pigeonburger
1mo ago
Couple of weeks ago I moved my MiSTer FPGA from the living room to the bedroom and turned it into more of a retro-computer like setup. But on it, I've been mostly playing MGS for the PSX for now. I've played through and enjoyed Twin Snakes on the Gamecube back in the day, but never the original.
I've also been trying to get into but been unable to really plunge into old school first person dungeon crawlers turn based RPGs. Stuff like Wizardry, Might & Magic and their descendants. I always loved the aesthetic of that genre and I keep thinking that once it clicks I'll love them, but whenever I try to play them I just... mostly don't have fun. They're mean games; they rarely forgive mistakes, they require remembering a lot of stuff to have a chance. Yet I have no problem with challenging games like From Soft games, shmups, fighting games, etc... or with games that require acquiring knowledge (I love straight up oldschool roguelikes like Nethack). But dungeon crawlers... I don't know why it won't click. The only ones I could stomach a bit (and only a bit, I still dropped them fairly quickly) is the Etrian Odyssey games and some MegaTen games (the remake of the original Megami Tensei on the SNES, Strange Journey, SMT IV).
pigeonburger
1mo ago
A lot of the knife answers seem to assume maximum stupidity from the bat fighter and maximum cunning from the knife fighter. That the only strike someone could do with a baseball bat is a big homerun swing. I'm pretty sure most people would figure out that's not all they can do with a bat within seconds of thinking of it as a weapon, and of how to avoid ending up being knifed. Most importantly, a quick overhead bonk (think kendo strikes) leaves you a lot less vulnerable if you miss than a swing, and if the opponent tries to catch it or to block it they will open up the entirety of their body to kicks. While that is not going to kill or even knock out in one shot, just one overhead bonk connecting is likely more than enough to end the fight; the amount of force in it would be enough to have the opponent reeling for long enough to line up another one, and another one, ect... And as for knife fighters, winning with one requires knowing something that is not really commonly known: you will not incapacitate someone with a knife. The targets that can incapacitate are small and an untrained person is not going to hit them on a resisting target. An expert probably wouldn't even bother either. The way to win with a knife is that you tie them down another way (say, by tackling them to the ground), and THEN you do damage with the knife, repeatedly. But the knife is essentially useless to win if you are not able to tie down the other guy, and with no distractions he has a big heavy piece of wood he's highly interested in keeping between you and him.
I'm expecting that the difficulty and variety of bosses will ramp up as I get deeper in, though, since Margit, Leonine, Erdtree Avatar, Godrick, and even the Ancient Hero of Zapor all felt like variations of each other to some extent.
I have to stress that it is a fantastic game that I'm nitpicking and that expecting otherwise is stupidly unrealistic, but sadly I believe this to be the biggest problem with the game, that as you keep playing the map/dungeon/level structure and the boss design, that felt so natural at the start, ends up feeling increasingly game-y. But then again, expecting otherwise is insane; a game that large could not have had hundreds of dungeons with the same intricateness as a bespoke-made Souls game, hundreds of bosses with all different movesets, etc...
Bat is a better fighting weapon, knife is a more lethal weapon. I would say the person with the bat wins more often than not, but it's more likely that "and then he dies from bleeding out after winning" for the bat wielder than the opposite "and then he dies from the delayed effects of a concussion/brain hemmorage" for the knife wielder.
Reasoning: The bat can be held out forward to maintain distance. Can be held with the off hand in the middle to be turned into a shorter cudgel to push away the opponent. It's not a matter for the knife guy to just "close the distance once and stab with the knife" like some sort of ninja: people who who get stabbed while hopped up on adrenaline keep fighting, most of the time, only to bleed out later. Very often they don't even realize they've been stabbed until after. People with shattered arms or legs immediately lose usage of them.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
It sparks an internal and social reflection that we would even entertain the notion that a banana taped to a wall is art, therefore, it is art.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Ah, you are misreading me, it's not Theodore Dalrymple who's the extremist political operative, it's the communist commisars who deployed propaganda knowing full well that its purpose was to humiliate.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
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It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
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I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
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This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
Yes, this is on purpose. It's part of the mechanism by which I would actually curtail the administrative state's power: I want the administrative state to be forced to be hostile to legislators so that legislators take the power creep of the administrative state seriously and write laws that restrict the discretion the administrative state has.
For instance, even though it is technically a crime to make a material lie to any government official, the FBI can lie to other government officials they are investigating and never be charged for it, while the FBI can set perjury traps for other government officials and go after them.
