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Also: Mickey Mouse says "Mario Kart," devs get diagnosed, and the Enterprise cranks up the stereo.
Hello! This week we're talking about the eternal realm of Scrooge McDuck, insect madnesses, and paladin logical fallacies.
The Mt. Moon benchmark
Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, has been trying to beat Pokémon Red on Twitch for the past week. The experiment is being run by Claude’s developers, the only people who could possibly afford the ballooning API costs. While Pokémon has been beaten by machine learning agents before, these experiments meant training an AI specifically to beat one game; here the draw is watching a generalist model approach the game in a human-like way.
Or sort of human-like. It uses a bunch of tools in concert — looking at images of the screen, reading the game’s RAM, writing detailed notes and adding them to its knowledge base, periodically getting its knowledge base reviewed by another AI — and seems to receive hints from the developers. But it still doesn't manage to play the game at a seven-year-old level. It routinely does stuff that makes no sense (switching Pokémon three times and then trying to run from a fight) and has a terribly short memory that leads it to loop the same actions for hours. It spent more than three days (78 hours) stuck in the Mt. Moon maze, inspecting the same ladders endlessly.
This all seems to have been great marketing, and Twitch viewers love it, in the same way they loved watching fish beat Pokémon. As Claude finally broke out of its Groundhog Day loop on Mt. Moon on Saturday, the chat filled up with more than 2,000 viewers, who cheered on its context-cleaning cycles and chanted “AGI” as Claude strode boldly past the ladders that had once transfixed it.
But some AI true believers on the r/singularity subreddit were disheartened at Claude’s lack of emergent brilliance — and, often, abject stupidity — while playing a game that can be beaten by a goldfish. “Lengthened my AGI timelines a bit,” one Redditor said.
Exploring an iPhone video graveyard
Tired of machine-made junk polluting your internet? Why not trawl through some forgotten human-made junk instead? A bot called IMG_0001 (created back in November) makes it easy to channel-surf between 5 million iPhone videos added to YouTube between 2009 and 2012, when Apple had a two-button upload process that led countless users to upload untitled snippets of their lives to the platform, where they’ve sat mostly unviewed ever since. If the bot sounds familiar, you might have seen the blog post that inspired it, or similar sites that serve you zero-view videos, like astronaut.io.
While these sites romanticize the activity of surfing uncharted regions of the web, the format of IMG_0001 also turns old footage into a modern form of overstimulation: lurching between handheld camera feeds, slowly getting your bearings, then flying into a new unknown perspective. We encountered IMG_0001 after watching streamer/Twitter user Choobs use it to entertain his chat, and it seems to work best as a party game.
Tuning into the billionaire frequency
We were vibrating poorly the other day, and were lucky to chance upon a mystical money fountain (via the streamer Skylarky):
There are many, many channels like this, which freely combine pseudoscientific concepts like healing frequencies, thought vibrations, and numerology. (They also overlap with binaural beats, a real sonic illusion of dubious financial benefit.) But they’ve continued to drift away from, like, what a frequency actually is, the point where many just play random low-key ambient music. Some are oddly dark; others could be playing on TV at dentist's offices across the US. They’ve established their own coarse eternal realm of Scrooge McDuck imagery, where golden showers of coins erupt forever over a mandala of banknotes and 3D dollar signs. The video linked above seems to be inspired by the image of a starship traveling through a sci-fi wormhole, but has converted the vessel into a monumental block of bills terminating in a golden spigot raining pennies into space.
Where did all this come from? It seems mostly based on Solfeggio frequencies, a 1970s numerological theory that takes the do-re-mi method of learning musical pitches and maps them to specific frequencies. A 2013 blog post from musician Roel Hollander attempted to check the sources and found it all pretty arbitrary, especially given that standard concert pitch didn’t exist in the 11th century when the do-re-mi system was invented. But nobody really cares about any of that — money frequency videos seize on any shiny number, whether it’s 432Hz (which music theory guy Adam Neely called “a big new age circle jerk”) or “angel numbers” like 1111Hz.
New game caters to arachnophobes
Monster Hunter Wilds is the latest title to add an "arachnophobe mode," listed under its accessibility settings, which turns the game's smaller spiders into blurry slimes. Curiously, it does not affect the game's two enormous spider monsters, which remain uncensored. MHW is only the latest big game to add an arachnophobia mode, with mixed results—some players are more unnerved by the knowledge that a game's cute stand-ins are actually spiders in disguise.
- Satisfactory (2019) turned spiders into creepy 2D billboards of cats, leading to the Q&A question "will you add an Arachnophobia Mode that isn't actually scarier than spiders?"
- Kill it with Fire (2020) added an arachnophobia mode after release that made spiders blobbier and more toy-like
- Grounded (2020) removed the legs and turned them into floating orbs
- Webbed (2021) turns its spider hero into a Meat Boy blob
- Hogwarts Legacy (2023) removes legs and adds rollerskates
- Lethal Company (2023) turns them into 3D models of the word "spider"
- Star Wars Jedi Survivor (2023) patched in a mode that replaces a scorpion enemy with a less threatening low-poly version
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Zombies (2024) removes the legs and turns them into Doom-y floating torsos with teeth
So: blobbify, reduce legs, try not to look like a spider in disguise.
We saw a few comments claiming that devs were inspired by the popularity of spider-removal mods in Skyrim that preceded the current wave of arachnophobia patches by a decade. While there may be some truth to this, it's not totally satisfying, as Skyrim mods that make the spiders hairier are actually more popular than mods that remove them.
Chum Box
Games
Sonic Adventure 2 had a heartbreaking farewell message for users who deleted a Chao [link]
1992 adventure game Inca knew how to rock (stick around until takeoff at 1:25) [link]
Unpleasantly difficult N64 kart racer Mickey's Speedway USA (2000) is now chiefly remembered for inspiring a joke character in the user-made fighting game M.U.G.E.N.: a game box that spawns a stream of kart-riding Mickeys who say "Mario Kart" [link]
Thanks to the ongoing accretion of IP in Call of Duty Warzone, you can now play as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle smoking a huge green gun-bong [link]
This spreadsheet of indie devs and their “special traits” — which include “insect madness” and “pineal drynesses” — is impressive marketing for a mecha game called B.C. Piezophile [link]
RPG completionist Mortismal is the 15th player to complete Pillars of Eternity 2's The Ultimate challenge, an achievement officially verified by the devs [link]. Earlier victors had their names engraved on a plaque and were rewarded with a performance of Dolly Parton's "I will always love you" by lead developer Josh Sawyer [link]
Balatro dev LocalThunk started a blog, and his first post is about solitaire [link]
The Internet
This “Star Trek intro but the theme is coming from inside the ship” video starts to work better than it has any right to [link]
The specter of Adam Neely appears again in a jazz-hating video starring ancient MidiJam 3D instruments [link]
A fiber optic cable core video about “dead internet theory” is not for the faint of heart [link]
Logical fallacy lich is undefeated [link]
AI
A sk8er Harry Potter AI video did numbers on TikTok [link]. There are few things that AI models know better than the actors from Harry Potter and LOTR movies, who have to do costume changes for each new AI fad about runway modeling, Wes Anderson, concert footage, etc.
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