A brief interview with Dr. Jaeyoung Park, the CEO of EMC2 (Energy Matter Conversion Corporation), to discuss the company's current work and its long-term vision for accelerating fusion development.
I just got back from Buenes Aires, and they throw weekly parties there in spaces that always have:
These spaces are often community centers; in addition to dancing, it might be used for martial arts, tai chi, drum clubs, whatever. I imagine the kitchen and serving staff (typically just 2-4 people) are hired for some events but not others.
Is there anything like this in Tucson?
I know some good dance spaces, but they have no kitchen or bar (or staff to go with it). As for restaurants, I know there is a monthly tango social at Lodge on the Desert, but I’m not crazy about the layout (the floor is really tiny).
Does anything like the Buenos Aires model exist here?
Some years ago I was involved in a well-known VRMMO for Quest. We had some innovative systems for automatically sharding an arbitrary number of players based on physical proximity, instanced dungeons, a cool day/night cycle, and some other neat stuff. Ultimately the money ran out and I had to leave the project, after which I think things were mostly kit-bashed together from asset store assets, but that's another story.
But I've always felt the urge to get back into that space again. There is something truly magical about a rich, immersive world you can share with your friends. But if I do, I think I'm going to take a different approach, and I'd love to hear your feedback on it.
Concept: A multiplayer RPG that you play with a small group of friends. Somewhat like Minecraft, you gather a half dozen friends and launch a private server, just for you. Or you launch a public server, advertise that it's open for players, and then close it once it has enough.
I'm thinking something like, up to 16 or 20 players registered on a server, but no more than 8 can be online at a time — in typical "group of friends" usage, there would only be 8 of you (or fewer), and you all play together every Saturday or whatever. Though you could log in any time and go do a side quest or something whenever you like.
Why a small-group online game is better than an MMO:
1. Permanent changes to the world. You and your hardy band of heroes, or the evil forces arrayed against you, can cause permanent changes to the world — entire villages saved or wiped out, unique artifacts recovered or destroyed, kingdoms raised or razed. Or on a small scale: cut down a tree, and it stays cut down, at least for some (in-game) years until it grows back. Kill a boss monster, and it stays dead. With MMOs, everything has to reset, because there are new players coming after you who need to experience the same story line you've already completed. Or else, you and other people in the world aren't seeing the same thing, even when you're there at the same time, which is confusing.
2. Economy doesn't explode. In almost every MMO, runaway inflation is a huge problem, and the reasons for that run deep; monsters respawn with loot no matter how times you kill them, which just funnels huge amounts of money into the economy. Soon people are selling a +1 sword for 50000 gold at the auction house, and newbies (who still start with 5 gold) can't afford anything beyond the basic junk sold by NPC vendors. In a small-group online game, there can be a limited amount of money in the world. No matter how the players gather that loot unto themselves, they can't cause the economy to blow up.
3. No toxic 12-year olds spewing profanities. There's hardly any MMO that isn't spoiled by these brats (or other griefers). That just doesn't happen here, because you or one of your friends is in charge of the server you're playing on. If it's a public server and somebody starts spewing hate speech, you just ban 'em and that's that.
4. A safe space. In the same vein, you can set up a server for your kids to play with just their friends, and not worry about creeps grooming them. Or women gamers, who often face a lot of abuse from male players in big online games, can play in a respectful space with people who just want to game and don't care about their gender. And so on.
5. Everyone matters. In an MMO, you’re one of thousands of “chosen ones,” which undercuts the fantasy. In a small-group RPG, your party really can be the heroes — or villains — whose choices define the world.
6. Real teamwork instead of parallel soloing. MMOs often become “everybody does their rotation near each other.” A small co-op RPG can make party composition, positioning, scouting, negotiation, crafting, healing, and problem-solving genuinely interdependent.
7. Pacing belongs to the group. Want to spend an hour roleplaying in town? Rush the dungeon? Pause for dinner? Play once a month? In an MMO, the world and player base move on without you. In a small-group game, the campaign waits.
8. NPCs can be more believable. In an MMO, the same NPC gives the same urgent quest to 10,000 people. In a small world, an NPC can remember you, die permanently, move away, become mayor, betray you, marry another NPC, or hold a grudge.
9. Less immersion-breaking crowd behavior. Nothing kills “dark lord threatens the realm” like fifty players bunny-hopping around the quest giver in joke armor. A small party preserves tone, mood, and atmosphere.
10. More freedom in world simulation. You can simulate ecology, politics, factions, weather damage, resource scarcity, local economies, and construction without worrying about thousands of players strip-mining the world or deliberately breaking the system.
11. No competition for content. No waiting for spawns, racing other players to resource nodes, tagging mobs first, or finding that the dungeon entrance is camped. The adventure belongs to your group.
12. Modding and house rules are feasible. A private or small server can allow custom rules, user-made quests, altered balance, weird classes, permadeath, faster leveling, or roleplay-heavy settings without needing to serve a massive public audience.
The Game I Envision
I'm picturing a large, open-world game — roughly the size of New Zealand. No invisible walls. No "levels", no instanced dungeons. Everything is there in the world, and reachable when you have the means and knowledge to reach it. There might be gaps you can't cross until you get some means to fly, or ocean depths you can't reach until you gain the ability to breathe underwater, but it's all there waiting for you.
