domain:worksinprogress.co
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12m ago
I think the moderators have mentioned several times that they often do not notice rule violations because no one has bothered to report the violations. Did you report this comment and give the moderators enough time to process the report?
epohon
1m ago
And if I'm too much of a coward to end myself before that point, at least I hope I'll have the presence of mind to see that there is no reason other than they're strong and I'm pathetically weak, and so not bother with this pitiful question.
BlindDeafRat
11m ago
I love this genre, so I'll list the ones I've played and liked.
Forced stealth is pretty rare. And just that alone basically excludes everything. So I'll ignore that criteria. Although none of these games have diplomacy.
Far Cry is a good recommendation like the other poster said, all the games from FC2, to FC5. They also all have mods if you want to make it more difficult.
Tom Clancy's Wildlands is third person, but you can aim in first person. Also fits the forced stealth metric because you will die almost instantly if you get caught on the higher difficulties). There's also its sequel Breakpoint which I haven't played, but I heard some say it's better.
For a less popular route there is the Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 1 and 2. There's also the earlier games, but I didn't like those. Contracts is basically an eastern european AA version of Far Cry with some pretty solid mechanics and good level design.
There's also Homefront Revolution. Which is again a European take on Far Cry, this time by Crytek, it's set in an urban environment which mostly plays it straight except it also has sections where you're in controlled civilian areas and have to sneak around and can't freely kill people.
Intravenous is an isometric top down game, but it's a really good stealth game otherwise. Includes a lot of mechanics from other games, has a ton of customization, and has a bunch of different difficulties. If you don't mind the isometric perspective check it out. The developer is clearly right wing too, and it shows in the story if that matters to you at all.
Hunt Showdown is a multiplayer version of this as well. Stealth is a huge element because it has really good sound design, so if you give away your position by making noise skilled players can easily find you.
There's also the old school Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games, and SWAT 3 and 4, or the more modern Ready or Not, but I haven't played these because controlling other characters isn't really as interesting.
Finally if I depart even further from your criteria there's Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3. If you like pure stealth they're amazing games, but they're isometric and you control multiple characters at once and can at any point pause and order them around. So it doesn't really fit except that it's stealth, your characters will die very quickly when spotted and stealth is mandatory.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
25m ago
Yeah! It's not a masterpiece, but it's a big open world, the aesthetics are neat, and some of the quests are done really well. Some of the story is kind of incoherent, but it looks cool and the systems are fun.
jkf
32m ago
Ironic given his habit of dropping media falsities in the middle of long arguments, seeming to acknowledge corrections only to advance the same claims again a few months later in the middle of even longer arguments...
NullHypothesis
2m ago
It sounds pretty realistic to me, and if I was conversing with the AI over the phone it would take a while before I would even suspect it wasn't a person on the other side. How many years until the AI voice becomes indistinguishable from any random person's? Heck, people are even saying the AI voice sounds more human than the actual person talking to the AI.
There was that one news segment a few weeks back about some guy framing a school principal with an AI voice to make him sound racist and it had an actual tangible impact on that person's and the schools livelihood. And this is AI copying another person's voice, which means the voice would be nowhere as good as 'Her's' voice.
It honestly doesn't matter if you or I could identify 'Her' as an AI, if enough people believe a shoddy AI copy of some random dude's voice to be a real voice then even more people would not be able to tell 'Her' is an AI. At that point, it could very well be considered to be 'real'.
NelsonRushton
14m ago
What Big Teeth You Have!
Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
The propaganda of Soviet communism was rife with woke sounding platitudes. For example,
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others Stalin: Interview with Roy Howard, 1936].
The Social Democrats' ideal should [be] the tribune of the people, which is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects [Lenin (1902): What is to be Done?].
They [blacks] have the full right to self-determination when they so desire and we will support and defend them with all the means at our disposal in the conquest of this right, the same as we defend all oppressed peoples [Trotsky (1933): The Negro Question in America].
