Ooh nice! You reminded me of A Hand With Many Fingers, as well.
Every so often I come back to a daydream about an investigation game (think Her Story, Immortality, Gone Home, Digital: A Love Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, etc.) but with a premise like you're in a small town and have access to a bunch of messy data from all over the place, mostly in Excel files but also receipts, security cam footage, maps, stuff like that.
Maybe you're a a hacker or an AI that was able to gain illicit access to everything, but now you have to clean up and correlate everything without outside help (i.e. no ability to ask things like "Who is employee 731?"- either you figure it out or you don't).
DnD.Sci comes pretty close, but I wonder if making it more messy and involving things besides just CSV tables and borrowing ideas from things like https://www.huntakiller.com/products/nancy-drew-mystery-at-magnolia-gardens lets one fit in a lot more rationality skills besides just data analysis.
Man, I would really like the news to stop feeling like it's coming from the prologue of A Fire Upon the Deep.
Amtrack also travels fairly slowly.
I agree with Hank Green that it sure seems like it's so they can start selling ads like a traditional social media company, and furthermore that that sort of behavior doesn't feel like what one would expect from a company that thought they were building an AGI.
What would have presumably given much different results would be Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is actually a lot less sycophantic by all reports (I’m a little worried it agrees with me so often, but hey, maybe I’m just always right, that’s gotta be it.)
Now you've got me wondering if I'm being reverse-sycophantic, and have been trained to say things Claude would agree with?
I agree with the idea of looking at customer response management (CRM) systems for ideas. This talk feels like a pretty good overview of that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jwiABwGC6c
Because you hopefully may enjoy the ideas, I've been kind of tackling this from a hobbyist perspective:
Lately I'm drawing inspiration from this articles, and imagining that I'm "building myself a skrode": https://medium.com/@greyboi/building-a-skrode-initial-thoughts-a195c4a0663d - and also the original story, A Fire Upon the Deep where skroderiders are introduced. Chiefly, the idea that your own skrode is something that is DEEPLY personalized and customizable, including programming your own desired automatic and semiautomatic actions.
1I think I feel the same sort of 'What if we just said EVERYTHING deserves welfare?' thought. I care for my birds, but I also care for my plants, and care for my books, each in their own way.
Like, if someone built this small skin-device-creature, and then someone else came along and smashed it then burned the pieces, I think I would be a little sad for the universe to have 'lost' that object. So there's SOEMTHING there that is unrelated to "can it experience pain?", for me.
I love this idea, it feels like it would also work for a lot of non-fiction, and I could see this being a part of a traditional book club too.