Lurker > adjl

Jen0125 posted...

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-mnuchin-house-senate-ffdf37776e63a09bb6966d741df7093b

Awesome

Amazing

So much better

I like the "any service that collects data on users around the globe should be owned by Americans" without a hint of self-awareness.

Blorfenburger posted...

You didn't say for how long. Even just a couple months is huge savings towards a decent place to live down the line

pionear posted...

No you're locked in Forever...

I tried that, and unfortunately that's against the rules.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

New York City. It's a huge fucking deal there at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_migrant_housing_crisis

So... in places where Texas is deliberately engineering a crisis situation by spending large amounts of money on political stunts instead of trying to solve the problem. Sounds like the migrants aren't the problem, but that's none of my business...

agesboy posted...

he is one of the very few politicians i actually trust

And that's why they do him dirty.

darkknight109 posted...

The traits generally correlated with billionaires are high starting wealth, high degrees of risk-tolerance, greed, and a certain level of narcissism and/or psychopathy. None of those require above-average intelligence.

And among those, high starting wealth is probably the most important because it means they can get away with high degrees of risk tolerance and levels of narcissism/psychopathy without going bankrupt or getting punched.

Won't someone think of the children at the border?

The Pelennor Fields Rohirrim charge.

Metalsonic66 posted...

At least one scene in every Pixar movie

The intro to Up in particular is just brilliant. The rest of the movie is nothing really special, but those first ten minutes or so are a masterclass in emotionally evocative storytelling.

Pretty great, but I'll be astounded if it actually goes through.

Don't you know? Catching more people means an even greater percentage than usual are making it through and terking er jerbs.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

It's good for other things. My step dad knew enough about mechanics work but not enough to know how to work on specific models of vehicles. He'd YouTube it and get it done. Basically he knew how to work on older vehicles but not modern ones.

It's a big hole in the whole "kids these days don't know how to change a tire" narrative. Many younger people indeed don't know how to do basic vehicle maintenance or other similar tasks that can be handy to know but come up relatively rarely, but they do know how to find out. The Internet is a gold mine of directions for tasks like that, often with step-by-step video guides, such that there's very little reason to learn them before they're actually needed. The idea that everyone needs to know and every parent has a responsibility to pass the knowledge on to their children is just outdated.

I memorized it to 9 decimal places early enough that I can't really make a comparison to the before times.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Oh for sure, I wouldn't dispute that someone with two Bachelor degrees is above average intelligence. I also don't consider it that special.

I might actually consider it special in the sense that it's not very common (particularly *only* having two bachelors). Most people who get a bachelor degree either stop at one because going further won't help them, or they push for graduate studies because it's necessary to do so to move forward in their fields. But that's special in the statistical sense, not in terms of respect owed or anything like that.

I expect quite a few wealthy Americans have invested in Tiktok, the same as they have in other social media. They've probably withdrawn that investment with this news, since that's going to quite dramatically hurt the company's value, but American investors don't limit themselves to American-owned companies.

On a side note, knowing that Sea of Stars is in many ways a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger, I tried looking up its sales data. Concrete data is hard to find because it's still quite new, but apparently it sold 250,000 copies in its first week, which is almost as many total copies as Chrono Trigger sold on the SNES outside of Japan. It wouldn't actually surprise me if it ends up outselling the game that inspired it, which I thought that was kind of interesting.

Maximothelad posted...

And you are 100% wrong! Kids from 2010 on have grown up on iPhones / iPads / Youtube / Netflix, etc.. Maybe their parents have a few DVD's or CD's laying but this generation is NOT BUYING PHYSICAL MEDIA ! They do not care. You are just in denial at this point. You know what the #1 CD sold last month in the USA? 412 copies. Want to know what the DVD / Blu Ray was? It was so low they don't even report it anymore because everyone streams now or uses spotify.

Got a citation for those numbers? Some quick googling is only giving me 2022 figures, namely that 33.4 million CD albums shipped, but nothing as recent as last month (and, in fact, monthly sales statistics are pretty rare). That's obviously still a massive decrease from the 900 million or so that shipped each year around 2000, which is not surprising because streaming and digital distribution have become the dominant formats, but it's also quite thoroughly at odds with the narrative you're pushing of "nobody born before 2010 buys CDs."

As for DVDs, I did find this interesting list:
https://www.the-numbers.com/weekly-dvd-sales-chart

Several months old (which, again, makes me question your claim that you have credible data from two weeks ago), but very much not "so low they don't even report it anymore," and a few orders of magnitude higher than 412. I'm also going to go out on a limb and guess that Paw Patrol: Big Truck Pups was generally purchased for people born after 2010, so looks like "Kids born in 2010 have never owned or used a CD / DVD / Blu ray" is not only demonstrably false, I've now demonstrated it to be false. Whoopsie.

ZayKayWill posted...

Apparently there are some people speculating that he doesn't even know how to program or engineer stuff and that the people he hired are the ones doing all that?

If that's true, my question is how someone would even fucking know that without knowing him personally.

Anecdotes from people that have worked with him, evaluating stuff he's said to make inferences about how much he understands (for a concrete example of this happening with somebody else, Trump's question about injecting bleach to cure Covid suggests that he understands very little about medicine)... By and large, that's also just how corporations work: CEOs are not CEOs because they know anything about the work being done, they're CEOs because they know how to manage money.

ZayKayWill posted...

If he really was as stupid as people make him out to be, why not replace him with someone who could actually do the job better?

