Mediator here. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what mediation is for. Mediation is about helping the disputants find a solution they can live with, but mediators never decide what that is. Mediations have a large emotional, human component. Most mediations include a step of just giving parties a chance to be heard by another human being. Mediation outcomes don't look like court outcomes for a reason.
And mediators do sometimes offer a mediator's proposal, but that's the exception, not the rule, and mediators do not decide what is fair. That's not mediation.
Real examples:
1. $50,000 contract dispute, really just wanted an apology, and dropped the dispute once they got it.
2. Civil dispute over incomplete landscaping that had been paid for. Was actually about an explanation for a romantic break-up. Ended with paying to replace the flowers.
3. So many disputes over which extended family members can have what access to kids, pets, and boats.
Those are choices the disputants made for what was an acceptable outcome, not the mediator, which is the point of mediation.
This tool sounds like it might be closer to something for Arbitration? That's a very different environment.
Appreciate the pushback, but I think this misreads the mechanism. Mediator.ai doesn't decide; it generates candidate agreements, scores them against both sides' stated preferences, and presents the best one. Either party can reject the proposed agreement. The parties still have to agree. That's facilitation, not arbitration.
On the hidden-interests point: the assistant actually tries to tease out unstated preferences. That's what the conversation with each party is for, and it uses several preference-elicitation strategies to get at what's underneath a stated position - but I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity for refinement here.
As a long time techie I understand the desire to approach mediation as a programmatic systems problem, but as a mediator, I'd recommend OP work as a volunteer mediator long enough to realize that mediation is ~90% soft skills.
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.
The only other tip I'll give:
When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.
OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):
1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
What did I spoil? That you keep dying? They'll encounter that very early in the game. And if you look around, you'll see that quite a few quit the game because they didn't understand that dying is normal.
The lack of knowledge about the other two items I mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an incredible drag. Even I would have quit if I didn't know about meditation.
You revealed the central conceit of the game. In my opinion, discovering that is an important part of the experience of playing the game, even if it's very early, and even though I did find it initially frustrating. The Steam page doesn't reveal that, and they have an incentive to make the Steam page fairly revealing in order to sell you on the game.
I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on the game because I didn't understand that dying is normal.
The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated - I had spent well over an hour playing it and it didn't even save the game?
And felt the same thing the second time round.
Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The only reason I returned to it was because I couldn't understand why so many would like such a game. So I finally searched online on how to save the game and ... oh, that's why.
As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see plenty of people quitting the game early because they didn't understand this. There's a whole thread on the subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game before they got to any of the interesting parts.
I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure people will actually play the game.
A revelation of a mysterious element of the game which is not revealed in any of its marketing material is a spoiler. The fact that you believe it's a "decent compromise" doesn't enter into it. The proper disclaimer for your comment would be: "Spoilers, but I think these things should be spoiled."
I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.
"presented at exactly the right time and in the right way" is highly dependent on individual gameplay experiences. For me it was revealed in a very obtuse way. I love the game very much but I think this is perhaps its biggest flaw.
You perhaps have a unique neurotype that wouldn't experience the intended positive revelation from the reveal. You are still ruining something for many more others than you are helping.
Please consider accepting what your critics are telling you, and remove the spoiler.
I think it's academic since the edit window for the comment has closed.
I do have some sympathy for the frustration. I don't think neurotype has anything to do with it. Struggling to phrase this in a non-spoilery way, but I think individual experience really depends on where they are in the game at the time of the reveal. I almost quit because of this as well - very glad I didn't.
This could be explained without spoilers though. Something like "There's a moment in the first few hours where you may want to quit. DON'T. Stick with it, I promise it's worth it."
I haven't played the game, was interested in it (I've heard of it before, just haven't gotten around to playing it yet), and I was a bit bummed to read about this unusual game mechanic without discovering for myself.
"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
IMO it's a good enough game that you could read the entire plot summary and it'd still be a good story & fun game to play. Much like how you can re-read an Agatha Christie novel & still enjoy it, the best stories are spoiler-proof because even when there's a "twist" that "twist" isn't as important to the quality as the rest of the work.
This is a standalone game that needs to be purchased. For PC, it can be acquired through Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/). It is also available on consoles, it is not available on mobile. It is playable with keyboard and mouse, but it was primarily created with a game controller in mind.
