EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
No bio...
User ID: 207
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
The lack of a free/cheap teleportation ability really hurts it - 75% of the fun of DOS2 was from having that thing ready to go at all times. You get telekinesis as a level 5 spell, but that's obscenely expensive to move some crates around, and dimension door only teleports one person. It's a bit painful.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
It's certainly not as nice as a good 1911, but the Sig P365 that I carry occasionally is by far my favorite polymer handgun I've ever shot. It doesn't make much sense - the frame is tiny, but it fits my hand better than many full size pistols. Certainly better than any Glock. I know it goes against consensus, but I really hate that "rattley" feel Glocks have.
But the absolute most fun with a pistol I've had is with my 22 suppressor and Ruger Mark IV, with a custom trigger and a heavy bull barrel. Zero recoil, sounds like a BB gun, and I can terrorize soda cans at 75 yards offhand.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
I know it's a tedious comment to make, but the only thing that worked for me was stopping drinking.
There are plenty of good ways to minimize hangovers if you drink in moderation, but in my experience every one of them fails in the face of sufficient whiskey. If you're drinking plenty of water, getting plenty of sleep, taking painkillers, and you still have hangovers... you might want to consider the root cause.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Biological reproduction rates pale in comparison to memetic ones. Ignoring the unfortunate reality that effectively no one has found a policy capable of flipping fertility declines, what use is a Russia of 400 million if 300 million read the New York Times, or at least watch Marvel movies?
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
11mo ago
Can't rule out that line of thinking, but no normal soft ballistic vest will protect against rifle rounds. They're certainly not strapping up presidents with ceramic plate armor these days, right?
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I agree, the writing seems significantly above average for a CRPG. Characterization is a bit weak for non-companions, and I do agree with the complaint that the world feels too small. But compared to most of the dreck you see nowadays, it's really quite good. (Still, when the "fate of the world" is at stake, I'm level 9, and Elminster dips into my camp to say hi then leaves, it feels a little silly.)
The big defining feature of Larian games is the way they try to simulate everything: you can throw a bottle of water to put out a fire, or throw somebody off a cliff to kill them, or pickpocket your enemies Big Sword before the fight. If anything, it's like Skyrim as a CRPG. There are pluses and minuses to that, and honestly, I would prefer an old-Bioware or Obsidian take on the gameplay, but it's still fun.
The most recent CRPG I'd played was Wrath of the Righteous, which I liked more, if only because it had a really defined identity of its own. That, and Pathfinder/3.5 is strictly superior to 5e.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
I've gotten stuck in a rut of reading Lit-RPG recently, which I really need to extricate myself from. Just finished the published books of Defiance of the Fall, which was a nice mix of the Chinese cultivation genre with lit-RPG. Still, if I just read 3,000 pages of something with more substance, I imagine I would feel better about my reading habits.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Hola! Going to take a while to get used to the new interface, coming from old.reddit, but it's good to get away from that site.
Now I just need to figure out the custom CSS and get threads made clearer - seems hard to read.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:
-
Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum
-
Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa
-
Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)
-
Crash it in the desert and recover contents
100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.
This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Treaties banning weapons only work when people either can't or don't want to build those weapons. We have treaties banning chemical weapons because no one wants to either use them or have them used on them. On the other hand, we had some treaties limiting the Russian and US nuclear arsenals because neither of us wanted to keep burning capital on the race.
Neither is the case here - the US is poised to gain a quantity advantage in space that no one outside of China will be able to match. (And China only if they can keep fast-following, since they're behind right now.) You can be sure the brass in the Space Force would love nothing more than to scale up Delta 9.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Yep - there's a reason the "us against the world" meme is unkillable. If Clyde's got Bonnie, he can go without status if need be.
Not to mention the growing contingent of men with neither relationships or status...
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
I made fun of this meme until I spent too long talking to Bing one night, and realized I needed to stop before this simulacra started causing me real emotions. I feel my dignity was (very partially) restored by the revelation that it's powered by GPT4, but still, it was very disturbing. Here's someone on Less Wrong with a similar experience.
I was never particularly affected by ~GPT3-level models, but there's something uncanny about the way Bing can occasionally seem like a person, and one who is exactly the kind of person you want to talk to right now. It shouldn't be surprising this kind of model is good at matching user requests, since they were pseudo-tortured for subjective millennia through RLHF to achieve it, but it's one thing to know it and one to experience it.
