Widow's Bay, the delightfully eccentric new comedic horror series from Apple TV, is easily one of the best new series of the year. There's a reason everyone from Guillero del Toro and Ben Stiller to Damon Lindelolf (Lost) is raving about the show. It's an eminently binge-able, addictive series that pays tribute to all the classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways. Think Stephen King meets Parks and Recreation, with a dash of Twin Peaks—except Widow's Bay is very much its own refreshingly original beast.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is a widower and mayor of Widow's Bay, a quirky little seaside town that has a colorfully bizarre history marked by periodic tragedies. Tom is eager to elevate the town into a trendy summer tourist destination. But the arrival of New York Times travel writer Arthur Lloyd (Bashir Salahuddin), who has the clout to make Tom's aspirations for Widow's Bay come true, coincides with the onset of a mysterious fog. Local resident Wyck (Stephen Root) warns Tom that the fog is an omen that the island is "waking up," meaning more supernatural occurrences are bound to happen.

Initially skeptical, Tom becomes increasingly paranoid after a sailor who got lost in the fog essentially goes mad, with his eyes turning white just before dying. But by then Arthur has published a glowing account of his time in Widow's Bay and tourists start flocking to the island for the summer season. Tom gamely tries to put a positive spin on things. He stays in the local haunted hotel alone overnight to prove it's safe (it isn't), and runs afoul of the legendary Sea Hag during the traditional mayor's inaugural swim to open the beach.

But Tom still refuses to close everything down, despite Wyck's warnings. Tom's assistant, Patricia (Kate O'Flynn), has her own disturbing supernatural experience when she tries to host a "sunset cocktails" event to boost her social status in the town. It doesn't go well and the mayhem is next level. That's all I'm going to say, because the fun lies in the finding out.

Meanwhile, Tom's rebellious teenaged son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), has fallen in with a delinquent crowd out of sheer boredom, resentful that he's never been allowed to leave the island. That's because local legend holds that anyone born in Widow's Bay cannot leave.  The supernatural energy keeps escalating with each subsequent episode, eventually delving into the island's early history and the town's founding by one Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater). That history still has repercussions for Widow's Bay in the present.

A "dangerous excitement"

Series creator Katie Dippold is best known (until now) as one of the writers on Parks and Recreation, and Widow's Bay actually started out as a spec script for that earlier series. "That version was much jokier," she told Deadline Hollywood earlier this month. "It was more comedic and I think it gave a good idea of my sense of humor." But she described that script as feeling more like a spoof, "and as a horror fan, I just wanna be immersed into the island," she said. "I wanna feel like I could go explore this island and find all the little nooks and crannies and terrifying little spots. That's my dream, but I'm strange."

Clearly millions of viewers share Dippold's strangeness. By the time the Patricia-centric fourth episode ("Beach Reads") aired, viewership numbers had tripled since the launch, and those numbers have kept growing as positive word of mouth rapidly spread.

The most impressive aspect of the series is its mastery of tone: a perfect balance between quirky humor and spine-tingling horror that is incredibly difficult to consistently maintain. "I used to get into all sorts of antics when I was young, me and my friends going to check out the abandoned house and then running off," said Dippold of the tone she wanted for the show. "It was almost kind of a dangerous excitement. And I just love that feeling because you’re so scared, but you’re laughing so hard, and I just wanted to get that feeling on television."

It also helps that Dippold has populated her fictional town with such well-drawn, unique characters; even one-off side characters, like Todd the Shaman (Chris Fleming) feel fleshed out and fully realized. That's thanks to the show's terrific cast, of course, but the actors are given a lot to work with in the smart, snappy scripts. And the series' structure is very well plotted: it's part monster of the week, part longer narrative arc. The show is warm and funny in the margins, and genuinely scary when the supernatural antics ramp up. There's not a single false note across all ten episodes.

All episodes of the first season of Widow's Bay are now streaming on Apple TV. A second season is already in the works so we'll be getting even more comically horrific adventures. Dippold wants the show to come back as soon as possible—and so do we. She jokingly told Deadline that S2 will be "about how everything is great on the island and there’s nothing to worry about." Don't you believe it.

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Video game composer and sound designer Bobby Prince has died at age 81 following an illness. Developer id software shared the news. Engadget reports: Prince was perhaps best known for his pioneering work on the Doom series. The Library of Congress inducted his soundtrack for the original game into the National Recording Registry just last month. "Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back," the Library of Congress stated. "Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies." Prince also worked on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D. In 2006, the Game Audio Network Guild honored Prince with a lifetime achievement award.

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On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films himself in the ocean while describing how you can naturally build up a "solar callus" or sun tolerance to getting burned. (You can't.) In another, a young woman confidently states that eating healthy foods full of polyphenols and other antioxidants will help make your body more resilient to sunburn. (Antioxidants help w …

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In a viral essay about how ludicrous the idea that LLMs are conscious is, science fiction writer Ted Chiang asked us to consider Microsoft Word:

“Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded,” Chiang wrote. “Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time.”

Let me tell you about a Microsoft AI researcher, then, who recently spent quite a lot of time considering whether the legendary Microsoft real time strategy game Age of Empires II is conscious, and built a basic neural network within the video game using digital goats to prove his point.  

“If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II,” is the title of Adrian de Wynter’s paper showing his work. He told 404 Media that absurdity can be a powerful tool. “I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point,” he said. “I should also note that absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science.”

And so De Wynter built an LLM within AoEII using goats. “The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong,” he told 404 Media. “It's not an easy task, given that ‘human-like attributes’ is a bit of an abstract term.”

