YouTube link here. We have achieved Ezzie!
This week, we talk a fair bit of video games. Sorry to those of you not interested. Also, Tony vents his spleen vis a vis fast food. But we do manage to have time to read an email and then talk about something completely different. Enjoy!
(NOTE: I appear to have accidentally not set the Zoom to split screen. So you only see who’s talking at the moment. Sorry.)
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I work just a few doors down from Raisin Cane’s. I like that because they have a limited menu, it’s easier to order for a crowd than somewhere that has lots of options and ways to customize (also, they have “tailgate” packs. Still same types of food you listed, but another way to obtain it beyond a la carte and combo). I agree, it’s fine. I would be mildly disappointed if they closed, but would not go out of my way to eat there.
Pizza Hut – if the charge appears on your credit card for an item you didn’t receive, you can dispute the charge with the credit card company. Usually it’s just a few button clicks to do this.
My credit card number was stolen in December, they tried to buy something from Nebraska Furniture Mart (my husband declined the purchase when we got a possible fraud alert), tried to buy something for $9 at Fendi (curious, I looked up what one could purchase at Fendi at that price and came up with nothing, the cheapest pair of socks was $150 and the cheapest hair accessory was $240), but they did successfully buy $54 of Domino’s pizza in Houston Texas. I would appreciate if Dominos has similar issues with their online ordering and this person never got their pizza either.
Unfortunately, we tried to stop payment with the bank, and just got the response that they think it’s legit.
Which makes sense, sadly. In what way does it NOT look legit to a bank? We made the purchase, from our home address, with our card, to a valid secure website.
We just didn’t get the pizza. And that’s not something we can really prove or demonstrate to the bank.
It’s an expensive lesson, but a useful lesson, all the same.
AI-wise–Seems like you are talking about 2 things: 1- Large Language Models (LLMs) of which GPT is just one from Open AI (ChatGPT for example is hooked to the LLM GPT 3.5 or 4 depending on if you pay). There are a ton of LLMs; some are better at certain tasks than others. You can conceptualize them as expert readers and amazing comprehenders of HUGE datasets, for example, everything on the internet. So, when interacting with them, it is as if you are conversing with someone who has ingested and understood all of that and is able to freely create new text and new ideas without regurgitating others’ stuff. Its ability to synthesize concepts, create brand new text and ideas is absolutely the case. The difference is that there is no real understanding behind it, only REALLY good predictions of next words. 2- That being said, you can make them your bitch using prompt engineering. Sounds like Tony’s site is using low quality of both.
But so you (the human) are the one to decide what KIND of response they should give, yes? e.g. the most common response, the most positive response, the most helpful response, etc?
I’m behind as always so a run down on solo and duet games:
I probably should have described the solo ones as journaling rather than letter writing through there are some where you’re writing letters in response to in game events or prompts. Generally with these games you’re responding to a set of prompts that describe what has happened and the mechanical effects. I co-wrote one called Numb3r Stations where you’re a spy and your letters are you mission reports back to an unseen handler. There’s also The Wretched, which uses a jenga tower and you’re the last survivor on a spaceship in an Alien like scenario. There your messages are the logs and transmissions you’re sending out. Duet ones are less common which I think is a shame as there’s a lot of nuance that you can play with.
Happy to provide some suggestions if you think you might be interested in them.
I have no idea if I’d want to play them, but I’m so fascinated by them as a concept. I probably should try one.
So there’s still a random element, to determine if you were successful or not in your… journaling? See, it still slightly confuses me. But I think it’s such a neat idea.
The random elements vary a lot from game to game. The most common approach is that you get a random prompt to respond to, drawing cards for that is pretty common. Then you may or may not have a way of determining success or you may just respond to the prompt. It would probably be easier to take a look at actual examples, itch.io is a good place to start
Cool, thanks! I think I’ll check them out. And I have an itch.io account, so it’ll be easy. 🙂