Not Daily Podcast

We discuss with listeners whether an AI has imagination, and how it is seen by the general public.We present new tools developped by Yoann to learn Japanese and compare the usage of Kanjis and Chinese characters.For the main question of this episode, we try to assess whether or not there has been an ongoing anti-rationality vibe in our media and myths. It brings us to a lot of places, assessing the relationship between empathy and rationality, or even its place in storytelling: is rationality the enemy of drama and therefore not a good story driver? Or is it the core of any character growth? Is an excess of rationality why totalitarians dystopia fail, or is it just that they're missing key components of the human nature in their application of rationality... Is this all a matter of imperfect information? Or is it a warped rejection of determinism from the very depths of human nature?Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

Listen to the full interview: Listen: http://163.172.97.59/ndp/ndp17-bonus-fullinterview.mp3We first revisit what your storage system says about you to bring up the social aspects that we didn't study last time.But the core of this episode is the reason why it took us a while to make it: we tried to interview an AI powered by GPT-3, the latest machine learning framework from OpenAI. You can listen to the raw interview, but there's a lot of ambiguity between what humans produced and what AI produced, and even though this ambiguity is a pretty cool piece of performative art, it may not be the best podcast experience :)So in this episode, we debrief this interview and share the best highlights from it: what is GPT-3 good at? bad at? Is it intelligent? Is it conscious? What does any of these words even mean? What's the fundamental difference between its "brain" and ours? Can it replace us? Could it have written a better description?All this and much more in an exclusive interview of our new AI

Going back over our last episode, we wonder if we spend too long talking about main characters, as opposed to background NPCs, and then ask the real question: what is the main storyline of the real world?We follow that up with Bioshock: it is a cult classic that we both didn’t try until fairly recently, and even though this genre of games doesn’t suit either of us, there’s still plenty to be said about the Bioshock universe and the philosopher that inspired it.Finally, we go back to our tech/productivity side, continuing in a way the discussion from episode 6. Seeing that operating systems have lately abstracted the storage away from the user, is it the death of the file system? It seems that retrieval within a huge blob is more suited for the human brain, and successes like smartphones or Gmail seem to lean that way. But is there no redeeming qualities to a structured file system? Are we doomed to let all our data sit in a huge mix of everything, or is there still hope for the file-sorting lovers?Join us on:

We revisit our last episode’s conclusions: turns out that making an MMORPG is in fact a pretty arduous task, but maybe there’s interesting things we can still look forward to instead.We then talk about recent recurring dreams about corpses and highschool diplomas, and how their oddities let us experience different parts of the brain.Finally, we tackle a question that mixes game design and cognitive psychology: what creates empathy towards some NPCs. We examine examples like Undertale, Pokemon, Animal Crossing or Watchdogs, to understand some important factors like shared experiences, free will and anthropomorphism. We end up analyzing the difference between cinematographic games and choice-driven gameplay experiences to understand how they create different caring vectors.Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

We review the comments for the counting base system: even though it was our longest episode yet, there is a lot that we still missed! It leaves us little time to talk about Masaaki Yuasa’s “Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!” and how it influenced the making of this podcast!For the main topic, when we talked about No Man Sky a few months ago, we decided to dive deeper into why we don’t see more MMORPGs lately. We explore a wide range of reasons, from game design to supporting technology, passing obviously by the economic aspect (did free to play and loot boxes really kill subscriptions?), but also the societal and psychological aspects (after all, the internet, the world and people have changed a lot since WoW first came out).Shownotes:Our No Man Sky episode:https://www.reddit.com/r/NotDailyPodcast/comments/ewdon1/ndp_11_no_man_sky_and_is_material_design_the_end/Interesting stuff we didn’t tackle in the episode: what numbers do you pick within your base:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternaryEizouken anime:

One of the most interesting things to come out of this pandemic is that it serves as a free global cognitive science experiment for everyone, so we discuss what we can conclude about habituation.In the main part, we discuss how we should celebrate the milestones of the podcast: using base 10 and celebrate “round numbers” seems so arbitrary... If we were to decide from scratch, could we choose a better base to count in without the bias of having 10 fingers? What even makes a good base? Come hear our argument and take part in the poll to decide how to number our episodes from now on :)Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

We can’t exactly not talk about the thing on everyone’s mind, can we… but can we put an original spin on it?Do not fear, though, we quickly move away from the grim reality to tackle a loosely defined topic drafted on Yoann’s notes: Are we approaching a Cultural Singularity? In the first part, we try to see if we could define it by looking at the layers of irony and self-awareness that riddle our communication in this post-truth era. In the second part, we dive into another approach, and see what we can infer from the technological singularity.Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

We first discuss how Banana on the Wall widened our understanding of performance art since we last talked about Banksy, and spend a bit of time exploring Yoann’s impressions of No Man Sky.We then turn to Material Design and its counterparts: recapping its history, we see that it’s definitely applying a scientific method to reverse engineer the human brain. Does this mean that it’s the Final Form of design? We try to answer this by thinking about the affordances of the medium that guide design evolution, and also by drawing a parallel with pop culture, a time-proven domain where we can clearly see generations as shared experiences.Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

In this episode, we spend a bit longer than usual discussing the latest TV show written by Russel T. Davies, “Years and Years”, and where we think it did great or fall short. In particular, we also wonder why science fiction seems so grim lately…But weirdly enough, our main topic of discussion about how theme parks are engineered and designed to be a bubble of happiness brings us back to the question of utopias and dystopias. What can this manufactured happiness teach us about our nature, and can it help with our daily lives?Join us on:notdailypodcast.com@NotDailyPodcastnotdailypodcast@gmail.com

