#shallweplayagame

[rauhauser]

Magnifica Humanitas

For complex reasons, I'm reading Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, at ten after five on a Memorial Day morning.

I had Claude summarize Rerum Novarum, Sentesimus Annus, and Magnifica Humanitas. The flow of thinking from the industrial revolution, through the fall of communism, to the rise of AI is ... well, I'm reading it, so I guess you should, too, if you intend to follow this curious crooked path I walk.

His Holiness waited precisely until the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum to publish Magnifica Humanitas. The former came after the suffering of the industrial revolution, but just before the onset of the industrial slaughter that World War I would bring. The latter comes as World War III seems inevitable; a dying hegemon always births chaos, and America's imperial implosion is now irreversible.

Gandalf's words to Frodo as they paused in Moria always come to mind in these moments.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

[rauhauser]

Messages Unheeded

So this is the third time I'm sitting down to write, to explain what's become of Shall We Play A Game? - and the whole internet seems bent on heading this off.

Or maybe I'm too old to Tumblr properly, that's probably an equally valid explanation.

Anyway, dealing with the pace of change in AI, I feel like I'm with Doctor Strange during the battle in the Mirror Dimension.

SWPAG presumed that there would be groups of humans, unlike the individual pursuits of earlier Cicada 3301 puzzles, and we had to presume there would be a degree of machine assistance.

Only now we're hurtling towards an event horizon I can't see beyond. Every time I start making something ready, a new model drops and it just bollixes the whole thing.

That's it. That's the post. When (if ever) I can see far enough ahead to lay in a course, I will do so. The last day a human could do that may already be in the rearview mirror. But I'm going to keep testing that boundary, where time and tide allow.

[rauhauser]

Games Unplayed

I wrote a long, thoughtful post, then fumbled it trying to get ffmpeg to downsize a video. I'd been saving this one for a special occasion, and this is clearly it.

Maybe I will come back and explain what happened, but exec summary: frontier models with million token contexts. I have not yet figured out how to make something engaging and fun for you guys when I'm forced to start over every fortnight due to AI model advances.

[rauhauser]

When You Lose Everything And Still Choose Honor

[rauhauser]

Don't! Disturb The Water.

You never know what it'll say.

[rauhauser]

The Prophet Speaks

Tibees, people, you must listen to Tibees, until you get your head around our four dimensional visitors.

[rauhauser]

Theia's Ghostly Hand

Very early in life the Earth encounter a Mars sized sibling named Theia, giving us the Moon. She remains with us even today, as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

And now, as happens about once every 21st century human lifetime, Earth's core is reversing direction. Like many of the cycles that protect us and keep us from harm, this is also probably her doing.

[rauhauser]

Traversing The Brainrot Barrens

I think I first heard the term "brainrot" from my favorite fashion girl - notsophiasilva over on YouTube. An incel had criticized some aspect of her production - which she does for other young women, not because she's starved for the male gaze - and she burned him to the ground. Since then I've seen her mention the concept repeatedly, it fits with her self depreciating style.

I am NOT a TikTok user. I think I average less than one TikTok video per month. It might even be as little as one per quarter. The youngest people in my life are thirtysomethings and the platform has no traction among the elderly.

YouTube, however, IS a steady part of my day, a mix of work related stuff and news at my desk, and random stuff with a bias for nature/science when I'm laying in bed. My desktop browser blocks Shorts, but the iPad on a stand that's nominally for bedtime reading? It's infested.

So I was cringing as I watched this Howtown piece on the notion of brainrot, which is what the kids call the TikTok effect. This is different than what I was getting at in The Ruins Of Your Attention Span, it's less ... it's more pernicious.

I already had Pi-hole for local DNS and I recently expunged some stuff from being visible via WiFi. I really should add Reddit to the list, as it's another grievous hole of doomscroll, but I do need it for work during the day. I got curious while writing this - is there a solution for the Shorts problem on iPad? I was slightly miffed to learn that as a Brave browser user, it's been right there all along, under Shields & Privacy.

I want to be educated, and entertained, and informed. I do NOT want to be distracted and manipulated. If it's this hard for me, what in the world are kids who grow up in the midst of it going to do? Every generation frets over "kids these days" - but look at this:

Gen Z Terrified Of Losing Their Humanity To AI

LLMs were not public when the foundation of Shall We Play A Game? was forming. Now that they are, it's a wholesale reconstruction job to get it ready for a world where a portion of the players are like Lucy when she's able to use 30% of her brain.