I really need a full walkthrough, the first few results on Google are faster than waiting for Bing to talk through it.

I just use the mobile website. It works and doesn’t harass me to use something else, which are both huge improvements from Reddit!

The Space Quest Historian does YouTube videos about classic adventure games with full playthroughs, historical deep dives, and creator interviews. He also actually hangs out here in the Fediverse: he’s on Lemmy as @SQHistorian@lemm.ee and on Mastodon as @sqhistorian@dosgame.club.

Also, SQH’s band Error 47 does industrial rock covers of retro game music and is criminally under-subscribed. They’re currently working on an album covering The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, which I’m really looking forward to.

I’ve also been really digging Quake Speedruns Explained lately, which is a really chill dude talking about one of the oldest and most competitive speedrunning scenes around.

I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?

If it’s coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It’s not “I want to play one more game” anymore, it’s “this game is pressuring me to play one more game.” Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.

If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it’s a question of priorities. If I’m spending time watching one more video on this platform, there’s something else I’m not going to get to. So the question for myself is “out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?” Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven’t checked in today. But if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.

Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn’t have all my old niche communities yet, but it’s got enough for me to log on and see what’s happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven’t been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.

This is going way back, but the 7th Guest soundtrack had lived in my head since the first time I saw the game. Really great atmosphere, equal parts creepy and playful, perfect mood for a haunted mansion filled with puzzles.