We’re comparing Banksy’s work to Oobah Butler and Thierry Guetta, the star of the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop, and which of them pushes contemporary art to its limits.Then there’s a question I’ve long wanted to clarify: it’s super annoying to have a conversation with someone who has inconsistencies in their discourse, but is it really a problem in itself?To answer this, we’re examining how humans are inconsistent by nature, and logical consistency is an acquired skill that takes effort. We discover that it’s essentially the scientific method applied to discourse, and that it’s necessary for meaning to progress. So what can you do at personal level?Shownotes:The previous episode about Sarazanmai: http://163.172.97.59/ndp/ndp8-sarazanmai.mp3An introduction to Slavoj Zizek: https://archive.org/details/2013ThePervertsGuideToIdeologyExit through the gift shop: http://www.banksyfilm.com/How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8I faked an Art Gallery in London a

Vlad has a new cat, and it comes with a lot of new challenges, because Maine Coons are not really standard :sAfter this, we dive into the dauting task of analysing the symbolism of Kunihiko Ikuhara’s 2019 animated series “Sarazanmai”. You should definitely watch it before this episode! We try to make light of things like what “desire” or ㋐ mean, mostly adopting an approach following french philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan to try and figure out what life lessons are under the insane amount of butts.But this is a very rich show, and there’s so much we didn’t have time to go into, so I hope we can continue this discussion! What did you think of our approach? Is there other points you’d like to add/counter on it? Or other completely different questions/topics/symbolisms you’d like to dig into? Do you have a theory about the meaning of the word Sarazanmai? We’re very curious to hear a wide range of analyses!Shownotes:The waifu vending machine: https://waifulabs.com/blog/axPictures of the new cat: ht

We're back after this little summer break with a slightly different format! We've always thought of this podcast as a dialogue between us and you, so we're shooting for more interactivity! From now on, we're not recording in advance anymore, so that we can answer all the comments you leave us here, on twitter or at notdailypodcast@gmail.com.This episode is mainly focused on addressing all the comments we've received from episode 1 to 6 so we can start this format from a clean slate!But before that, Yoann introduces us to the GPT2 machine learning algorithm that he trained on a corpus of his writings. You can find all the details in his blog post, and Vlad's reactions in this episode! Feel free to try it out, it's very easy!And please let us know what you think of this new format, because it cannot function without you :) If you're trying out GPT2 in particular, share your experiments and thoughts, we're super curious!

It may be a bit late, but we wanted to reflect a bit on Black Mirror's interactive episode Bandersnatch, and try to see what it did well, what it did poorly, and why so many critics are negative about it.After the previous heavy episode, we are going into lighter territory by discussing the fundamentals of productivity and self organisation. With a focus on media consumption, we each detail how we're organizing everything we need to do/watch/read... We try to analyze the specter we're at both ends of, between Vlad's power-user use of Google Keep (and his memory ^^) and Yoann's numerous lists split in many Google Docs.What other systems did we miss? Did any of you figure out the magic weapon to solve all organizational TODOs? What's your product of choice?

This time, we go deep into the rabbit hole!We casually try out our new mics before jumping to the meat of the reflection: natural selection is the survival of the fittest and it brought us creatures better and better adapted to their environment, but what is the next step? How does this translate to ideas (memes) which are following the same pattern? And what does this mean for the universe's trajectory as a whole?This episode frames the topic and throws the bases for the reflection. There is plenty more we want to expand on. But we would love to do this with your input! We hope we gave you something to think about, so let us know the fruits of your reflection: is there something we missed? What do you think warrants more analyses? And most importantly, do you concur with our points, or do you have a totally different view of what the development of the universe so far is leading us to? Do you side with the teleological view? Are we all just byproducts?0

Hi! In this episode, Vlad comments on his new AI-driven cat toy. In the main part, we try to understand why there isn't an abundance of copycats following the success of Pokemon Go, since it would presumably bring a lot of cash. To do that, we come back to the root of its success: was it just the Pokemon brand? What even makes a good ARG? Are we lacking in technology? Or is player interaction doomed to fail? What is even the value of going outside?Do you have hypotheses we didn't mention? What's your dream ARG?

Hello! This time, we discuss Terrace House (Opening New Doors) which Yoann finally watched following Vlad's recommendation. Its cringy moments lead us to consider this episode's topic: What exactly is cringe? Can it ever be good? If not, why is cringe comedy even a thing? Is The Room cringy? Why?Join us as we attempt to make sense of this fuzzy topic, and let us know what you think constitutes cringe!

Hello!Yoann introduces the new member of his hardware family, a Surface Go, and explains what it's good for and not good for. The conversation naturally shifts to the topic of USB C and the many emotions it inspires, from the excitement of having a standardized universal outlet to the frustrations that a cable trying to do it all inevitably creates.Which side are you on? How do you feel about USB C, or Surface Go?

Hello!In this first ever episode, Vlad explains us why he switched from Alexa to Google Home. And for the main part of the discussion, we tackle the question that anyone (^^) faced at some point in their life: "what scale should I use to rate my ideas?". We'll dive into the difference between ranking and rating, elo systems for chess or go, that kind of things...Hopefully it'll help you organize anything you care about :)