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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Well, much of the world does live in areas where 34 degrees Celsius are genuinely problematic and where homes are not suited to providing decent living conditions.

    The fact that you don’t immediately consider that temperature a problem given your personal circumstances doesn’t mean that you should assume that it’s not a problem for them. Your comment made it seem like you were trying to make light of it.

    Where I live, 34 degrees is well past the point where we’d get major national emergency warnings from the government warning of the danger that the current heat poses. I’m curious how people in your area deal with 41 degrees though, that sounds brutal to me personally. I assume it’d at least be a low humidity heat?


  • Normality in some countries means little when it happens somewhere it’s unexpected and people aren’t used to it. Not only is acclimatization a thing, meaning that people who genuinely aren’t used to these temperatures suffer more from them, it’s also relevant how the local culture handles high temperatures.

    Where it’s normally very hot or very cold, infrastructure, daily routine and other culturally influenced elements provide for relief in some form. Texas suffered immensely under a cold period that other places in the world would consider utterly unremarkable, simply because it is utterly beyond what had been anticipated.

    Telling people in those situations that something isn’t that hot/cold is a bit callous.



  • It’s not quite that simple. Crowdsourcing has many of the drawbacks that AI has too.

    While it can have a higher reliability in detecting nonsensical inputs or inputs that it’s simply unfit in processing, that comes at an intrinsic cost in scalability. Some tasks can’t be effectively crowdsourced for, either because of volume or urgency.

    Machine Learning systems learn to approximate decision making and thus can attempt at learning from crowdsourcing efforts. It is notable though that depending on the use case, model and training method, machine learning algorithms can potentially be better than the data it was trained on. Or much worse, it’s very fickle.

    It is definitely still the case that crowdsourcing is a really important tool and oftentimes machine learning relies on it’s efforts. And it naturally can solve tasks that we don’t have a viable automated approach for.




  • Taiwan isn’t exactly a rogue province. It’s the holdover of the prior government of China that lost the revolutionary war and retreated there.

    It doesn’t entirely invalidate the point, but it has to be said that the situation is markedly different from the one with Texas.

    It’s more like if Texas overthrew the US government in a violent rebellion and the UK worked to support the holdover of the old US government that retreated to Puerto Rico.

    Nothing that happened since has invalidated truly the right of Taiwan to remain a sovereign state. It’s in no sense a rogue province.





  • Paradox has long maintained a DLC policy based around their permanent improvement and development of their games. I don’t get what is greedy about genuinely expanding their games with content that wouldn’t have been in the base game and charging money for it. Some of the DLC may indeed be on the more expensive side, but calling their entire policy greedy is simplistic and just trying to bunch them in with companies trying to rip you off. Sure, there’s been cases where some of Paradox DLC has been egregious, but frankly, the standard case is that they clearly added onto the game that otherwise wouldn’t have been there at all.

    To propose one of the titles where this works best is Stellaris. I genuinely mean it, take a look at that games post release development and tell me that Paradox is being genuinely greedy. Just because something is long term profitable doesn’t make them necessarily immoral.




  • I admire your ability to keep track of all that. I actively play FF14 to fill my MMO slot and then some other game that is my mainstay at the time. If I dare even touch another serious title, it tends to completely push out the prior one, so I have been really trying hard not to start another bigger game while I’m not done with the last one.

    It’s how I’ve been playing Yakuza 0 for the last entire year, coming back every half eternity. I really need to just sit down and play a title or take forever.


  • Shogun 2 and older games massively lose out on the UX. Especially in combat, the games have much less quality of life.

    Furthermore, the newer games simply work towards a somewhat different audience. The studio has clearly picked up on the success of Warhammer and after stumbling both through all of Three Kingdoms and the launch of Troy, they seem to have firmly settled towards the more fantasy direction which is counter to the philosophy of the earlier games.

    While I certainly support trying out the older titles too, calling Troy a simply worse game than the older titles is a bit reductionistic and definitely has a personal bias and may be somewhat misleading, even if your advice was in good faith.



  • You’re thinking of the right game. You had a pet that was pretty much a massive bipedal animal monster that you could train. Depending on what you do with them, when you reward them with food and petting and when you punish them by slapping them, they’d change their behaviour. You could teach them to either farm food off of fields or eat villagers when they were hungry, whatever you wanted. It was a really fun feature, at least for six year old me.