Soteriologian
22d ago
The story is a bit cheesy, and takes itself more seriously than is merited given its quality.
But the battle system is really unusual and really fun. I did two challenge runs with it in the past year: gambits only (no issuing any manual commands during combat) and Vaan solo, both of which were challenging enough to be fun but not so difficult as to be frustrating or infuriating.
Soteriologian
25d ago
"Usability research" is not formal theory. It’s psychology, applied to human-computer interaction. And psychology has one of the worst track records of any field ever.
By formal theory, I mean math you can put into a theorem prover like Coq/Agda/Lean.
Soteriologian
26d ago
I have strong feelings that GUI toolkits have never been done well. All existing solutions are bad, and they’re mostly all bad in the exact same ways.
The root of the problem is smart people want to work on things where they can deliver formal results—and in many areas of software engineering, you can! Databases, type systems, even graphics to a large extent are all backed by substantial formal theory (even if the users of these technologies are largely unaware).
UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.
Soteriologian
26d ago
It’s hard to do any worse than the results themselves these days, but they pull it off somehow.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
I’m not active, but I played hardcore a fair bit. I think my living characters are a mid-40s mage and a mid-20s priest.
I like the early Alliance classic flow, up through around Duskwood. And I like the endgame, especially Blackrock Depths. But from around 37-57, the game is such a slog, especially without the accelerated levelling curve from future expansions.
Still, I might try to hit 60 before TBC anniversary begins, since I’ve never done TBC on schedule before and I’d kinda like to experience it.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
You may be older than you think—MC was definitely soloable in WotLK, which was over 15 years ago!
Soteriologian
2mo ago
You don’t watch WoW streamers? Where do you get your geopolitical analysis from? Surely not some legacy boomer outlet, I hope.
I bet Rachel Maddow couldn’t even clear Molten Core.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Flash was vastly more inspired than the gui tech stacks in wide use today. You could do so much with it without having to be a programmer.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
I hope so. If I ever try to take over the world, I can’t imagine seeing all these comments steelmanning my endeavor as some bureaucratic trifle.
I am burning the Erdtree, goddammit! I intend to ascend to Elden Lord and reforge the shattered Elden Ring!
Soteriologian
3mo ago
I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I’m playing Persona 4 for the first time now, and it’s fantastic. And it can’t be nostalgia, because I never played any Persona games growing up.
People were just less brainwormed back then, and it shows.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"
And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
In some sense I think this is even more damning than it may seem to a naive viewer.
Like, that scratchpad memory a la Memento strategy should absolutely work, assuming you have an intelligent agent in the first place. The fact that it works so poorly is a sign there’s serious problems with the thinking part of SotA LLMs. It’s not merely a memory problem.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?
You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.
What’s happened is the aesthetic of the Empire became less about some non-partisan celebration of Captain America’s thunderbutt and more about evangelising radical social issues of the Democrat party like Pride Parades and trans kids.
The Republicans, thanks to their total lack of representation in organisations of any influence, decided it was simpler to dismantle the Empire entirely rather than try to steer it away from gay pride back to Captain Thunderbutt.
Basically, the Empire-maintaining parts of the government became partisan, and now are being cut off since the other party is in power.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
Cut adverbs.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
abandoned Walmart (shoplifting killed it)
That’s impressive. It is difficult to kill a Walmart.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
Not if you keep your socks on!
Soteriologian
5mo ago
My personal favorite:
https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs
The comical part is they try to act like this is some minor compiler bug that can be fixed and not a core problem with the type theory (or lack thereof) itself.
Unsoundness of this sort would be fine if Rust portrayed the type checker as a mere tool to assist a well-intentioned author in reasoning; but it’s portrayed as an authority capable of guaranteeing memory safety, and you’re expected to submit yourself to it.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
It’s not probable, but still, President of the United States is by far the most lethal job you can legally have.
Statistically, there’s a nearly 10% chance you’ll be killed (not merely die; be killed!)
Trump would be safer working as a RedBull stuntman than working his current job.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
Inbuilt disdain of "computer says no because reasons" not enough?