The problem is that Soviet communism did not really accomplish any of those things. What it did accomplish was to murder 40 million Russian people, plus or minus 20 million, and to terrorize hundreds of millions more over multiple generations. The people of Russia, including many of the soon-to-be victims of Soviet terror, for the most part did not see this coming. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [The Gulag Archipelago]
I invite you to consider the scenes Solzhenitsyn describes above, imagine them as vividly as you can, and multiply by 40 million. Next, imagine the continuous, lifelong fear that you could be next no matter what you do, and that you will be next if you say publicly certain things that you know to be true; multiply that by 300 million (over three generations), and add to the total. If you can get your head around that quantity of human suffering, then you have grasped the magnitude of the evil of Soviet Communism.
As merciless and malevolent as Soviet communism was, how could the Russian people, especially the intelligentsia, have failed to apprehend its true nature until it was too late? First, the Bolshevik revolutionaries didn't say they were merciless and malevolent; quite the opposite! Who could be against their stated agenda of fighting tyranny no matter what class of the people it affects? or self-determination for oppressed peoples? or abolishing oppression of some by others? One of the lessons of the Russian Revolution -- along with the histories of Naziism and of Chinese communism which followed later in the same century-- is that when the leaders of a political movement expound the lofty mission of defending the downtrodden and looking out for the little guy, that may not be what they are actually up to. Often, indeed, they are up to the very opposite, and it is not always easy to tell.
On the other hand it is not impossible to tell. Tyrannical movements may wear sheep's clothing, but they cannot hide their fangs. The hallmarks of tyranny, which are often evident even in the early stages of tyrannical movements, include identity politics, censorship, thuggery, and authoritarianism. Soviet communism exhibited all four of these hallmarks from its beginnings, as did the Naziism in Germany and communism in China. This essay will discuss the visible role of identity politics in the early stages of the communist movement in Russia.
2. Identity Politics in Soviet Russia
Oh grandmother, what big teeth you have! [Little Red Riding Hood]
The chief intellectual and political leader of the Russian communist revolution was a one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin. Like the thinker Karl Marx before him, the doer Lenin often spoke in terms of "class enemies": not individuals who had exploited other individuals, but kinds of people who had historically exploited other kinds of people. For example in 1905 Lenin wrote (in the fashion of Marx):
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. [Lenin (1905): Socialism and Religion]
For Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led, the exploiting class, aka the bourgeoisie, consisted of (1) the aristocracy, (2) kulaks (farmers who owned over 8 acres of land), (3) industrialists, and (4) ideological enemies -- meaning basically any white-collar worker who was not a communist. Anyone denounced as fitting one of these four descriptions would be marked for persecution and often death in the USSR, regardless of their personal history as an alleged exploiter.
On the one hand, it is true that working class Russians of Lenin's time often lived in grinding poverty, that many aristocrats and industrialists enriched themselves at the expense of that working class, and that these same aristocrats and industrialists often exhibited depraved indifference to the wellbeing of their fellow men. At the same time, it is true that not all landowners and industrialists were equally exploitative, and that many showed more kindness toward their fellow men than the workers would have been in their shoes. It is also true, especially of the kulaks, that many earned their way, partly or wholly, into their positions of relative wealth by diligence and foresight. But the communist picture of the world washed over the whole story of individual difference in merit, conduct, or culpability. Lenin's narrative of class struggle conveniently drew a circle around everyone who owned land or other valuables, labeling them as "parasites" and "class exploiters". This in turn licensed the indiscriminate looting and confiscation of those valuables -- at first by rioting thugs and later by the Communist government -- not only with a clear conscience, but with a pretext of righteous indignation.
In 1916, just before coming to power, Lenin's tone was confrontational, but not as overtly malicious as it would later become. On the eve of his successful coup d'etat, Lenin wrote that violence would probably be necessary to bring about the revolution, but that it might not, and that in some sense he hoped it would not:
Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only programme of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals. [Lenin (1916): A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism]
In hindsight the last clause (violence is alien to our ideals) was a complete lie. Within two months of assuming to power, Lenin's tone became far more menacing:
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies! All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism. [Lenin (1917): How to Organize Competition]
and we now know that Lenin's talk of war and death was not just talk. After seizing control of the government, the Bolsheviks rapidly instituted the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The immediate business of the Cheka was to carry out the Red Terror, which would take the lives of tens of thousands of allegedly "bourgeois" Russian civilians. This terror campaign was consciously named and patterned after the infamous Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution in the late 18'th century. One difference, however, is that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" by its enemies, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects and implementers.
