After talking about it a few months ago my copy of the game finally arrived. @MimicSquid and I met up in San Francisco today and finally got to play Hide&Seek. It was a good time and it was neat to have a better sense of how the game plays instead of just watching it on Nebula. We're planning on playing again in the not too distant future, so if anyone would like to join in on the next one, please let one of us know (we both thought that it would play better with at least three players).

Message for Deimos or anyone else on Tildes development

I'm putting this here after writing the rest of my post, but could we please get an "expand edit window" option, unless there is one and I'm blind? The preview window's great but the edit window's locked to 6 lines and I would appreciate some more since it would make editing a long post like this much easier. Thanks.

The actual post

There has been a lot of gaming buzz regarding extraction shooters as of late, with the closed alpha of Bungie's Marathon currently underway, the second tech test of Embark Studio's ARC Raiders starting just now, and the recent news of the cancellation of a Titanfall extraction shooter from EA/Respawn. As someone who's played and enjoyed extraction shooters before I've been following these and observing the discourse surrounding them (except the Titanfall one, I didn't even know that was a thing til the news of its cancellation) and I've been somewhat dismayed to see a lot of confusion, mixed messaging, and general disdain for the genre. So I've decided to put my own thoughts and definitions of it down here, and clear up the most common misconceptions or falsehoods I've seen repeated ad nauseam elsewhere.

A brief introduction to extraction shooters

First off, what IS an extraction shooter, what makes it different from other shooters, notably battle royales, and which games qualify as extraction shooters? An extraction shooter, as its core gameplay loop, is a shooter where you enter a map with loot and AI enemies scattered about, and the goal is to gather loot and extract from the map with it. However, you need to get out alive - should you die, you will lose everything (with some exceptions) in your inventory, including the gear you went in with. On top of that, the most popular and successful extraction shooters are PvEvP - you will be competing with other real players for loot, and taking loot off their bodies can be just as profitable if not more so than taking it from PvE enemies. It is optional though, and it is entirely viable to play as a "rat", sneaking around and gathering loot without drawing attention and extracting without anyone noticing.

Not a battle royale

Extraction shooters are also frequently confused with battle royales as both games have players inserted into a PvP map where they scavenge gear. However, the similarities more or less end there. With battle royales, you do not risk losing your items on death as all players are dropped in with nothing and don't have a stash to draw from or store items in, so any "loot" found is merely a means of securing victory for the current round. PvP is also mandatory, as the goal is not to get loot but to be the last team/person standing. To facilitate this in a timely manner, battle royales have a shrinking map mechanic that forces the remaining players into a smaller playable area as time goes on to force them into a confrontation. Extraction shooters do not force PvP or have shrinking maps but do have their own ways of drawing players towards each other, through loot-rich points of interest and extraction zones. Some parts of the map will have greater quality and/or quantity of loot, which will naturally draw players in, and there are a few designated areas where you can actually leave with your loot which will also increase your odds of encountering other players either trying to take your loot before you can leave, or trying to leave themselves. Because it is not forced though, PvP encounters are a much more unpredictable and organic experience in extraction shooters.

What extraction shooters are out there?

So which games count as extraction shooters? The current leaders in the genre, which also happen to be some of the longest-lasting ones, are Escape From Tarkov (EFT) and Hunt: Showdown. EFT is a rather hardcore modern military FPS with a heavy focus on realism - guns are extremely customizable, ammo types and armor can make a huge difference, bullets are extremely lethal even from AI enemies, and a good headshot will drop even the most geared and armored player so there's always risk. It has a cult following but its hardcore emphasis makes it unapproachable for most. It also has periodic progression wipes where players have to start over from scratch to keep things fresh and more fair for newcomers, but is a major turnoff for players that don't like to lose what they've earned. Hunt is an FPS set at the end of the 19th century with a bit of dark magic/voodoo theme. Guns are reflective of the times and rather limited in terms of rate of fire and reload speed, which results in more drawn-out firefights where every bullet counts. For each round, the focus isn't to get loot around the map but rather to track and hunt down a bounty boss monster, then extract with that bounty. These two games are what will come to mind first when extraction shooters are mentioned, EFT more so.

I won't go over cancelled (Titanfall), discontinued (The Cycle: Frontier), or side game-mode (The Division's dark zone/survival) extraction shooters here, which is basically almost all of them sadly, so I'll talk about the two biggest up-and-coming ones instead, Marathon and ARC Raiders.

Marathon and the surrounding controversy

Marathon is a sci-fi FPS that uses the lore of Bungie's Marathon trilogy from the 90's as its setting. You play as a "runner" in a robotic shell scavenging the remains of the colony on Tau Ceti IV for scrap to fulfill contracts for the megacorporations involved in the colony's development who now seek to find out what went wrong. It checks the usual boxes for an extraction shooter - you go in with your own loadout, scavenge at points of interest to fill your limited inventory, defeat PvE enemies and other runners for loot opportunities, and try to extract alive before time's up. There are a couple things of note that have resulted in mixed opinions:

• The art direction for runners, gear, and architecture is a sort of mass-produced, neon-colored, smoothed plastic, blocky style, which is a "love it or hate it" kind of thing.
• The gunplay is very similar to that of Destiny, Bungie's last game, which in my opinion is very solid. However, they did make the decision to have mouse magnetism enabled for PC (your cursor will magnetize to targets) to give it more parity with console players, and that has been very unpopular.
• The only queueing option is teams of 3 and the devs have stood their ground on not having a solo or duo player queue, which is a turn-off for players that prefer solo, or don't want to play with randoms and don't have 2 friends to play with.
• Players do not have full customization of their runners but must choose from 6 runner archetypes that have a set of abilities and a specific look, which can be partially changed with a skin. This is also largely unpopular, as Bungie's past titles have featured high levels of cosmetic customization and this feels largely restrictive and monetization-focused instead.
• There is no option for proximity voice chat, which the devs have said was excluded to protect players from toxicity. This has also proved to be very unpopular.
• It will have seasonal progression wipes which will reset faction reputation and clean out player vaults, which is unpopular among players that like to hoard their loot, especially many Destiny players.
• Supposedly there will be more "raid-like" PvE experiences on an as-of-yet unreleased map that takes place aboard the Marathon colony ship, but how mechanically complex those are or whether or not that will be enough to attract PvE-oriented players is pure speculation at this point.
• It will not be free-to-play, but rather released at a "premium" but not full game price point, which most people are assuming to be $40 USD.

