legend

I sympathize with what @Mr.Vic20 is saying. I'm enjoying the game, but the combat doesn't click in a satisfying way the way God of War or something does. The most effective way I've found to fight the bosses and mini bosses is also the most boring. Here's the general conclusions I've come to Bigger enemies are non-responsive to player hits. They just ignore all your sword slashes and proceed through whatever canned attack animation they want to do. The regular dodge is often not good because the enemies will do a series of unbreakable attacks and the dodge freezes you in place immediately after you do it (even if you dodge and counter, they'll keep going through the attack unimpeded as with the above point). Instead, it's better to just free form run from attacks and only dodge if you have to. Never target lock, because this decreases your free form mobility to just run out of the way of attacks which is superior to close-range dodges. Hurting unstaggered boss/mini bosses is painfully slow (and unresponsive as with the first point) Charged up magic blasts (especially once mastered for quick charges) is very effective at dropping stagger Combining all those facts together means by *far* the most effective I've been is running away, shooting with charged blasts until stagger hits (or the 50% stagger hits) and then unloading ability attacks. Which is... not the most exciting? I guess the extra thing is I use the Gouge special in particular once they are 50% staggered (and you do the pull move on them) because they can't do anything during that and you'll shred their remaining stagger to go into a full stagger.

My wife and I started ESO a couple years ago or something and I can't begin to describe how frustrated we were that huge swaths of the game are solo only. WTF was the point of making this "online?" As it is, it's just a shittier Skyrim with some coop for the most mundane parts.

Sucks that it slipped by for so long, but you figured it out on a good game! FFXVI's most graphically pleasing feature is their contrast and colors in HDR. Shit fucking pops.

I think I ordered it sooner than I posted that I did but it was less than a week delivery for sure. Just the charging hub for accessories.

@Rev I got mine! Worked flawlessly with the steam deck right off the bat, even with the charging hub, which is the main motivation I have for these (for travel). Not setup or anything -- just plugged them in and away it went! The colors are indeed surprisingly bold seems like it will be great for my trips. I'll echo that I feel like the screen is slightly too large. If we can modify its size that would be awesome. Maybe there is a way to do that through the steam deck system settings at least, if not through the glasses. I'm on an iPhone so I can't use it with that, but I think I heard there are adapters it will work with? I might give that a try.

It is rational to want the death of horrible people that harm the world, so that's fine. But there is no way to justify wanting them to horrifically suffer on top of that without invoking some pretty ugly values. It's a common human reaction to wish for such suffering, but it's not one we should encourage. That's where I land.

Will do!

I bought a pair. Not sure when it will arrive

I’m liking these review scores!

I did Rito -> Zora -> Guerdo-> Goron I don’t think order matters. They suggest Rito first but even that I could see doing later.

Never watched one piece. Animes that go on forever never really interest me much. (Side thought: maybe if I got high regularly these kinds of animes would be more interesting). That said, while this trailer suggests they're giving it the old college try, I'm still unconvinced they can pull it off. Good animes are often good because they're animes. Even the more grounded ones tend to lean into the art direction to their advantage. Animation allows you to exaggerate emotions and aspects of the scene without it breaking immersion. You might still get a good story without that, but I don't see anything being gained from it being live action either. Maybe it being a live action means they have to make it more concise though, in which case maybe that is a reason for me to watch the live action version since I otherwise don't want to engage with the never ending random stories. That might be the best reason for it I can give!

I see. No I did not mean that. There are lots of virtues about living the country. I own a house and even though I am *far* from an outdoors person I love the sounds of the wind in the trees, birds, etc. I absolutely get enjoying that. But they're not. I live in New England and a lot of the buildings in various cities are wood. There are lots of different ways to build cities. I do think many cities fall far short of what cities could be though. Home/rent pricing in particular is often completely fucked, but this usually has to do with auxiliary issues and various forms of corruption rather than being an intrinsic property of cities. My understanding is home pricing in Toyko is far better than in many US cities despite Tokyo being one of, if not the, most dense cities.

Lack of cultural exchange limits diversity. Limited diversity is boring in itself and stagnates progress, which in turn is boring. So is medicine and airplanes and cars and rockets and computers and robots and boats and video games and basically anything humans of today use and enjoy regularly. Who gives a shit what's natural? Putting aside the weird limitation that cities can only be "concrete jungles," what the hell does race segregation have to do with living in a city? I don't live in a city myself.

Honestly, if it's anything it's probably this

"White only" is obviously morally reprehensible, but it's also weird because these people strive for the more boring existence possible. It's incomprehensible on multiple levels.