How long would it remain a crime if legislators were maximally subject to it? Legislators have the power to make it not a crime. Or to significantly limit or clarify when and to whom lying is a crime. They just never bothered making it not a crime because they know that unless they find themselves significantly out of favor with the administrative state, everyone with some discretion with regards to enforcing this is gonna ignore it or refuse to prosecute it. But if the opposite political party could, for instance, sue the FBI (or even better; make the individuals in the administrative state personally liable) for not prosecuting crimes of the their opponents, then the law would be fixed in a hurry.
Right now, legislators write laws with significant vagueness, so broad as to make everyone technically commit crimes, safe in the knowledge that the heads of the administrative state are in their peer group and would not weaponise these against them, barring extreme situations (like that one businessman-politician we all know about). And for the most part, they wouldn't even weaponise them against the majority of the population, they're content to keep these laws in their back pocket to use if they need to take someone out. But the average citizen is not in the peer group of the legislators and the heads of the administrative state, all they know is that there are dozens of crimes a hostile state could find them guilty of if it wanted to. They might not mind if the state feels friendly, but increasingly people on all sides except the elites are finding the state to be apathetic or outright hostile to them. Making legislators feel this hostility is the best way I can think of to incentivize them to restrict the power of the administrative state.
Note that I'm also thinking that a "Higher Standard" law, if it turns out to work with legislators, could also easily be applied to the upper echelons of the administrative state and the judiciary: judges, prosecutors, etc... Any one who's got any power to wield the state's power against the population and whose power is based on significant amounts of discretion. Break up the professional courtesy that they have between them that the population at large doesn't get to enjoy; the administrative state being friendly towards itself is not compatible with democratic principles, it's a form of corruption.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Agreed on it being currently shitty to be a politician, but then again part of the issue is that on top of relatively bad benefits and pay (bad relative to what the same person could get working somewhere else with the same skills and workload) it also has very low respectability. What that law would do hopefully on the long term is restore respectability to that profession. And if it takes a significant pay increase to justify, I wouldn't be against it, as the benefits of a better breed of legislator would quickly outweigh their cost by orders of magnitude.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Following posting this comment ( https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193633?context=8#context ) regarding a law that I believe should only apply to those who would want to impose it on the population, I have been playing in my head with the idea of a "Higher Standards" bill for politicians. The idea would be that all laws apply maximally to elected officials; in situations where prosecutors or judges find themselves with any discretion in their ability to prosecute or punish crime committed by an elected official, even in their personal life, they should forced to start their process from the point of the harshest possible position. They would be forced to prosecute jaywalking, the slightest driving infraction, etc... and start the mental accounting for sentencing / fining with the longest sentences or highest fines before any mitigating circumstances can apply. Details as to whether it would apply to actions before the enactment of the bill, or to accession to public office could be negociated either way. A grace period could be left open to allow rewriting laws before it applied.
I see a lot of positives coming out of such a bill. The main one is to urge restraint in writing laws. Legislators pass laws knowing that it is unlikely that they would ever be used against them and care very little that these laws are held over the population like the sword of Damocles that could at any moment be applied by a prosecutor looking to make an example or please a private sponsor. If you want to vote for a law criminalizing piracy, you should yourself be able to account for every single piece of digital content you have. If you want to curtail "hate speech" you better be damn certain that whatever comments you make today on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict will not be considered "hate speech" by the standards of tomorrow, etc... While I don't believe it would stop all of it, I think it would force legislators to reconsider some laws that achieve little but make technical criminals of very average people for widespread actions.
Other benefits I see is that it would encourage legislators to pay attention to the technical minutia of the laws they're passing, outside of the pork they're able to fit in it and how it will play with interest groups. It would also discourage criminals from running for office.
I struggle to see negatives; technically it could discourage effective would-be politicians from running for office if they believe that this is going to be weaponized against them. And I guess it would be a struggle to pass as politicians obviously would hate it, but without any arguments to bring forward I think they would find it hard to convince their constituents that voting against it is anything but voting against their interest. And it would take only a few fairly clean politicians to make some noise in favor of such a bill, willing to trade the benefits of future criminality in exchange for the large boost such a clear pro-plebeian move would give them.
I guess it could also be argued it's a very legalistic, low-trust society move, which I would concede, but that's the point I believe we are at in much of the west. That when the system is seen as benevolent it is fine to leave cops with the discretion to decide, for instance, when it's in the public's interest to disperse disruptive people for vague reasons like "loitering" or to punish antisocial speech as "hate speech", but when I do not trust the system, until that trust is restored I would rather know exactly what the rules of the game are, and so I want lawmakers to be highly interested in making sure that rules are crystal clear too.
