loobkoob

And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone's stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that's even more entry level than autocross, I'd argue!

We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so ~twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.

(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)

£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don't tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.

I don't hate the idea of midichlorians, honestly. Or rather, I do hate them but I think that's the point - to show that the jedi have kind of lost their way, are judging everything by "midichlorian counts" and tried to standardise and automate the process as much as possible rather than properly considering the human element and doing things on a case-by-case basis. If it's not the point then, well... it should be.

I think there are some decent ideas in the prequel trilogy, I just think the execution was pretty bad.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting "soft answers", but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don't feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn't really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.

Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They're not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there's so much more gameplay depth.

Register for a postal vote!

I've been separating Chris Brown's music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.

I don't disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You're paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)

I wouldn't recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it's quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding "soft answers" to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn't particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that's about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn't recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• "I want something more friendly than that"
• "less professional"
• "more wonky"
• "less rounded"
• "less uncomfortable"

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a "top 10 fonts for X" listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it's a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn't want it to replace search engines.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don't necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there's less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That's not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that's coupled with people wanting simple "explanations" because they don't understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter's fault in any way - it's the immigrants' fault - but also, they don't personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it'll all be solved for them. It's all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it's going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide...

Some people are beyond help.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that TalkTV is Rupert Murdoch's latest outing, and is owned by his News Corp, which also owns The S*n and The Times. It's no surprise it's awful.