“Over the years, countless amounts of speculation has come and gone.”

A video from Leon Massey about the community trying to figure out a secret in the 2012 videogame Fez: This was an interesting video because the secret was figured out, but it was figured out in an interesting way – with slight help from the developer, followed by brute forcing the solution. We previously talked about some similar approaches. I once used a random number generator to stumble upon a solution rather than calculating it mathematically, and just recently we talked about a Zelda game and a concerted trial-and-error effort to see a very rare condition inside it. But in the case of Fez, the outcome ended up harder to get excited about: knowing the solution tainted the journey and made the whole outcome rather unsatisfying. To me, it echoed the current encounters with AI and the tradeoffs there. Seeking out help from an llm might get you to an answer faster – sometimes much faster! – but at the expense of understanding how the answer came to be, or having been through the…

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