ladyattis

I don't see that working out as well as they imagine. The big thing is that folks use D&D as a form of structured play whether it's online or offline. It's that interaction and the freedom of both the players and the GMs to figure out how to structure it. Unless Hasbro accepts that they must limit their 'recurring payment' model to make that less painful for players then I suspect that D&D the brand will decline in relevance with competing TTRPGs replacing them.

I remember somewhere in one of my undergrad courses textbook that had a quote to something of the effect that C++ was a federation of languages. And honestly, it still feels like that all these years later. It's both a blessing and a curse depending on what you need to do. Most folks probably never venture fair outside their specific subset of C++ to use anything else and probably an unlucky few have to have an esoteric level of understanding the language to do their work. I don't envy the latter.

I'm surprised the article didn't cover "life" or simulation games since these are often seem to be relaxing games compared to more frantic games like MMOs. For me, Stardew Valley is my comfort game when I just wanna to turn off thinking for a little bit and go fishing or chat with Linus by the lake. Or go on a gift giving run. It just seems like you can kind of turn off your head and go with the flow in the game rather than trying to min-max. I'm sure there's tons of videos for Stardew Valley that focus on min-maxing but I'm glad I just ignore them otherwise, I'd be restarting my game to do that, no thanks.

It's funny you speak of flow state here since for me reading up on MMORPG meta or any meta changes to any game is where I mostly focus on such that even before I launch a game I've been reading up on its mechanics and trying to understand it in an abstract way (the opposite of this for me is when I just play Stardew Valley since I just wanna fish or chat with the NPCs rather than figure out how to min-max my farm). The act of figuring out how a game works mechanically is just as fun as trying to play the game itself for me.

Victims of Communism and the authors of the Black Book of Communism's own figures are debated by experts of the history of Russia and the USSR, especially during Stalin's reign. Many of the deaths that the Black Book of Communism sites were mostly due to the invasion by Nazi Germany (somewhere around 10 or 20 million iirc). The rest are also mostly not direct deaths by the Bolsheviks or the USSR state apparatus (this is including the famines). And the biggest problem with the book is that it often makes up the figures whole cloth.

This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).

Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.

The problem with Thiel's worldview is that it's not all that accurate. Yes, the Soviet Union was a horrible authoritarian state but the alternative to it isn't any better especially if you're not in the United States or of its preferred/default social classes. The damage done by the USSR and the Russian civil war pale in comparison to the yearly death toll of millions from medical deprivation and starvation even after the Green Revolution (we still have a distribution problem wrt food and medicine). His solutions are basically go back to some form of feudalism but without there being a singular sovereign to keep the nobles of our age in check (i.e. him and other billionaires). The reality is that capitalism has been limping along post Cold War and it's not getting any better, so without there being an outside threat to unify ourselves around, its flaws are seen more keenly and felt more closely than in the past. If Thiel wants to stop the second Bolshevik revolt then he should focus on making wealth distribution through market means viable and support ending monopolies and enclosures of various commons (weaken IP law, reform land rights, and so forth).

I agree with the comments in the video since often I find myself dealing with opaque code. Having code that's opaque makes it hard to make sense of what it does, when it does what it does, and what happens when it fails. Having code that's obviously less than optimal but still understandable is far better as the OP mentions in the video. At least with bad code that's understandable you can improve it sometimes if the underlying requirements and dependencies aren't too deep (otherwise, you're gonna break something and it's better to just leave it be bad or ugly code).

Yeah, it's easy to make ChatGPT do wrong things which is why I'm not so concerned about it other than companies using it as an excuse to further strip down essential technicians for such platforms. I think ChatGPT can be a wonderful tool if corporations would stop pretending that capital can always replace labor which won't happen anytime soon since many C-suite folks are naive about most things in my experience.

When you usually have flags in your function then you really have two functions in one which can be a problem. In practice, I usually break these kinds of functions down if it's looking like it's handling radically different cases, it does add some duplication but most times it's just the boilerplate of the language/platform than the actual work itself.