Just as important as exterminating (Lenin's word) the bourgeoisie, another job of the Cheka was to systematically confiscate the belongings "enemies of the people" -- where an enemy of the people was, again, anyone with enough property to be worth stealing. There were some obstacles to achieving this objective: gold, jewels, and works of art, and such could be carefully hidden and it often were. Indeed, the stories of targeted families desperately hiding themselves and anything of owned of value is one of the most poignant chapters in the story of the revolution. But the Cheka found a solution to that problem, which became part of their standard playbook: (1) kidnap a member of the bourgeois offender's family, (2) guess how much the family could pay and ask it in ransom, and (3) collect whatever payment the family could come up with, or kill the captive, or both. Thousands of the deaths in the Red Terror were the results of this scheme.
Martin Latsis, one of the men appointed to oversee the Cheka, wrote explicitly of the role of identity politics in the Red Terror:
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror. [Latsis (1918), Red Terror, no 1]
Publicly, Lenin stated that Latsis's methods were excessive and that he talked too much about collective punishment -- but my opinion is that Lenin simply didn't want the quite part said out loud. Lenin never removed Latsis from his position, and Latsis's views, as reflected in the quotation above, essentially governed the tactics of the Cheka under Lenin's command. The Red Terror was the first modern experiment in social justice -- carried out under the same pretext embraced by the modern social justice movement (historical class exploitation), and with indiscriminate cruelty that was scarcely hinted at before the fact.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
17m ago
Nope. They have captured a strip of land across the border, but the city itself is still very far away in this war's terms, 20-30 kms or so.
Folamh3
43m ago
Played it, really enjoyed it. The stealth parts of New Order reminded me of it.
NullHypothesis
16m ago
the ability to follow instructions
You could interpret this in two ways:
- The actual intellectual ability to understand the instruction.
- The willingness to follow instructions.
Since IQ is already taken out of the equation and the focus is on behavior it probably means point number 2.
NullHypothesis
20m ago
What's the argument on the percentage of observed behavioral differences that can be attributed to genetics versus culture/upbringing?
Even IQ (and general related intelligence/ability-based measurements), one of the most, if not the most robust things that can be measured to come out of the social sciences puts its predictive power on something like job performance at around 50% on the most positive studies on the topic. On something like salary, I think it's like 20% depending on the study.
I don't doubt there is an underlying genetical factor on behavior, but I believe the effect to be less than culture and environmental upbringing in influencing an individual's behaviors as an adult. I base this on the fact that even psychopaths can be conditioned to be less violent through therapy and behavioral training, especially if done in childhood. Single-family black households are at record highs compared to decades ago but there was a point in time when the amount of two-parent black households was higher than the percentage of two-parent white households today. This is more due to culture and less due to genetics. If genetics was a primary factor we would never see big shifts in behaviors across genetic populations.
Don’t worry, the mods have decided that’s not a controversial claim, otherwise they’d have issued a warning for not proactively providing evidence.
The scary thing is, it’s not their own bubble. The service is wholly controlled by OpenAI. For these lonely people, the majority of their “human contact” be with the avatar of a megacorp. The implications are staggering. People will pour out their hearts and souls to this thing; don’t you think that a lot of actors, both private and governmental, would love to have access to all that data? Your deepest insecurities, sexual proclivities, problematic politics….
And it’s not just a one-way-street where the data flows from the user to the AI. The AI can then manipulate the user. I mean, it’s so easy to fall in love with one of these things, and love can change a person. So all of a sudden, your girlfriend will start subtly suggesting that you buy certain products, buy into certain ideologies….
I’m on mobile, so thankfully, this is the farthest I’ll be taking this schizo rant. But, for the record, this is why I refuse to engage with any non-open-source “AI girlfriend” initiatives, even if I’m in the target audience.
More options
Context Copy link