Seems pretty obvious to me just from “four-player, four-monitor arena battle with full eight-way scrolling and AI drones for players not present”.
And it’s clarified with “As a social experience had it been released in 1986, this would have been the grandfather to games like Fortnight; a multiplayer PvP battle arena where each player was supposed to have their own dedicated set of controls and display.”
The main question I had was what was the form of combat. There was no mention of shooting. So what was it? Ramming? Lasers? Magnetism? Bullets? Turns out it is bullets. Boring.
But they did say "a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar" but it would have been more accurate to have said "it's literally a 4-player version of Sinistar" and I would have had zero remaining questions.
Sure, people have been putting different sprites on their projectiles for a long time. But whether it flies in a straight line, drops from the top of the screen, or follows a ballistic arc, a bullet is a bullet. It doesn’t matter what sprite you use.
And yet even Feanor was a “good guy” at one point in time. It wasn’t until many years after the invention of the palantiri that he went off the rails, and that was only after talking to Sauron for a while.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
And more particularly, any remaining telescope after an apocalypse which caused all of them to be controlled and by a mind-destroying superhuman force of literal evil incarnate.
It’s not the palantir’s fault that Sauron exists. You might notice that there are several other psychic tools lying around that nobody is using because Sauron will enslave anyone who does. The Throne of Amon Hen, certain magic rings, etc, etc. The danger is Sauron, not the tools themselves.
So what? This was never about the moral culpability of the inanimate object itself. (Charitably ignoring, for the moment, that the One Ring was instead a part of Sauron, infused with his own life force. )
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
No, that’s normal. See also newspapers, radio news, television news, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, The Algorithm, etc, etc. It’s not like Tolkien invented a new thing here; the wicked Vizier who tells the King selective truths is a trope practically as old as time.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.
Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
Reasonably foreseeable is the tonic to cure your attempt at a dilemma. There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.
I have unfortunately lived long enough to see my passion cross this line.
If you don't mind answering, what exactly was this particular passion of yours?
> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.
Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.
After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.
Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.
It depends on your moral framework. For example if you believe killing is always wrong, then guns are not neutral - they're a tool designed for evil uses.
> once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.
That’s not true. They were only dangerous to use as long as an insanely powerful immortal demon god had one. If you used a Palantir he would notice and draw your eye toward him. He could then make you see what he wanted you to see, unless you were strong enough to resist. He corrupted Saruman and Denethor merely by talking to them, showing them misleading things, and convincing them that he could not be defeated by any means. Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.
The tools are neutral. It is the users who are good or evil.
It’s the same with the Throne of Amon Hen, fwiw. It’s only dangerous to use because Sauron will notice that you’re using it.
TIL. So it's an even better analogy. Tech is not a problem unless Sauron can read our positional data and control our attention machines in our pockets.
To blame the phone in your pocket is also to miss the point. There are whole industries out there aiming to manipulate your attention. Television, news, advertising, etc, etc. They’ve been manipulating people for centuries, and don’t need phones to do it.
They really must be incompetent. First to make the control for a bridge portable, second to make only one of them, third to have nobody in charge of the thing, fourth to lose it, fifth to not be able to afford to replace it.
I suspect that they do not actually contain the encryption key. It is more convenient if the disk encryption key is stored on the disk, but separately encrypted. You actually want to store the key multiple times, one for each unlock method. If the disk can be unlocked with a password, then you store the key encrypted using the password (or encrypted using the output of a key derivation function run on the typed password). If it can be unlocked with a smartcard, then you store a copy that is encrypted using a key stored in the card. When Bitlocker uses the TPM, it no doubt asks the TPM to encrypt the key and then stores that on the disk. To decrypt the disk it can ask the TPM to decrypt the stored key, which will only succeed if the TPM is in the same state that it was in when the key was encrypted.
The reason it's done this way is to allow multiple methods of accessing the disk, to allow the encryption password to be changed without having to rewrite every single sector of the disk, etc, etc. You can even “erase” the disk in one swift operation by simply erasing all copies of the key.
That is also required for any kind of key rotation to work, you're getting new key for a key, because alternative of using key directly would mean re-encrypting the whole drive when it changes and of course only having single one instead of multiple
Working backups are important regardless, but if you use a TPM then you’d better have your recovery keys somewhere convenient. I’m sure you can print them out and keep them in your wallet or something.
don't worry, ms pushes users to just put data on onedrive, they will start losing data far before machines actually die. We already had plenty of stories of that mess.
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