The game is set to release in September this year, but based on the feedback Bungie is getting from players in this very first alpha, they will need to take this feedback very seriously and make a number of changes in the few months they have left, or risk a very rocky release and potentially financial failure. Many players seem to want Marathon and Bungie to fail, notably vitriolic Destiny veterans that feel like they were snubbed out of Destiny 3 for this, but as someone with over 2000 hours in Destiny 2 myself I want it to succeed, whether I play it or not. I'd rather there be more fun and successful games than major failures, and wishing for something to fail just because it isn't what you want is incredibly petty.

ARC Raiders, the underdog

ARC Raiders is a third person shooter set in a post-apocalypse where robots called ARC have devastated the surface of Earth and humanity has retreated underground, sending "raiders" to the surface to scavenge for tech and goods. It's developed by Embark Studios, which is made up of ex-DICE (Battlefield) developers, and their other title is the well-received but niche PvP shooter The Finals. Mechanics-wise, there isn't anything particularly unique about this extraction shooter - limited mobility, limited inventory space, PvE enemies, points of interest, extraction points, etc. However, it seems to check all the boxes of what players want and it does it well while making the experience more casual and accessible:

• There are "safe pockets" where players can store a few loot items they won't lose on death (Tarkov does also have this, Marathon and Hunt do not).
• There is proximity voice, and also a quick emote menu for giving vocal commands, directions, and responses.
• The art direction is realistic post-apocalypse with high graphical fidelity and semi-futuristic robots, which is "safe", but still good looking.
• The audio design is phenomenal. Distant gunfire, supersonic cracks of rounds, bullets ricocheting off surfaces, large bots stomping around from blocks away, player footsteps on different surfaces and within enclosed spaces, quadcopter drones buzzing, larger bots with unsettling and deep "roars", and more.
• There isn't a solo or duo-only queue, but there is solo-matching priority at least, so you're more likely to be placed with other solo players.
• There is a clear progression path in the form of a workshop you can upgrade with scavenged materials, and a deep skill tree with multiple branches.
• Raiders are not class or hero-based and are freely customizable by the players in terms of loadout and appearance.
• Chaff PvE enemies are relatively easy to defeat but still dangerous. Aside from eliminating them as threats, they can drop materials or items to recharge your shields so they're not just a waste of ammo. Non-chaff PvE enemies can be significantly more dangerous and harder to defeat but will have valuable loot.
• There is already an example of a PvE "boss" robot guarding a point of interest which requires some mechanics to collect the loot within it. The boss itself is very challenging to defeat, even with multiple teams fighting it, but should reward top-tier loot.
• While the game was initially announced as free-to-play, the devs have since switched to selling it at at $40 USD.
• There are "battle passes" in the game in the form of shops players can unlock using a currency that is earnable in-game, or purchased with real money (like warbonds from Helldivers 2 for any helldivers reading this).

Overall, the game is shaping up to be a more accessible extraction shooter for the wider gaming audience and very serious competition for Marathon. No official release date has been announced but they are planning on releasing some time this year.

The stigma around extraction shooters

I've mentioned various things about extraction shooters that may be contributing to their unpopularity amongst the wider gaming audience throughout the post, but for the sake of cohesiveness and for all the folks that just want a TL;DR, I will collate and expand on those ideas here:

• Confusion with battle royales - I've seen some people confuse extraction shooters with battle royales and say "the market is oversaturated with extraction shooters, dead trend chasing game" or something along those lines. It's hard to call a market oversaturated when there's only 2 successful and very niche games in it, but if you incorrectly lump all the battle royales in that makes more sense.

• Escape From Tarkov is a bad poster child - When people do think of extraction shooters (and not mistakenly battle royales), they will default to EFT, which is notoriously hardcore and "sweaty". It would be the same as never having played an RPG, and being introduced to it with Dark Souls, which would understandably turn away anyone that isn't looking for that kind of experience.

• PvP and losing progress - The game always having a PvP element is already discouraging to PvE-focused players, and this is only made worse by the chance to lose your gear if you die. Many players are strongly opposed to losing progress, and losing multiple times in a row due to other players defeating them when they just want to do PvE and get some loot is an awful experience that they don't have to have in a different type of game.

• Progression wipes are anathema to hoarders - On top of potentially losing progress on a round-to-round basis, seasonal progression wipes also threaten to reset progress entirely between seasons, While they are effective at keeping things fresh, players that like to have 400+ items stored away in their vault that they will never use and just admire from time to time revile this concept. Less hoard-minded players may be concerned about their potential inability to max out their progression, the fear of missing out induced by temporary progression, or the pointlessness of even progressing if it gets wiped anyway.

I didn't read any of that, are extraction shooters for me or not?

Well, that depends. If you:

• Don't mind or enjoy a mixed PvEvP experience
• Are ok with the idea of loot and progression being temporary
• Like the higher stakes of potentially losing your inventory and gear, or taking someone else's
• Are ok with inventory management, even in the middle of a round
• Are not terrible at shooters

Then yes, extraction shooters may be fun for you! They certainly aren't for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with not enjoying one or the genre in general, but if you do, they offer a very unique gaming experience. If you are interested, keep an eye on ARC Raiders and Marathon - they aim to be more accessible than previous extraction shooters and it's a lot easier to get in on a new game than join one with a veteran playerbase.

