There’s something almost poetic about watching a tech platform shoot itself in the foot so spectacularly that users flee en masse to a service most people thought had been relegated to the dustbin of internet history. TeamSpeak, of all things, is experiencing a renaissance. TeamSpeak! The voice chat platform I last used during my Counter-Strike days is now being overwhelmed by refugees from Discord. If that doesn’t tell you something about the state of modern tech platforms, I don’t know what does.

Remember those old-school text adventures where you’d die from dysentery, get eaten by a grue, or make one wrong move and plummet to your doom? The gaming landscape has certainly evolved since then, but there’s something oddly nostalgic about those unforgiving experiences that shaped many of us.

The recent release of Wayfarer, an AI model specifically designed to create challenging and potentially lethal gaming scenarios, has caught my attention. It’s fascinating to see this deliberate shift away from the overly protective AI we’ve grown accustomed to. The team behind it has essentially created what people are calling a “Souls-like LLM” - a reference that made me chuckle, thinking about my teenage daughter’s frustrated sighs while playing Elden Ring.