naomialderman.bsky.social
I write novels (eg The Power, new novel is The Future), I make games (eg Zombies, Run!), unorthodox Jew. not-getting-into-pointless-arguments-on-the-internet is an act of revolution. However complex you think things are, they're more complex than that
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You’re sounding quite aggressive towards me, is that what you intended?
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eg this, which is a very helpful breakdown of how AlphaGo is programmed compared to LLMs and in what ways the progress in playing Go might or might not be applicable to LLMs: pca.st/episode/16d3...
also this on what is boosterism and what isn't:
calnewport.com/ai-and-work-...
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all of those "how dare you do this differently to my home country?!" feelings one gets when actually moving somewhere else - you can get them all the time now for free at home
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but when, 20 years ago, would I ever have regularly tried to solve a New York Times puzzle except when I was *living in New York*? moving country is difficult and everyone who does it ends up in tears sometimes from culture shock.
now, we are all having hard-ass culture shock all of the time
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it is perfectly OK for American people not to know anything about pubs and need stuff explained to them, it is perfectly OK for British people not to know anything about American sports slang and therefore an NYT puzzle with US slang in it is much harder for Brits than the puzzle designers intended
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a rough stab at some insight on the fly before my piano lesson:
one of the great problems with the internet is not that (not *just* that) it puts us into bubbles but also that it allows us to see very easily the contents of other bubbles which would previously have been invisible to us
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I have a 110-year-old vintage flex Waterman 452 silver basketweave pen and it gives me italic handwriting and I love it so so much
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yes! the writing out is key. I can get the same effect from typing a list on a keyboard, and so I thought it might be the same with an AI but instead it was like everything was vanishing from my brain in quite an unsettling way.
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so I felt like I was getting to grips with my to-do list but in fact I was just talking more and more to a swiss-cheese-memory AI.
a notebook and fountain pen turn a list of ideas into a physical object. a computer list turns it into a digital object. AI turns it into "more eyeballs on the AI"
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the disconnection was the most intriguing element. what I realised in the end is that one of the things AI services are trained to do (obviously, in retrospect) is to keep you talking to the AI. they want to hook you on it like social media. that's why they end every interaction with a question.
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I mean... we could go on debating but I think it's starting to edge toward my rule against "pointless arguments online"! We do disagree. If you haven't played a lot of games I can massively recommend The Return Of The Obra Dinn which you will find is definitely very much like a novel. xx
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it's mesmerising. looking through multiple eyes at the same time. things that just vanish between one 'glance' and the next because the leaf fell/the insect flew/the wind blew that branch over this one.
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Hockney's late work is really grappling with this, he's been pushing at the edges of it all his life. He mounted 18 cameras on one side of a car and drove slowly through the English countryside; then you can watch the 18 different perspectives on one drive, on 18 screens on the wall.
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god I love Hisham, he is fantastic
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yes, it feels (sorry Ben!) like the kind of thing you think about games if you don't play a lot of games?! 😬
narrative-based games have a story structure.
there *is* pure sandbox eg Minecraft. but even there, sharing is built in! you literally *invite people into your world*.
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not to mention all of the different actors playing great roles, all of the different performers playing great pieces of music, anything that is live is unrepeatable. that doesn't make it solipsistic, that makes it speak to the nature of being human in time.
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just been to the David Hockney retrospective in Paris. there's an artist who would tend to disagree that even one person looking at the same painting at two adjacent moments is having the same experience each time.
we can discuss games just fine, they're not unique to each person.
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I mean... you go to see a play on a different night and the experience is different. you wander through a piece of interesting architecture and the experience is different one moment to the next. games aren't infinitely expandable, there's a possibility space.
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yes I have made people literally physically sweat with anxiety watching me trying and failing 40 times to do a jump in... I mean... Steamworld Dig 2? a game with an age rating of <checks> 10+.
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yeah tbh I don't honestly think that playing a game is more solipsistic than reading a book? both are (can be) engaging quietly by yourself with the creation of another mind or minds.
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I agree with all this. I am also dyspraxic. I take ages, I am overlevelled, I have sometimes had to laboriously go through a video, doing each jump precisely as indicated and then pausing the game so I could have a rest/regroup. Still bloody love it?
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STEPHEN you are making me think that I/you/we need to be the change we want to see in the world. Argh.
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Nick I was going to say this in person at the thing in a couple of weeks but I want to send you my book about the information crisis. Especially this bit:
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that's some of it. I also think games are just harder? like, it does not take a great deal of skill to watch a movie. we all get taught the skills of reading a novel in school. for games, there is often a real pain barrier you have to voluntarily go through before you get to the good stuff.
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it is a good film!
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the movies you watch are influenced by games - not just in stories but even in individual shots/sequences. tracked health behaviours are conceptualised as casual minigames. *the fact that people can self-identify as different to their IRL identity* has a relationship to game avatars.
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I feel like videogames has somehow remained an area where many people *both* don't like it/care about it (fine) *and* remain completely ignorant about the bare fact that it has significant cultural and economic weight. Like, you're living in a world made by videogame culture.
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I haven't even read the article and I'm already wildly agreeing with it.
The thing is: I know nothing about football and don't care about it BUT I am very aware that it is a massively important force in the UK and the world, shaping culture and economics too.
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there are so many unknowns. one is: a lot of people are very happy to use AI tools right now when they're free. does that translate into people being willing to pay enough for them to make them profitable enough to justify the investment? maybe! could well be! also maybe not!
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right. or both, or neither.
I am never going to say "it's impossible for innovation to improve this tech product"... historically that is a BAD bet. however "this tech product will soon be able to do every bit of creative work people can do" has also just been SF every single previous time.
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there are definitely really good reasons to think there are hard limits. there are also reasons to think "come on now, how many things we thought five years ago were impossible are now possible, it's getting better every day".
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we are - as my therapist used to say - in a place of not-knowing. (I used to say "but I like *knowing*, Sally, that's why I do all this education".)
boosterists are making up a story. doomers are making up a story. we just don't know what's going to happen. it feels shaky ground for policy promises