legend

For myself, I was a computer nerd since I was old enough to use a computer. Certainly I loved games, but I also had a general fascination with them. The fact that computers were nerdy things that the majority of adults (and most other kids) sucked at using even for basic tasks back then probably fueled that interest because it gave me something to stand out on even as a child.

Those facts made it "obvious" that I should do something with computing, but my ultimate path in the field would not have been obvious at the time. Being that I was already good with computers, hated school with a passion, and was an abysmal high school student (I graduated with an utterly mediocre 2.7 GPA) made me strongly consider not going to college. But I did anyway and managed to go somewhere decent probably on virtue of having at least passed the CS AP courses. Not long into college I started looking into more advanced CS topics. For a topic that was always easy for me, it was wild to flip through AI books and not have a clue what was going on. I didn't even have the requisite math to understand them. Since I've always been a nerd, AI also had a special appeal to someone like it and that for once in my academic life actually motivated me to learn more, so I started working in an AI research lab as an undergrad and the rest falls from there.

In many ways, I am deeply lucky. The thing I had a passion for just happened to also be a solid career path and I happened to fall into the right path for it despite being a terrible student. Unfortunately, that's not true for many, if not most, people. If you're feeling stuck though, I would still try to identify if there is something exciting you can work toward making a career. If that's not possible, then I would look for something you would feel good about doing, e.g., something that helps society in some way. You can of course just look for jobs only as a paycheck and nothing else, but I think that will be unfulfilling. Instead of a generic corporate ladder, maybe consider joining a non-profit and doing something you can be proud of. The world could certainly use it.

Of course, that's just my view and maybe that won't work for everyone!

20 minutes ago, Biggie said:

I’m just going to download P4 Golden because I loved it on the Vita and the fact it’s only $19.99

Hope you still enjoy it then!  

Not sure I'll do this one. P5 is one of my favorite JRPGs of all time, but even 4 has been difficult for me to get into due to the extremely bland and grindy dungeons (although the rest of it seems solid). Whereas P5 had vastly more interesting dungeons to explore, witch palace having its own unique spin on things. P3 looks like due to its age will suffer the same issues.

I think this means I'm pretty firmly waiting for P6.

55 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

That largely is not the problem. I work with an organization here in Houston which provides all manner of assistance to the homeless population here. The percentage of folks who we get into free housing that are back on the street within 90 days is something crazy like 95%.

The two main drivers of the homelessness crisis are mental health issues and drug addiction, not the lack of housing itself.

 

One area that we could improve with more housing are single mother homelessness which is typically caused by a lack of financial resources for housing, though that tends to be a shorter term problem as we do have programs to assist with this demographic. It just can be difficult for a woman, often fleeing violence from a partner, to initially access these resources which leads to the short term things like sleeping in cars.

 

But there are still plenty of good reasons to build more housing 😊

I have no doubt mental health and drug issues plague the homeless. Giving them housing isn't going to suddenly cure everything about the homeless. But getting them off the street seems like a big win for *everyone*

I'm not sure why the homeless you're talking about are "back on the street in 90 days." That suggests to me they're not really being given a place to stay but adding a whole lot of hoops that make it impractical. Given the general attitude of the country regarding the homeless, it's easy for me to believe this is being poorly implemented at best.

But no, I don't have first hand experience to have a particularly nuanced opinion on the solution. But I do think far too much of the public resists just paying to help them because they don't like the idea of giving away basic needs, even if it ends up costing us more to not do it.

Let's just give them housing.

On 1/13/2023 at 10:02 AM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

So I finally got to a point where I could kill the reaper at minute 30, but my first time I killed him too quickly and didn’t make it to minute 31 for the achievement. lmao 

Hmm That's strange. It should have given you the achievement anyway. I'm pretty sure I was worried about the same the first time I did it, and they still gave it to me.

I’ve got some bad news for you regarding the actual binary encoding of your numbers

When do we make the D1PTTRPG?

I’m not see enough love for evolved four seasons. 

2 hours ago, best3444 said:

It's true that it's mostly positive around here regarding VR but the price for PSVR2 is way too high. That's the negative. 

Yeah that seems fine? I certainly wouldn't classify being unwilling to pay a certain price being equivalent to being a hater of an entire technology  

1 hour ago, Stickey said:

Lol so many VR haters. No wonder I see ZERO VR news here. 

? As far as I can tell, there was only one person who had something negative to say about VR and they were limiting their criticism to a specific context. Everyone else here seems pretty clearly on the positive side of VR.

7 hours ago, Fizzzzle said:

I pay $80/month for internet. My only options are Comcast or DSL, and guess how many improvements Comcast has made to their infrastructure around here in their last, say... 20 years.

