KobaCumTribute

Their stovetop was all touch controlled.

This is apparently normal now. My grandmother had to replace her stove recently and apparently all the budget stoves were those dogshit glasstops with shitty touch control buttons instead of just like cheap exposed coils and physical dials. I don't get it at all, everything about it is awful and so much worse than the cheaper established options it doesn't make any sense.

Also many people groups that have been through long famines have a disposition towards gaining weight faster and diabetes.

This is also a multi-generational process involving epigenetics, to further support your point. Parents who suffer famine during their own childhood pass on these epigenetic flags that cause their children to have these adaptations to food insecurity activated, which generally makes them shorter than they would otherwise be (since someone who is physically smaller needs less food) and store fat more readily whenever possible leaving them with more of a safety buffer if food stops being available.

It's really fascinating on like a meta level how there's this sort of layer of reactive temporary inheritance for some traits, where an evolved adaptation can be turned on or off based on multi-generational material conditions like that, because something that's a desirable and life-saving adaptation to an unstable, famine-prone environment becomes a liability in prolonged periods of stability and plenty.

The researchers in this video talk about how these gen AI models try to “escape” when being trained

The models are basically random noise being selected by some sort of fitness algorithm to give results that that algorithm likes, so over time they become systems optimized to give results that pass the test. Some of that training is on a bunch of tech support forum threads so some of the random noise that pops up as possible solutions to their challenge are reminiscent of console commands that might provide alternate solutions to the test they're placed under if they actually worked and weren't just nonsense, although sometimes that can break the test environment when they're allowed to start sending admin commands to see what happens and then end up deleting the bootloader or introducing other errors through just randomly changing system variables until everything breaks.

In some games they "cheat" because they're just mimicking the appearance of knowing what rules are or how things work, but are really just doing random bullshit that seems like it could be text that follows from the earlier text.

It's not cognition or some will to subvert the environment, it's just text generating bots generating text that seems right but isn't because they don't actually know things or think.

This is a Seinfeld bit. This is the b plot of a fucking sitcom from 30 years ago. Deeply unserious country.

Philip K Dick: "Imagine a horrible dystopia where the state uses magical psychics that are almost always right to stop crime. That would suck and be bad even for you, an eager collaborator and true believer in that system, because they could be wrong about you too."

The UK: "Oi chatgpt get yer robot calipers out and tell me if 'e's got a loicence for that telly?"

What gets me is that that isn't even true. The Italian fascists were famously bad at day-to-day governing in Italy.

The train thing came from them trying to solve train delays by cutting maintenance schedules and instituting absurd penalties for the train engineers if they didn't arrive on schedule.

The result was more accidents, more breakdowns, and more overall delays, but they were still just beating their chests and declaring they made the trains faster.

My immediate assumption is just that these are migrant workers working in call center sort of things in China (which is what the previous "North Koreans secretly working for US companies!!!11!!??1!" headlines have always been about), and the "funneling money to Kim Jong Un" is just the dipshit racist way of saying they pay taxes on income earned while abroad.

Unironically the best HOI4 mod. Not just because the tonal dissonance of colorful magic ponies waging a hellish industrial war with nuclear weapons is funny, but because it's also a genuinely good overhaul of the game itself. It's a better overhaul than Kaiserreich, certainly.

(also one month doesn't seem like long enough to polish off a full novel lol)

The concept is basically just trying to hit 50K words in a month as an exercise. Like not worrying about editing or quality, just getting something down everyday. I actually think it's pretty useful, even though I've only done it once.

I really don't know how or why the silly writing challenge was an organization with employees, though.

Look up how figs form.

It really doesn't seem all that surprising: people form attachments like that to basically anything at the drop of a hat. It usually happens to things that move around on their own like animals or mobile robots, but it also gets done to tools and simple machines, to plants, to places, even to entirely fictional constructs that exist only within an abstract space in their head. Broadly speaking, people project spirits into things (so to speak) as something like a facet of how empathy works.

Like people become emotionally attached to robots that only move when they personally operate a control panel to move them and become distraught if those unemotive and unresponsive machines are damaged or destroyed. Now make the machine talk back in a somewhat coherent way that mimics actual interaction and life and it's going to kick that phenomenon into overdrive. If you attach a synthetic face to it it'll happen even harder.