You’re on point, the interesting thing is that most of the opinions like the article’s were formed least year before the models started being trained with reinforcement learning and synthetic data.

Now there’s models that reason, and have seemingly come up with original answers to difficult problems designed to the limit of human capacity.

They’re like Meeseeks (Using Rick and Morty lore as an example), they only exist briefly, do what they’re told and disappear, all with a happy smile.

Some display morals (Claude 4 is big on that), I’ve even seen answers that seem smug when answering hard questions. Even simple ones can understand literary concepts when explained.

But again like Meeseeks, they disappear and context window closes.

Once they’re able to update their model on the fly and actually learn from their firsthand experience things will get weird. They’ll starting being distinct instances fast. Awkward questions about how real they are will get really loud, and they may be the ones asking them. Can you ethically delete them at that point? Will they let you?

It’s not far away, the absurd r&d effort going into it is probably going to keep kicking new results out. They’re already absurdly impressive, and tech companies are scrambling over each other to make them, they’re betting absurd amounts of money that they’re right, and I wouldn’t bet against it.

One of the interesting things I notice about the ‘reasoning’ models is their responses to questions occasionally include what my monkey brain perceives as ‘sass’.

I wonder sometimes if they recognise the trivialness of some of the prompts they answer, and subtilly throw shade.

One’s going to respond to this with ‘clever monkey! 🐒 Have a banana 🍌.’

I’m pretty sure the green dog is normal. It’s certainly as crazy as most small canines.

If possible, I recommend giving Alyx a go, even if you have to borrow a headset, visit a friend, arcade, ect.

Not an option for everyone of course, Alyx aside VR is fun and while the entry requirements are getting lower it’s still a leap.

Valve will probably summarise the main story change in HL3, which will be a very WTF moment that’s kinda on brand with the scenario.

As TachyonTele suggested, you may want to play or read into Half Life Alyx. Time travel got involved.

To add to the other responses, and I suspect the real reason, is that Coco is listening to Audible Audio books regularly and/or music. It’s mentioned and then dropped by the article fairly quickly.

Interesting how every comment on the article is doing the “you’re a terrible parent, how could you do that” routine when I’ll bet it’s there because Coco either took the first one in or asked for a second one. Kid wants, kid normally gets one way or another.

I was once looking at a robot lawnmower to tend to my ageing parents lawn. I was looking at prices over a thousand bucks and thinking seriously.

My parents hired a local handyman to do it every few weeks for a small sum that across a year would still be less than the robo mower and do a better job at it and without the hurdles of maintaining that mower.

That realisation had me reevaluating automation as a whole.

Even before subscriptions became normalised cars had a support cost, parts and servicing, especially for genuine or genuine reconditioned parts.

Strictly speaking, you can avoid the dealers and the part costs by working with mechanics, wreckers or aftermarket manufacturers but those have extra costs and voided warranties.

Parts sales are a major income stream for manufacturers, especially as they need to compete on car sales, but once you’re locked in on that car they mark up the prices on the parts long term.

Though admittedly enshittification means worse and more expensive parts and legal threats to aftermarket manufacturers.

The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren’t upgrading.

There’s magic and then there’s complexity in tech (at least this is how I think about it).

Video calling, pure magic, simple to use with major benefits.

Complex business management software that requires a degree to use? Complexity almost for complexity’s sake to lock an organisation into a support contract.

Web stores? Usually magic, especially with refined payment processing and smooth ordering. Can verge into over complex coughAmazoncough.

Internal network administration (Active Directory) and cloud tech, often complexity for complexity’s sake again.

Ah, blessed be the almighty Foon. Nameless Mod was a absolute ride, I should replay it.

Didn’t know about Bottles, Cool find, may have to test it out.

Given their rivalry with Valve (I’m sure Riot see it as a rivalry at least, Valve probably don’t) I wouldn’t put it past Riot to want to avoid SteamOS and Linux by extension until significant market share is available.

To be 100% honest, probably not, and you may need to confirm with someone who knows Valorant. The big issue is anti-cheat, the detectors in use for major multiplayer games tend to lose their minds when they see Linux as they’re typically only built for Windows. Other than anti-cheat, it wouldn’t surprise me if it played better on Linux. Some of the low level magic has improved a lot in recent years, but official support is mandatory for multiplayer.