Miami Grand Prix
Miami International Autodrome
May 2-4, 2025

Sprint Race Qualification:
Friday, May 2, 2025 - 20:30 UTC / 16:30p US EDT

Sprint Race:
Saturday, May 3, 2025 - 16:00 UTC / 12:00p US EDT

Grand Prix Qualification:
Saturday, May 3, 2025 - 18:00 UTC / 2:00p US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, May 4, 2025 - 18:00 UTC / 2:00p US EDT

See your local time here

Next race:

Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix
Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari
Sunday, May 18, 2025

1. Introduction

I have, on many occasions, considered creating a fiction writing and feedback exchange workshop on Tildes. As these things often go, I exaggerated in my plans, detailing them endlessly without ever putting them into action. This post is an attempt to break the cycle of procrastination, and I am doing so by forcing myself to adopt a much simpler approach.

2. Goals

The main goal of the Tildes Short Story Exchange is to allow people to get feedback on their short stories. Is it any good? How can I improve it?

3. Why only short stories?

Although there are many writing genres people like to share, short stories are among the most practical. They can be read much more quickly than novels and novellas, and their evaluation is simpler than what poetry requires. A simple, defined, and easy-to-understand prompt is conducive to creation. Every month, participants will know that the Tildes Short Story Exchange is a place to get feedback on short stories. They will feel compelled to write as a result.

4. Position on LLMs

This is a workshop for humans. Producing human connection is one of its main goals. Because of that, all submissions must be human-generated, both in full and in part. That said, LLMs can be used for the same things traditional tools such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word have been used for in the past: proofreading. Additionally, it is allowed to use LLMs to assist in the translation into English of text that you wrote yourself.

5. About the submissions

For the purposes of the TSSE, a short story is a work of fiction with 7,500 words or less. This is based on the classification by both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Stories that go a little above that will, of course, be accepted within reason. All submissions must be in English.

6. How to submit your short story

You may use any website, blog, format, or platform to share your story!

If you are inclined to share a PDF, please also share your story in a format that is open, allowing it to be easily converted and better displayed on mobile devices such as phones, tablets, Kindles, etc. Some good formats for that are .docx, rtf, odt, epub, mobi, txt, md (markdown).

If you are sharing your story on something like Google Drive or Microsoft Office Online, make sure to set the appropriate permissions!

I will make an effort to read and provide feedback on as many submissions as I can, and if you share it in an open format it will at the very least have me as a reader!

You may also use detail markdown blocks to paste your story on Tildes itself (see "Expandable sections" on Tildes docs here).

7. Example submissions

All short story submissions should be top-level comments on the TSSE posts.

I drafted below an example submission that I encourage you to use. There are a few additional suggestions in there!

Title: My Super Cool Story
Genre(s): Science fiction, romance
Expected feedback: In this story I need feedback on story, language, everything. You can be as ruthless as you want. I can take it!
File: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffWEjR7qP3Gfn693cLvOaRujetl6b_5x/

Title: The Day My Dog Died
Genre(s): Drama
Expected feedback: I'm really insecure about the ending. This is a very personal story—be gentle with me!
File: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffWEjR7qP3Gfn693cLvOaRujetl6b_5x/

8. How to provide feedback?

All feedback should be a direct response to short story submissions.

Feedback should always follow the guidelines put forth by the writer, but anything that is not explicitly prohibited can be understood to be allowed. There will be no strict rules on how feedback must be written, but I would suggest that everyone provide something potentially helpful to the improvement of the story. That is, of course, highly subjective.

9. How are rules going to be enforced?

Given that I am a regular Tildes user with no administrative privileges, all rules in this project will serve merely as guidelines that I suggest participants follow. There will be no enforcement or consequence for not following the guidelines. That means there will be no score, and no “feedback points” will be awarded. It is suggested that everyone seeking feedback provide at least one piece of feedback prior to posting their own story. But that will be entirely based on the “honor system” and no admonitions will be made toward those who seek feedback without providing it.

10. What will be the schedule?

The TSSE will feature one post on the 1st day of each month. This is to help with mnemonics so people always remember when it will happen. That will help them get their “creative mojo” working every month.

Exceptionally for this first edition, given that it is already May 3rd, the Tildes Short Story Exchange – First Edition will go up next Monday (May 5th) and remain as the current post until June 1st, when it will be replaced.

Within that period, everyone will be free to post their short stories and their feedback at their own leisure.

The schedule may change to once every 2 months if there is not enough activity.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like blackouts, misconceptions and epic games v apple. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was hawk-eyed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

For me it's:

Pants below the natural waist. What can I say, I grew up during the Britney Spears' Time.

Long socks with shorts. Also, invisible socks, apparently I just hate crew or 1/4 crew socks.

ADDENDUM.
This popped up in my feed I see that no one has defended capri pants, yet...I like how at some point in society, a "cupped" clothed ass was considered so provocative.

That is such an infinite subject that a lot of people are passionate about. It could easily be a scheduled post. So this time I am the one doing it. Any misconception is welcome as long as it is something you genuinely care about!

A while back I read an article about the development of a new Digg platform.

I signed up for an email list about new developments. I got invited to pay $5 USD to join a forum to see updates on their efforts and give suggestions.

I've been advocating for not implementing downvoting.

My reasoning is that having just upvotes like Tildes serves the original purpose of voting on content. It moves the better content towards the top and the poorer content towards the bottom. Downvoting at least on Reddit just becomes a middle finger for most cases.

I was surprised how many other people at this special forum were AGAINST that idea. They really want to be able to give people a middle finger.

Sadly, I saw a preview of the U.I. today and at least for new threads it had a "bury" link.

Oh well. I tried!

So I was raised in a religious household with prayer and such but due to things like a dysfunctional family where some members used religion in a very unhealthy way, combined with distrust I have developed over the years of any sort of authority (and some of the teachings that i disagreed with), I just couldn't fully reconcile being part of the religion I was raised in and left.

