I would say taste and touch are my strongest recall senses. I can still remember the experience of my favorite sandwich at a local sandwich shop, discontinued around 2009.
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
We're being forced to use some AI features in our IDE at work these days, and we see it make stuff up all the time. Very unpleasant to work with. It will tell us implementing something a certain way is impossible, when I've implemented it myself that way in the past. It will fabricate reasons why builds are failing. It will make assumptions about database schemas from thin air.
It's like a science fiction writer or an improv actor doing technobabble. If by chance it knows the actual answer it might use it, but even if not it still has to say _something_ that sounds plausible to a layperson. It'll never say it doesn't actually know, because their character it's acting as _should_ know.
> lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.
I can open a zip in a normal file explorer window just fine. Maybe this is something stripped from European versions for anti-monopoly reasons?
Anyway here's what I've done with my Win11 install to make it tolerable:
- Disable onedrive
- Make a secondary local admin account and use that exclusively instead of the the main Microsoft account one (since the library paths in the main account all have onedrive in them even if it's disabled)
- Disable web search in the start menu with group policies
- Remove task view, widgets, the search bar, etc. from the task bar
- Put the start menu in list view and remove every pinned item
- Left-align the taskbar
- Show file extensions in explorer
I'm sure there's a lot more I had to do, but I don't remember off the top of my head.
The actual extraction is done with a wizard. Sure you can navigate in and out of the file, but if you want it to all come out, you need to right click and extract all which brings up a wizard with multiple steps.
On Linux in the file explorers, there is a right click context menu that just dumps them into a folder or not right there, no wizard, no extra pop-ups or anything.
If you want that experience on windows, you have to download 7zip or winrar and navigate to a nested context menu item.
You can also just copy the files you want to move in the archive view and paste them where you want them.
Or you can click and drag the files from the archive to where you want to move them.
Funnily enough, it's really only Linux users and people who used computers in the early 00s that don't think to move files in archives the same way they would move files that aren't in archives.
XFCE's Thunar doesn't natively handle compressed files, but I much prefer it to the bloat that is Dolphin. I'm surprised someone found a way to complain about Windows not being bloated enough.
What we get typically is a second or third-hand summary of an analysis someone else did about how the current version works, with no indication of what stuff has to stay as-is in our replacement and what stuff can be improved.
Splinter Cell and Thief are the only series I'm familiar with that actually have light and shadow based stealth. Everything else is all hiding around corners or inside/under furniture, like Metal Gear Solid.
The Splinter Cell lighting stuff never made much sense anyway, since you'd be perfectly fine if you were standing in a shadowy patch while making a clear silhouette on the illuminated wall behind you.
The strangest misbehavior moment I remember from the first game was like this: There were two NPCs working on computers in a dark room. Behind them was an open door to an illuminated office. I walked into the office and shut the door, they didn't notice there was suddenly no light coming through. I turned off the office light, no reaction. I opened the door again, and then they noticed the office light had gone out.
One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a light gem indicator. One of the things I really love about the Thief games is how intuitive they are because they're mostly relying on sight/sound senses, you can relate to how the guards/defenses are going to sense you because it's how you would detect someone. If you're noisy you know what will happen next, and the guards are extremely vocal in telling you their state.
Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.
Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.
I think it's a good idea to experiment with and discover the limitations of small, untuned models before exposing yourself to the modern very powerful ones. It gives you a better sense of their nature as token predictors and not real sentience.
In the same way, seeing an incompetent stage magician fumble before you see a very talented one perform flawlessly will help you understand that it's all sleight of hand. If you jump right to a professional performance, you might think it's real magic.
Agreed, and you could get a completely unrelated LLM to generate a similar apology without any of the real context, it would make up reasoning just as effectively.
Yes, this isn’t a logical error at all. If you don’t have taste in one area — actually, it’s even worse, you’re not even aware of your own lack of taste — why would I trust your taste in another area?
This is assuming that the owner is also the chef, and exclusively concerned with cooking. Being a restaurateur is a multi-disciplinary job. The owner's job is literally to have good taste in all areas of the restaurant business: food, interior design, hospitality, branding and marketing, etc. No one is saying that they have to be a graphic designer. The obvious answer here was to have the good sense to hire a local college art student for like $300 to make an endearing and meaningful logo.
Probably more likely to run into a Shoggoth than Cthulhu in the Antarctic, or maybe an Elder Thing if any are still around. Rl'yeh is a bit further north.
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
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