There IS crying in Blaseball

WTCH - One Whole Year

Happy One Year Anniversary! I can't believe it's been 52 weeks since I started this silly thing. It's been so much fun to make, and I'm so happy I get to show you my children and the silly things they get up to. Thank you for reading, thank you to everyone who's reblogged and commented, it means the world to me.

Let's do it all again this year.

-Kosmo

oh! the space needle is a cute mascot base for seattle’s MLB team! i wonder how they managed to communicate that in a big foam costume?

oh

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Last month, the Blaseball website updated.

I've been cleaning up and finishing old art, and finally tackled this one. Hobbs Cain, from my doomed ship fic, "Until You Said Goodbye," a story suggested to me by @polkadotpatterson: what if you did a Necromancy and your boyfriend got killed about it. I went into a 12 day fugue state and came out of it with an 18k word fic about Hobbs Cain/Elijah Bates, doing Necromancy, and experiencing Consequences.

𝟓𝟎.𝟐 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒

Canon PowerShot SX160 IS

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

my solo zine for @blaseballzinejam :] !! i'm very proud of how it came out!

You'd think the best move would be to use a random number generator, but true randomness will only give random results. Turns out you need to play mindgames like that one northernlion clip in order to actually be good at the game.

First pitch of the game, pitcher throws 823, batter throws 127. Difference of 304. Not close enough for a hit. Out.

Second pitch, pitcher copies the previous batter, 127. Batter said 57. Good hit, only 70 away. Gets on 1st base.

Third, pitcher says 127 AGAIN. batter said 504. Differential of 377. Out.