And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone’s stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that’s even more entry level than autocross, I’d argue!

We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so ~twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.

(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)

£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don’t tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

To be honest, I think your position is short-sighted, naïve and lacking in pragmatism.

Right now, in most constituencies, your choice is between Labour/Lib Dem and Tory/Reform. And anyone who thinks Labour getting into government wouldn’t be an improvement over the Tories hasn’t been paying attention for the last decade. Even if Labour had the exact same political stance as the Tories - which they don’t - the fact that they’re not nearly as likely to be corrupt, self-serving slime balls makes them an improvement by itself.

Labour needs to appeal to moderate, swing voters. There’s no steadfast left-wing voter base in the UK; if Labour can’t win over the swing voters they won’t get elected - it’s that simple. That doesn’t mean they’re sat there asking themselves how they can be more like the Tories, it just means they need to take positions that have broad appeal and don’t just go full-socialism. As much as socialism appeals to me, I’d rather see Labour actually get elected. There’s zero chance we go from our current government to a socialist government overnight.

And if I think about where I’d like to see our country in ten or fifteen years, Labour winning this election is the most realistic way for us to get there. Spoiling your ballot, not voting at all, or voting for some candidate who’s going to get <3% of the vote isn’t going to achieve anything other than a short-lived sense of self-satisfaction. The best thing any of us can do is to pick the least bad of the realistic options. I don’t like that that’s the system, but it’s the system we’ve got and we either have to work within it or have it imposed on us anyway.

I don’t think the Labour Party is perfect by any means. They have some ideas I like, and I’m hopeful they’ll unveil more policies I like in the next few weeks. And, of course, there are things I dislike about them. They’re certainly not my dream party. But I also think it’s important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. We have a chance to improve things, and squandering that chance just because things aren’t going to be perfect is fucking stupid.

The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don’t feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn’t really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.

Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They’re not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there’s so much more gameplay depth.

I believe the thinking is that three days is (hopefully) enough time for whatever issues to be resolved, or for you to look for other sources of supplies. You’re not expected to stockpile enough to live on for months!

Register for a postal vote!

I don’t disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You’re paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)

Unfortunately for her, too. She might be successful, but she seems fucking miserable all the time.

I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• “I want something more friendly than that”
• “less professional”
• “more wonky”
• “less rounded”
• “less uncomfortable”

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

I saw an article on the Torygraph titled something like “I voted for Israel in Eurovision to spite the woke”, and there were people in the comments talking about how they’d sent in 20 votes for Israel. And others talking about how “the left” are relentless bullies for making the Israeli singer cry, etc.

I’m wouldn’t be surprised if Israel did try to influence the votes, but I think there are plenty of right-wingers willing do do it for free, too.

I think a lot of people on lemmy use lemmy/kbin/the threadiverse interchangeably. But yeah, I use kbin, too.

I definitely find myself being much, much more active on Discord since the whole reddit thing went down. It has its issues, and it’s not exactly a 1:1 substitution for thread-based forums, but I enjoy the greater sense of community that comes with Discord.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don’t necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there’s less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That’s not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that’s coupled with people wanting simple “explanations” because they don’t understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter’s fault in any way - it’s the immigrants’ fault - but also, they don’t personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it’ll all be solved for them. It’s all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it’s going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

I’m definitely a little confused about Tango - I’m hoping we’ll at least get more details come out about why Microsoft shuttered them. I mean, Ghostwire Tokyo was… whatever, and I could understand Microsoft not wanting to have them working on that kind of scale again any time soon. It wasn’t bad by any means, but it was fairly expensive and perhaps didn’t do as well as they hoped. But I’m surprised they didn’t want to just downsize the studio and aim for another HI-FI Rush-esque game (or sequel).

But Arkane Austin being closed definitely makes sense. Not only was Redfall a disaster, but by the time Redfall released, 70% of the people who’d worked on Prey had left the studio. (Largely because the studio’s president had left the studio just after Prey, I believe, rather than because of the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda.) All that was really left was the name.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

Those and reducing the requirements for the early blinds definitely stand out to me, yeah. Reducing the early blinds is a very good change - I think most of my early losses aren’t necessarily because I’ve played badly, but rather because it’s too early in the run to have found something to build around or to put any combos together. This change makes you less beholden to RNG in the early game, and also allows you to think a little more about your endgame strategy rather than focusing on surviving right now.

It certainly is a lot, although it’s the sort of thing where, when you really think about it, you’d kinda hope it’s something the government is willing to spend money on. You don’t want all the best and brightest just going to private companies because they can earn 3x as much as the government is willing to pay. (Whether the current SPADs are the best and brightest, I don’t know… If they are, it’s certainly not reflected in the government’s decision-making! But I think the point still stands that there needs to be a financial motivation for talented people to work in government rather than private businesses.)

Yeah, the diversity looks pretty bad…

I’d assume we’d have to wait until he was an actual government advisor before we got any figures (if at all). And yeah, advisors can do pretty well for themselves, although how much they get paid depends on how involved they are. Advisory roles can range from full-time consulting roles and helping with policy creation to “hey, can you just spend a couple of hours reading through these documents and give us your thoughts?” once every few months.

You can see the pay for the government’s special advisors (ie, the top tier of advisors) here if you’re interested. Bear in mind those are in the top, top tier of advisors so most aren’t necessarily going to be paid that much.

It’s worth noting he’s standing down at the general election:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

This one feels a little different. He stated previously that he was going to stand down at the next election, which is reiterated in the article:

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Defecting - and especially co-ordinating with Labour for months to time his defection and pre-arrange him joining Labour - isn’t just fleeing the sinking ship so much as hanging around a little longer and deliberately trying to make it sink faster. It represents something rather than just being about saving his own skin.