It's also not really clear if everyone is going to want a frontier model when the real implications sink in. Maybe we'll get sick of incomprehensible code optimizations and people wile tire of reading AI prose that feels ever-more-human. There might be a few use cases, but who is going to pay for this when providers start charging enough to be profitable.

Rather than saying "give us 1$ and we'll sell you a customer's data" it was more like "provide the navigation software and we'll let you keep the data". It probably seems like an elegant solution: as long as the driver needs navigation they "pay" for it with their data. It's really no different from how gmail or facebook works.

Or are just supposed to, as a society, happily await the results of their experiment handing weapons to psychopaths?

The creator of Sim City was working on a game called Raid on Bungeling Bay" [1] where your job was to bomb a fully functional civilization into the stone age. He had so much fun developing the civilization that he decided to make a game of it.

So maybe we just need a "Raid on Bungling Bay Redux: Massacre of The Sims".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay

Then someone offers them $1 each for a fleet of 1M cars, who is going to turn down $1M for a few TB of data?

I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.

You'll see similar arguments on this thread: "shame is just what you don't approve of", etc. Yes, it's just about being a decent person, and no, scientists still haven't discovered a moral axis in the universe that says what that means. Unfortunately we're in a position where we have to explain that "just be a decent person", which is an inclination shared by 95% of people anyway, isn't some vestigial instinct that modern humans should be ridding themselves of.

Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football)

-- Cory Doctorow

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11...

You can release a party balloon and it will create pressure disturbances as it moves to the top of the room, which theoretically you could measure. It's just not very loud.

Similarly, a charged particle passing through anything at any speed creates a disturbance, it's just not very easy to pick up on until it breaks the speed of "sound".

Space operas are closer to fantasy than hard science fiction: they are about extraordinary people and their extraordinary interactions, you aren't supposed to think hard about the physics.

Procedural generation, on the other hand, is all about emergent behavior, which is closer to hard science fiction: tweak the rules and see what happens. You have to build some deep core physics that are robust, make all the other systems interact in sensible ways over a wide range of conditions, and not worry when balance goes completely off the rails in some cases (in fact, that's the fun part).

No man's sky is a space opera. You could imagine it being hard science fiction: digging into the ground could be deadly (as opposed to a reliable shelter), water / atmosphere mechanics could change (as opposed to just... water and air), gravity could have a much greater range, resource concentrations could vary more, etc. You'd need some mechanics updates to avoid making this frustrating, but maybe not so many as you need to keep the space-opera plot moving.