Avoiding Gell-Mann amnesia! Unfortunately, to even get to this question you have to be expert enough in one area to see through the BS… Not a luxury everyone is afforded.

Precisely. If you train by lifting stones you can still use the lever later, but you’ll be able to lift even heavier things by using both your new strength AND the leaver’s mechanical advantage.

By analogy, if you’re using LLMs to do the easy bits in order to spend more time with harder problems fuckin a. But the idea you can just replace actual coding work with copy paste is a shitty one. Again by analogy with rock lifting: now you have noodle arms and can’t lift shit if your lever breaks or doesn’t fit under a particular rock or whatever.

If your basket has a big fuck off hole in it stop putting eggs in…

Thus frames the eggs as the humans and the basket as earth. Could easily flip it and say we are stewards of one planet and if we fuck up so catastrophically we have to leave maybe our arrival wouldn’t be the best idea for the next habitable planet we land on…

Wow, that was their takeaway from that game? I honestly didn’t think about it once the whole playthrough, why are they so desperate to role play racism/sexism?

I can’t help comparing it (unfavourably) to baldurs gate 1. The story just didn’t hook me the same way.

God I hadn’t thought about it that way. Scroobius pip wrote “Tommy c” about it, which has a really positive spin, so I always thought about that angle.

Yeah, I the flaws define the character, more even than the relationship with Watson in my eyes. I quite enjoyed Johnny Lee miller in “elementary” the same way for actually being shown struggling.

Superhero Downey Jr type holmes’ are fine in their own way but sort of misses the point.

I haven’t played a lot of souls, but elden ring death (both of non-boss enemies and protagonist) is super toothless. What made it more relevant in previous games?

Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.

For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.

Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).

It doesn’t feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?

That’s a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.

Ultimately I don’t think we’ll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.

Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I’m not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.

Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.

Merry Christmas to you!

It had a single player campaign too! Deck builder pvp gets too sweaty for me, but I really like deck builder RPGs.

Couldn’t find a good primary source to dig into it. But from Ipsos:

“I believe the preference for physical discs amongst next gen gamers reflects the potential value they derive from the pre-owned market,” commented Ipsos director Ian Bramley to MCV, “which is holding up the preference for physical - this is unlike the music and film markets.”

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/64-percent-prefer-physical-media-to-digital-distribution

I’m sure there’s a lot of generational and market segment differences. I never really understood “collecting” games. But I guess people do that in digital too with their huge steam sale backlogs!

I’m sure not many people care about physical vs digital per se. It’s the arbitrary locks by servers, digital storefront, DRM etc. So that when you pay your money you have no idea what you are getting and what your rights are. Physical game media was a simpler time from that perspective (play in perpetuity, don’t redistribute, cool cool that seems like a fair trade) and resulted in better pricing and experience for consumers.

I’d accept “move on” if the argument was just “muh pretty box” (god knows there are plenty of ways to buy pretty boxes of vidya IP) but consumer rights are surely worth fighting for, or we get needlessly bled for ever more dollars.

Even better than that. You take the medicine and it reduces everyone else’s risk of getting sick, even the ones that refuse to take the medicine. It’s the closest thing we have IRL to literal magic.

As an immunocompromised person, thank you to everyone who gets vaccinated against communicable disease, you make my world a little less heinous to navigate.

It continues despite general opposition. That’s exactly the problem. Systemic and unconscious biases are really hard to combat, even if there wasn’t a vocal reactionary minority. “just don’t discriminate” has at this point been proven beyond doubt inadequate to equalize opportunities.

Well how about, before you form an opinion, you go do some reading.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482221000115

I take it you’ve never been a hiring manager or worked in HR. Hires are almost never made on an objective basis, the bias of interviewers/assessors inevitably affect outcomes. In the absence of positive discrimination, on average, this means unfair outcomes for minorities (because some people are bigots and most people have unconscious bias against out-groups).