Studies with promising early results like these, such as the tooth-regeneration study that is expected to complete its Phase I trial soon, really give me hope for being able to grow old while staying healthy.
It does make me wonder how long it'll take until we've reached the end of things to cure, and what might come after.
After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it.
The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the next run so it didn't matter that much.
After that first hour, the game became a slog. I encountered the same rooms, solved the same two puzzles for resources and was constantly praying for the RNG to give me something new.
There is some RNG manipulation, but not enough to mitigate the boring part of the game.
There are a few interesting overarching puzzles, but most of them are wrapped in multiple layers of RNG.
For example, for one puzzle you need a specific item that randomly spawns, use it in a room that randomly spawns which you need to unlock with another room that also randomly spawns.
It took me 6 hours for the game to give me a run where I got all three of those things in a single run.
The reward? Some resources that I have next to no use for and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.
I have absolutely no idea where the praise for the game comes from. Maybe this game is perfect for those who are really into roguelites, but for me personally it just feels like the game is wasting my time for no reason at all.
While I still mainly use Google to search for terms online, I am increasingly using the free version of Perplexity for more advanced topics or general questions.
Perplexity is an LLM like Claude and ChatGPT, but instead of relying on the data it's been trained on, Perplexity gathers a whole bunch of sources (websites, youtube video transcripts, etc.) related to your query, and then uses the contents of those sources to generate an answer.
So while it may not be as smart as Claude or ChatGPT on certain topics, it does seem to hallucinate a whole lot less.
And at times when I'm not given the answer I'm looking for, or when I want to make sure it's not making things up, I simply browse the list of sources it used to generate its answer.
I personally believe the reason for non-western fiction gaining so much mainstream traction is quite simple: it provides a perspective almost entirely seperated from the reality most people face.
Even simple scenarios, like running a small store or living life in a rural village, are so different from our usual experiences that it provides a way for our brains to release some of the pressure that comes from our busy day-to-day lives.
The "isekai" genre (being transported to a different world, usually after dying an unfortune death) is an extreme take on this, where almost all connection to reality is removed entirely.
Compare those stories to most (not all) modern mainstream western fiction, and you'll find that a lot of it tends to take place within our existing world instead.
The author states that AI safety is very important, that many experts think it is very important and that even governments consider it to be very important, but there is no mention of why it is important or what "safe" AI even looks like.
Am I that out of the loop that what this concept entails is so obvious that it doesn't require an explanation, or am I overlooking something here?
It is quite amusing to read this essay 8 years after it has been published, now that we know about the similarities of how large language models (LLMs) and the human brain function.
The average brain does indeed not copy processed information perfectly, as the author demonstrates. It generalizes and creates or strengthens connections between neurons that represents that information. Just like how LLMs increase or decrease their own weights.
It does make me wonder how long it'll take until we've reached the end of things to cure, and what might come after.