However, despite the complicated relationship I have with God (I am left unsure as to whether He exists and if He is truly loving), it has proven a useful outlet for my gratitude for life.

I see unhoused people around me, people struggling with drug addiction, I am friends with a nurse who works in a psych ward and they sometimes text me the saddest stories. combine that with the fact that I was laid off for 6 month during the tech layoff season (I was over the moon when I finally landed a job), I have a lot of gratitude for the fact that I have a job in something I am passionate about, can afford my lifestyle and and a roof over my head. basically the necessities.

And I find I have a need to direct this gratitude somewhere and the idea of God proves useful in these cases.

For people who don't believe in God, do you feel a need to express gratitude at anything and if so, how do you do it?

I have grown fond of this community. But I can’t help but feel sad that I lack this connection in my flesh life.

So, how would I meet you out in the world ? When I wrack my brain I can only imagine I’d meet some of you at school, or in some cases, work ?

I don’t even know how to tell someone to meet me lol. I am pretty encouraging, so I guess if you just even make a tiny mention you want me to take interest, I will. I have met friends playing sports and in school and working. And online.

It may surprise you to hear that ever since the tender ages of 15 to 16 (2004 to 2005) I have tried to “become famous” on the Internet.

Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to. I wanted people to hear my opinions on the Internet and praise me for sharing them.

I tried pretty much everything: blogging, YouTube, social media, you name it. Content that I made ranged from commentary, to news, gaming, music, cooking, etc. All my projects “failed” (or rather, they didn’t grow as fast as I expected them to, so I gave up). I’m talking hundreds of attempts.

Then in late 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution for 2024 to fully delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, 9gag, and Reddit. My resolution worked and it changed my life.

A lot of people in my social circle have since begun telling me that I have this talent or that talent, and that I should monitize it by growing a following on social media. I have ignored all of them, despite spending a good 20 years trying to do exactly that. Here’s why:

• The first and foremost reason is that I don’t want to wrestle with algorithms and follow trends. It seems that it’s almost impossible to grow a following on the Internet these days without doing that, unless you get very lucky growing a following organically, which only very few people do. Chasing algorithms and trends is not fun, and if I’m not having fun with what do with my spare time, then I don’t want to do it at all. I’ve also come to hate creating video content for some reason. I just find it tedious.
• Over the years, I feel that I have become afraid of getting lucky and becoming successful. It seems to me that the people who live off creating content for the Internet, don’t ever get a break. Their followers demand a steady stream of content, and if you don’t keep vying for their attention, then they’ll go give it to someone else and you’re suddenly left without any income. I know that many creators work seven days a week.
• This leads me to the problem of “attention”: I don’t want to compete for people’s attention anymore. I hate the whole concept of the “attention economy”. It’s so insane to me that the survival of so many hundreds of million of people depends of how much human attention their work gets. And I’m not talking just about social media now, but entertainment in general. There are only so many humans, and they have a limited amount of time during the day that they can offer attention to entertainment to (be it social media, TV, movies, music, games, you name it). I think that these business models are not sustainable. There are also too many “things” for us to pay attention to these days and I feel like it’s driving us all insane. I’ve been intentionally trying to pay attention to as few things as I possibly can for a while now and it has significantly reduces my anxiety and FOMO. It’s given me a lot of peace. So, I don’t want to contribute to this “evil” myself.
• The Internet has become a dangerous place. Even people who publish otherwise completely innocuous content get sometimes harassed or doxxed. Streamers get SWATed. Women get the brunt of it (I think) because sexual harassment and deepfake porn has become so prevalent, and they can do nothing to protect themselves. Everything you publish anywhere can and will be used against you (including by potential employers). Being “unknown” and “staying in your lane” seems to be about the only way that you can stay safe these days.
• I also just don’t want the endless scrutiny that comes with fame, the expectation that my personality can’t change, that opinions can’t be nuanced, and that I squarely fit into either the “blue box” or the “red box” (in whatever aspect, since every field of opinion these days seems to be thoroughly divided in half). Whatever opinion people share online, even the most trivial, can and will be misinterpreted by bad faith actors and trolls to just mentally crush you.
• I have come to think that dying in anonymity, while leaving no legacy behind, is actually not a bad thing. I mean, it’s a “natural” thing. It’s what happens to the vast majority of humans anyway. Why should I be so afraid of that? Afraid of living my life in the peace of anonymity? There are plenty of ways to live a meaningful life that don’t involve becoming famous on the Internet, or famous at all.

I regret arriving at this conclusion now only. I had so much trouble in my short and fruitless life because of stuff that I posted on the Internet (talking about Facebook and my social circle more specifically). I could have avoided all of that. I could also not have wasted so much time entertaining ideas of online grandeur, blowing away countless hours of my pitiful existence on projects that never amounted to anything, and instead, gotten an education, so that I wouldn’t be living in poverty now.

Oh, well. It is what it is. Better learning now than never.

I’m not sure why I ever wanted to be famous on the Internet to begin with, or what made me think that there’s any inherent worth in getting online praise just for sharing my mediocre opinions. Maybe I’m mentally ill. Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe this is something that I should consult a therapist over. However, what I do know, is that I’m done with pursuing online fame.

I think that the Internet as it is today, flipped some sort of switch in people’s brain (including mine), which convinced us that it is normal to chase fame because the means to get there are so readily available. I don’t know how the Internet could have been designed differently to prevent this, but “giving a voice to everyone” was, in hindsight, maybe a badly implemented idea.

I’d be surprised to hear that any of you here have been trying to become famous on the Internet, but if you have, then I’d like to hear about your experience, and your opinions on this topic in general.

I feel like this was forecasted for a few years, and I'm not sure if places are following through with it yet.

