I feel similar but I wouldn’t say I particularly hate my parents.
I was an accident and honestly if anything I’m very frustrated that the only reason I was born was that my grandmother is super religious and refused to even entertain the idea of an abortion, hell she’s even responsible for my name (again from the fucking goddamn Bible. For me that’s ironic since I loath most organized religion.) but my parents in no way should have gotten together. I think my mom was just attractive and my dad is a pig for sex (I recognize some of that in myself so I guess I got that from him… Thanks…)
As others have mentioned it’s not so much that the entirety of all 38 years of my life sucked, but for me I have a distinct memory at 11 years old of having this feeling that something wanted me to kill myself because it just kept “poking” at me, making life miserable in various ways. I gave the sky the finger and said “fuck you I’m not doing that” simply out of spite of whatever it was. (I don’t believe anything like that now). So I have to imagine childhood wasn’t as bad although I did have to live through 2 stepfathers that both wished I didn’t exist probably as much as I do.
Anxiety runs rampant through my father’s side of the family and I’ve definitely been depressed for the entirety of my teenage and adult life. The world wouldn’t be affected by my passing, but I sure as hell would love to hit the “off button” as well. All that said, if women even found me worthy, I would never want to pass these absolute garbage genes on to anyone. That should be a crime thats how shitty they are (except my immune system, that seems pretty ok lol)
World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).
But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.
Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.
People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.
It depends on if you value your time or not. That’s what you gamble in WoW. If you don’t get your drop at the end of the raid, you lost time. When a new expansion obsoletes your gear, you lost time.
Oh wait, you literally have to buy play-time to even do the raid in the first place and roll the wheel. Not to mention the (sub)time it takes to level up and gear up.
Yeah. Just because you are not pulling out your wallet at every kill doesn’t mean you aren’t gambling and losing, both time and money.
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
It is gambling becaae there is a “house” you at playing against, whoever sets the odds and has a financial interest in them.
If you’re playing a singleplayer game, you are still triggering the same mechanisms, but no one is profiting from you staying up until 3am playing a singleplayer game you already paid for.
I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.
And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.
Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.
Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).
Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.
The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.
Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).
If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.
So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).
The crowd that murdoch and limbaugh handed the orange parasite on a platter, does not care about pesky and boring little things like facts and figures. It is an irrational mob fed with bacteria-infested red meat for two decades. They can only be reached via the basest of impulses, ripe pickings only for the most ignorant and/or shameless of conmen. It doesn’t help society that the right-wing toxic propaganda machine operates at full blast 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
labor of love
fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
all shots actively rendered, leading to:
realistic friendly fire
even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
meaningful terrain
radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
free server hosting (!)
active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
It’s a small measure, but I’d really like to see a law where gacha games need to publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.
The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static. Many gacha systems have been accused of putting a hand on the wheel, assuring someone “so close to their needed item” must keep going through a series of failures.
Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.
Honestly, I wish he was shot down. He would’ve died, not as a mortar for MAGA that they were right, but as a mortar for democracy that citizens will use blood if their voices aren’t heard. We need more harsh reality checks and protests demanding he faces justice
And as much as I want to see brains on the pavement it’s not the right move politically.
Trump is setting himself on fire socially right now if he died in some violent fashion it would only enrage his supporters and they would vote for anyone who stands for trumps image.
He should face jail time though. He should already be there. But at the same time imprisoning him right now could sort of half martyr him as well.
We need the Republicans to personally oust him. Then his supporters hate the Republicans. Checkmate for Dems
It’s a capitalist invention and, therefore, will be used for whatever capitalists deem it profitable to be. Once the money for AI home assistants starts rolling in, then you’ll see it adopted for that purpose.
You’re just being pedantic. Most autocorrects/keyboard autocompletes make use of text predictors to function. Look at the 3 suggestions on your phone keyboard whenever you type. That’s also a text predictor (granted it’s a much simpler one).
Text predictors (obviously) predict text, and as such don’t have any actual understanding on the text they are outputting. An AI that doesn’t understand its own outputs isn’t going to achieve anything close to a sci-fi depiction of an AI assistant.
It’s also not like the devs are confused about why LLMs work. If you had every publicly uploaded sentence since the creation of the Internet as a training reference I would hope the resulting model is a pretty good autocomplete, even to the point of being able to answer some questions.
Yes, autocorrect may use text predictors. No, that does not make text predictors "spicy autocorrect". The denotation may be correct, but the connotation isn't.
Text predictors (obviously) predict text, and as such don't have any actual understanding on the text they are outputting. An AI that doesn't understand its own outputs isn't going to achieve anything close to a sci-fi depiction of an AI assistant.
There's a large philosophical debate about whether we actually know what we're thinking, but I'm not going to get into that. All I'm going to elaborate on is the thought experiment of the Chinese room that posits that perhaps AI doesn't need to understand things to have apparent intelligence enough for most functions.
It's also not like the devs are confused about why LLMs work.
Yes they are. All they know is that if you train a text predictor a ton, at one point it hits a bottleneck of usability way below targets, and then one day it will suddenly surpass that bottleneck for no apparent reason.
Was chilling with some friends of friends the other week and operating systems came up and one guy said he ran Ubuntu (I’m on KDE Neon) so we started chatting about that and a guy in the back seat said “Hey, aren’t you guys supposed to be fighting?”.
I’ve always had a preference for Balma, it’s unfortunate she becomes less and less important as time goes on and the characters outgrow the need for tech. She’s a genius inventor, though!
Granted, I’ve always had a preference for female characters, which isn’t exactly DBs strong suit, lol. Now that I think of it, whatever happened to Launch, that lady with the two personalities? Did she just… disappear in DBZ?
To be fair, DB started off as a gag manga so I guess she was just sort of a gag that no longer mattered when it became less of a comedy. So… ya, forgot about her. Lol
Training good models requires lots of training data and computational resources, so the only ones who can afford to train them are big corporations with access to both. And the only objective they have is to increase their profit.
Well, as long as we ensure training data needs to be paid for and can’t just be scraped from the web, we will ensure that only large corporations with deep pockets can train models.
That is the reason there is a big “grassroots” push to stop AI from training on all our web content: it’s a play to ensure no small players can make AI, and that AI is dominated by a few big players.
Lots of technologies could be used to improve things, but corporations just look at profit, not improving the human condition. Just like Ford patenting the system to listen to you in the car and serve you better ads, AI will trend toward making more ad sales, and models trained will lean to this always. It is why OpenSource stuff is so important, its the unpaid or low paid people doing cool stuff to solve actual problems that innovate to a goal of solving , not to goal of monotizing. Like Windows 11 is ad bloatware. The amount of tech and money MS could leverage and instead they build an ad OS, that they are now backporting to Windows10.
Meanwhile OpenSource devs build a linux distro that turned my 13 year old laptop (that choked and died on running W10 (was OK on W7)) into a peppy machine that handles web streaming, zoom calls, and opening files as fast as a brand new laptop. When money is not the end goal lots of good things happen
Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like “Press T to open up trainer menu”.
Unfortunately it’s not available (natively) on Linux. I’ve used Lutris but I don’t believe it has the same customization options. I don’t think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven’t tried to customize it in several years. I’ve gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It’sFOSS article about it here.
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