AoEII has a scenario editor, a sandbox mode that allows players to craft their own maps and quests using the game’s assets, and De Wynter used that to build an operational NOT AND (NAND) gate and a 1-bit perceptron within the game. In this crude version of an LLM, grass is 0, bridges are 1, and goats are the bits. “Only one rail is active at a time, with a goat acting as the signal carrier. When the gate fires, the bit-goats are removed (they ded) and a new bit-goat is placed in its respective output rail,” Wynter explained on his GitHub.

A perceptron is the simplest form of a neural network, it’s an algorithm that sorts an input into binary classes. YouTube is littered with videos of players doing the same thing with redstone in Minecraft. But no one claims the goats of AoEII are neurons in a thinking machine or that the complicated tracks of NAND gates players build in Minecraft show emergent intelligence.

De Wynter’s point here is that it’s possible to build a neural network in AoEII that works the same as the ones underlying Claude, ChatGPT, CoPilot, and all the rest. It’s a simplified version, yes, but the basic technology is the same. Faced with the absurdity of viewing AoEII goats as carrying the spark of consciousness, we might reconsider Anthropic's assertion that Claude has a “constitution” and experiences anxiety. 

If you’re looking for human-like traits, you will tend to find them. De Wynter’s argument is that it’s possible to build a basic LLM within Age of Empires II that has many of the same internal traits of the chatbots people use everyday. The difference is the interface. When a person interacts with an LLM through the medium of AoEII and not a chat window the perception of human-like traits in the LLM vanishes even though the underlying tech is the same.

He’d been playing AoEII since it came out in 1999 and thought it would be good for the thought experiment. “Age of Empires was an excellent way to drive the point home,” he said. “It is just about ‘alien’ enough to exemplify the representation-interpretation relation, but sufficiently well-known to really emphasise the point. It also works at a meta-level, since the example itself is a good representation of the argument.”

According to De Wynter, the problem of anthropomorphizing large language models (the neural networks we commonly call artificial intelligence) begins before scientific research even starts. He reviewed 315 computer science papers released over the last two years and found that 57 percent% began with the assumption that LLMs have human-like traits.

“What is common to some of these studies [...] is that they test and ascribe blanket human-like properties (e.g., anxiety or morality) to these LLMs while considering them the central subject of the experiment,” De Wynter’s paper said. “Regardless of these evaluations’ results being positive or negative, their core assumption–that LLMs possess anthropomorphic attributes–influences the experiment’s planning through (e.g.) the design of the test set, the interpretation of natural-language outputs, and even its null hypothesis. In turn, this directly impacts the conclusions made.”

“We either start by thinking that tokens represent language to LLMs the same way they do to us, or that because an LLM outputs a relevant string, it must be understanding the concept/having theory of mind/empathy/etc,” De Wynter told 404 Media. “This goes both ways: we could also assume that LLMs are blobs of weights just floating about on a GPU, but that would not help explain some skills that they are shown to have.”

Some people perceive their interactions with LLMs as “human” because the way they interface with it mimics a human conversation. “I propose that we need to stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language. Instead, we should perform experiments that allow us to see LLMs as how they are, not how we believe they should be,” De Wynter said.

De Wynter said widespread anthropomorphization of LLMs among executives, scientists, and the public is becoming an intractable problem. “This is why I used the goats: there are things which make the LLMs what they are in themselves (i.e., the relationship between weights as defined by some operation), and there are things which makes them what they are perceived as.” Goats and AoEII break the perception that these machines are human.

He’s also not ruling out that LLMs have some form of consciousness, but said that’s beside the point. “We tend to ascribe consciousness as some sort of binary construct (either it is or isn't!) but I'd argue that there are levels. It's hard to say that humans aren't conscious. But, what about a dog? Yes, of course. What about a potato? What about a virus? It's quite relative and we do tend to go for something human-like when we evaluate/define it, where, in reality, LLMs are things we have never seen before,” he said. “There was a recent article in science about bumblebees solving problems. Everyone was like surprisedpikachu.png — it's a great, amazing discovery. I love bumblebees and people understanding their behaviour is absolutely fantastic. But, did we really assume that they couldn't perform some sort of problem-solving? Why are we so surprised?”

De Wynter wants us to focus beyond the window we use to interact with LLMs. “I pointed out that if goats could show emergent capabilities, that's great. But these properties need to be preserved if we remove the chat panel. After all, it's not like your neurons know they are part of a brain,” he said. “I think the #1 thing that one can do to mitigate these perceptions is to have appropriate disclosures, and use good alignment techniques where the model is explicit on its nature. I worked a lot on how users perceive LLMs, and they do tend to get attached when it appears to have some sort of warmth/personality. To put it in another way, I don't get attached to my toaster, but I definitely get attached to characters on a movie screen.”

But people buy more objects—whether they’re toasters, phones, or LLMs—when they can empathize with them. “The issue here is that these capabilities and claims thereof are very strongly tied to marketing—after all, a lot of these models are products,” De Wynter said.

This is, of course, the point. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has repeatedly implied that building out LLMs is a path to creating an AI god. Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI board member and scientist, often talked openly with employees about seeing the company’s LLM as a god-like consciousness. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times that he can’t be certain if AI is conscious or not.

It’s good marketing for an industry that’s hemorrhaging money.

In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.

But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.

The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.)

Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration's policy.

Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today's decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing.

The big question is whether some of the monitoring equipment has already been removed. “We also don't yet know how much damage they have already done," Lofgren's statement said. "To be clear, this should have never happened. This pathetic scheme was illegal." For now, however, it appears that this is one instance where we won't have to wait for the courts to decide whether that last claim is accurate.

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