What exactly are you arguing against here? Error messages at compile time? There’s plenty of interpreted languages that crash at runtime if that floats your boat.
Presumably, such people enjoy removing the annoying "check engine" light and just waiting for their engine to start smoking.
that "shipping product that works well enough" is more important than "mathematically correct, but your competition beat you to market by a month"
I don’t believe this is even a real dichotomy, at least in the Rust vs mainstream language sense. (Obviously if you’re formalising something in Lean4, that’s going to be comically inefficient compared to just building it, but that’s so far from the Rust vs C++ land it’s not even relevant.) The reason companies are fond of mainstream languages has nothing to do with engineering, it has to do with the availability of replacement labor. It doesn’t matter what technical properties the mainstream language has; what matters is that it’s mainstream.
which is why everyone tends to bitch about the borrow checker
I’m going to out myself as much crazier than anyone may have expected, but: the borrow checker is the least-inspired part of Rust and the language would be better without it entirely. The reasons Rust is good are because it actually has sane primitive types, non-ambiguous syntax, algebraic data types, parametric polymorphism, a non-busted standard library, and perhaps most importantly: cargo.
The borrow checker paradigm is basically a half-baked bastardization of linear types, and the way it’s done has some serious theoretical deficiencies that basically mandate leaky abstractions. But I’m not going to babble about that here.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
I mean, the person reverse-engineering the Mac M1 GPU and building a Linux driver for it is doing so in Rust. I don’t know how much more bare-metal you can get than that.
Rust isn’t about gaining safety by being far from the hardware, the way memory managed languages with runtimes are; it’s about giving the systems programmer a mental model that actually has some degree of engineering sense behind it. You seem to have the impression that C++’s danger is what makes it an appealing tool, but the danger is to the user not accomplishing their intended goal, not to an enemy: it’s a kitchen knife which is all blade and no handle. Moar blaDe doesn’t make the knife better at cutting food into sizes and shapes you want for your sandwich.
And disdain for C++ long predates Rust. If you need to copy your opinions from someone high-status, I’ll defer to Linus Torvalds on the matter.
While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is, the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
It disagrees with all my sensibilities about "talking computer", and thus far I find it's constructs around "borrowing" references silly and contrived, especially in light of being able to assign unsafe sections of code that ignore it's memory safety rules. I guess it assumes you'll be responsible with that, but it feels like a half measure to me, and no replacement for actual skill.
lol, I'll put this in hardcore WoW terms: many imagine skill as being able to stylishly finesse your way out of thorny situations; anyone who's ever succeeded at this game mode knows the real skill is not getting yourself into bad situations in the first place. For example, Xaryu -- professional WoW streamer and many-time rank-1 PVP gladiator -- died in the harpy cave in an extremely stylish way. In his next run, did he learn how to super-skill the harpy cave even betterer? Well, yes, in the truly high-IQ way: he decided going in there was a terrible decision in the first place and he wouldn't do so this time. He hit 60 on that character.
This is the difference between a C++ developer mindset and a Rust developer mindset. It is the humility to accept that you are, in fact, not skilled enough to get it right all the time, so you should stop playing with fire in the first place.
PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly, although it still doesn’t quite capture my sentiment.
A priestly class actually has the respect of the other classes, and takes its mission in shepherding them seriously. The noisemakers the West has today fit neither of these criteria.
If anything, I’d say the primary characteristic of this class is being annoying in rhetorically-compelling (but not epistemically- or aesthetically-compelling!) ways. Think "Team Building Exercises" or other such nonsense. What are you gonna do, argue that team building and camaraderie is bad, hmm? Yet everyone who’s ever been subjected to this has the same thought in their mind: "this is such bullshit."
Dumbledore vs Umbrage is a good example of the contrast between the actual priestly class and the rhetorically-motivated class that fancies itself priestly.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Were there any pedophiles in the pedophile cabal, or was it wholly infiltrated by blackmailers with no authentic dedication to pedophilia at all?
Is there any gold in Fort Knox?
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