I don't know why folks are so freaked out about it. Yes, some of these programs can act somewhat like a person in text but often their output is just garbage. Heck, even AI focused on image generation gets hands wrong much as human artists do (sometimes even worse). It's strange to see folks being freaked out or otherwise surprised by computers. Maybe I'm just too old to care or understand the response.

I remember in the 80s that there were bees all over the grounds at my elementary school, they had dandelions, clover, and a few other weed/grass species in the mix but bees went whole hog on them. About a decade ago I went back to that school during summer and noticed not a single bee was around the grounds. It's wild how fast insects are dying off these days. Heck, I remember summers in my hometown where it was a bad idea for me to be out since mosquitos would bite me furiously but now I rarely see them.

The problem with making a VR layer on top of the Internet is that it's not something you can do alone. It has to be done in a manner that's organic/spontaneous with competitors being allowed to participate on their terms as much as yours (Meta/Facebook in this case). Zuckerberg didn't like this idea so he decided to strike out on his own to have the first mover advantage but such a move as we see can be a failure. Rather than just slowly building up a foundation on the Occulus and forming partnerships with indirect competitors like Sony, he chose to force the issue and just belly flop right into it. Now, it'll take a decade or two before anyone else even tries this effort in a concerted fashion again as too many shareholders with the memory of the last attempt will be there to put a stop to that (for good and ill imo). In the long term, the idea that VR or human-friendly interfaces will dominate the Internet isn't a bad prediction but as I've stated before, it must be done in a slow and careful fashion. You can't force tomorrow to come any sooner than it will and you can't do it alone.

Such devices are a dead end, imo. I think the next generation of BMI will likely be something you can put on your head like old time headphones with some being even less invasive than that maybe as mere 'pebbles' you just put on your temples or where ever else is potentially optimal for interacting with the human brain.

>I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short.

Have you ever listened to the tv show Avatar the last air bender? There's a character who's blind named Toph and she always goofs on her friends who aren't blind throughout the series. It's quite amusing since it's not done in a manner that insults her for being blind but that they sometimes say things which might be insensitive which she makes fun of in her own way.

>"OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme LateBinding of all things." – Alan Kay

This is probably why I love programming in Cuis, Pharo, and Squeak. The ability to just write my code in small chunk as I need it. Heck, the fact that block closures exist in the language spec makes it easier to even be kind of FP-like with the code as needed by just passing along function blocks where it fits best and then reverting to the OOP messaging where it's better suited.

>And by replacing ownership with either de facto or de jure rental of any and all private property.

My theory is that as profits decline due to the tendency of markets to reach equilibrium with respect to products/services supplied that capital owners will begin to reintroduce pre-capitalist norms and practices such as landlordism as these can sustain revenues to their liking as you renter won't have any ownership rights to contest their actions. It means they can raise rental rates anytime in the majority of cases and then just evict you from or repossess what was rented. Kind of like feudalism but without the fancy hats and titles.

>That's why it's confusing that you would go from "we have persistent hard problems" to "mathematical models can't exactly correspond to reality".

That's not even what I said. Go back and read it again. Take none of your assumptions into it, just read it as is.

The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.

If you mean why is quantum mechanics probabilistic? That's because it's the best model we have to handle many of the momentary variations in physical systems. But I'll say that determinism could still be true even if we can't make predictions. But equally, I believe that determinism can be false even if the observable universe seems well ordered. Chaos doesn't just mean random things happening without a cause that could be found. It just means that not all chains of causality can link backwards and forwards perfectly in time (i.e. some chains of causality maybe emergent at best).

>I don't see why it's logical to conclude that difficulties modeling hard problems means we can't model them using math.

That's not what I'm stating though. I'm stating that the math involved is a model but it isn't ever going to be identical to the thing being modeled. Meaning that math isn't the "language of nature" as we don't have a direct means to truly comprehend it (direct realism has a whole has been discarded by philosophers for a long time now).

>I see literally no reason to jump to the conclusion that the core problem is trying to use math at all.

Again, that's not what I said, please read my post again.

