My wife and I both remember playing a PC game in the mid to late 90s that neither of us have been able to remember the name of or track down. It was a 2d platformer with pixel graphics. The setting was some kind of factory or laboratory, and the enemies were monsters or aliens. I remember one type of enemy being like a floating ball with eye stalks. The player character was a human, and I believe you could collect various weapons and items as you progressed through the game. I'm pretty sure it wasn't part of any well-known game series, such as Metroid or Lode Runner. Anyone have any guesses what this could be?
Edit: It's Commander Keen, thanks for the help everyone.
guajalote
1yr ago
Even if I thought there was a 99% chance of AI destroying humanity, creating a massive totalitarian world-state that tracks all private behavior and is willing to start nuclear wars to enforce its power doesn't seem like an improvement. What Yud is proposing is probably not possible, but if it is possible it's one of the worst futures I can imagine for the human race.
guajalote
8mo ago
I think this is the best way to keep politics out of gaming - just don't reference anything remotely political and let people do whatever they want.
Also, the game is based on 5th edition DnD, which is a fantasy setting where basically anything is possible. A high level wizard can easily change their gender or species if they so choose simply by casting a spell. A 20th level wizard can cast True Polymorph on himself and become a dragon (permanently if he so chooses). Or he can cast Magic Jar and inhabit someone else's body (permanently if he so chooses). Real-world concepts of gender identity barely even make sense in this sort of setting.
guajalote
11mo ago
For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly.
I am not saying that a phenomenon that involves the creation of observers requires no explanation, I am saying that observing such a phenomenon exists provides no information because such a phenomenon is 100% guaranteed to exist in any universe with observers. So I am saying we cannot draw any useful conclusions from observing such a phenomenon exists.
For example, every person I meet who has ever been skydiving tells me that their parachute has opened every time they've gone skydiving. This fact tells me no information about how likely parachutes are to open (except that the probability is not 0%). It provides no information about parachutes one way or the other.
guajalote
6mo ago
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
guajalote
11mo ago
It doesn't provide information, because the only possible one-shot universe we can observe is one with observers. Maybe there was a 0.000...01% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers, or maybe there was a 99.999...% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers. Either of these possibilities is consistent with the fact that we, as observers, see a one-shot universe with observers in it.
guajalote
6mo ago
How you dress is never an invitation to be mugged, but that doesn't make it a good idea to wear a flashy diamond Rolex in a bad neighborhood. You have every right to do so, and if you're robbed the perpetrator is still 100% at fault, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.
guajalote
2mo ago
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this.
I don't think we all agree it does this, at least not in the way you seem to claim. Music can temporarily evoke an emotion, in much the way a movie can, but the idea that music changes people's actual beliefs or actions seems like a very strong and unsubstantiated claim.
I enjoy Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon and Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles. Both songs basically celebrate deranged serial killers. Neither has made me want to kill anyone to even the slightest degree.
guajalote
4mo ago
Yes, basically cats lack a robust theory of mind, whereas dogs have a theory of mind that allows them to infer intentions. This makes "no" and other punishment-type responses especially ineffective for cats because it requires an inferential leap: I knocked over the lamp, the human made a loud scary noise. To connect those things causally you need to form a hypothesis about the human's mental state (they are upset I knocked over the lamp) which cats struggle to do.
guajalote
5mo ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
7mo ago
No, it makes it even less legible. Is this "pressure" or is it playful banter that both parties are enjoying:
Him: "Let's have our first date at XYZ Mini Golf."
Her: "No way, I hate Mini Golf. And if that's your idea of a good first date then you aren't getting a date at all."
Him: "You're just saying that cause you're scared you'll lose."
Her: "Ugh. Fine. But I'm only agreeing because you're being such an asshole about it."
You, the observer, notice, hey, I'm a rational being who came into existence! I'm saying that it's rational to think that this should update your priors towards hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2. But only if there's a one-shot or few-shot universe.
No, it shouldn't change your priors, irrespective of whether there's a one-shot or multi-shot universe.
Given that you are a rational being, the odds that you will observe a universe where a rational being came into existence are exactly 100%. This is true regardless of whether hypothesis 1 or hypothesis 2 is true, and therefore it tells you no additional information about which hypothesis is correct.
