Thevenin
Someday, I’ll be a little old man passing on my hardest-earned life lessons, and I’ll tell people this:
Hope is not the expectation of future improvement. Hope is the defiant refusal to give up. It is the antithesis to nihilism. Fight on not because you think you’ll win, but because fighting is the right thing to do. Many wars have been won through this kind of perserverence.
There are bad times ahead, but ignore the gloom and focus on yourself. Spit in the face of insurmountable odds and live your life as if it makes a difference. Someday, you may find – quite by accident – that it does.
After years of yearning, I finally worked up the nerve to take a pottery class! And I think I nailed my first attempt, too.
As of last month, SAE is making NACS an open standard (properly open, not just in name). So if you want to make an NACS charger, you get permission from SAE, not Tesla.
https://www.sae.org/news/press-room/2023/06/sae-international-announces-standard-for-nacs-connector
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know for sure that there isn’t any patent-pledge sneakery involved here, but I would be a lot more comfortable using those designs myself if they were published by a standards body like ISO, IEC, or SAE.
In electrical engineering, a thevenin equivalent circuit is a small, simplified circuit that mimics the behavior of a large, complicated one for the purposes of calculation.
Whenever I talk on forums, I make effort to distill ideas that are often nuanced and math-heavy into something everyone can relate to. The thought once struck me that I’m making a thevenin equivalent of myself, and the name stuck.
Artificer: “This is Bixby, and he’s my coping mechanism.”
Bixby, the construct who sounds like Danny Devito: “That’s right, I’m a mechanism and I’m trying to cope.”
In Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games like Dungeon World and Monster of the Week, if the player fails a challenge, in addition to the usual consequences, they gain XP.
This makes players feel like their efforts aren’t wasted, but it also sets up a cool dynamic: if you only gain XP through failure, then your character will stagnate unless they seek out challenges they could realistically fail.
I haven’t run many RPG systems, but I’ve had great success running The Witch is Dead by Grant Howitt as a party game. Because it’s one page of rules with a succinct objective, it’s easier to learn and more broadly appealing than most card games – my mom enjoyed it as much as my nephews.
If I were looking for a new one-page RPG, I’d be looking for a few highlights:
- A strong elevator pitch. A one-page RPG needs to communicate a lot of ideas in as few words as possible. The intro to the game needs to set the tone and stakes and create common expectations. Being genre-savvy can help with that; tell your players that they’ll be executing a bank heist under the nose of a dragon, and they immediately know what to do and what can go wrong.
- Rules of thumb, not rules of math. I’m sure there are some great crunchy one-page RPGs out there, but that’s not really playing to the medium’s strengths, in my opinion. In The Witch is Dead, the spells the players can cast are described as “little bits of hedge magic to help around the house,” which I really like. It communicates their power and capabilities faster and more comprehensively than saying that Mage Hand can exert 10 lbs of force and move 30 feet per round.
- Good DM tools. Ideally, a one-page RPG should be as easy for the DM to set up as it is for the players to learn. In The Witch is Dead, there are roll tables for the village, the enemy, and the plot twist, which I found very useful. Just as the elevator pitch for the game needs to kickstart the players’ imaginations, the setting needs to be a springboard for the DM.
It doesn’t change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not “a virtual brain” that creates “art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it.” What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.
Today’s large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don’t make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers – they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They’re not striving to make the correct answer. They’re just producing the most statistically average output given the input.
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn’t create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person’t style, it must make a copy of that person’s work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.
None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.
It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images
This is the process I was referring to when I said it makes copies. We’re on the same page there.
I don’t know what the solution to the problem is, and I doubt I’m the right person to propose one. I don’t think copyright law applies here, but I’m certainly not arguing that copyright should be expanded to include the statistical matrices used in LLMs and DPMs. I suppose plagiarism law might apply for copying a specific style, but that’s not the argument I’m trying to make, either.
The argument I’m trying to make is that while it might be true that artificial minds should have the same rights as human minds, the LLMs and DPMs of today absolutely aren’t artificial minds. Allowing them to run amok as if they were is not just unfair to living artists… it could deal irreparable damage to our culture because those LLMs and DPMs of today cannot take up the mantle of the artists they hedge out or pass down their knowledge to the next generation.
