How I died in an AI simulation
Fictitious Fridays đ
Welcome to the Fictitious Fridays. Itâs a section Iâm testing in March â a weekly collection of notes, observations, recommendations, links, and thoughts. Nothing too deep or too shallow. Letâs go!
I. How I died in an AI simulation. As a teenager, I really liked reading about obsolete tech. The first computers that took up the whole room. The game of Pong. The first viruses and worms. There was something cool about the technology frontier in the 60s-80s. Thanks to emulators and the Internet Archive, I could play around with some of the oldies myself.
One of the coolest pieces of retro software I had come across was Zork â a text-based adventure game from 1977.
In Zork, you would type in commands and move around, manipulate objects and crawl through a dungeon. All in text form. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I had played the original game, and as I it was rather simple, I thought Chat GPT-4 could handle it.
The experience the AI bot generated for me started similarly to how the first Zork did: âYou are standing in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox hereâ.
I tried doing nonsensical things that Zork would probably not have allowed me to do. Licking the mailbox, for example. It all worked. The bot would describe my actions, commenting on how they were âunconventional choicesâ, but never did it bar me from doing anything.
I then decided I wanted to fly around.
âWhile I appreciate your imagination, the rules and mechanics of the Zork game world don't allow for unassisted human flightâ was the answer my personal HAL 9000 gave me.
But after some back and forth, we agreed to break the rules just once. It felt like entering a cheat code in a video game like Tony Hawkâs Pro Skater or Grand Theft Auto. Or maybe even better â like modding a game, making it play in a way that was never intended by its creators.
So there I was, playing⌠I mean, reading descriptions like âYou take a deep breath and concentrate, feeling a strange sensation in your feet as you begin to levitate above the ground. You are now hovering in the air, with a bird's eye view of the open field and the white house below.â By golly, I was flying!
I flew inside the house threw an open window. I found myself in a âliving room with various pieces of furniture, including a couch, a table, and some chairs.â I explored some more, going from room to room. It was just like Zork, only I had nearly absolute power. And what do people with absolute power do? They start blowing stuff up.
The AI bot tried to talk me out of it. But I was determined to blow up the house I was exploring. I ended up surrounded by debris, with the AI telling me that I was no longer alive (âunfortunatelyâ, âfor the sake of imaginationâ, âin this scenarioâ). That was how I died in an AI simulation. I Have No Eyes But I Must Scream level of eeriness, right?
II. My new short story is out! I published a longer (by my standards) short story that gives the reader a glimpse into my childhood. It follows three kids trying to explore the mystery of a little abandoned hut that started emitting a weird hum.
Hereâs a short excerpt to give you a feeling:
There were reasons not to look up, as their eyes were usually scanning the grass for brown beer bottles. At the kiosk, the bottles could be exchanged for any convertible currency â dolphin-shaped gummies, jawbreakers, Formula One stickers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gum. The lady who owned the little aluminum shop of wonders was a sweetheart. She was so apologetic when the kiosk ran out of plastic turtles you could get after collecting ten TMNT wrappers (only Donatello was left, but you couldnât really play with four Donatellos). âIâll call the wholesaler myself,â she swore. Even if she never actually bothered to do so, her promise made the three boys feel like adults.
Youâll find the full story on the Soaring Twenties website:
III. Is this still funny? Nostalgia has a hold on me. The playlist of todayâs Oleg very much overlaps with the playlist of 20-year-old Oleg. I re-watch The Office every year. And when I daydream, my imagination takes me to places I havenât visited in years. But what about humor?
In this mini-subsection, I want to share some of the stuff I found absolutely pee-my-pants hilarious 10-15 years and ask: âIs this still funnyâ?
Kicking off this section is the classical Swedish video titled âHow to dance at a raveâ:
Itâs a 6-minute video of a guy showing off increasingly funnier dance moves. From âwalking the dogâ and âmilking the cowâ to âChernobyl childâ and âmilking the bull.
Have a look and let me know if itâs still funny after 15+ years!
IV. New essay published this week. If you havenât had the chance to have a read yet, hereâs a link to my latest essay. Itâs called âFinding God in an underpassâ and itâs⌠about finding God in an underpass.
V. Everything is going to be all right.
âEverything is going to be all rightâ is written in a window of an otherwise grey building in one of Vilniusâs many sleeping districts. Every day we read hundreds of micro-messages outdoors â from billboards and graffiti to number plates. Donât tell me combinations like POO, LOO, or UGH never made you smile. Most of it all is rubbish and spam, but sometimes you see something positive. The other day I saw âI love Skodaâ written in snow on a car parked by my building. It made me smile. Itâs quirky. And, most importantly, it wasnât a swear word or a penis. Why isn't there more of that in the world?
V. Etymology of the week. DASHBOARD. Many of us use some sort of dashboard every day, like Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Manager or something. I never gave the wordâs origin much thought, but apparently, the term originally applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves. Like this:
Until next time?
Let me know if you found this edition worth your while. See you on the dance floor showing off those âbicycle pumpâ moves!






LOVED the dance lessons. I would have laughed at them years ago and I howled this morning. Funniest thing I have seen in a long time. Especially the last 4 minutes when he blended all the moves together. Fabulous. Thanks for that!