You wake up. Assuming there's not going to be any distinguishing sensation between the two ways you could wake up, which should you think is more likely? I would think you should think that there's a 50:1 chance that it worked.
That's true, because this situation is materially different from the one we are talking about above. Here, we know two sets of probabilities ex ante (both of which can occur), and are now trying to decide, ex post, which is more likely to have occurred. Given two different possibilites, the one with the higher probability is, by definition, the one that was more likely to occur (this is true whether the surgery is one-shot or many-shot, by the way).
In the situation we are discussing, we don't know anything about the probabilities ex ante, and we are trying to derive those probabilities based on our ex post observations.
A better analogy would be: you go into a surgery and nobody knows your odds of survival. You wake up after the surgery. What, if anything, does this tell you about your ex ante odds of surviving the surgery? The answer is, it tells you nothing about those odds. It just tells you that you survived. Your odds of survival could have been 0.001% or 99.9%, but since you can only observe outcomes in which you survive, that fact that you observe your own survival gives you no additional information about the ex ante likelihood of that outcome.
Another example to illustrate the point. Suppose an alien hands you a black box with a screen and a button on it. You push the button, and the number "21" appears on the screen. Pushing the button again does nothing and you cannot disassemble the box to learn how it works. What are the odds that the box was going to display the number "21" when you pushed the button? The answer is, you have no idea (except you know the odds are not 0%). It might have been a 100% chance, it might have been a 0.000000001% chance. You have no way of knowing based on your single ex ante observation.
guajalote
1yr ago
If any other Republican nominee had beat Clinton, they would have been hated, as Obama was, as Bush was, and perhaps even more due to social media turning up the temperature. But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.
guajalote
1yr ago
There's no good reason you should do worse after going back and reviewing answers. More time to think should always be better, ceteris paribus. The only explanation I can think of would be if you're biased toward assuming your initial answer was wrong (e.g. because you doubt your own intelligence or doubt your test taking abilities) and so you consistently talk yourself into changing answers you shouldn't change.
guajalote
2mo ago
Why do you care if Bob screws up? Obviously Charlie doesn't care, at least not enough to do anything. Just let Bob screw up. If it's clear that Bob "owns" a different set of responsibilities than you do, his screw ups should only reflect badly on him and might even make you look good by comparison. Either Charlie will wise up and do something about it or he won't. Either way not your problem.
Also I would consider looking for a new place to work, since poorly managed businesses usually don't do well in the long run.
guajalote
2mo ago
You can have religion without god, but I don't see how you can have religion without faith. By "faith" I mean roughly this definition that popped up when I googled it: "Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment."
But if they aren’t coming to Jesus anyway, surely I would prefer to funnel those people into a group where they can proudly and honestly proclaim that ‘of course Jesus isn’t real, but that’s not the point; the 10 commandments have served our people well for 2 thousand years because they work and you should follow them too.’
In this form of the religion you have faith in the Ten Commandments or in biblical laws more generally. If the adherents take this faith seriously, then they end up being every bit as "religious" as if god existed. As you put it, people would still have to be "convinced to believe or to feign belief" in the inerrant properties of the Ten Commandments. So at best you have effectively replaced god with the ten commandments, and I think you will find it just as hard to convince atheists to truly believe in them. Alternatively, if the adherents don't really take their faith seriously, then it's hard to see what holds the religion together, or how it answers the kinds of existential questions that people look to religion to answer. It's reduced to a social club at that point. If people were excited to join secular social clubs we'd see participation in clubs like Rotary Club, bowling leagues, etc., rising rather than declining.
guajalote
10mo ago
I'm not sure if it completely counts as an RPG, but Final Fantasy Tactics is an incredible game with one of the best storylines I've ever seen in a video game.
I enjoy Divinity Original Sin 2 and am looking forward to the full release Baldur's Gate 3, which is made by the same company and appears to be a similar game except using the rules of DnD 5th edition.
guajalote
1yr ago
Imagine a doctor gets it right 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the time he says "I'm not really sure what's going on" and either consults with another doctor, suggests you get a second opinion, or even just sends you home with no treatment.
