The skins market became a de facto stock market with extremely low volume (and therefore more manipulation). Someone eventually lost money, not necessarily the first link in the chain.
I once did a course with a paramedic on basic aid. We were discussing choking, which is a condition that really needs a 2nd party to intervene. Someone asked what to do if you live alone (with no close neighbours) - the answer was essentially ‘good luck’
The idea of the heimlich is to put sudden force on the diaphragm and force air upward. You can do that alone by pushing your upper abdomen against a chair back, counter, railing, whatever. Not something I've ever tried, but good to know about in case.
I know how to in theory, and I think I'm probably "above average" at calm-in-crisis, but my confidence that I'd calmly rescue myself via self-heimlich while unable to breathe is not high.
There is/was an AI Dungeon app running in the early/pre-ChatGPT days using GPT 3-ish, I think? Long term context was a real problem - story arcs were very.... drifty. A more modern agentic approach might help with this, doing multiple passes over the work to achieve consistency.
Back in the mid-to-late-1990s, when Lynx was the browser of choice, I encountered a collaborative online CYOA just like this. I have always thought it was called "The Neverending Story," although of course that's also the name of a movie. ...This person [3] also thinks it was called "Never Ending Story," and that it was still online as late as 2011(!).
You start at the "entrance" paragraph, where there are four or five choices — or, if you don't like any of those, you can just type in your own choice. The game then prompts you for what happens when someone selects that choice; and choice and consequence both go into some database on the server end, ready to be served to the next player. Anyway, you can follow the existing paths until you get to a dead end, at which point the game tells you to create at least two more choices and responses, so the next player will get to play a little longer.
As Gwern writes:
> So [any] player can ‘author’ an adventure by carefully curating a premise and then choosing actions and backing up and editing, creating a full-fledged scenario [...]
And that's exactly how it felt: By going down different paths at the start, you could navigate into a "Lovecraftian horror" subtree, an "alien abduction" subtree, a "romance" subtree, etc.
The technology at play here is just a minor extrapolation of the BASIC era's "Guess An Animal" game [1].
Plugging an LLM into the thing seems... well, frankly, it seems unnecessary. The core engine/database doesn't need an LLM for anything; the only thing the LLM would help with is coming up with new choices and new response paragraphs "less tediously" than we could do it in the 1990s. But the uncharitable way to describe that is: you could use an LLM to fill your CYOA game with AI slop, instead of hand-crafted texts that are meaningful to some real person in the world. ...Well, OK, maybe an LLM could provide a first rough pass on content moderation; or power a diagnostic like "Your new choice seems similar to this existing choice: [X] Are you sure you want to add this branch?". So there's places for LLMs in this. But I wouldn't use an LLM for content.
Several years ago I finally decided to try reimplementing the-thing-I-recall-being-named-"The-Neverending-Story" myself [2]; but I didn't get far, because (A) I've been too lazy to do anything requiring server-side hosting since Heroku went belly-up, and (B) opening such a thing up to the public means you're getting into the content-moderation business (Gwern also alludes to this) and ain't nobody got time for that. (See also "Why do you require an email address?" in [1].)
The guy in [3] doesn't think that [4] is the same website; but that's exactly the sort of locked-down, account-required, highly walled interface I'd have expected it to evolve into over the past 20 years. (However, it seems to have been essentially walled since <=2004, according to the Wayback Machine: [5].)
You’re right that really it’s collaborative production that’s the heart, and there’s no real benefit to LLMs.
It does feel like some classical explore/exploit algorithms could be interesting, but I imagine the challenge to any effort is really just getting enough high quality contributors
There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
I think he had a blog called LifeHacker and/or 36 folders (I don't know if they were his or just a writer, but I remember following him back in the day).
It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)
Merlin ran 43folders.com[1]. That domain name was a reference to GTD's tickler files[2].
Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.
F1's official site has improved significantly since 2021, now scoring 75+ on mobile PageSpeed Insights vs ~45 back then. They've reduced initial payload by ~40% and implemented better image optimization techniques, though they still lag behind some team sites like McLaren's.
> Home runs, walks, and strikeouts now dominate baseball, with 35% of plate appearances ending without involving seven defensive players. This has reduced balls in play by 20% since 1980, creating longer games with less action
Do baseball fans ever discuss potentially changing the rules or game setup to mitigate this?
> Nearly a quarter of the way into the 2023 regular season, the rule changes MLB implemented this year are continuing to have their intended effects -- namely, a quicker pace resulting in a significant reduction in overall time of games, more hits and more steal attempts.
Yes. In the past MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound and widened the strike zone to benefit hitters, and there’s been talk in recent years of doing it again, or moving back the mound. The league also recently instituted the pitch clock, which helped hitters a little.
There is no risk free investment that will return you 12%. In a year where you are down 30% are you still contributing 5% on initial capital?
If not, you are just constructing an instrument where you only pass through downside risk
For all practical purposes you can - and the world broadly does - consider e.g. TBills to be risk free (or take your favourite interbank lending rate etc etc).
The US government has confiscated value from T Bills before.
The government used to sell two bond types - dollar bonds that paid off in dollars, and gold bonds that paid off in gold. The gold bonds were safer and hence paid a lower interest rate.
Enter FDR. FDR decided to pay off the gold bond holders in dollars, not gold, and since the value of gold vs dollars had diverged substantially, FDR confiscated the difference.
That was the end of the phrase "sound as a dollar". Gee, I wonder why nobody says that anymore!
The largest risk of TBills is that inflation will shrink their value, and with catastrophic deficits that is a very, very real risk. That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
>>That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
Being "denoted in dollars" means the returns are a specified number of dollars. Stocks, on the other hand, are "denoted in shares of the company" and the returns are the change in value of the company.
The share value is price x shares, so there’s an effective dollar numeraire.
It’s easy to imagine a well performing stock that neverless loses due to a currency shock. Indeed this is why one would typically hedge currency risk if trading a name outside of accounting currency
This is heterodox opinion to modern financial theory. You’re welcome to hold it, I’m not interested in trying to convince you otherwise — I think it undermines the larger point I’m trying to make in an unhelpful way.
The modal user likely doesn’t even know anti-cheat exists, and if they did, wouldn’t care at all. They just want to play the game.