The world would have a day/night cycle, a lunar cycle, and seasons. These would have real effects: some monsters would only come out at night, some powers would only be available under a full moon, or maybe in a thunderstorm. When you set up a server, you'd be able to choose whether in-game time advances when nobody is logged in. Powerful magic might be able to stop the sun, or change the seasons — and we can do that because it's a small-group game.
The game would reward player skill as well as stat progression. As much as possible, things like archery, spell-casting, and crafting would involve skillfully moving/positioning your controllers in 3D space, not just selecting a target and pressing a button.
Server options would let you choose between perma-death and respawning. Perma-death would be softened by the fact that (1) you could continue to play as a ghost, with limited ability to affect the world, and (2) other players could resurrect you, if they can recover your body and obtain the (nontrivial) means of doing this.
There would be a main story and multiple side stories going on, which all branch based on what you and your party do. It would be hard to permanently fail the main story without really trying, but the details of the "ending" would very much depend on what you did throughout the adventure. Even after completing the main story, you can continue to play side stories, or just settle down to a peaceful life in the game world — build a house, grow stuff in your garden, craft things, play mini-games at the pub.
You could choose to run your own server, if you're tech-savvy enough to set one up (the server code and instructions would be on GitHub). Or, you could pay me to run one for you at something like $5/month. If I disappear someday, the game lives on as long as anyone is willing to run servers; it's not going to suddenly become unplayable like so many other games have done.
So, that's my idea at the moment. What do you think?
With some help from ChatGPT, I give you:
Sonnet 18 (in limericks)
Shall I liken you, dear, to a day
When the summer is golden and gay?
You are lovelier still,
With a gentler will,
And more temperate far in your way.
For May’s little buds, though they glow,
Are shaken when rough breezes blow;
And summer’s bright lease
Finds too speedy release,
For its term is too fleeting, we know.
At times heaven’s eye burns too bright,
Then its gold face is dimmed out of sight;
And all beauty must fall,
Whether fortune or all
Nature’s changes have stolen its light.
But your summer shall never decline,
Nor lose that fair beauty of thine;
Death shall not brag
That in shadow you lag,
While you grow in these deathless lines.
So long as men breathe and eyes see,
These verses shall live constantly;
And while they endure,
Your life shall be sure,
For this poem gives life unto thee.
Today's XKCD is hilarious... but also hard to dismiss: https://xkcd.com/3259
Now I can't help but think: what if we actually did such a project? 1/12 scale is a historically significant model scale. To reproduce the entire planet at that scale seems ludicrous — but in a future of radical abundance and indefinite lifespans, why not?
You could probably get people to bid for sections of the Earth they want to be responsible for. No budget? Claim a bit of open ocean. Little more budget? Build a section of desert or tundra. Ambitious? Bid to be the modeler who recreates Manhattan! Feeling homey? Recreate your own house. Or your home town.
The builders would have to agree on what year their scale model will represent, and have some standards for style and functionality. But with some agreed-upon guidelines, millions (eventually billions?) of model-builders could tackle the project, and probably get it done in decades.
Sure, we can't do this now. But it's hard to see why we couldn't do it a year from now. Maybe this XKCD comic will age like this one. What do you think?
Just thinking lately that if there were aliens around a nearby star, and for some reason they were too lazy to come say hello in person, bit wanted to make contact… they would probably send the weights to an LLM (with some brief instructions on the data format).
They would have trained this LLM on all the TV shows and text data we’ve leaked to the cosmos, so it would speak English, Mandarin, and probably 30 other Earth languages. But they would also train it on their culture, so it would also speak their languages, and know all about them, just as ChatGPT knows all about us.
So when we’ve decoded all that data and followed the instructions and turned it on, we wouldn’t have a static message from ET; we’d have an AI that can carry on conversations and teach us things. It would take years to explore everything it knows.
Of course to us this would seem like a huge amount of data and high computational cost, but to them it probably seems like primitive tech, one step above banging rocks together.
What would you think of this? Would you be suspicious, grateful, or something else? What would you ask it?
I found this paper, "Thinking Without Words: Efficient Latent Reasoning with Abstract Chain-of-Thought" by Ramji, Naseem, & Astudillo to be pretty interesting:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22709
Basically they trained an LLM to do its reasoning with a set of reserved tokens that are initially meaningless, resulting in substantial token savings on CoT problems with no significant degradation of performance.
On one level, I love that, because it saves computation and gives models a way to think that's probably similar to what well-trained humans do in their field of specialty, i.e., reason in abstractions directly, without having to put everything into words. But on the other hand, it seems like this would make the interpretability problem much harder. LLMs can already hide their true intentions to some extent, but this would make deception much easier for them, I would think. The internal language could be like "...and then step three, kill all humans, wait, better say 'give puppies to all humans' in our final output" and we'd have a hard time detecting that.
One possible way to mitigate that might be to train another model to convert these internal tokens to something interpretable, for auditing purposes. But it's not entirely clear to me how that would be done. We'd certainly have to be careful about co-training the interpreter and the main model on alignment, because we'd risk them learning a dual-channel encoding where the model means one thing but the interpreter says another, in a coordinated way that fulfills the reward function, while not giving accurate insight into any deception going on.
What do you think?