 

Move across town where Comcast has competition with fiber and suddenly their service doesn't blow massive buttdicks. Weird how that works.

 

#fuckmonopolies

 

Things like streaming games could absolutely be the future, but it will never be widely possible/available as long as ISPs have no incentive whatsoever to improve their product in 90% of their markets.

This is the sad reality of our internet infrastructure and business. From 2013-2020 I live in an apartment where there was only Cox as an option. We were told when we moved in that fiber was coming, but it only seemed to be made available everywhere *except* our apartment complex. The result is I paid the same as you for absolutely awful internet.

In 2020, (right before Covid!) we bought a house and one of the first questions I always asked when looking was "is FIOS available?" We now pay $10 more for bilstering gigabit up and down internet. And fortunately game downloads are not really an issue anymore.

We seriously need new regulation to break up these regional monopolies. It fucks everyone.

1 hour ago, stepee said:

 

maybe the valve stand-alone is real and will be good! 

I will probably be getting the PSV2 as my first because it ticks all the boxes I’ve been waiting for while not being priced as high as comparable models and it’s not owned by Facebook. Consoles do also have the advantage of fixed hardware which seems like a win when consistent performance is as important as it is for VR. 
 

Im also interested in what Apple is going to do for AR.

If Valve releases a new feature match for a good price I could be tempted into that too though! They knocked it out of the park with the Deck. 
 

19 hours ago, stepee said:

 

I think you just need to try some stuff :P

 

Aiming is one of the things that already just works great in VR. It’s not a usual complaint that it’s difficult. Moving around, especially in first person, is where it gets tricky. But that is more due to motion sickness issues they haven’t worked out yet, more so than control issues. I have no idea what the answer for that is in first person yet outside of a treadmill. 

I do indeed look forward to trying more out!  

2 hours ago, stepee said:

 

Using a mouse might be easier, as not much is easier than that. But actually aiming accurately with analog sticks without auto aim assistance is definitely more difficult imo. I’m a gamepad player, but aiming isn’t the best thing about it.

 

Most VR games don’t really account for that anyway, I think that’s more if it had accurate physics and it’s designed to be realistic. Usually you just point and shoot, which if you’ve ever used a wiimote; just picture that but accurate.

2 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

 

VR games offer aim assist afaik, also there's no gun weight or recoil. It's def not as easy as a mouse, but I don't think it's any harder than using a Wiimote.

I do think aim assist could level the playing field if done well. Good user interface to assist in showing where you will hit would also help.

2 hours ago, stepee said:

I don’t see how vr controls aren’t as good as regular gaming for aiming when in VR it’s just 1:1 perfect accuracy. 

I don't have a VR system (yet), but I do think there is a distinct possibility that aiming is harder in VR for the same reason aiming is harder in real life: there are many more degrees of freedom to get wrong than moving a cursor and you have to align the trajectory from gun to the target, vs pointing the center of your view at the target.

9 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

I broke @legend's heart and had some garlic. 😢

 

 

But it was a run with evolved bibles, garlic, crosses, runetracer and lightning ring

 

Would have had the pentagram upgraded too but ran out of time. Was using Dommario and he's slow af.

Pentagram is the absolute worst.

Until it's evolved and then it's crazy powerful  

10 minutes ago, chakoo said:

 

No you're only as old as the last time your model was deployed and only in touch with how much training data we allowed you to have. Now go back and finish your homework in your jupyter notebook. 

Psh I almost never work in Jupyter notebooks  My code bases are too big and complex. Even when I'm processing results I usually just work in a scratch file.

5 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

this mf Jared Huffman is 58 years old making him 40 when Leeroy Jenkins became a thing. 

Sounds good to me. I'm nearly 40 and still pretty in touch with gaming culture  

1 hour ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

I used it a lot initially, fell off it, and now that I start stuff with max curse, there are still some characters / levels / builds where it's very useful.

I'd be curious to know which builds you like to use it for! I can see that as long as you can survive long enough to evolve it, because then it does have some nice properties. But its vanilla flavor seems pretty bad unless you're surrounded by trash (e.g., early game)

9 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

So I was under the impression that garlic was a must have, but I pulled it off without any garlic or bibles!

 

 

Garlic isn't that great until it's evolved, and even then there are better weapons. I got better at the game when I stopped taking it. It's tempting because at low levels it's good, but ultimately isn't that great.

3 hours ago, Brick said:

OK I keep hearing about this game, and how everyone likes it. Debating buying it during the Steam sale, but what exactly is it like, and what makes it so addictive? 

It's four dollars. Get it!

You know you're OP in the game when you accidentally kill death having had no intention to for that run.