I looked it up, and found some articles, which I haven't vetted at all:

• https://www.the-sun.com/money/9078715/mass-gas-station-closures-across-country/
• https://www.thestreet.com/retail/major-oil-company-unloading-1000-of-its-retail-sites
• https://thefw.com/shell-gas-station-store-closings/

I don't know if the political situation in the US has slowed down the gas station closures, but I'm really not interested in turning this topic into politics talk, so please save that for another topic. I'm also definitely curious what's happening outside the US, I want to hear the facts and numbers, out of curiosity for how quickly this is happening, or not happening.

It's easy to be wired all the time. Checking messages, performing tasks, planning for the future, making the most of every second with obvious output. But do you have any intentional inefficiency in your life? Breaks? Breaths between tasks? If so, what are they?

I was reminded this morning of the video in which a physical education teacher is performing a workout dance routine in Myanmar, not realizing that she captured the start of the 2021 coup d'état in the background.

She's wearing a covid mask, dancing to an incredibly upbeat and catchy song while the military vehicles roll in to crush their democracy. I can't recall where I saw this, but I will never forget the comment someone left online about the video which read, "This is decadently post-modern."

To make it even more interesting, the song itself is a parody of authority. It's essentially a song mocking weak men with big egos, and the song title translates roughly to, "Have Mercy, Mr. Tough Guy/Big Shot"

Link to video

What other insane things do we have in 2025 as a result of ubiquitous high-definition cameras?

I'm curious what your sense of nostalgia is like?

For me I think it's reasonable low. Like I look back at certain things, events and people of my past and I will think fondly of them. But I don't think about it often, and I almost never think "I miss that thing", more so that I enjoyed it at the time and I'm glad that it happened.

What about you? How do you view nostalgia? Does it bother you that things aren't the same as before? What things do you miss?

Question is as stated in the title. How did you learn to read?

I am re-listening to the great podcast, "Sold a Story" and it has prompted a lot of questions to myself, and now to others.

So, I'm curious, how did you learn to read and what do you remember about it? I am extra interested in people who have learned from "non-phonetic" languages, and also have a new curiousity about French, which I consider a language that does not match the spelling of its spoken and written words (if that makes sense, I'm sure that is my own bias there, as an English speaker).

tl;dr: Happy (?) ending

I wanted to post a short follow-up to my post last week, as things have progressed very quickly.

The most important thing I would like to say is "thanks" to everyone who chimed in with your very helpful advice, well wishes, and support. I took everything you said to heart (which is probably a risky thing to do from random internet folks, but this community is simply different).

Everything just clicked for me as I was going for a run last Friday and talking out loud to myself in a sort of stream of consciousness manner. I probably looked like a crazy person. Honestly, I don't know where the words came from, but it was all crystal clear.

I went home and asked my wife to talk "just one more time... and this time it will be different, I promise." I told her that I have come to terms with her decision and I respect it. I also asked her if my understanding of what went wrong made sense, and she said I hit the nail on the head. So I have a starting point for what I need to start working on personally.

We talked for a long time and started going through logistics. We are both on the same page about raising our son in a healthy manner. We will be doing equal shifts (week on, week off) and will find places to live relatively close to each other. We plan to remain friends and meet up regularly for our son.

On top of all of these things that happened VERY quickly on Friday, I found out that my mother fell and broke her hip on Saturday. She's got a bunch of other issues so a hip break is NOT good for her. We all packed up and hit the road to drive ~4 hours to the hospital. Mom is recovering now. It was a very surreal experience, this new form of bonding my wife went through over the weekend. We're now just friends, living together for the time being; yet still doing everything we can to help each other out.

I'm still very tired and not sleeping, and I'm CERTAIN I'm not even one step into the grieving process, but I feel better right now. I am working on moving on and moving forward. I feel as if I have stepping stones that will make me a better person AND I can work on the issues that caused all of this in the first place so I can learn how to pass that wisdom on to my son to make sure he doesn't run up against the same challenges as I did.

Again, I am sharing all of this because you all gave me some very frank, direct, and compassionate advice and support. Reading through the comments as they came in helped to keep me grounded and on track. I have archived all of the messages in my Obsidian notebook and I will read them in the future to remind myself to stay focused on self improvement. Thank you, once again.

I’m going to bring up examples from a variety of mediums, so I couldn’t really fit this just under ~books or ~tv. Sorry about that.

Lately I’ve been thinking about just how much I love fiction with a good plot device, and I’ve been wondering what it is that makes these devices such great vehicles for telling an interesting story.

Death Note is the first example that comes to mind for me. The “plot device” (and I may not be using this term correctly) if the titular item, which is a notebook where, if one writes a name of a person, while imagining their face, along with a time and date, and then a set of realistic circumstances that lead to that person’s death, then it will occur as written. If nothing other than the name, time, and date are written, then the person dies of a heart attack (after 40 seconds, if I remember correctly). The main character was the right kind to have acquired the book, because it enabled the story to be told in the manner that it was. I think the author illustrated this well when, at the very end, another character, not nearly as intelligent as the previous owner of the Death Note, quickly got done away with.

Code Geass is probably one of my favorite animes of all time. It combines a lot of genres into one. The titular “geass”, however, particularly the one that the main character acquired—which allows him to give a one-time order to any person who looks in his eyes, which the person will see through no matter what—is also an excellent plot device.

*The Lake House, a 2006 fantasy romance film, staring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It’s not a masterpiece or anything, but I can’t forget the whole plot device about the mailbox that allowed the male main character to send letters to the female main character two years into the past.

Dreamless is one of my favorite webcomics of all time. It’s crazy for me to think that this beautiful, entirely-colored webcomic was made available for free all the way back in 2009. I wish more people knew about it. The plot device, which is brilliant, revolves around a man and a woman who were born on the same day at the same time, but he in Japan, and she in the USA—a few years before the outbreak of WWII. From the very day of their birth, they were “connected”. Whenever they fall asleep, they begin to “see through eyes and hear through the ears of the other” until they wake up. If they both happen to be sleeping at the same time, than they see darkness but still hear surroundings. They became aware of this at very young age, learning each other’s languages and falling in love with each other since they were children. The time zone difference makes it relatively easy for them to observe each other’s lives as one sleeps and the other goes about his or her days. They embark on a quest to figure out how to meet each other, in the midst of a brutal war waged between their respective countries.

