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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
It's TZD
User ID: 2892
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
why China would want to advance US foreign policy goals is unclear to me
My best guess: the US believe China has more to lose than gain if Russia were to use destructive satellite weaponry and that their Chinese counterparts will reach the same conclusion. Russia and China may have a 'special relationship', that doesn't meant they're on the same page.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
I can neither agree or disagree with such a vague assertion. When did the drop off happen? What are some notable examples of poor writing? What sort of games do you actively seek out and which do you avoid?
In creating my own mental shortlist of games I'd recommend on the strength of their writing, I find it starts in the early 00s and continues right up to the present day. This is pretty consistent with the transformation that happened around the turn of the millenium, where genres that had previously included only the bare minimum of writing suddenly had characters the audience cared about and plots that were more than just the connective tissue between levels. Naughty Dog went from Crash Bandicoot to Uncharted in less than a decade, and many studios went through similar if not quite so dramatic shifts.
If I had to offer an explanation as to why you feel writing is worse, it's because it's much, much harder to ignore now. In many games you simply cannot escape voiced dialogue unless the developer had the charity to offer a distinct volume slider for it. Audio logs are fucking everywhere, friendly NPCs chatter, disembodied voices give instructions and repetitive incidental dialogue just won't die (No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses). Probably most egregious are the walk-and-talk segments that Ubisoft (I believe) pioneered, which are the worst incarnation of the unskippable cutscene yet. Maybe they're 'invisible' to the average player which is why they've become the expository vehicle of choice for titles like the new God of War.
Anyway if you're looking for some good writing in a scifi setting I'd recommend The Talos Principle.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
And in this hypothetical the positioning of troops in Mexico and Canada was in direct response to USA's seizure of Nova Scotia.
The Baltics joined NATO in 2004, and didn't host any permanent NATO troops until the EFP was created in response to Russia's seizure of Crimea. The current force is ~10,000 in the Baltics, 11,600 in Poland. It doesn't take much historical acumen to understand that this is not a credible threat to Russia's continuity.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
As a relatively new user I made the jump to start frequenting the motte because the discussion at my former haunts had become increasingly shrill and monocultural. Moderation might be a little more hands off, but I see no such trend towards deeper and thoughtful discussion on the wider web.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
Sachs is making the same fundamental mistake the current administration has made and the next administration will likely make again, which is thinking that the US is in the driver's seat and all it needs to do is turn the wheel to get everyone going in the direction it wants. The war did not start on America's terms and unless it wants to intervene directly, it will not end on America's terms (a position Sachs is not advocating for, as I understand it).
NATO's enlargement was not, as Sachs seems to imagine, a result of an ever expanding American empire, but the manifesting of the strategic needs of the member states. Even if the US could wave it's magic wand and dissolve NATO tomorrow a new Euro-centric bloc would form as a symptom of the same strategic anxiety. Life in the Russkiy Mir is still within living memory of the majority of the former SSR and there is hurry to return to it. The Baltics are preparing for the worst and Poland's military buildup has gone into overdrive. Western Europe, which does not have the misfortune of sharing a border with Russia, has been slower to wake from its stupor.
Meanwhile at the Kremlin there appears to be no desire for a neutral Ukraine either. Putin et al shunned all offramps prior to Feb 2022 and have opined repeatedly that Ukraine is Russia. The Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have been legally incorporated into Russia. After the sanctions placed on it in response to its seizure of Crimea, Russia made great efforts to reduce its reliance on the west and built up great wealth (which it is now spending to fund the war). Does Mr Sachs imagine that if Biden were to ask nicely that Putin would just pack up and leave?
Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
I want to like Kidology, and I like that she's tried to position herself atop the culture wall. But Christ is she verbose, whenever I try to watch one of her videos I find myself skipping forward looking for some meat on the bone.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
They've just grown up with tools that work. They aren't shadetree mechanics because that hasn't been something in their environment. They know other things.
In your opinion what are these other things?
Today no journalist beside Tucker would ever interview a Russian.
Requests have been made for interviews with Putin. The BBC still has Steve Rosenberg in Russia and I feel safe assuming there are other western journalists, some of whom interview Russians.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
Whilst this is equal parts sad, tragic and horrifying, the prevailing thought in my mind is that this is excellent material for a black comedy.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
I didn't play much Starfield, but i did complete the SecurityVPiracy questline and it reminded me strongly of the Skyrim Thieves Guild questline, in how little of the plot actually makes sense. I have mercifully forgotten most of it at this point, but my overall impression was that it was deserving of the kind of breakdown that the late Shamus Young did for the aforementioned Thieves Guild quests. That said it does at least have one decent (by the game's abysmally low standards) dungeon on a lost, derelict ship.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
1yr ago
How often do you see your co-worker tackling problems beyond their profession? In my experience raw intelligence and domain expertise can very easily give the impression of a deep and profound wisdom that simply isn't there. Do not be too surprised if one day you see them out of their element and the illusion shatters.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
As someone that only started interacting with the rat-sphere and adjacent parts somewhat recently, I appreciate this window into history. Great work.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
Can't speak for /tv/ but most boards I browse tend to be moderately much more tightly for off-topic content now than they were 5 years ago. I find the mods over-zealous, but prefer it to every board degenerating into some different flavour of /b/.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
A sudden surge in personnel could cause exactly the kind of organisational chaos that allows for gaps in oversight, especially when multiple organisations are involved.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
character.ai has a pretty notable userbase if its subreddit subscriber count is any indication. I think Zvi might have had a more objective stat in a recent newsletter. I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about if you're not already in certain circles. As someone very much outside of the circle my only exposure to the subculture is the occasional peek into the chatbot threads on /g/.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
To really salt this fine broth of a comment, it needs to be read by Dagoth-Ur.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
OpenAI were recommending phasing out voice auth back in March, passably mimicking voices is now extremely accessible. Current TTS can't replicate more subtle mannerisms and tics, but human mimicry and speech-to-speech gets you most of the way there.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
It's not hard, you get on the phone with Putin, you stop the war with a phone call, this is literally how that works.
