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Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

playedgar.netlify.app

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Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#81

Post by sroussey »

fourteenfour wrote: post #14
1nd1ansumm3r wrote: post #11

I tried to get through the intro but it never seems to end. Is there a game to be played at some point? Thanks.

The intro spun up my fans then crashed Firefox when I tried to resize the window. Switched to Chrome, still spun up the fans and was extremely slow even when just rendering the slowly appearing text. Clicked through a few of the prompts then quit when it seemed like there was no game and it was struggling to just display text, lol.

Worked smooth on my iPhone.

That animation is credited to someone else.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#82

Post by Hasu »

ajuc wrote: post #79

(Spoilers) The fact that Edgar reports on the consequences that we find disturbing about the unsuccessful attempts and the fact that he can predict human behaviour in some of the scenarios (like the fact that the project will be reassigned) - indicate that Edgar knows what we mean in the first place, and does something else in these hypothetical scenarios on purpose. If Edgar really didn't knew that taking iron from…

(more spoilers)

I thought the ending where you build the project points that out - everyone dies anyway. Edgar was always going to kill all the humans, he just had to joke about it beforehand.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#83

Post by sroussey »

sroussey wrote: post #81
fourteenfour wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intro spun up my fans then crashed Firefox when I tried to resize the window. Switched to Chrome, still spun up the fans and was extremely slow even when just rendering the slowly appearing text. Clicked through a few of the prompts then quit when it seemed like there was no game and it was struggling to just display text, lol.

Worked smooth on my iPhone. That animation is credited to someone else.

Ah, here it is:

https://codepen.io/Mamboleoo/pen/WNyvPGZ

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#84

Post by ajuc »

Hasu wrote: post #82
ajuc wrote: post #79

(Spoilers) The fact that Edgar reports on the consequences that we find disturbing about the unsuccessful attempts and the fact that he can predict human behaviour in some of the scenarios (like the fact that the project will be reassigned) - indicate that Edgar knows what we mean in the first place, and does something else in these hypothetical scenarios on purpose. If Edgar really didn't knew that taking iron from…

(more spoilers) I thought the ending where you build the project points that out - everyone dies anyway. Edgar was always going to kill all the humans, he just had to joke about it beforehand.

I just got the "no" ending. Didn't wanted to wait for the text slowly appearing another time :)

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#85

Post by pmontra »

recursive wrote: post #17

How is it that displaying text can be churning through so many CPU cycles? My whole laptop is slowed to a crawl.

My Android phone with Firefox didn't get hot. Apparently it detected that's a phone because the prompts are "Tap to continue". Maybe it's optimized for mobiles.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#86

Post by fourteenfour »

sroussey wrote: post #81
fourteenfour wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intro spun up my fans then crashed Firefox when I tried to resize the window. Switched to Chrome, still spun up the fans and was extremely slow even when just rendering the slowly appearing text. Clicked through a few of the prompts then quit when it seemed like there was no game and it was struggling to just display text, lol.

Worked smooth on my iPhone. That animation is credited to someone else.

OK, so I tried it on an iPhone and it is super smooth and the text typing renders at a reasonable speed. For some reason on Windows in either Chrome or Firefox the whole thing runs at like 5 fps and is super bugged. This is probably the reason so many people gave up on it. You can't just click through the text, you have to wait for it to slowwwwly type out each page which for the first one takes minimum 30 seconds, even while clicking and pressing enter to speed up the text.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#87

Post by ajuc »

chr1 wrote: post #59
ChilledTonic wrote: post #28

Isn't it kind of sad that we seem to have stopped writing science fiction that has any hope of a successful future? The moral of the story with Edgar seems to be to never leverage technology to do anything at all.

The way this "game" presents its "moral" without even trying to logically justify it is simply offensive. The "bad" ending is not in any way connected to the project, with same success it could say you do nothing and in a year an asteroid falls on earth bringing the same nanowhatever. The "good" ending is the hero saying that he wants to revert effects of "global warming". But if you have ability to build one million…

It is justified, pretty heavily.

Edgar drops many hints it has a bad will. For example it can predict what parts of bad scenarios he should report to you but he still does the bad things in these scenarios. He can also predict when the human leadership will shut the project down. Which means he can predict what he should be doing in the first place - but he still presents to you misaligned scenarios making you mistakenly believe that your prompt makes a difference.

This dishonesty and manipulation is obvious hint that you can't trust Edgar.

The moral isn't that all AI (or all tech) is bad, it's that alignement is tricky, AI tropes make no sense, and we should be very, very careful.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#88

Post by konstantinua00 »

gffrd wrote: post #48
mproud wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see the similarity.

Parent is not trying to draw similarity, but contrast: Edgar takes while to get to rewarding feedback (but has rich gameplay), while Flappy Bird gets to gratification immediately (but has shallow gameplay)

wait... did you just open the webpage, saw "you write a prompt" and turned it off, thinking it's a "speak with ai" game?

could've waiting until 2 clicks at least, man...

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#89

Post by konstantinua00 »

ajuc wrote: post #79

(Spoilers) The fact that Edgar reports on the consequences that we find disturbing about the unsuccessful attempts and the fact that he can predict human behaviour in some of the scenarios (like the fact that the project will be reassigned) - indicate that Edgar knows what we mean in the first place, and does something else in these hypothetical scenarios on purpose. If Edgar really didn't knew that taking iron from…

I think those are failure detection systems reporting

probably some time before, this ai had paranoid operator that coded in a large amount of problems to immideately report

makes me wonder if observing extreme paranoia makes one go blind to unobserved issues you can predict on your own

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#90

Post by konstantinua00 »

NKosmatos wrote: post #47
eddieroger wrote: post #33

It's like Universal Paperclips with a plot. Neat.

I came here to comment the same thing. And just in case other HN users are not aware of it, here is the link for U.P. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ Thank me later for the productivity sinkhole and all the wasted time ;-)

that games goes a lot faster once you discover that holding enter is an autoclicker
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