Severance is a show that everyone is talking about right now, so I don’t need to explain much to you, right? The plot device here is a chip that is implanted into people’s brains, and makes it so that their memories are split in two, based on location. At their work place, the character’s memories from the outside world are “shut off”, and they only remember what they experienced on the inside. I’m almost done with season two and this show is what prompted me to write this thread. I’ve been loving it.

Black Mirror is a show that I need to give a shoutout to, because many of its most famous episodes are centered around a very specific plot device. For me, the most impressive of these, was the one where they had these chips that basically recorded everything that they saw, and it was a normalized thing in society. I think that it was episode three. Episode eight was also interesting. It was about a society in which people’s social status was determined by their online social media rank.

I had an example in the back of my mind of a piece of fiction with a great plot device that I felt was not properly made use of. I’m sure that there are others like that, and it’s a bit sad when that happens, because there is a great idea right there, but it was wasted. I totally forgot about it though. Maybe you can think of some bad examples yourselves?

Edit: I remembered a different one, In Time, a 2011 movie about a society where people don’t age, but rather have their life spans written on a digital countdown clock on their arms. The way that people used their lifespans as currency that they could exchange was a neat idea. I didn’t watch the movie, but I read from other people about it, and it seemed to me like the concept wasn’t properly explored. Maybe I should give it a chance.

And maybe you can also think of some other good examples, plot devices in books, shows, movies, manga, anime that really blew you away. I’d be curious to hear about them because I’d like to look into them if it’s something that catches my interest.

As for what makes a plot device interesting for me, here are some points:

• It is a concept that is easy to grasp or an object the functions of which are easy to understand.
• It has strict limitations that the plot revolves around and the characters repeatedly run up against. These limitations are explained very early on in the story.
• The plot device and its origins gets gradually explained over the course of the piece.
• The story is largely centered around a small group of individuals.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like popes, bethesda and minimalism.digital. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was befuddled.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

Just something I was frustrated by ever since it became increasingly common even outside of smartphones and tablets.

For a few years now I increasingly see basically any battery powered product having mostly internal accumulator options(aka proprietary battery of uncertain ability to replace), especially in more expensive items in the category. Why?

I mean do see several advantages from the business side, I simply have no idea what advantage would there be for the actual user.

I could see it if the batteries had comparable lifespan to the product, which they most definitely do not unless the item is of truly bad quality.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Last of this triple header!

Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Jeddah Corniche Circuit
April 18-20, 2025

Qualification Session:
Saturday, April 19, 2025 - 17:00 UTC / 1:00p US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, April 20 2025 - 17:00 UTC / 1:00p US EDT

See your local time here

Next race:

Miami Grand Prix
Miami International Autodrome
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Sprint Race Weekend

I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.

I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".

I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.

I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.

EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.

I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').

So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. Thoughts?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 4chan, buttholes and tags. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was mortified.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Howdy hey folks, I've recently been trying out ProWritingAid (for the unfamiliar: a grammar/spell checker tool) specifically the premium version with the expanded tool set. And now I want to step onto the internet soapbox and talk about it. It's been.

Okay.

To preface, I've been writing (casually) for 'bout a decade, mainly short creative fiction. (And a few novel attempts. All of which are incomplete but I'm glad I did them) Throughout my time I've gone through a few tools, text editors and what-have-you-nots. With my ever so gleaming credentials established, let's get into the ramble.

Right out of the gate, automated grammar checkers and creative writing have a rather fun relationship. Half the suggestions are useful and the other half are useless. (This ratio can also tip forward and backward). They'll catch syntax errors, spelling mistakes, missing words or punctuation, all good things to fix.

It'll also flag intentional word choice, sentence structure and other creative decisions. Sometimes this can help but more often than not it'll be sucking the You out of your own words.

ProWritingAid (PWA) tries to sidestep this particular pitfall with Style Guides where it'll be more or less rigorous depending on the selected 'genre'. It's a mixed success. This flaw I don't think will ever be truly fixable given the inherent separation between Author and Tool. So we'll have to make do with clicking "ignore."

Now PWA does a bit more than just grammar check. During my time with it, I've currently used two versions. PWA Everywhere, and PWA Desktop. Everywhere is meant to integrate with your text editing software while Desktop is a contained application. They have similar feature-sets, but not identical. Specifically, Desktop has the Word Explorer feature: a tool that if you highlight a word it'll show some synonyms or you can dig deeper with alliteration, cliches, anagrams, rhymes, reverse dictionary and more. Pretty nifty. PWA Everywhere best to my knowledge and searching does not have this feature- which is disappointing.

Especially since everything else Desktop does, Everywhere does better. The UI alone is far more functional, without clipping or cramping. There's the convenience of direct integration. Some features like Single Chapter Critique (which I'll get into later, trust me) also blank screened in Desktop while working fine in Everywhere. Grand.

Besides the Word Explorer, PWA also gives you AI "Sparks" and Rephrases. I'll be entirely honest, I have these turned off (Which I am glad I was able to do). I don't have much to say here besides I like getting into the creative word weeds myself.

Alrighty, that then leaves me with two more things to discuss: Writing Reports and the Critique features.

Okay. The writing reports are useful. Able to be granular or extensive. They scan every selected element in the text and format the results into a nifty report (or in some modes, direct text highlighting) Having all that data visualized with tables, graphs and bars oh my, (with the occasional cross-work comparison) is a great look-at. Grammar-wise it'll run into the problems mentioned above, but otherwise, this has been the feature I've liked the most.

