Yeah, that’s not how conversation works, my lemmite acquaintance. One isn’t required to slavishly pound away at the initial focus of a comment. It’s not only acceptable to work tangents and expand on sub-topics, it’s expected to some degree or another.

People seem to think that every interaction online is a debate. It isn’t. Me? I’m just drifting along, chilling, shooting the shit with other human beings.

In that spirit, why do you think “goodness” is either a singular thing that is the totality of a person, or that there aren’t gradations of it? Not all saints are of equal goodness, nor are all villains purely evil. In terms of the human condition, nobody is so completely single faceted that it’s useful to apply good/bad paradigms to the entirely of the person unless the entirety of their actions so heavily skew things that good or evil is such a large percentage that it’s moot that other aspects exist.

I think we can agree that there’s difference between someone like Trump and someone like bezos. Both absolutely horrible people overall, but the degree of horror is not the same.

As such, when you look at the bad of a given person, it has to be taken along with the good.

Now, I think we’d also agree that billionaires as a thing is a net evil so horrid as to need abolishment. But it doesn’t preclude individuals from being the same kind of mix that you and I are. See, I know I have the capacity for darkness and evil. I also know that I choose, even when darkness is lapping at the shores of my true self, to do the most good I can. I hope that the opposite is true for you, that your inner goodness is so great that only puddles of evil reside which are easily relegated to meaninglessness.

But people are never so purely good that they’re incapable of bad things. The same is true of even the most vile examples of humanity from history. In the worst cases, any good may have been accidental, but still.

The ruling class of the ultra wealthy should indeed be abolished. But it’s just silly to pretend that they aren’t human, and thus a spectrum of good and bad

Not really though

When you’re talking about hoarding wealth, the problem isn’t just different from hoarding money, it’s a deeper and more complicated problem.

Assets in the case of these assholes is ownership. If they just held onto cash, all they could do is buy shit, which isn’t really a problem.

What they own is vast amounts of the economy, land, and the labor of people.

They think they own the people as well as the labor and products of that labor. They do to a large extent.

When you start whittling down a tier list of which billionaires are worse than others, and there are layers of shittiness there; it’s about their impact and how they wield that wealth as power.

I’m not sure billionaires actually have billions of dollars just sitting in a bank account.

It’s usually assets that contribute to net worth, not actual cash

How the fuck did steam invent gambling for kids? That shit started back in Facebook games.

It is awesome that you left the previous comment in place. Mad props!

Well, I’m not a code monkey, between dyslexia and an aging brain. But if it’s anything like the tiny bit of coding I used to be able to do (back in the days of basic and pascal), you don’t really have to pore over every single line. Only time that’s needed is when something is broken. Otherwise, you’re scanning to keep oversight, which is no different than reviewing a human’s code that you didn’t write.

Look at it like this; we automated assembly of machines a long time ago. It had flaws early on that required intense supervision. The only difference here on a practical level is about how the damn things learned in the first place. Automating code generation is way more similar to that than llms that generate text or images that aren’t logical by nature.

If the code used to train the models was good, what it outputs will be no worse in scale than some high school kid in an ap class stepping into their first serious challenges. It will need review, but if the output is going to be open source to begin with, it’ll get that review even if the project maintainers slip up.

And being real, lutris has been very smooth across the board while using the generated code so far. So if he gets lazy, it could go downhill; but that could happen if he gets lazy with his own code.

Another concept that I am more familiar with, that does relate. Writing fiction can take months. Editing fiction usually takes days, and you can still miss stuff (my first book has typos and errors to this day because of the aforementioned dyslexia and me not having a copy editor).

My first project back in the eighties in basic took me three days to crank out during the summer program I was in. The professor running the program took an hour to scan and correct that code.

Maybe I’m too far behind the various languages, but I really can’t see it being a massively harder proposition to scan and edit the output of an llm.

Yeah, this is actually one of the good things a technology like this can do.

He’s dead right, in terms of slop, if it’s someone with training and experience using a tool, it doesn’t matter if that tool is vim or claude. It ain’t slop if it’s built right.

True, I was just kinda hoping maybe graphene had found a way around that, that I hadn’t heard about yet.