Now imagine a LLM gets it right 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time it gets it confidently wrong and prescribes you an incorrect course of treatment.
In this hypothetical scenario, even though the LLM is "better," I'd rather have the human doctor, because getting treated for the wrong thing is often much worse than not getting treated at all.
guajalote
1yr ago
I've posted here before about how my wife is considered a "person of color" by employers and universities because she's from Mexico, even though her skin is pale white. Outside of the really clear-cut cases, American notions of race are pretty incoherent. It's not like sex where 99%+ of people can be reliably classified as male or female.
guajalote
1yr ago
What fraction of human beings alive today do you think could generate something that plausibly looks like SPICE code? What fraction of those could "with some handholding (or, rather, explicit statements of how to fix the circuits) ... get closer to something functional?" What fraction could give "some justification for how it connected the nodes of each individual device?"
guajalote
1yr ago
If you hold that consensual transactions are generally good, whereas non-consensual taking is generally bad, then there needn't be any tension between opposing colonialism and supporting open borders.
As you note, colonialism violates people's individual rights by one group subjugating another against their will, expropriating their rightful property and reducing or eliminating their rights.
An immigrant entering a country need not do any of these things. He can enter into entirely voluntary transactions to obtain housing, employment, etc. These are transactions where everyone involved is happy to participate and ends up better off; no one's rights are violated.
It is also conceivable that a group of immigrants could band together into a political bloc and use their collective political powers to "colonize" the native population and take away their rights. But there is no particular reason why such an outcome is inevitable or likely. Moreover, such an outcome can occur without any immigration, such as if a country's native protestant population banded together to oppress its native Catholic population. The free movement of people across borders does not require the formation of group identities nor does it require any group to oppress any other group.
guajalote
1yr ago
Maybe it's because I've literally never used the block feature on any website, but I agree. What value is blocking adding in a place like this? If someone is harassing/insulting you then they are breaking the rules and should be banned. If they are not violating the rules, what valid reason could you possibly have for blocking them? Disagreeing with someone or finding them annoying is not a good enough reason, IMO, since this site is supposed to be about open debate where all perspectives are welcome.
guajalote
1yr ago
There are (conservative) cultures where it's considered semi-acceptable for married men to have sex outside the marriage. For example, I have met multiple women from Mexico who have expressed sentiments along the lines of "wives should never cheat, but if husbands cheat once in a while that's unfortunate but understandable."
guajalote
2mo ago
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal.
The fact that certain types of music promotes certain types of dancing does not imply that it promotes specific types of behavior off the dance floor. You haven't provided any evidence of this and it certainly contradicts my experiences.
So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
You claim this based on what evidence? It sounds like in your worldview music is almost a hypnotizing force, something that changes people subconsciously, but then you contradict yourself with statements like:
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song.
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder. But if it's just a hypnotic or automatic response to lyrics + rhythm, why should this matter? I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal. But that story would have as little evidentiary basis as yours does.
Also you seem to be claiming that if Paul McCartney turned out to be a serial killer, and stated that Maxwell was meant unironically, this would transform it from a "good" song to a "bad" one?
I should probably also note that Charles Mansion credited Beatles songs as inspiring his murders. How do you square that with your claims?
This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
Any evidence for this claim? In my experience the songs that get stuck in my head are random and have no connection with my emotional state.
No, it doesn't. It works equally well with a one-shot universe. If the parameters had not been properly fined tuned, then we wouldn't be here. Therefore we can only observe a universe in which the parameters are fine tuned. This is true regardless of how many universes exist.
Those other billions of acts of conception are irrelevant. You could not possibly have been made by any of those other acts of conception, since those other people had different genes than your parents. Moreover, the statistical likelihood of you being conceived is independent of each prior act of conception in the same way that the outcome of a coin flip is independent of prior flips.
The relevant analogy is to note the large number of eggs and sperm your parents produced over their lifetimes and the extreme unlikelihood that the particular egg and particular sperm that produced you would have combined. This was, indeed, extremely unlikely ex ante, but you can only observe an ex post world in which this highly unlikely event did in fact occur.
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