Finally I can get into the whole thing that inspired me to write this post. The Critique suite. Ohohoho, I have some thoughts about these. Human proofreaders are irreplaceable, just want to toss that out there (PWA also keeps that disclaimer in its header). My friends will never be escaping the random PDFs sent for their lovely review. I am ultimately writing for a human audience afterall. That in mind, I have run into a hilarious problem with the Single Chapter Critique.

Apparently I write too good to get use from it. Truly I am suffering here. In complete honesty, the actual point I'm trying to make is the AI is a kiss-ass sycophant. I fed five of my short stories from across the years into it, just to see what it'd say. It cannot be negative. In each and every one I was praised about various element of the stories. Glowing and gushing, could say no ill.

This is pretty useless. Sure it has the "Potential Improvements" section but it's... eh. In the name of curious study, I am having my non-writer friend compose a piece for me to feed to the machine spirit later. (I also only get three uses a day, compared to the unlimited reports with their nitty gritty)

Now, could this simulated praise be a sign I'm a genuinely good writer? Well I don't need the AI for that- I have friends zip-tied to chairs to feed my ego. (I forever cherish one of my close writing friends telling me: "You have a voice of a fantasy writer from the 70s with a thick series full of wondererous imagination written by a twice divorce middle aged man who is disgruntled with reality. It was never exactly reprinted as it was unknown, but the aging, withered pages hold such a gorgeous narrative that it sticks with you for the rest of your life.")

Back to the AI: Their shining critique falls apart when I look at the story myself and can point to several areas for improvement/refinement with a cursory reading. (Thank you creator's curse, you're my true reliable critic.)

Woe to me, I cannot escape personal proofreading. (Real talk: the hope was have it be able to do the cursory stuff so I could focus on the creative viscera. That's half the fun after all—)

There is two other Critique features, Full Manuscript Analysis and Virtual Beta Reader. I have used neither of these as I do not have any large manuscripts to toss into the jaws. To ensure jolly feelings, it's also a credit based system. So let's talk money.

Scrivener, a writing workhorse that even after years of using I still find new features and has long cemented itself as my text editor of choice, was $45 for a lifetime license. Fantastic software, it has earned its reputation.

ProWritingAid, a grammar and spellchecker was $115 (discounted price) for a year subscription. (Can I mention how idiosyncratic their tier system is? Free, Premium, Premium Pro? Why??? Just name it Free, Pro, Premium. Don't stack luxury words.) For $115, I get several features I don't even use, or aren't very useful. Oh, a discount for the aforementioned analysis credits. ($25 for 1, $70 for 3, $175 for 10. Full priced it's $50, $150, $500 respectively. Spend this money on an actual person please)

Now what's worst off is I wasn't even the one to spend the $115. That was someone else wanting to support me and my writing; an act I am quite grateful for and the meaning behind it. I feel bad complaining. I have hopes for PWA. Something that can act as a quick look proofreader would be wonderful. But perhaps I'm just asking for too much from what is again, a grammar and spellchecker.

So far, I don't know yet. I don't know if I'd call it good or bad. As I started with: it's okay?

Maybe I'll do a retrospective after a while once I've utilized it longer. Maybe features will be better fine tuned in the future.

And that leads me here. What have been y'all's experience with it, if any? Searching online has been miserable; I'd like to hear from other people.

[As a footnote, PWA was not used when writing this. Kinda forgot that I never set it up for browser. Tallyho]

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like accessibility, protests and rant. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was astute.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

So I've been playing a lot of WoW lately and that includes a ton of raids, always with voice chat on discord. Just now I found out that someone is a streamer and broadcast a full raid + the voice chat.

I was not part of this particular raid thankfully. And as far as I can tell he doesn't have a lot if any viewers. But it still made me uncomfortable that someone has been streaming my voice without my consent, without my knowledge even. I do not feel that it is unreasonable of me to expect someone to ask for permission before doing this, but maybe I am just completely out of the loop about streaming?

Is it naive to expect privacy in this regard? Is this what one should expect from online gaming nowadays?

Curious to know what museums people have visited that really left them thinking, "this was worth it" (time, money, whatever "worth it" means to you).

I will start.

Minneapolis, MN
Mill City Museum

This museum really shocked me with its breadth and depth! The location and setting are really cool as well. It has parts of the ruins of the historical building, integrated with some beautiful architecture of the new building.

The museum aims to explain how the grain industry was established and blew up in the Midwest, and what special role it had in shaping Minnesota. It goes all the way back to discussing WWII up to the advent of convenience foods like Betty Crocker and Pillsbury. There is even a Betty Crocker test kitchen in museum, complete with all the smells pumped into the air.

The displays are cool and I think are kid friendly, while also not boring the shit out of adults. My favorite part of the museum is the elevator, I truly believe it's one of the coolest displays(?) I've seen in a museum before, but I don't want to give away anymore, lest I make anyone's expectations too high and spoil it lol.

As requested last week, I'm doing something different for this race. This will be a discussion post for both Qualification and the Grand Prix itself. Or anything else concerning this weekend: Free Practices, Formula 2, Formula 3, whatever. There's also a Formula E in Miami race this weekend and an INDYCAR race in Long Beach on Sunday. Plus MotoGP in Qatar and IMSA also in Long Beach.

I'll post Quali results here. Plus, as usual, the race results. Maybe one of our cool, seemingly never sleeping, Tildes mods can rename the post after everything is finished!

Qualification Session:
Saturday, April 12, 2025 - 16:00 UTC / 12:00p US EDT

Bahrain Grand Prix:
Sunday, April 13, 2025 - 15:00 UTC / 11:00a US EDT

See your local time here

Next race:

Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Jeddah Corniche Circuit
Sunday, April 20, 2025

Its a heavy show but three episodes in, I'm loving the single shot approach that they took.

Without cuts, it's all about the pace of the drama, the honesty of each beat and the quality of the performance. That, and I haven't seen a show tackle toxic masculinity in quite this way and I'm super here for it.