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
A half-joking comment I once heard from someone who was part of the group that established the NUC. It stood for "Not US Currency," but tracks the dollar because that compromise was the only thing everyone could agree on. The first stablecoin.
I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)
There used to be a story going around, possibly apocryphal, that the process to reset them used to be entirely manual and generally unknown to the rest of the organization. There was a big problem the week the person who had that task retired. Someone around here was probably there if it really happened and can add some color.
Here's a thought experiment. I offer you the chance to be put in a medically induced coma and shipped around the world to strangers you know nothing about. You don't know what economic, political, or moral system you'll awaken to. The only thing you know for sure is they, for some reason we're interested in receiving an unconscious person, no questions asked.
Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).
As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.
Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.
> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?
Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.
Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.
This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.
Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?
What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?
I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.
People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living? I don't know but 99% of my life being used to solve captchas makes it not worth living
>Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives
Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"-esque torture chamber. Given the historical track record of communism, you're more likely to end in the torture chamber than not in that situation. The curve of history bends towards factory farms.
I read your quote "Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"" and my brain immediately went to the millions of Americans working dead end jobs just to put food on the table for their family. It need not be communism for this to be a reality.
Not a chance. In fact all these developments make me convinced that my early choice for cremation over burial was and is the right one. Arrive blank and leave with grace, try to improve the world while you're here.
Already went through this exact process. It wasn't too bad but I think I got lucky this time. I celebrate the anniversary every year. Most of my memories were about how to walk and be afraid of animals with big teeth though.
Even in the best case scenario I would wake up in a world that barely makes any sense to me, where the things I cared about are long gone and nearly forgotten.
Imagine everyday waking up in a world that forgot the grammar you dream on. That's a curse.
I'm going to assume you mean this seriously, so I will answer with that in mind.
Yes, I can.
- I can build an unusual, but functional piece of furniture, not describe it, not design it. I can create a chair I can sit on it. An LLM is just an algorithm. I am a physically embodied intelligence in a physical world.
- I can write a good piece of fiction. LLMs have not demonstrated the ability to do that yet. They can write something similar, but it fails on multiple levels if you've been reading any of the most recent examples.
- I can produce a viable natural intelligence capable of doing anything human beings do (with a couple of decades of care, and training, and love). One of the perks of being a living organism, but that is an intrinsic part of what I am.
- I can have a novel thought, a feeling, based on qualia that arise from a system of hormones, physics, complex actions and inhibitors, outrageously diverse senses, memories, quirks. Few of which we've even begun to understand let alone simulate.
- And yes I can both count the 'r's in strawberry, and make you feel a reflection of the joy I feel when my granddaughter's eyes shine when she eats a fresh strawberry, and I think how close we came to losing her one night when someone put 90 rounds through the house next door, just a few feet from where her and her mother were sleeping.
So yeah, I'm sure I can create things an LLM can't.
So the only thing I am seeing here is physical or personal (I have no idea how you feel or what your emotions are. You are a black box just as an LLM is a black box.)
The only thing you mentioned is the fan fic and I would happily take the bet that an LLM could win out against a skilled person based on a blind vote.
I have --- set to autocorrect to —. I've been using it in formal writing for 30 years. When we were in high school, we had a "Dash Party" in English class, where we ate Twinkies and learned about the different dashes.
I would argue that LLMs overuse the emdash more because they overuse specific rhetorical devices, e.g. antithesis, than because they are being too correct about punctuation.
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
I loved my TI-99/4A. I used to think it was ahead of its time, but now I realize it was from an altogether alternate timeline where we built stuff to work.
And mediators do sometimes offer a mediator's proposal, but that's the exception, not the rule, and mediators do not decide what is fair. That's not mediation.
Real examples:
1. $50,000 contract dispute, really just wanted an apology, and dropped the dispute once they got it.
2. Civil dispute over incomplete landscaping that had been paid for. Was actually about an explanation for a romantic break-up. Ended with paying to replace the flowers.
3. So many disputes over which extended family members can have what access to kids, pets, and boats.
Those are choices the disputants made for what was an acceptable outcome, not the mediator, which is the point of mediation.
This tool sounds like it might be closer to something for Arbitration? That's a very different environment.
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