Over the weekend, friends and I played our first game of Free League’s Alien The Roleplaying Game. We had a blast. The game mechanics are fun, built around a Stress mechanic that basically ensures characters will freak out at some point. Alien RPG can be played in campaign mode, where characters progress over many sessions […]
Geek Alert
More on AI environmental costs
In my earlier explainer about recent AI developments, I linked out to a Wikipedia entry that ran through some of the environmental impacts of AI models, mostly in terms of energy and water usage. Since that post, Andy Masley came out with a much more useful comparison of AI costs. It’s worth reading the whole […]
Something’s Coming
Last week, Dwarkesh Patel put words to an uneasy feeling that resonated with me: I think we’re at what late February 2020 was for Covid, but for AI. If you can remember back to February 2020, both the media and the general public were still in normal-times mode, discussing Trump’s impeachment, the Democratic primaries and […]
A few thoughts on Sora
Yesterday, OpenAI announced Sora, a new product that generates realistic video from text prompts. ((Sora is a great name, btw. It doesn’t mean anything, and doesn’t have any specific connotation, yet feels like something that should exist.)) The examples are remarkable. A TV writer friend texted me to ask “is it time to be petrified?” […]