Sam Shields @smshieldsy.bsky.social presents Playtrace Arc Search, which essentially acts as a 'heatmap' of playtraces for designers to use for posthoc analysis. Very neat stuff!

Anyways, I'm probably not saying anything that hasn't been said in more eloquent or researched manner - I just felt the need to scream into the digital void on this one. If you're still reading, thank you for coming to my TED talk and I wish you safety and well being.

I was outraged by the state of LLMs being shoved into everything before, and the impending sense of dread of some of the damages I listed above. But this one (and it's downstream implications) struck a particular nerve that I'm having a lot of trouble letting go of.

Danger to others, themselves, and the environment, accumulated across that huge combinatoric space. What unseen damage comes from that? Is it like the assumption in the mid 20th century that plastic is just hunky dory for the environment, snowballing until it's too late?

A few people for each search, but across millions of searches and people. Put aside the native environmental/power damage, the medical and psychiatric damage, and political misinformation for a moment. What is the net impact of those people making dangerous decisions based on a result they trust?

But let's even just a few people got this result and didn't have those advantages and decided to climb. How much damage would they inflict? I reported the result and hope it changes, but it got me thinking - how many other situations that are potentially destructive get demonstrably wrong results?

"No, climbing on wet sandstone is generally not a concern". A result that, to a novice climber or uninformed audience, could place people in direct danger and cause damage to the environment. I am grateful that I had the tech, media, and climbing literacy to know this was TOTAL bullshit.

Anyways - back to search. I was in a bit of a rush so I didn't go to my normal sites directly, I just slapped my search into Google - wet rock sandstone in "area". To my surprise, the AI response, above the reliable websites on the matter, informed me (in bold that)...

If a hold breaks in these situations, you will get injured - rock rash and bruises to broken bones to worse, and you might injure others. The good news is that services like weather underground and wetrockpolice allows you to concretely know if it's a risk. Has it rained recently? Don't go!

Worse yet, if someone is hiking below you, or someone else is being a dork and also climbing near you, you could cause rock fall that could seriously hurt (or kill) other people. You become a hazard to yourself and others.

So - unpredictable sandstone that can break unexpectedly makes it so you can't guarantee your safety. It's inevitable on a climb where a fall might be unsafe, but your skill keeps you safe. You might be on a lower incline slab, or be over a ledge with slack in your system.

Think of it this way - climbing is like having saving throws in dexterity. If you can make it so that your saving roll is always above 20, you'll never fail a roll. However, if things cause your check to be below 20, you could roll badly and seriously hurt yourself (or die).

This is because climbing outdoors is a constant exercise in risk management. Rock is pretty solid and predictable (for the most part). This makes climbing safer than you might think - if you know your body and can make good risk assessments as you go, you can stay very safe.

The biggest one is to make sure that it hasn't rained in the last 3-5 days on an area with sandstone. This is because sandstone, when wet, becomes soft and brittle. This makes it so that not only will the rock be extra susceptible to breaking and erosion, but also unsafe to climb on.

I was planning to do some sandstone climbing today to work on some safety techniques. Growing up in Nevada and the west being a home of some (if not the) best climbing destinations in the world there are some precautions you need to take before you climb on it.

Both Foundation and that one were exercises in saying "oh so that's where that comes from" every other page

Have you read Neuromancer yet?