I believe NASA ultimately had to scrap the idea, but the cloud 9 buoyant cities idea is an old one, tracing back to Bucky Fuller and Earth, and it’s vastly more plausible than trying to make Mars habitable. Or even the Moon! Venus has Earthlike conditions if you exploit buoyancy to settle in the goldilocks area of the atmosphere.

Inside you are two humans. One wants to befriend every animal. One wants to eat every animal. You are named Terry.

I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.

I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.

Finally, it’s Plan 9’s time to shine!

It was a genuine question, because I’m honestly not keyed in to the marketing buzz, and I’m generally disinterested in big publisher marketing. Also, “Daggerfall in space” wasn’t a dig; I absolutely love No Man’s Sky, but that game to me, in terms of ethos and mechanics, is Space Daggerfall in all the best ways.

I should also stipulate, I’d say “creativity” to me means exceptional aesthetic qualities, writing, or mechanical novelty. There are many very good and fun games that I wouldn’t call “bursting with creativity”. I love Skyrim, it’s an incredibly entertaining, beautiful, and compelling game; but it was a step back for the series in terms of innovating the genre the way Daggerfall and Morrowind did.

But yeah, to be perfectly honest, with small developers who treat their workers well like Motion Twin, Supergiant, or Hello Games, I can’t really get invested in any Bethesda games beyond being kind of curious.

I haven’t followed the hype cycle but is it looking like it’s going to be anything more than Daggerfall in space? Which is a great core concept, but it’s not exactly “bursting with creativity”.