A few years from now, Lydia in Skyrim will have a fully consistent personality with dynamic dialogue and full contextual memories of all our adventures together in Skyrim.
A visual makeover is great but what happens when millions of people fall in love with virtual characters who seem to deserve that love?
Question is if we even want that. Video games often are escapism, we want an illusion of reality but not actual reality. I mean there definitely is a market for that, but I don't think it's for everyone.
There was a comic book about comic books I read when I was young. I believe it was "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" - part of it dealt with what is gained and lost with realism.
In a nutshell, (with my memory of 30-40 years), the more and more realistic a scene becomes, the less the brain applies it to ourself. It becomes this definite place, definite person, rather than ourself or our surroundings projected into other characters.
All these scenes, that I guess are amazing, they all are creepy to me.
That actually sounds implementable even now! Except the fully consistent personality part. And maybe that's a good thing. Falling in love with beings without physical presence sounds agonizing; probably better spent on real people.
I imagine you could implement the fully consistent personality by putting a recurring dream about the player, followed by waking up, in Lydia's context at startup.
I was honestly surprised at how good it was, would recommend if you have any interest at all. I played ME 1 - 3 then Andromeda in a row and Andromeda took the #2 spot behind ME 1.
Mathematicians are grieving the birth of something that is, in a very real sense, the crowning achievement of mathematical ingenuity.
I never appreciated hard math much because my brain just can't get there. I thought so much of math was much ado about nothing, but now I see the art in math...not in the inscrutable formulas, but in the creation of AI.
Well done, mathematicians. You can now rest from your labors.
In the US, it’s only a matter of time before El Presidente decides to take away those reservations from the Indians and sell them off and the same goes for Camp Pendleton in Taco’s favorite American state.
Has anyone else noticed human drivers becoming more aggressive and causing more accidents than ever?
I thought it was because my smaller town was overrun after COVID by transplants, but I'm hearing similar complaints from other places I was considering relocating to.
Perhaps the solution will be robocars where, if there's a potential road rage scenario, the passengers can duke it out in a VR headset session.
I always notice higher traffic, aggression, and accidents around stressful events in the news. Those have been particularly frequent during this administration.
Yep, it's awful. I'm not sure if it's confirmation bias, but I've noticed the worst offenders have been Boomers. I'm gonna chalk it up to an aging population, and a specific generation that likes to think of themselves much too highly.
I am honestly still confused about this limitation. I can understand cybersecurity, because mass "hacking" can be automated and Claude itself can help you do it, but biology...? Is it that easy to manufacture and distribute viruses and whatnot?
You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.
It’s like saying you sell ammonium nitrate and fuel oil online and then saying it’s too risky to let people have computers in case they use them to make ANFO. They can only make bioweapons because you’re selling them bioweapon components! They can’t make genes at home!
The companies selling genes online already scan the orders and do not fulfill anything considered a possible hazard (presumably unless it is to a known and certified lab at a serious organization).
And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.
You joke but it's really easy to develop viruses at home. You can order everything you need online, and it's not expensive nor does it require a particular skill set.
God I wish people on HN would just shut up with snarky takes about things they don't understand. This place used to be better.
I'm pretty sure one reason is to influence public opinion about LLM regulation. Open-weights models cannot be restricted as effectively and they want to ban those for obvious reasons.
Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.
So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.
HN doesn't give a shit about AI safety. The people here might care after thousands of people die, but they'll probably just call it a "marketing exercise" or blame the company - certainly won't blame themselves for cultivating an environment in which safety isn't taken seriously amongst technologists.
I'm convinced everyone here thinks of engineering ethics as some sort of joke.
A visual makeover is great but what happens when millions of people fall in love with virtual characters who seem to deserve that love?
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