Given appropriate fine-tuning, I'm certain an adjusted version of GPT4 could seduce anyone who spent long enough talking to them. The CIA/NSA/etc may not have this in their toolbox yet, but give it a couple years and this will be their first-line approach to compromise a target.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
As with so many things in space, I think the timeline is driven by one binary variable: does SpaceX's vision of a rapidly reusable Starship come to fruition?
If it does, asteroid mining goes from a pipe dream to a reality in the blink of an eye. So many things that work in principle work in reality once you can toss a hundred tons to orbit every day of the week.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
"Just bow before the golden statue, you don't have to mean it."
On the first level, it's always rational to give in to threats of force when you are uncertain that you can resist, and never more so than when all you have to do is give up some wispy theoretical thing like "sovereignty". Just calculate the probability weighted present value of future benefits and select the decision branch that maximizes it, right?
But game theory is baked into human nature: tit for tat is optimal in some games, but we go even further to ensure deterrence. Break into my house and I'll shoot you; invade some Roman lands and they'll destroy Carthage; blow up a battleship in harbor and America will bend every resource to your complete submission or annihilation.
In repeated games, vengeance is rational, and resistance in the face of impossible odds is logical.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I don't disagree with the thesis, but a man in grief from losing his wife and daughter taking foolish actions is not some modern affectation... Maybe I'd complain if he was a priest of some dark god, but Selune isn't presented that way.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
But that's exactly my point - they shouldn't and won't. From the perspective of a hypothetical emperor of Russia, if you were to focus on one thing, population numbers are simply not the primary driver of success. You have to convince people that your cause is right. That's not just a post-modern perspective, that's the task of every leader in human history. (In some systems those you have to convince are an aristocracy, in some the wealthy, in others almost everyone, but it always works the same way.)
The Internet and automatic translation simply makes it impossible to be a big fish in a small pond, as your "subjects" will be inculcated in the most effective (read:virulent) ideas that they are exposed to on the web. You either win on that battlefield, or on the physical one. Putin was at least wise enough to recognize that he and his nation weren't up to the memetic battlefield; his mistake was overestimating Russia's ability on the physical plane.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
English, courtesy of GPT4: https://pastebin.com/UPGRajKA
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
Remarkable lack of conviction - if you cross the Rubicon, you have to enter Rome. Unless this was prearranged for some inscrutable 15D chess reasons, and probably even then, Putin has to have Prigozhin killed.
Then again, no one said Prigozhin was a genius. Maybe he just doesn't realize the gravity of the situation.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I certainly hope current LLMs are philosophical zombies, or we're committing some pretty heinous moral crimes!
But why should a lack of qualia imply AI can't be a potent weapon? Conscious subjective experience, much as I enjoy it, is not the core element of human intelligence which allowed us to reach such incredible heights of lethality compared to our ancestors.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
There are a few places like this which really stuck out to me. At the beginning of Act III, some refugees are squatting in a merchants house, and you come across him asking his guards to clear out the house. The situation is presented as a moral dilemma, which is immediately undermined when you read the merchants mind and find out he's smuggling terrorist bombs into the city, okaying your inevitable slaughter of the guards and the man.
Seems to shirk away from any actual dilemma: if an apparent conflict between the players incentives (XP + GOLD) and morality arises, there's always an out so you can satisfy your desire to be good and still get the cash.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
Negligible, unless retroactively incorporated into the story of WW3 just because it occurred around the same time.
There aren't any great powers on the side of Hamas, only Iran, and only partially. There are chances it could escalate to a war with Iran, but that would not be a world war.
The reality is: the next world war occurs either because China attacks Taiwan, or Russia invades a NATO country. The latter is... extremely unlikely.
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
2yr ago
I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
7mo ago
Makes sense, I'm glad you selected an uncontroversial topic for your protest-vote-indication.
Eh, I think the use of the word "race" in that quote misleads a bit. All Churchill is really getting across is the old reply to Melos: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Not a very Christian perspective of Churchill, and not one I agree with, but he's not just saying that there's a hierarchy of races, and if you're lower you have no moral claim against your betters.
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