Pour changer, une suite pas très tech d'articles (bon ok, sauf le dernier).
Et comme ça fait un peu plus d'un mois et demi que je publie des liens, je vous pose la question très ouverte : Comment ça se passe jusqu'ici ?
Vous pouvez répondre par le canal que vous préférez, mais sachez qu'à travers la newsletter il est aussi possible de répondre directement au mail. Je serai le seul à recevoir la réponse.
I have a new job, though I’d be the first to admit it doesn’t look like one. Nevertheless, it’s important to me: I click and click at little squares until coins come out, and spend the coins until I get more squares. The job is a game called Garden Galaxy, and I’m its newest employee.
[…]
I know that games aren’t work, at least if you’re not explicitly playing them for money. And I know about the intricacies of simulating work. I’ve written about it.
But you don’t understand: I need to finish making my garden.
[…]
In all these games I’m anything but idle, which makes a game like Garden Galaxy stop me in its tracks. The sounds, the aesthetic, even the gameplay tells me that by playing, I should be relaxing—so why does it feel like I’m doing something else?
L’entrée. Court, facile à lire, et qui me fait réfléchir sur les jeux et autres apps "que je consomme"
“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation… in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase,”
[…]
It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. Hence the emergence of a colossal trade in organizing people’s leisure. This need is perhaps one of the real absurdities of our existence today, and it reflects the decay of some crucial value-systems… in all types and kinds of human beings. The pursuit of frantic leisure… is perhaps one of the most dissipating qualities of the technical cultures. The individual on whom leisure has been imposed in massive doses, and who has little capacity to deal with it, then searches for distractions that will fill this vacuum… A great deal of the distress and psychic conflict that we see clinically… is the result of a warped and erroneous expectancy of human nature and existence. It is the omnipresent fallacy of our age that all life should be fun and that all time should be made available to enjoy this fun. The result is apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.
[…]
A craving for leisure, and the concomitant yearning for distractions to fill the void of given-leisure, is the result of our failure to understand the role and function of the need to lie fallow in the human psyche and personality… We have industriously misinformed ourselves about the essentials of human nature. We have confused the necessity to relieve human poverty and misery with the demand that all life should be fun and kicks. The entertainment media of modern cultures have further exploited this leisure void for commercial gain and flooded citizens with ready-made switchable distractions, so that no awareness of the need to develop personal resources to cope with fallow states can actualize as private experience.
Le plat principal. Plus long, et probablement celui qui bouscule le plus, essentiellement sur le rapport à l'ennui et l'activité. Je l’ai pourtant trouvé reposant à lire.
What had happened earlier that spring was a routine software update to a piece of my digital studio. But the update rendered a different, crucial piece incompatible. So I updated that. Which made another piece incompatible – an expensive piece. And I couldn’t update that. (This was at the height of the pandemic. Who could afford to update anything?)
Moreover, I was in the middle of a project – mixing our album A Sky Record – and I very much wanted to continue along the lines I had started. In the digital era, we are all accustomed to fast moving technology – but could I really no longer make it through even one album from start to finish on the same equipment? And if not, how do we ever come to any kind of mastery of our tools?
Le fromage. Court, pas spécialement tech, mais qui rappelle que derrière chaque update la rupture de contrat d’interface est le sommet de l’iceberg. Qu’en est-il des apprentissages ?
This paper introduces generative agents, interactive computational agents that simulate human behavior. We describe an architec- ture for generative agents that provides a mechanism for storing a comprehensive record of an agent’s experiences, deepening its understanding of itself and the environment through reflection, and retrieving a compact subset of that information to inform the agent’s actions. We then demonstrate the potential of generative agents by manifesting them as non-player characters in a Sims-style game world and simulating their lives in it. Evaluations suggest that our architecture creates believable behavior. Going forward, we suggest that generative agents can play roles in many interactive applications ranging from design tools to social computing systems to immersive environments.
En gros : Westworld en virtuel c’est pour aujourd’hui. Et si vous avez eu l’occasion de tester les technos OpenAI vous comprendrez vite que, sans aller dans un design aussi poussé que proposé ici, ces simulations sont très accessibles. Merci gauthe_t pour ce dessert à ganache au chocolat bien solide.