Has anybody else seen it? What did you think?

I believe a few of us have Steam Decks, thus I wanted to do this kinda public announcement.

TL;DR

• If your Steam Deck reports low battery health (low % of original capacity) drain the battery until it shuts down and then fully charge and check again
• Use your Steam Deck until it shuts down from time to time (say once every 6 months?) to keep your battery level indicator (and remaining time) precise

Long version

I have my Steam Deck since May 2022 and I put certainly over 1000 hours in gaming on it. I would believe if it was even approaching 2000 hours.

Lately I played demanding game and battery was discharging rather fast with remaining time on full charge being under 1:30 hours, which I wasn't used to just a few months ago when it lasted over 2 hours even in demanding games (I limit to 30 fps and I also limit TDP/power). This weekend I jumped into desktop mode and checked the battery life which showed me what I feared - 65% of original capacity.

I went on iFixit page and the price for new one is hefty 95€, but since Steam Deck got me so much enjoyment, I was ready to pay for it - if it was in stock, that is. I'm glad it wasn't!

Since I have a bit of electronics and software background (hobby level), I realized that the charging chip (or whatever keeps the info about state of charge) was running since day 1 on relative data. What I mean: I have never discharged my Steam Deck lower than 10% and most of the times charging anywhere between 30-80%. And since the charging chip likely measures last fully charged capacity (and thus battery health) based on, well, how much it was charged and discharged all over again, it probably skewed its measurements in those three years.

So I went on a "quest" to play until dead. And I was surprised when Steam Deck reached 3% battery and kept running for another hour (ligthweight game) until it was finally dead. Then I fully charged it and voila - battery health 90%!

I have already said how it likely happened, but once more and in short: the charging chip needs to reach both limits, 0% and 100% of battery, from time to time = You have to let it drain fully here and there if you want your battery level indicator (and remaining time) to be precise or if you want to get the real state of your battery.

A bit offtopic: I've had laptop that had 50% of original capacity. I have changed the battery cells inside the battery and let it fully discharge and charge again but the vendor locked the chip from "learning" the real capacity making the new cells useless because the chip still reported 50% thus telling me when I booted it up that the battery has to be changed and also telling me non-relevant remaining time based on this 50% battery health... I'm glad that Steam Deck is capable of re-learning this data and not playing dumb.

Hopefully the title says it all, I decided to make this generic because I think all game randomization is cool.

To be specific, this is not about games which have random elements, this is about games which have been modded to introduce some form of randomization.
The Pokemon games are reasonably famous for having fun randomizers.

I posted this because I recently started a Dark Souls 3 randomized run and got given a heap of really nice sorceries and miracles right at the start of the game. Luckily also a catalyst too. It was like it was begging me to be a mage, even though it's apparently hard as hell.

I've been feeling nostalgic and watching some old Top Gear recently. It has got me thinking about how remarkable the chemistry between the three hosts is and how the combination of those three, the time that top gear ran, and the format they chose created such an incredibly successful and wide-reaching show. Despite many efforts no one has been able to make a car show to rival it.

What are some other examples of this sort of phenomena? Where the right time, place, people and format come together to create something extraordinary? Doesn't have to be television necessarily, but given the example that spurred this question I figured this wasn't a bad place to post.

Overheard in the Cooldown Room:

Piastri: "That's all the highlights? That's all that happened in that race?

Norris: "Nothing happened. I didn't think there was one overtake [laughs]."

Piastri: "For a race that felt like it was pretty flat out, nothing...nothing happened."

Haha, never change, Oscar. Never change.

I'm going to bed.

Next race:

Bahrain Grand Prix
Bahrain International Circuit
Sunday, April 13, 2025

Curious to know if we have a current morphometric based system that can detect with the same accuracy as DNA testing, if two people are related, without a priori knowledge that they are related, if that makes sense.

Meaning, if a system is fed 100 random photos of humans, but is not told "there are definitely related people in here" can it match it as accurately as a DNA test of those same humans' DNA samples?

What would your past self(intentionally vague) say about your current self(also intentionally vague)?

Look forward to hearing others' thoughts.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like advetising.digital, cory booker and april fools day. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was miffed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

Update (2024-04-11 at 19:16 UTC): François Chollet has a new 20-minute talk on YouTube that I recommend. I've watched a few videos of Chollet talking about ARC-AGI or ARC-AGI-2, and this one is beautifully succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHezX43I-4

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

My son loves reading time before bed, but he’s only 3.5 so the books have mostly been picture books until now. Lately though he’s been getting more into stories with plots and an extended narrative, but entirely in the form of movies. There aren’t a lot of kid’s books to go around with the sorts of dramatic stories he likes, they’re more like “caterpillar eats food” and “train engine climbs a hill with grit and determination” type stuff. And whenever I’ve tried to have him just lay down and listen to me read a story without any pictures to stare at he has absolutely no interest. He really likes having pretty visuals to look at.

I know when I was a small child these sorts of board/picture books weren’t really a thing in India. The pre-sleep ritual was usually “storytime” instead, where my parents would tell us stories. I’m a little bit concerned that my kid has been so accustomed to always having visual cues presented to him that it’s stunting his imagination a bit, like failing to exercise his capacity to visualize ideas and concepts for himself without being anchored by some artist’s depiction.

So I’m curious to hear from other parents or caregivers/educators (@kfwyre?). Did you find there was a natural transition point between going from picture books to telling/reading stories? Was there any sort of work you had to do to enable it? Are there “exercises” I can work on to help my son exercise his imagination? I have been working with him to have him tell me stories about his day, which he does pretty well. But his stories are always quite grounded and he’s usually telling me what he’s actually done and seen. When my nephews and nieces were his age they tended to spin out a lot of random stories that pretty obviously did not happen, and I assume this is because they had more experience being told stories themselves rather than just factual reporting about the happenings around them.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.