Rcs kinda sucks, but it would be nice to have it as an option. And messages isn’t an option for me, sooooo lol

Yeah, but you still have to use messages, right?

Baldur’s gate 3, tiny Tina’s wonderlands, ff7, annnnd I’m not sure. The fourth and fifth slots are harder.

I would say pacman, but even if you gave me the arcade game for free, I don’t think I could play it worth a damn now. Same with centipede (they were my favorites back in the day, but pacman I was good at).

The original Mario Kart could be in there. And I can’t pretend that need for speed carbon couldn’t compete for a spot either. I think I’d take Kart over Carbon though.

Yeah, fuck it, pacman and Mario kart. Those are the last two spots.

No! Wait!

Neverwinter, the mmorpg. Fuck mariokart, I’d take that one, assuming I could either have ai teammates that didn’t suck, or could just keep a server for it running without cost/effort. Loved that game. Technically still love it, but when I stopped playing for a while, I got power crept and didn’t want to play ptw style like it turned into. But my haste cleric? Fuck yeah!

Amen.

My wife loves the game, so I’ve heard a lot of the music, and it may be the best sounding game I’ve ever heard overall. Not just because individual tracks are good, but because they fit the feel of specific scenes and locations so well.

I could never play it, but it’s one of those rare games where I can sit and read a book happily without the audio being totally annoying.

There’s low resource games that would do fine. You aren’t gonna be able to run a graphics intense FPS, but I’ve seen people run Minecraft, stardew valley and the like on minis.

Well, when it comes to video games, despite being foundational, Mario Bros. At the time, it was mids, but there were a lot less truly great games, and less abysmal ones so it looked better than it was. The series got better, but that first one was kinda meh. It’s all timing jumps, which is fine as far it as it goes, but there were both better and worse options on that console.

Away from video game, Life is about as meh as it gets. No real strategy, no depth. But it’s a good time killer and you can play it with a table full of people drinking and not get bogged down or into arguments because of the game (unlike monopoly lol).

It has definitely been a goal. How far they’ll get with legislators against them, I dunno. But it’s what Pinchai and the people in control wanted because they think it’s part of what made Apple powerful

This is my favorite game, ever.

Well, video game anyway.

Why? It’s just silly enough, just simple enough, but also just challenging enough for that perfect casual gaming range that I prefer.

It’s almost like a game developer went looking to make something I can play even when I’m not in the mood to play.

What’s kinda weird is that the first few times I played it with my kid and wife, I didn’t like it. I’ve never liked first person play at all. But after a while, I got used to the and could actually kick back and enjoy the vibe.

Besides, there’s a quest in one section where the first half is all a set-up for a Sepultura reference. How the fuck can I not love that? Like, you know that whoever was working on that part was high as fuck, listening to the specific track, and went “heh heh heh, this is gonna be awesome”, and drops in the punchline that’s so subtle you don’t catch it unless you know the band and are paying attention.

It’s basically a game built good borderlands fans that are also d&d geeks.

It’s cheating, but there was a track in need for speed carbon that was catchy as hell. Love me or hate me, by Lady Sovereign

Not technically video game music, but it’s one of the few tracks in any video game that I went out of my way to find outside of a game.

Prices never go down for things like that, they only go up.

Word. A company that says “hey, you own it, if you want to do the work” is a good thing

Ngl, when I do the occasional tablet or phone repair for someone that isn’t family or a friend, that’s around what I end up charging, with parts included, depending on the job. It’s extremely rare I’m willing to, but fucking around inside tight fitting devices with tiny screws and easy to screw up parts just isn’t something I’ll do cheap if I’ll do it at all.

Yeah, the optimistic people in the field might have the rosy outlook to say in about a decade currently, but they’ll usually kinda start mumbling if you try to pin them down on it.

Only person I know that’s keeping up with the various attempts to regrow or replace teeth as a professional has said we might see the very first wave of it around maybe 2040ish, if everything goes well, with early trials sometime after 2030ish. And even getting them to be that predictive was with the promise to never quote them by name because “there are so many steps between what’s going on and human trials that could fail or go wrong, shit is still science fiction to me”

Damn, I can hear the wheezing from here

That’s a lotta fucking Newports

Sure, but intent does matter.

As does the structure of the comment/conversation.