So are there any negatives I'm not seeing? Has any similar law been enacted elsewhere and what has it led to? I see lots of references in the anglosphere to proposed bills claiming to hold elected officials to a higher standard, but for the most part it seems like it's either object-level transparency laws (which of course, we need too, but won't encourage restraint in lawmaking), too vague or obviously meant to be solely weaponized against the proposer's rival (laws against "lying", or against "contesting election results" or whatever else of that kind).
pigeonburger
1mo ago
If I were the Conservatives I would swear that if this law gets adopted, when they get the majority they are likely to get, they will immediately abrogate it and replace it with one that only applies to a list of named persons consisting of all MPs who have voted for it, with a provision that it should be prosecuted by law enforcement to the fullest extent it can be.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
My humble 6GB v-card isn't running shit anytime soon, but yes, Mixtral has a good reputation in local-focused threads for being a very strong model for its size.
The answer is RAM and llama.cpp my friend.
Mixtral fits easily in 64 Gb of RAM with llama.cpp, and that is much cheaper than VRAM. You can offload a bit of extra processing to your GPU to help and get tolerable speed from Mixtral. That's the beauty of the MoE approach, it's quicker to answer than other models for the same memory footprint. I get about 3 t/s on a 3070 with 64Gb of relatively slow RAM, less than that but still tolerable when it has to ingest a big chunk of context first.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink.
Would not say utterly vanquished, it was a pyrrhic victory for the press and wokies at best. Gaming journalists barely exist anymore, sure some of that can be blamed on existing trends towards independent video bloggers and streamers and the threat of AI, but you know what would have surely helped them weather these conditions better? Not having alienated the very core fandom of the topic they're covering, those that would have kept consuming high quality written content about their favorite topic, if that had been what was on offer. As for the game industry itself, it's not doing so hot, especially on the western AAA side. Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times. Meanwhile, it's not like gamers could really lose to begin with; they're the one with the money and who drive the transactions. If the western AAA market refuses to make games they want, well, if there's demand there's gonna be some clever indies or 2nd tier devs snapping up the opportunity. And there's always Japan. And the past can't be taken away from them, there's an essentially infinite back catalog to explore.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Well yeah, if criminals had the moral wiring and foresight to dodge "tragedy of the commons" scenarios, they wouldn't be criminals.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
The people who are blaming hip-hop for cultural decay would have blamed jazz for the same 70 years ago, and now jazz is probably the second most "respectable" high brow musical genre after classical.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
The main argument is that Section 230 as-is allows big tech to have their cake and eat it too. They can claim to be not liable for user content on the basis that they cannot control what is posted on them, then turn around and heavily "curate" content on political grounds. The idea would be to repeal Section 230 and replace it with an alternative that forces a consistent position; either you curate content and are liable for the content you allow, or you aren't liable but have to tolerate wrongthink on your platform.
Reassurance that death is not the end.
*EDIT: Meaningful words of comfort for those who grieve.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Numbers are hard to put in context on this, but vibes-wise, I don't know if I'm completely isolated from the affected class of people by my filter bubble, but here in Quebec I don't know a single person taking opioids outside of medical bounds (abusing prescribed or non prescribed). On the other hand the government recently put out a TV ad advising the population that they made an anti-opioid overdose drug available for free in pharmacies and that ad felt to me like a foreign object intruding into my filter bubble.
I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.
It's probably that I've become desensitised but Montreal is not even really bad with this, we might have the proper balance of how to treat them. The police, barring extreme circumstances, do not let the homeless cluster until they become a problem. The real trouble tends to start when they interact with one another, if they're spread out they might panhandle and annoy the public a bit, but they don't often get violent.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
It's not exactly the same, but I think it shares components with the "DARVO" tactic. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Maybe if OP or his brother has a talk with the teen afterwards about the movie they could highlight the philosophy. Maybe I was just thick, but when I was younger it eluded me how Hollum was a weak leader, I accepted the crew's stated reason for their dislike of him.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Of recent movies, the Dune adaptations would fit the bill while being entertaining. Later books muddle the message, but the first one (and its adaptations) showcases legitimate, virtuous leadership in a righteous struggle against decadent, and in the case of the Harkonnens outright degenerate, adversaries. It makes very clear why Leto and Paul are inspiring leaders and why they are a threat to the Emperor. It makes a great case in favor of virtue.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
A very good suggestion, but I'm afraid the case laid out by the movie would have eluded me when I was a teen, because it's not as clear it's making a general point about leadership and the nature of society rather than a narrow one purely in the service of a (truly excellent) action movie. Fight Club meanwhile beats you over the head with the fact it's making an argument about society.
Yeah, the main contribution to the book of that is emphazing that you should not think that the Harkonnen are moral equivalents to the Atreides. The aesthetic choices in the movie already do that job well enough.
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