FermiEstimate

I felt the exact same way about the conversation you mentioned. I really liked the idea of the quest, but way they handled it just utterly drained all the stakes. And as you noted, it's weird to see a misstep like this after they nailed it once in Sumeru.

"We're all in grave danger! What? Well no, we can't give specifics unless we risk not getting paid. Signed, Anonymous"

I mean, I wasn't exactly expecting the Einstein-Szilard letter 2.0 when I clicked that link, but this is pathetic.

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren't fit for purpose, but he's 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed. 

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack. 

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

OpenAI: "Our AI is so powerful it's an existential threat to humanity if we don't solve the alignment issue!"

Also OpenAI: "We can devote maybe 20% of our resources to solving this, tops. We need the rest for parlor tricks and cluttering search results."

If they're really lucky, they'll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.

Charles Stross' Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

I'll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He's not interested in good per se, it's just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.

It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.

Maybe a controversial suggestion, but my advice is to ignore the Minutemen stuff until late in the game. Just don't even go to the museum until you've followed some leads and want something else to do for a bit.

This is definitely not the intended way to play, but I promise the story flows so much better without it. Setting out to find your kidnapped son just to immediately get sidetracked helping some uncharismatic misfits set up mattresses is just an underwhelming start to an otherwise decent game.

Doing all this stuff later on, when you've actually demonstrated you're a badass survivor and the OP gear you get free from the Minutemen quest actually feels earned, just feels much smoother. It's a great coda that they unf put two minutes into the game for some reason.

It's safe to say it's better, though I couldn't tell you if it's actually fun yet. For one thing, they've moved away from some of the wackiest design decisions, like the lack of NPCs.

B.S., a former partner at Andreesen-Horowitz

Lmao, of course.

and former chief technology officer of Coinbase

I.e., the company that survived by shedding a ton of employees, like 40% of headcount or something. I do not see this tactic working well when they're trying to win friends and influence cops by hiring their failsons into sinecure positions.

What makes all this funnier is that it's trying to thread the needle of embracing fascism while simultaneously seething with contempt for 99.999% of the people in the movement.

"If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it’s endless."

My dude, you work for Yum Brands, not Starfleet Command. Nobody taking a "major journey" inside a Pizza Hut needed AI help to get there. (Though they could probably use a cup of water, and maybe an Uber home.)