For me, if I’m trying to convince someone as the intent, I go about it different than if I’m expressing my thoughts/opinions and if it ends up convincing them, that’s okay, but it’s also okay if it doesn’t.

I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.

Well, maybe that the conglomeration of everything across the world into the hands of oligarchs means that tariffs are the lesser problem, but even that, I ain’t got patience to convince people of.

I’m just rambling and venting a little

Can we be real for a minute?

The kind of companies involved in android may have started in the US, but they’re international.

Buy a Samsung, it isn’t like it only puts taxes into one country’s coffers. Same with Google, which is headquartered in the US, but their phones aren’t actually made here. So you skip pixel devices, and feel all good about it, but if you actually get enough people boycotting them, it isn’t the us that takes the hit. It won’t even hit the pockets of the shareholders.

Who would take the hit is the people at the bottom, making the hardware, and that’s going to be whatever country has people willing/forced to work for bare minimum.

Some things, yeah, you can completely boycott and only US companies take the hit, which still isn’t really going to hit a big enough company because most of them are an international conglomerate’s property anyway. It might fuck over something like Arizona Iced Tea since that’s still a family owned company. But anything that’s publicly traded? Nah, it’s theater unless you boycott everything that conglomerate owns, and it ain’t like any of the nestle botcotts have hurt their bottom line in the decade or so it’s been going.

Phones though? There’s nothing you can buy that isn’t going to enrich Google in one way or another, at least indirectly. You can get close. Pine phones, fairphone, stuff like that where you have the ability to cut them out. But even going with a pixel and cutting google out from out still has feedback effect into Google’s influence via the secondary market keeping their brand with higher values, making their hardware look better than it is.

I get it, the shit is stirring, and you want to slap back.

But the only real way to slap back for real is to abandon smart phones. Some of those, android free, you can cut things down and maybe avoid sending funds into us coffers. LG dumb phones still exist on the secondary market, and they were decent. So I don’t doubt there’s other brands out there making phones that are decoupled enough that it might only be pennies instead of dollars.

Yah, that’s fun. But that’s also short term. Long term, you end up having to find stuff to do more than just drift.

Heck yeah! I got taken out of work by physical stuff, and finding ways to make a fulfilling life is what kept me going for a long time.

Nah, no judgement at all!

I think part of that gap is whether or not the retirement is a choice, and how much you can engage in life.

See, for you, you actually still have a “job”. You have a shape to your life, a purpose, a structure.

As people get older, there’s less of that. And, sometimes less ability to engage in the fun stuff.

It’s all situational, really.

Legit though, it isn’t as cool as its cracked up to be.

Yeah, rocket league is a sport game more than anything else, technically.

And, yeah, most rpgs are going to be better than all but the best sports games. It’s the sameness factor. One baseball game is much like another in what you’ll see and do on screen.

Not that rpgs can’t get samey, but they’re less so

Waaay obscure, but one of the few board games I’ve ever really enjoyed is solarquest.

I’ve played plenty of the usual board games over the years. They just weren’t anything I ever played because I wanted to play them. It was something to do, and people seem to naturally gravitate towards card and board games.

I had a chess phase in my younger days. I still play checkers checkers from time to time. “Chinese” checkers too, along with go. But those are still things that I’ll suggest when I’m with someone and looking for something to do while bullshitting.

I hate Life, and only play monopoly with the understanding that when I’m done with it, I’m going to give everything I have to whoever is the most behind. Sorry is okay, as is parcheesi.

But solarquest, I’ll find people willing to play with me because I like it. That and heroquest, but heroquest isn’t really a board game the way I think of the term, it’s a constrained ttrpg.

Both of those, my mom got me for Christmas after I begged for them, and I’ve never once been disappointed with them. I got both of them the year they came out, so we’re talking decades of play with both.

Heroquest, I used as a board with the figures good my d&d play for a long time as well as playing it as its own game.

Heroquest is cooperative, so I can definitely recommend it for low to zero conflict play. You’re uncovering a map, finding treasure, building a character. It’s d&d lite, in the best way. Original versions are expensive, but there’s a ton of printable versions out there, and it was rereleased in 2021.

