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by jbottoms 1195 days ago
An ePrimer has a few components: the book itself, a Ractor mentor, a curriculum that includes Ractor paid milestohes, and scientufic metaphor stories that are the rubric and scaffolding. It might also include the VR or AR components that supply the immersive context. I've taught this in a master's level Metaverse course at a NY university.
3 comments

Notably, we see two models for uses of the Primer in The Diamond Age. The one everyone thinks of has a single human Ractor on the other side, who takes a genuine, nigh-parental interest in the student's development over a period of years. The others... don't have that, and the outcomes diverge.
It’s a good point. I think we can easily imagine GPT writing (in ascending order of cost) speech synthesis actions, mechanical Turk scripts, custom actor interactions. (With the “tool script” for actuating each becoming progressively more complex.)

A Primer framework could make these pluggable. Also the curriculum could be pluggable and either generated or ingested from existing courses.

I guess the mapping of curricula -> scripts is probably the hard part, and what GPT-N (for some N not much bigger than 4) could most interestingly help with.

You've been teaching The Diamond Age? Fiction?
Not really. The Duamond Age" is referenced as a template, but it is not required reading.The main components of the course are 1) writing a Ractive, 2) designing a Paper Theater for the Ractive, and 3) designing the set for the Paper Theater. The object is to continue the existing workflow for media with apropriate extensions for the Metaverse. The work is done in teams of 3 people with continuous reviews by team members. An underlying goal is to teach a collaborative media design process. Our view is that collaboration is the main leverage component of the Metaverse.