When the gestapo come to your door and ask you whether you're hiding any jews in your attic, even a rationalist is allowed to lie in this situation, and [fnord] is also that kind of situation, so is it actually very embarrassing that we've all been autistically telling the truth in public about [fnord]?

I expect blockchains/distributed ledgers to have no impact until most economically significant people can hold a key, and access it easily with minimal transaction costs, and then I expect it to have a lot of impact. It's a social technology, it's useless until it reaches saturation.

And if you tell me there’s so much other value created

DLTs create verifiable information (or make it hundreds of times easier to create). The value of information generally is not captured by its creators.

Related note: The printing press existed in asia for a thousand years while having minimal cultural impact. When and whether the value of an information technology manifests is contingent on a lot of other factors.

That's...not the strategy I would choose for playtesting multiple versions of a game.  Consider

I think you misunderstood, I wouldn't write the manual this way after publishing for a broad audience. It's just fine for developers. But there are also some other reasons that stuff is less relevant:

• It's a game about choosing whatever rules make the most sense. Mainly setting laws, rather than game rules, but the mindset transfers.
• Everyone has complete information, and players are generally cooperatively striving towards mutual understanding (rather than away from it), so everyone's assumptions about the game rules are visible, if there's a difference in interpretation, you'll notice it in peoples' choices and you're usually going to want to bring it up.

then when they go to a meetup or a con, anyone they meet will have a different version

No, that would actually be wonderful. We can learn from each other and compile our best findings.

It's more of a problem when trying to talk about the game through the internet when you can't see each other playing and notice the differences in others' interpretations.

I guess the synthesis would be for me to be fully specific in the manual, then insert lots and lots of "but also try it this other way" sections all over the place, like chekhovs pathways in a metroidvania.

Objects are carried by a particular pawn, and cannot teleport between the two pawns controlled by the same player.

Oof, that's a good thing to point out. Not all bodies can be stood on, so teleporting might actually be a better rule, especially given how interesting that is as a mechanic.

[failed line of thought, don't read] Maybe, instead, the rule should just be that a piece can move any object in the same cell along with it when it moves. It may even be a good idea to include other players' pieces in that. Hmm. No. This would incentivize the formation of large clumps of agents that could essentially move around the board unnaturally quickly, using similar principles to those caterpillar trails, and aside from that being too damned weird, it would overwhelm the capacity of the cells. I like the idea of pairs of allied agents being able to do this, though (analogizes one carrying the other while the other rests). And in the case of objects, it would still incentivize clumps.

"longer descriptions of the abilities"

I'd like that. That would be a good additional manual page, mostly generated.

I should probably rewrite it, but the reason the rules document is the way it is is that I was writing it for developers (are you one btw) and so there were a lot of things I didn't want to be prescriptive about, and I figured they could guess a lot of it as they approached their own understanding of how the game should be and how things fit together, and I want to encourage people to fully own their understanding of the reasons for the rules.

For that, writing in this way actually might be necessary to get people to ask "how should it be" instead of just taking my word as law and not really thinking about the underlying principles.

It says you can move on your turn, but doesn't specify where you're allowed to move to (anywhere? adjacent spaces? in a straight line like a rook?)

I'm surprised you wouldn't just assume I meant one space, given a lack of further details.

It says you can pick up and drop objects on your turn, but "objects" are not mentioned anywhere else on the page and I can't figure out what this refers to

In this case, the other rules are on the card backs. A lot of them are, which may be part of what's going on here.

When someone gets a terrible hunger desire, it's explained on the card that killing creates bodies and bodies can be carried. Object stuff isn't needed before then. Maybe I should move the mention of object pickup to the hunger card as well, but I'm not sure there'll always be room on that (I'm considering doing one with a micro deck to support placing cards in the world), and it's possible that more objects, other than bodies, will be added to the game later.

terms like "nearby" 

This one gives me anguish. I don't think formally defining nearby somewhere would make a better experience for most people and I also don't want to say "on or adjacent to" 100 times.

Edit: I think a card symbology glossary would be a good move here.

Ah, so that's how most people do it. Personally, I can't say that using a spreadsheet would appeal to me more than a programming language, but it might be more approachable for others than installing rust or nix, so I might consider porting in the future.

[just now learning about the no free lunch theorem] oh nooo, is this part of the reason so many AI researchers think it's cool and enlightened to not believe in highly general architectures?

Because they either believe the theorem proves more than it does or because they're knowingly performing an aestheticised version of it by yowling about how LLMs can't scale to superintelligence (which is true, but also not a crux).

Everyone has an AI maximizing for them, and the President is an AI doing other maximization, all for utility functions? Do you think you get to take that decision back? Do you think you have any choices?

You should not care very much about losing control to something that is better at pursuing your interests than you are. Especially given that the pursuit of your interests (evidently) entails that it will return control to you at some point.

Do you think that will be air you’re breathing?

Simply reject hedonic utilitarianism. Preference utilitarianism cares about the difference between the illusion of having what you want and actually having what you want, and it's well enough documented that humans want reality.

Have you tried exa.ai? Maybe that's the crux, it's doing semantic search, perplexity doesn't seem to be, so exa maybe takes over its niche and also makes me kinda mad at it for not doing the most transformative thing these engines could be doing.

Interesting that perplexity also doesn't put FASD at the top despite it being so common.

Pro and free are currently using the same model.

Sometimes I use it for finding examples of things. Perplexity is actually not good at finding things.

EG:

What are some single player games that kept some logic on company servers so that players couldn't figure out secrets by decompiling the game code?

Perplexity: [looks at the pages you'd get if you just ran that as a google search] While there are no specific examples in the search results, I'm going to say some shit about the idea of doing that which very few people asking this question would need.

Claude: Spore, Diablo III, SimCity, No Man's Sky, Assassin's Creed Origins, Hitman [actually understands and engages with the question]

Oh, I just double-checked the claim about no man's sky (and spore), and it almost certainly isn't true o_o

Though the reason it gave, "preserving a sense of mystery of exploration" would have been a really good application for this, and I am kind of surprised they didn't do it. Which at least partially satisfied my query. So still a somewhat useful example.

what are the rates of the most common intellectual disabilities in childhood

perplexity: [boring stuff, doesn't list the disabilities]

claude: [lists some disabilities and] Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD): Estimated 2-5% of school-age children in the US [o}o !!!]

And I was able to corroborate that claim and this has substantially impacted my worldview. It's the most common cause of childhood intellectual disability. I then looked up the FASD subreddit and had a real heartwrenching time.

Another weird example

Is natto considered mogumogu

perplexity: yes

claude: no, mogumogu means chewy [ongoing conversation] oh you're thinking of neba-neba

And I can't imagine having a conversation with Perplexity in this way, though I'm not sure why it's so bad at that. They seem to have made it so that it forgets all of the context in followup questions.

I often feel like Perplexity's LLM parts, the clever parts, the synthesis, is flattened away, all it's allowed to do is recite.