Yeah. When you start to realize that video games are just success surrogates to help you compensate for a lack of success in real life, it gets depressing fast!

I did so much gaming in my 20s. Now in my 40s it’s hard to motivate myself to play more than a few minutes!

Seems like a lot of people base their D&D on themselves. I don’t really understand that. I always try to make characters totally different from myself to try to put my head in a different space. To me it’s a key part of escapism to try on someone else’s shoes for a bit.

Yes, of course. Look at Amish communities. Largely self-sufficient and thriving.

People who haven’t tried it greatly underestimate the amount of work though. I’d recommend dipping your toe in with some gardening at home first. Jumping in the deep end will usually lead to failure and disillusionment.

I think it’s supposed to be a depiction of an attack in progress. Creepy!

The man has all the emotional maturity of a toddler. He is only evil insofar as toddlers are evil. That is, he has persistently shown a lack of ability to accept and learn from the negative consequences of his actions.

All he knows is to chase praise, like a toddler chasing a butterfly, unaware of all the ants he’s trampling along the way.

But that doesn’t mean any follow-up predictions they make or solutions they offer or even explanations they have are right.

It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy we commit every time we point to an expert for making a correct prediction and using that as a reason to trust anything else they say. This is because countless experts make predictions all the time and if we ignore all the wrong ones then we need to account for the fact that one of them may be right due to pure chance.

I wouldn’t even go as far as to group people into tolerant vs intolerant binaries. Everyone is intolerant about something. Everyone has boundaries. You wouldn’t just let someone walk into your house and start using your toothbrush. But that’s not very controversial!

One of the biggest issues with tolerance vs intolerance debates is the unequal burden of tolerance. When it comes to housing, this is reflected in the classic NIMBY vs YIMBY debates. Many many people complain about NIMBYs but are actually NIMBYs themselves: they just want someone else to bear the burden. For example, they may be pro-early-release for a sex offender while not wanting that sex offender to live in their neighbourhood.

This applies to all kinds of issues. People may be pro-immigration but are they pro-giving-up-their-job to a (lower paid) immigrant? Probably not.

We as a society were much more tolerant and welcoming towards immigrants before we put all of our social welfare programs in place. In a society with no minimum wage, no social programs, and few/no regulations to limit housing development, there is no cost to immigration because immigrants have to claw their way up from the very bottom. That was how the big cities in Canada and the U.S. were built: by immigrants who choose to come here (fleeing brutal oppression and lack of opportunity) and make their own fortunes.

The complaint was that games journalism as an industry was unethical due to the unaccountably cozy relationships between game journalists and the industry they cover. Jeff Gerstmann is notable for losing his job (years earlier) due to his refusal to inflate a review score for the game Kane & Lynch.

Those legitimate complaints fell by the wayside when right wing commentators began their harassment campaigns against Sarkeesian and Quinn. The discussion turned into a culture war, much to the benefit of game publishers who wanted the spotlight off their quid pro quo relationships with game review sites. Ultimately, the rise of streaming and lets play content democratized game journalism, making the whole thing a moot issue.

Game development itself has also opened up more than ever before, with countless independent developers catering to gamers with every interest. Multiplayer games likely still have issues with toxicity towards women over voice chat, but I haven’t played a multiplayer game in over a decade so I don’t know the extent of that issue.

No, it was actually just about games journalism. Gamergate died when games journalism died (with the rise of streams and lets plays on YouTube).

Perhaps this map will help:

To get from Iran to Israel, the Iranian soldiers would have to cross Iraq (and Jordan) or Syria, both very unfriendly countries full of mountainous terrain. Not a viable ground invasion whatsoever!

Americans hate kings because they were founded by revolutionaries who fought against their king. That revolutionary, republican (small r) spirit is foundational in American culture.

No, though there’s been plenty of marketing where they claim “we know how to build AGI.”

They have marketed ChatGPT as a general purpose AI from the very beginning, though the question of how to leverage that has remained open.

I was very careful not to use the term AGI for this reason. General intelligence tool isn’t the same thing. It’s a much weaker claim, yet it’s also a far stronger claim than any purpose-built software. The ambiguity is part of their marketing strategy.

If ChatGPT were marketed as a toaster nobody would bat an eye. The reason so many are laughing is because ChatGPT is marketed as a general intelligence tool.

One of the only good uses I’ve seen for LLMs is as a sort of advanced grammar checker. I have a friend who is a subject matter expert but English is not his first language. He uses ChatGPT to help him rewrite his technical statements into plainer, more fluent English. He does not rely on the model for any subject matter information and when it hallucinates he is able to detect and correct the mistakes. Otherwise he finds it extremely useful as a writing tool.

Nothing like Prince of Persia. Has that overwrought modern platformer control scheme (with a zillion different things you can do in the air) that every single other modern platformer has. No thanks!

Anyone know of any modern platformer games without all that nonsense? The idea is to feel more like a human who actually needs to think before jumping. I want to feel the weight of my character, feel a strong sense of momentum, and be fully committed to jumps. Air jumps and mid-air momentum control are not my style.

That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).

6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than 1/10.

Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).

Prefer the juice that turns you into a bottle of juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice that turns people into juice…

People feel no social obligation because they no longer feel connected to anything. Membership in civic institutions and community organizations has fallen off a cliff. Urban planning has turned suburbs from walkable mixed-use communities into car-centric ghost towns. Rampant inflation and cost disease have destroyed affordability for many. Homeowners have become some of the worst ladder-pullers with extreme NIMBYism slowing housing construction to a crawl.