A phone call, of course, why didn't they think of that. Oh wait they did think of that, Russia invaded regardless. And then Lavrov gets snippy when the recorded call was released, because it clarifies just how disinterested in negotiation Putin was at the time.
Regardless if a call is made or not, I fully expect that given a second Trump administration we will immediately see the Kremlin bleating the need for a ceasefire. Russia's offensive strategy since Ukraine's culminated seems to be been to try and claw as much territory as possible, no matter the cost, on the gamble that a second Trump administration can bring Ukraine to the negotiating table. Russia wouldn't be seeking a ceasefire for lasting peace, but to give it time to lick its wounds.
"No matter the cost" is somewhat hyperbolic so I'll render it in clearer detail. US DOD estimates 350,000 killed or wounded between Feb 22 and June 24, estimates vary but the US is on the more conservative end. This might not look so bad from a glance at the map, after all Russia would end the war with a decent chunk of additional territory, but it made most of those gains in the opening stages and paid most of the cost in marginal gains. More pressing for Russia, most of its prodigious inheritance of Soviet equipment is running dry, which is manifesting itself in the repeated appearance of motorcycles in offensive action. Although if Russia finds itself on the defensive again, it will be the lack of artillery that will be most pressing. Russia can replace some lost equipment, but nowhere near enough to meet current consumption rates. The bottom line here is that Russia's warfighting potential has been trending downward since the beginning of the invasion and is only going to get worse in the near time.
On the other side Ukraine's warfighting potential has trended upward since '22. Over time its backers have been more willing to ship more and better materiel, and lift previous restrictions on how certain systems are used. This week the first transfer of F-16 should finally be completed, which is expected to improve Ukraine's situation re: glide bombs and cruise missiles. Ukraine has also made Crimea extremely costly for Russia to hold, and an abandonment by Russia (de facto or official) would be a huge political win for Ukraine, this is why Ukraine has invested so many of its highest quality and scarcest assets in making the peninsula untenable. A ceasefire would give Russia breathing room to undo much of the damage Ukraine has inflicted.
With this in mind what can the US do to bring Ukraine to the table? The naive answer is to simply cut off aid. Ukraine already experienced some very tough months without US aid, and while they were amongst the most difficult of the war and resulted in more territory lost than in the months with, there was no indication that the materiel shortage risked causing a total collapse. Judging the effect of a further extended period without US aid is anyone's game. Some things to consider are that Russia's fighting power declining means the loss of US aid hurts less over time. The European states also get a say. I expect that if a US administration were to cut off Ukraine entirely they would take measures to rebalance back in Ukraine's favour again. I think this is the scenario in which we are most likely to see European soldiers in Ukraine, in some fighting capacity. However more likely is the Europeans and other foreign partners would accelerate their existing efforts.
tldr: a Trump administration likely won't want to offer Ukraine any real carrots, and it's one good stick has clear limitations and drawbacks.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
I'm not expecting F-16s to change a whole lot, but longer range munitions like AMRAAMs should at very least prove useful for intercepting cruise missiles, which improves their air defence picture as a whole. I mention them because they are a recent, high profile, example of the overall trend thus far.
Sea drones don't need to be able to 'seriously contest' the black sea fleet to be useful strategically. They make it harder for ships to resupply Crimea, force the black sea fleet to operate further away from Ukraine's coast and have likely been critical in preventing the fleet from blockading shipments of grain.
They've had much more materiel throughout the whole war, including artillery.
Something that I tried to stress in my previous comment was that this advantage is a one-time bonus that is running its course.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
Was this only through the API? I'd be interested to see regular Claude's freakout
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
To have a volunteer for a foreign army as the Vice President
He did volunteer work at an Israeli base as part of a broader school program. He did not, as your wording suggests, join the IDF.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
I spent a fair bit of time in groups ostensibly proximal to the horse show, and never understood the appeal either. Despite absorbing large chunks of the fandom osmotically. Once I started directly interacting with people that had been into it (thanks, VRChat) did I start to see it as part of a broader constellation of "moe shit." If someone was into K-On!, Azumanga Daioh or Dragon Maid, there was a much higher than average chance they had also been into MLP at some point. I don't get moe either. The only useful observation I can provide is that it seems like you either get it, or you don't.
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due to lack of interest the human race has been cancelled
11mo ago
I'm most of the way through Seeing like a State. The book is undoubtedly fascinating, although I found it has more information about indigenous African agricultural practices than I care for. I wish more focus had been put upon the state's and intelligentsia's response to failures of central planning. It is mentioned that in many cases the authorities tended to quietly accept the necessary on-ground deviations to make the centrally planned systems work. Some self-reflection from central planners would have been a welcome addition. Furthermore it seems like the received wisdom now is that when you're planning anything you make sure to consult with stakeholders, so one wonders how we reached this point.
Greg Egan's Dichronauts moreso for the strange non-Euclidean geometry of the setting, than the plot itself which is a relatively pedestrian Jules Verne-esque voyage into the unknown.
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