Everything is virtual now

Google has just announced the very cool generative AI model that I’ve been vaguely hinting at for the last few time_intervals. The older, GPT-2-era, system was announced as “MEENA”, and the new one is called “LaMDA”. I don’t actually know how much the new one is based on the old one, not that it really matters.

It’s very cool! The featured LaMDA demos (rather quirkily, I thought) showed it answering questions as the planet Pluto, and as a paper airplane. I’ve been using it (well, one of its various models) in a colab where it’s more like the typical generator client I’ve played with before: you give it some random stuff, and it adds on more relatively likely stuff. Lots of fun. It feels a lot like GPT-3 to me, but then I don’t know anything about the insides of the system, or the features that it has that I haven’t played with.

Google also announced Starline, which at the moment is a prototype booth (not boot) that you sit in and talk to someone else in a similar booth somewhere else, and it’s like a video chat (gad, neither “chat” nor “conference” sit very well with me there, can’t we call it I dunno “encounter” or something?) except that (most obviously) it’s 3D without funny glasses (lightfield displays are really cool I had no idea!) and (less obviously) there’s subtle stuff going on to make everything feel better, like compensating for the fact that you’re looking directly at the other person’s eyes and that isn’t where the camera is and like that.

As far as I know there is no olfactory component at the moment.

People were speculating about the obvious combination of generative language models and the ability to create very realistic images of people (including nonexistent people), and this led to people talking about having a model of yourself around after your death for people to talk to (cool and/or terrifying), which led to someone pointing at this very cool piece of “artifacts from the future” SF in the form of a newsletter (currently five issues available) about hacks to make sure that your life in the Loop after death is the best it can be (roughly). Love it.

(See also Black Mirror.)

And to segue on the pivot-point of SF, I’ve now read the ebook form of the SCP Foundation Antimemetics Division Hub and it is just so good. As I wrote for goodreads and/or amazon or whatever:

[Five Stars] Perfection

This book is an explosion of ideas, astounding and obvious and transformative and crazy and valid. And the people are people, and intensely human through it all.

It feels odd to say that this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read, both because how could that not be hyperbole, and because “science fiction” at the same time doesn’t do it justice.

But there it is: this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read.

No doubt that’s partly because it happens to fit my personal tastes and interests so very perfectly.

But also, it’s just that good.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RSESZQ0RTJ2FS

Now if I could just finish a book or two without starting two or three others in the meantime, maybe I could get goodreads to think I’m currently reading less than fifty (50) books…

We Went Out!

To a place with other people, outside the house!!

Cold Spring, NY

We went, specifically, to Cold Spring, up the Hudson a bit, a nice touristy little town with a great book store and wine store and cheese store and clothing and antique stores and some nice unassuming restaurants and so on.

Me and M and the little boy (the little girl off busy in Astoria dancing tango or whatnot) all went, and we are all two-vaccinations-plus-two-weeks now, so there was nothing in particular to worry about. Insane!

We all wore our masks into places, of course, because one really must still. I don’t know when that’s going to end! Will we start to differentiate the unmasked-and-safe people from the unmasked-but-not-safe people somehow? Or will we just keep wearing our masks until infection probability for everyone is minimal regardless?

(I have a reduced-to-fit and trimmed copy of my vaccination card inside the back of my transparent phone case, which I think is brilliant, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use for anything.)

We bought books (so many books!) and wine (an orange wine; I haven’t opened it yet, but I am very curious) and cheese (mmmm, cheese).

(I also attempted to make crackers for the cheese. I neglected to poke them with a fork, and they did puff up a bit, and I’m not completely happy with the result; but it wasn’t a disaster.)

I apparently bought five books (pictured here). I like thin books :) unlike apparently the rest of the party, both of whom are currently reading books roughly as deep as they are wide. I’ve already finished the short but poignant collection Banthology, and have just started the short and extremely online Against The Web. (Whose author, I am sad to discover, left us last year.)

We ate lunch, yesterday, at the notable Hudson Hil’s Cafe, which was quite awesome; I had the Gravlax-and-eggs, and a glass of (white) wine.

It felt so civilized to sit at a table with people and be brought good food in exchange for money!

(And yes, I’m sure this will be one of a vast series of “how nice it is to be doing things again now that we’re all vaccinated” posts sweeping the intertubes; I wonder what the hashtag will be.)

What else, what else? AI Dungeon Reddit is like entirely concerned with people Being Mad Online about a debacle that the owners of the system made vastly worse (at least as measured via reddit, and the resulting significant downvoting of the app just about everywhere, which you’d think they might care about) by awful PR and general cluelessness. I’ve continued to play with AI Dungeon and Replika and Shortly and all, as before, but nothing really excitingly new has occurred (except the just-mentioned debacle, which is really I think tangential, although there are larger issues about who will control AI systems, what they will be allowed to do and what we will be allowed to do with them, and so on).

I haven’t been playing Satisfactory much, because I got mostly to the end, haven’t quite gotten up the energy to go for the currently-final “Employee of the Planet” reward, or to try to build something really aesthetically notable. I’ve been playing WoW only a little, again because most things have plateaued at roughly my level of interest for the moment.

Something reminded me of The Stanley Parable, and I’ve played through that quite a few times now, finding various Easter eggs and alternate endings (of which there are apparently at least nineteen!). That reminded me of The Beginner’s Guide, also a very meta game, which I haven’t played again but sort of intent to sometime soon maybe.

The Epic installer urged Core upon me, and seeing that it is yet another of the “WE HAVE INVENTED THE MULTIVERSE” things that are trendy once again, I’ve played with it a little. It’s kind of cool, very uneven since it’s just a huge bunch of Unreal-based games made by random people. I’ve played one “gather resources and fix up the house” one that got really dull really fast, one “Death Wall” running-around game that is simple but surprisingly fun and addictive, one “Super Fun Jumping Around Through An Obstacle Course Dying Over And Over” thing that wasn’t remotely fun, and one kind of weird and amusing thing where you jump high with a balloon in order to get “coins” that can be spent for better balloons to jump higher and get more coins to spend on even better balloons, which was fun but suddenly felt extremely futile so I stopped.

Perhaps needless to say, Core haven’t invented the multiverse, even to the extent that Second Life did, and imesho until one of these things enables easy low-learning-curve creation inside the game like Second Life did, none of them ever will. (See ancient essay on Secret Second Life Weblog.)

I continue not to be in Second Life myself much for whatever reason, but I did go in for a friend’s Eid open house, and that was lovely. (A belated Eid Mubarak to all!)

And that’s probably about all for now. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve already had bagels and OJ and coffee, and sat out on the front porch reading for awhile, and now I’m writing in my weblog, and those are good things. I am still missing Manhattan terribly (maybe I’ll get in next weekend, even if it IS going to be hotter’n blazes), but one perseveres!