Solarquest is essentially space themed monopoly on the surface. But, beyond your pieces being rockets and the concept of buying up parts of the solar system, there’s the flight mechanics where you have to have the fuel to go from one planet to the next. It adds a layer of thought and fun to it. Plus, you’re learning some local astronomy.

There’s rules for laser fights, and special roll actions, available as optional rules. It’s just fun. There’s an updated version available with more recent astronomy, fancier supplies and such, but I haven’t bought it yet.

Both of them are games I play with other old farts, as well as kids of all ages. I genuinely can’t recommend either of them enough.

Wrong kind of filter, but good on you for helping

Eh, going back at least as far as his real world days, he’s always been about being edgy and asinine. I’ve never heard of him directly fucking people over, but I can’t call him nice just because he uses a degree of manners in public.

It isn’t about his political views, idgaf about that as far as this subject goes. Until you get into actual extremists, the kind of right or left wing folks that make up the bulk of things tend to not be assholes in their day to day behavior. They don’t often pound their pulpit non stop, or publicly and directly bash any given group. Theo is like that, in that regard. It’s about him generally behaving as though he has some need to stir shit to feel like he’s funny.

Ehhhh, depends on what you want to trust them with.

Dank memes and dad jokes, sure.

Communicating with a friend about something personal, I wouldn’t.

That is pretty much the most chill chicken ever.

My hen? You put her on your shoulder and walk fast, she’s squawking in your ear to slow down, you maniac.

No such thing.

Google has not, and probably never will, make it accessible to outside developers.

Since they decided to play host for rcs, they essentially own it now.

No expandable memory, that’s the unforgivable sin.

But the form factor is unwieldy, no headphone jack, software dependent cameras, meh battery life, barely acceptable actual call quality as regards voice clarity, mid tier audio as regards music.

Now, the rest of the hardware isn’t bad on any given model compared to similarly priced phones. They use good glass, the radios all work well, and the processors are usually good picks.

I haven’t had a chance to fuck around with every model year. But they have consistently been a disappointment with call quality on the ones I’ve used, and the ones other people have used that I spoke to over a phone. That’s pretty damn bad by itself. Not so bad as to be unusable, but we’re talking having to pay attention closely in the worst cases.

Yeah, it’s the real barrier to graphene for me. Pixels kinda suck as a primary device.

This is why I’ll never buy anything Nintendo again. They’ve made too much of a habit of fucking over people.

Right now, nothing tops paprika.

It’s relatively expensive, even more so if you want it on multiple platforms as each one is a new purchase.

But there’s simply nothing out there better, period, much less on android. Better organization, better webclipping, better editing, better everything.

I tried every android recipe manager, and most of the windows based ones, plus some on iOS since my wife has the one flaw of preferring that (just joking, I ain’t mad at people preferring a brand) ecosystem.

Nothing could do everything paprika could do, and most of them didn’t do any single thing better.

Tangent!

I used to prefer being DPS. And then I played the first game that made healers and tanks fun for me. Shaiya. Wasn’t the best game overall. Kinda bad, and a ripoff of some parts of WoW. But it was fun to heal in, and very fun to tank in. You really could change the entire gameplay based on how you tanked, and how you healed.

Then I moved over to battle/war of the immortals. Again, flawed games, but tanking and healing were fun. Healing more than tanking in those two, but still more fun than DPS.

When I switched over to Neverwinter as my main gaming focus, the way they had the classes be able to handle tanking and/or healing was the most fun I’d ever had playing in PUGs. I could pop onto my haste cleric, keep everyone alive while also boosting them and put out play damage solo. Paladin? Same idea, only the team wouldn’t get hit much if at all. The fighter class was essentially pure tank, and good at it, but not as much fun as paladin for me.

I had more fun playing supports, heals and tanks than I ever did on DPS. It didn’t hurt that, on the games I played, I was great at tanking and healing. Enough so that my guilds/alliances would plan events around my schedule, even when the people were on the other side of the planet. Even on Shaiya, which was totally pay to win, I could out heal and out tank players that dumped tons of cash into it.

I miss it sometimes, but I’d have to rebuild my gaming PC to be able to play neverwinter now, because no way am I starting completely over on the ps5 with a controller that makes it much harder to play those classes. And none of the console based MMOs really entice me currently.