I played on desktop and it seemed pretty impossible tbh. They veer around unpredictably when bumped, and explode long before you can plausibly bump them into a pool. Limiting that to slams would definitely help though!
Cute! But the car challenges in Tier 8 feel undoable -- they're a bear to "steer" and can't seem to go more than a short distance before bursting into flames.
I wonder how plausible it would be to deduce where a given webcam is (some combination of IP data, context clues, visible landmarks, maybe face searching) and then contact the owner to let them know. There used to be this fun site called where-is-this.com where people could share images of public places for others to try to track down; it would be nice to harness something like that for good.
The current admin has been hostile to many things with mainstream cultural support (food aid, renewable energy, basic diversity, free speech) while championing unpopular/fringe ideas (anti-vax, tariffs, Christian nationalism, election denial, January 6th revisionism, aggressive foreign interventions). The fact they haven't learned on the AI labs to toe the party line is surprising, especially since they're so vulnerable to government regulation.
I'm amazed that the big models haven't come under more ideological pressure as more and more people use them, especially in the US. There was that conflict with Anthropic over military usage, but apart from that there's been no visible push to censor outputs or alter training, even as models gamely make unflattering assessments of people in power and knock down conspiracy theories.
I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.
Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.
This one's much better. Shorter, faster, adapts to one's level, gives an out for being unsure, largely doesn't bother with definitions (except the occasional verification challenge), and even mixes in some fake words to ensure you're not BS-ing.
You're responding to a comment talking about hours of tutorial dives and advanced config tweaks, my guy. You really think the official fix isn't the first thing I tried?
That button simply doesn't work. I forget the exact error message, but it was something generic and unhelpful. (Spoiler: none of the other solutions in the first few pages of search results worked, either.)
I ran into this trying to set up a new Dell laptop for my mom. It shipped to her in "S mode", meaning that among other things I couldn't install arbitrary software from the web. I assumed there'd be some straightforward way to disable it (even if it might be a little buried to discourage normies). But after several hours of searching through tutorials and mucking about in Windows settings, the command prompt, BIOS, and even the system registry, and I flatly could not do it. Never seen anything like it before. Ended up wiping and replacing Windows with Linux Mint, which she was happy with.
Gemini has been indispensable for helping me move from Windows to Linux. I'm reasonably proficient, but moving to a brand-new OS brought so many random questions and weird edge cases that I never would have had the confidence, patience, or time to tackle it alone, even with pretty strong Google fu. It's been so nice to have instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment or having to wait on a reply.
At the same time, I moved from Chrome back to Firefox, and Gemini was great at finding equivalents for my most-used extensions -- and, when none existed, to write my own. It's also been really useful for customization/"ricing".
More recently, I got into Quod Libet as a primary music library manager, and both Gemini and Claude have been fantastic at helping me build custom plugins that make it do exactly what I want it to. Scripts to automagically download tracks with metadata and synced lyrics, a lyrics sidebar that highlights lines as you listen and lets you click to jump to a specific line, a bookmark button that lets you mark your favorite section of a track for easy browsing later. Next chance I get is something that enables lyrics search across the entire library (a feature I was already able to build for the Stremio desktop player -- it's so cool to be able to search for a line in a TV episode or movie and jump straight to it).
There's an interesting connection to draw between liminal spaces (especially the Backrooms variety) and the "latent space" concept from AI, both mechanically and sociologically. Basically, generative AI is an industrial-scale blend of almost every image and concept in human history, and within the labyrinthine, uninterpretable neural networks that power it, you can "find" every conceivable combination of objects, styles, and features. It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled by a process that even its creators do not fully understand. Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon and churns out endless copies and imitations, each a little more degraded and disconnected from the original intention than the last. Like the way McMansions echo traditional architectural features, but shrunken, toylike, and not fit for purpose beyond a vague signaling at wealth and taste. In a society that feels increasingly overrun by these kinds of blind processes and cultural distillations, an aesthetic that connects it to a physical place (and one that happens to resemble so many anonymous places around the world and in our collective dreams and memories) is bound to be compelling. And how appropriate that it came to prominence not through any particular creator, but through an anonymous post expounded on via the internet.
The original videos have tens of millions of views, became extremely popular memes online, and the movie is now the biggest-ever opening for an independent film. It's not niche, just a bottom-up internet-driven thing.
If it helps, there's some stratification that makes understanding it a bit confusing at first. There's basically four layers:
- The original 4chan post, a vaguely unsettling photo of an odd yellow room with an evocative caption about it being a vast realm outside reality that you can accidentally fall into to be stalked by unseen monsters.
- This post went viral and kicked off the "creepy liminal spaces" trend, where people found or created unnerving images of dark or abandoned places that are normally busy, like malls, schools, hotels, airports, etc.
- This evolved into the idea that the original yellow Backrooms is just one of infinitely-many connected environments/levels, each reflecting a different surreal aesthetic: tiled pools, children's playspaces, empty suburbs, etc. People also invented their own weird creatures that inhabited them (think the SCP Foundation stuff crossed with Five Nights at Freddy's). This resulted in an explosion of videos, wikis, and indie games exploring and expanding the concept.
- Kane Parsons created a more restrained and focused version of the above in his YouTube series, dispensing with the profusion of levels and monsters and drilling down on various first-person, found-footage explorations of the original Backrooms and glimpses of the mysterious company researching it. His take became by far the most popular, and landed him the director role for the film, which has turned out to be quite thoughtful and well-done.
I definitely recommend checking it out if you like surreal psychological horror. It's good even if you're not familiar with his web series.
I recall Danielewski sharing a spec script for a possible TV series some years ago. Appropriately, it referenced itself and treated the show as a real thing within its own universe.
In the meantime, claymation studio Laika has a faithful adaptation of "Piranesi" in the pipeline. It's more dreamlike and beautiful than gothic horror, but it does center on a similar concept of an infinite structure existing beyond physically reality that reflects human thought in enigmatic ways.
The obvious counterargument is that the AI labs took virtually all human writing, imagery, music, etc., without regard for licensing or copyright. It's fair to ask what they owe back to the commons they built their models on (and which they are in some sense helping to destroy).
Idk, I'd put it in the same category as doing a crossword puzzle, building a LEGO set, doing some DIY task around the house, etc. A nice diversion that's not entirely creative but stimulating enough, and at the end you have something functional/interesting or at least satisfaction that a particular problem has been solved. It won't change the world or your life or make a million bucks, but not everything has to.
> In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?"
What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.
What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?
I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?
Not to mention it directly targets a job category overwhelmingly held by poor and marginalized women, especially immigrants, in order to boost the profits of the automation company and the hotel chains it serves. Destroying the livelihoods of some of the most vulnerable and exploited workers on the planet with no pretense of caring what happens to them or their families.
Any company like this actively working to liquidate entire categories of menial work with no tangible support for sufficient social safety net programs and retraining is both sociopathic and digging its own grave for the inevitable populist backlash against what's shaping up to be the biggest class war in history. It's too broad a change, too fast, and these companies are running society off a cliff with no care for what happens when gravity kicks in. (Apart from the techno-fascists who plan on bunkering down while crushing the desperate masses with surveillance and killer robots, ofc.)