I think the fact that the oddest approaches work aren't exactly a measure of how the particles actually work in physics. I think it proves that math isn't the language of the universe no matter how much mathematicians and physicists want to say it is. It just proves we're good at modeling but not good enough to actually know what we're seeing/measuring (a natural limit to our knowledge). I don't know why this position is considered controversial or out of the mainstream when it seems to be the logical answer.

I think it's more of a social norm than a legal right since it would be on shareholders to pursue a lawsuit to prove that the board of directors at a company are sabotaging the business from being successful. Even then, it would be dependent on the given strategies to achieve profit both short and long term. It's not to say that corporate boards have zero incentives to maximum shareholder value since many times the boards are shareholders (whether minority or majority owners), but that if this a problem then it can't be truly solved by papering over it or mythologizing it.

I think second mover has a better chance to succeed, even from the first mover themselves (Apple had many ideas for touchscreen devices but most flopped until the 2000s). Iteration on a good enough device or platform will always give you more success than iterating on a false premise (ex. the metaverse).

It just demonstrates how patents are a form of rent seeking. You own the product of your labor but you should not be able to assume you own the accidental products that are related to your labor (ex. buying tools from a tool smith which then you use to make your own tool smithy).

I think there's a problem at the heart of the matter, specifically the idea that the act of measurement is in itself powerful when in point of fact that this isn't universally the case. As the old adage goes: "garbage in, garbage out." Even more troubling, there is a physical limit to our ability to model what we measure. Take the retina, it has around a million light receptors and even if you assumed they only have two valid states then you're left with around 10^300,000 bits of information to process, so good luck with that. Same thing applies to whatever firms are measuring and what they think is conveying relevant information as they'll have similarly exponential increases if they don't filter out the vast majority of irrelevant data points and states.

I don't think it's inevitable. If anything, eugenics has been disproven on many levels as a viable model. You can't infer the future from just a set of genes and trying to simulate their expression as there's just too many unknowns in our environment which leave doubt to the probable outcomes of any organism, human or otherwise. The key issue with Eugenics is its belief in a clockwork view of genetics which today has been disproven in the last 30 years. Life ain't a clockwork, it's a chaotic system.

Not really, since the Treasury still honors the interest of the bond. Just because someone values the purchase value lower doesn't invalid the interest rate. You just lose money if you sell it.

Honestly, I think this is true. I've noticed ever since I've stopped watching TV since 2007 and avoided most TV dramas (I've been mostly watching youtube videos on various topics like radio electronics, cooking, and the like since with maybe the occasion let's play of Dwarf Fortress or a group of people playing a tabletop campaign) that I've kind of fell out of the loop of the mainstream culture. So many things from pop music to references to TV shows have kind of left me just puzzled. Mind you, I'm in my 40s so I'm kind of "boomer" at this point.

I've had to deal with this kind of weird obsession with folks performing in online spaces like Second Life for a long time. I mean, sure, you can do your roleplay in an explicitly roleplay oriented place, but whenever I'm in what amounts to as a town square I've still found people who would rather play the part of Mean Girls or some other nonsense than being an authentic human being. It seems sincerity and honesty are poison to such folks who would rather live in irony or satire 24/7. I have to wonder that after a while do these people become the thing they're portraying? Is it more like what Oscar Wilde said, "give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth?" Or is it that folks can't actually distinguish their performance from reality? Heck, I've seen the same stuff on Twitter. It just makes my head hurt these days.

MIC isn't so much a conspiracy theory but rather a complex set of perverse consequences when involving military equipment production for the US. Take for example that much of the production of complex equipment like planes or tanks are split up across the entire US. It's not just a cost saving measure of sub-contracting but that it also gives the primary contractor the power over representatives as they can spread rumors of a given production facility coming to X district or out of that district. It makes it painful for said representatives to vote no against a costly military contract even if from the point of view of the DoD it has no benefit for them (this has happened a few times iirc). It's not some sinister cabal that comes up with these plans, it's just a sound business practice when dealing with government contracts.