sandriver

Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.

I believe NASA ultimately had to scrap the idea, but the cloud 9 buoyant cities idea is an old one, tracing back to Bucky Fuller and Earth, and it's vastly more plausible than trying to make Mars habitable. Or even the Moon! Venus has Earthlike conditions if you exploit buoyancy to settle in the goldilocks area of the atmosphere.

Inside you are two humans. One wants to befriend every animal. One wants to eat every animal. You are named Terry.

I can't really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian...

Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.

Absolutely revolting.

I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation's team. I didn't like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a "MOBA mode" plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.

5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).

In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They've recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.

Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it's presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.

I'm not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn't mean it's good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

Game budgets are too big.

Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.

Yasumi Matsuno's career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.

Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they're neuron-like. Saying they're mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that's a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They're both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.

Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as "resources" and "consumers" are privileged.

Not better and cheaper, but cheaper faster and worse. And that's what a lot of dodgy business care about.