People are weirdly, emotionally, invested in meat. Like it’s part of their identity.
I enjoy the taste of meat but I recognize it’s not good for the environment or the animals. So I avoid eating meat. It’s not a big deal. But for some people they act like you’re going to eat them and bury their bones in an unmarked grave.
If people wondered what they would do during the 1930s, now we know.
A lot of people would cheer for the Nazis.
I know I’m not doing enough, and it’s depressing as heck. Most people I know are doing less. No protests. Not talking about it. Just head in the sand.
I think “diffciulty” is poorly defined.
The souls games have a kind of difficulty, but I think what throws people is more the change in kind than degree.
The games are largely deterministic. There’s little to no random factor.
You level up and improve your numbers, but the difference between starting health and the soft cap is typically a factor of five or less. Compare with like final fantasy where the factor is like 50 (a starting HP of 200 to 9999). Baldur’s Gate is typically a factor of ~10. The underlying math in souls games doesn’t provide that big of a buttress.
You don’t get a lot of super moves as you progress. There are some spells or weapon arts that can be strong with the right build (blasphemous blade!), but nothing really like getting Fireball in DND or Knights of the Round in ff7.
This stuff comes together into an interesting cocktail. The game is mostly about you, the one holding the controller. Your stats and equipment matter, but are secondary. This is very different than like old final fantasies where I can hand you my save and you could win any fight (just do quad magic ultima and mimic).
I think a lot of games try to set up paper tigers for the players. They want the player to feel threatened , without any real danger of losing. Most of the Bethesda games, you might have a scene where there’s a death claw or whatever, but you can always pause the game to heal. Most of the final fantasy fights are not a real threat. They wear down your resources, but you’re sitting on a stack of healing items.
I think it’s also worth noting that the fights also aren’t a super long challenge. Most of time, the winning match is over in a few minutes. It’s not like an MMO raid that’s a 30 minute ordeal.
This isn’t my most organized post but I’m on my phone, so editing is hard.
This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.
The other day some guy was walking his dog outside in the city. The dog took a shit, and the guy just kept walking. I made eye contact but didn’t say anything. Just shook my head and kept walking.
We were heading in the same direction and after a bit I got to my destination and stopped. He stopped a little ahead and let his dog take another shit. He looked back at me and said something like “you wanna pick this one up? Coward.”
I don’t know but for that moment I was emotionally ready to murder him. He’s literally making the world a shittier place, and for nothing. I don’t want that kind of selfish shithead just walking around without consequences.
Well, lucky for me I’m not armed and have impulse control. He was bigger than me and I don’t know how to fight. I yelled at him that he’s a shithead or something inarticulate, and he laughed and kept walking.
Fuck that guy. I hope he gets hit my a truck and bleeds out in a shit filled ditch.
Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.
It went basically like any reasonable person expected it to. Unfortunately many people in the US are unreasonable
Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.
Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.
Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.
I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.
We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?
No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.
I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.
This is a capitalist hell
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
In my last game I sent him back to sanctuary and then could never find him again. I hope he’s happy.
(Among my other problems with Fallout4, it really hurts my suspension of disbelief when the dog like facetanks a mininuke and then is just… fine. I tell myself the protagonist is a synth and that’s why they’re nearly indestructible. Maybe the dog is, too.)
I still have the onyx path WoD 2e books, and I enjoy them. I find it confusing that there several variations of “World of Darkness”
When people do try protests that are disruptive, people complain about it.
i think protests should be focused on stopping the machinery that’s grinding us all up. But if your protest means traffic or a closed Walmart then all the short sighted idiots and all the people barely holding on get mad.
I don’t think people are smart enough to deal with this world we have created.
Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.
Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”
One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”
I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.
Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.
If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.
I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.
But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.
I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.
I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.
There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.
Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.
Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.
If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.
Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.
That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.
I’ve got to a couple protests but they feel like they’re just for show. They’re not disruptive. They’re not making clear, actionable, demands. They’re better than nothing. i saw people handling out flyers so maybe some people went to more meetings.
But I feel like there needs to be more specific stuff. Like, a demand that musk be removed from government, or trump be removed via the 14th amendment, or whatever, and that needs to be backed by “if you don’t listen to us, then you don’t get any more labor”. (Violence, I’m told, is less effective, but can also be there in the subtext)
But actually organizing large things is hard, especially when the state and the money are opposing you.
I can’t even get my friends to suffer the mild inconvenience of getting off facebook, nevermind getting off the couch.