Yeah, early AI attempts were very much oriented around rule-based system and logical deduction. We usually refer to that as "GOFAI" which stands for "good old fashioned AI." Pure GOFAI is effectively dead and very few people believe in it. The world is too complex for humans to encode all the necessary rules and it doesn't have especially good mechanisms for learning from new information, a hallmark of animals. However, there is a need to give current methods more of an ability to reason. The trick is how to endow systems with reasoning that is compatible with learned models that are more murky. There's actually a bunch of good work in this direction. In my field it would fall under "model-based reinforcement learning" where agents statistically learn models of how the world works and then plans within them (typically still using statistical planning methods, but plan all the same!) You might have already known, but just to be clear, the Turing test is not the same as the Church Turing thesis. The former was Turing's rhetorical argument on intelligence, the latter is a computational theory claim (the foundations of which were simultaneously developed by Church and Turing, hence the name) which is far broader and is effectively the foundation for all computer science. Overturning the Church Turing thesis would be to computer science what overturning evolution would be for biology. The ramifications for what it would mean about reality would be really weird and extreme. On the topic of the Turing test though, it test succeeds as rhetorical argument, but fails as a literal test because it is very easy to dupe people with mechanisms that are pure smoke an mirrors. So I agree with him on that much. I don't think his framing of Turing's argument for the Turing test matches the historical context or content of the work Primarily, Turing wanted to object to the fuzzy and kind of mystical descriptions people had toward intelligence (or "thinking" more specifically) and push them towards adopting a functional perspective. If a machine can do all the cognitive things people do, it doesn't really matter what your fuzzy mystical thoughts on intelligence are. All we should care about is the function and we can evaluate that directly without untethered philosophy. There's some debate over whether Turing did think the imitation game would also be a good test or if it was purely for the rhetorical argument, but either way his drive was moving towards functional ways of thinking about intelligence. Even if the Turing test as a literal test was better and less prone to humans being duped, it's also kind of unnecessary for most analysis of AI. We know what we're building and what it lacks. It is necessary to empirically measure how good any AI system is at something, but we don't really need to empirically test what kinds of cognitive faculties it has. I don't need to "talk" to Chat-GPT to know about the seriously lacking cognitive faculties it has, for example. I know many things it lacks by its construction. People get overly swept up by AI scientists pointing out that these models are black boxes we don't understand. We actually understand a lot. What is usually meant by that is we can't tell you precisely how the process it carries out works because it's an incredibly complex process. If we knew how it worked precisely, we wouldn't have needed machine learning in the first place. We would have just programmed the process ourselves! But while we lack that precise knowledge of how it reaches its answers, we very much know how it learns to do that and what limits that imposes.

Much of the practical implementations of modern AI use human sources for the data, but that is by no means the limit of the field nor the end goal. My primary sub field is reinforcement learning and by default there is no human information in reinforcement learning. The agent learns autonomously by interaction with its environment. Back during my postdoc, a lot of the work I did was to *add* the ability for RL agents to learn from additional information from people (e.g., through human delivered feedback or commands) because teachers can accelerate learning and allow for user-tailored agents. The aspirations of AI are very much to move passed supervised learning. It's also why it's hilarious that people think LLMs are near "AGI" when LLMs are still just doing limiting dataset fitting of very well structured human data. Well if he does, that seems very unlikely to be true Human-like intelligence is only limited to humans if either the Church Turing thesis is wrong or the "hardware" of brains is the only kind of hardware that can manage the computational complexity of intelligent processes in practice. The former is very unlikely to be wrong and if it's wrong it has *vastly* weirder implications about reality than just what can be "intelligent." That latter is also very unlikely because evolution doesn't select for intelligence and populations evolved to it only through a series of local hacks. (Although I do think it's very plausible that we will need a hardware revolution for more intelligent machines -- but probably not one that needs to look just like brains)

I both like and dislike this article Things I like Demystifying LLMs instead of embracing the complete an utter nonsense capabilities OpenAI wants you to believe it possess. Focusing on more tangible risks with AI technology Promoting more transparent AI that can be reasoned about Things I dislike Reinforcing the incorrect view that AI researchers buy into catastrophic risk scenario by pointing to poorly conducted pools and a handful of legitimate scientists buying into the unscientific and unhinged speculation. Myself and so many of my colleges are regularly exacerbated by this narrative primarily fueled by PR focused tech bros with a savior complex. Dismissing "AI" as concept merely because our current technology is far from anything like human intelligence. It's still the aspiration of the field to work to intelligent systems with human-like cognitive abilities. But it's important to note that there is a huge difference between human-like cognitive abilities and human-like. We're building the former, not the latter.

I generally like loot, but that does sound like a bit much! Perhaps I'll wait for a sale.

"This will be first From game I enjoy," I tell myself for the fourth time in a row.

I do want to play this one at some point because it's just so fucking over the top I feel like I'll be laughing through the whole thing.

When Oblivion released, it was wildly impressive and led the way for open world games. Skyrim was less of an achievement and I was deeply annoyed that they removed my favorite feature: being able to make your own spells (which if you speced your character build for mana led to some absolutely awesome custom spells), but they were still unique enough that it was a stand out game. But I agree, since then, open world RPGs have evolved so fucking much and I don't know if Bethesda has moved with it. I hope they have and I'm sure I'll still enjoy Starfield. But the demos haven't made me think they can rival the best.

I went with 55" because anything bigger would be a bit much for my former apartment when I bought it (2019). In my new location I could see increasing the size to 65, but I also don't feel like I need more than that.

Well, they have my attention!