Because people actually working with him rarely have the authority to replace a CEO. If that's possible (depending on how he took ownership of the company, it may actually not be), that falls to the company's board of directors, and they tend to just look at the company's bottom line. They generally aren't connected enough with the frontline operations of the company to be able to assess whether the company's performance is because the CEO knows what he's doing or because the workers are able to produce a good return on investment despite that. Even when replacing the CEO is on the table, finding a new major investor isn't exactly the easiest thing to do, especially if a company is struggling and therefore not overly appealing as an investment (even if that struggle is entirely due to the incompetence of the CEO they're looking to replace).

There's a reason Twitter jumped at Musk's offer: The company was losing money, and the prospect of anyone buying such a struggling company for enough money for the owners to turn a meaningful profit on the whole ordeal was pretty much unfathomable. This is also why Musk tried to back out as soon as he realized he was in deep enough for it to have real consequences instead of just being a matter of showing off. Nobody with half a brain would have bought Twitter for $45 billion, so the fact that Musk offered was beyond Twitter's wildest dreams as far as exit strategies went. Musk, in turn, didn't actually plan to do it, but Twitter ended up with the legal upper hand and he was forced to go through with it.

SinisterSlay posted...

It's not really about spying though. It's about China using tiktok to influence American voters. Russia and China have been using social media to do this for ages now.

Spying, influencing, either works.

https://imgur.com/xGgP8RO

Reminds me of Atomicrops. That was a fun game.

fettster777 posted...

You'd be surprised, especially now that Trump is saying not to ban TikTok (a complete 180 from his view when he was president). I'm assuming he fears it will get banned and see this as a "Biden win", but he also has a vendetta against facebook and could also see this as Facebook getting more popular with a TikTok ban. Man only thinks of himself.

I'm actually concerned that this might increase Trump's chances of getting elected. Tiktok's userbase is overwhelmingly younger people, and as much as it's a bipartisan bill and Trump has previously expressed a desire to ban it, the overall perception is going to be "Biden took away our fun video site" from that userbase, especially given that said userbase is generally tech-savvy enough to understand that all social media does the same things that are supposedly so terrible when Tiktok does them. Trump may be banking on that and doing a 180 on his previous position to drive home the idea that it's Biden's fault.

SomeUsername529 posted...

But the CCP won't let that happen because they think owning TikTok is worth more than whatever the monetary value is.

That calculus may change if it's no longer allowed to operate in the US. I'm not sure how much of that perceived value is "we get to spy on Americans" versus "we get to spy on everyone else."

Jen0125 posted...

i dont see the difference in china owning my data vs the US lol like i really think this is a lot of nationalistic propaganda.

Pretty much. Tiktok is generally a bit worse than other social media in terms of how invasive its data collection is, but virtually everything that people criticize about Tiktok can also be said about Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon... the difference is that Tiktok is scary and foreign while the other companies are American and therefore trustworthy (at least in the eyes of people that understand absolutely nothing about the issue beyond what a bit of nationalistic grandstanding has told them).

ZayKayWill posted...

Do you really think that someone of average or of below average intelligence could have become literally the richest man alive? Yes, his wealth is inherited, but it's not like him inheriting that wealth just made him the richest man in the world overnight.

Inheriting wealth doesn't magically make one rich, but it does give significantly more opportunities to do so and significantly reduce the consequences of failure. Musk got to where he is now because he made a few good business deals, deals he was only able to access because of the wealth he inherited. That's more luck than intelligence: there are countless other people who came from similar backgrounds and failed because the deals they tried to make didn't pan out. That Musk succeeded doesn't indicate that he's particularly any more brilliant or business-savvy than them, it just looks like he is because of survivorship bias.

He's got some modicum of business competence, since you don't stumble into success like that completely blindly, but his success is overwhelmingly a matter of investing into companies that were able to yield a sizable return on that investment, a return that was largely independent (and in many cases, in spite) of any direct input on his part.

Colonel_Lingus posted...

In some ways, yes.

In some ways, no.

I don't think he's a completely mindless buffoon, but he does and says a lot of stupid stuff.

This seems about right.

Depends on the context. If dealing with numbers or referring to the key on a keyboard, number sign. If talking about a phone keypad (not keyboard), it's the pound sign/key. If talking about music or hashtags, sharp.

Battery readings are often not completely linear (like 100% to 50% will go much more slowly than 50% to 0% will), and both capacity and readings tend to get a bit wonky as the battery ages. If it's a few years old, the battery may just be wearing out. Either way, there isn't much you can/should do about it now, just go about your life until the battery capacity becomes a problem for you. At that point, you can see if you can get a new battery, or you might just want to go for a new phone.

On the first pass, I assumed there was just a typo in the title, and I was going to respond with something like "don't you mean a KENtervention?", but then I realized you'd already done that. Now I'm not really sure what to do with myself.

SinisterSlay posted...

Just wait until you try Treasure of the Rudras where your expected to make your own spells, and effectively cheat by saving the spells the end boss uses and use them on another campaign.
Some games just expect you to be smarter, be a better player.

Some do, but that's not necessarily what everyone wants, and generally I'd say that kind of obscurity (that is, core systems where the only way to figure out what works is through either extensive trial and error or by referencing outside resources) is something games should avoid. Many good games don't avoid that kind of obscurity, and make up for it either with extensive official wikis, by being games where people expect to have to do a bunch of metagaming to get anywhere, or just by being good enough in other regards that people don't mind the metagaming, but in general I would still say that mechanical transparency is better.

Revelation34 posted...

Nah I mean a JRPG like that.

They exist. If we extend "JRPG" to cover any turn-based RPG (recognizing that the story focus isn't likely to come through in a roguelike, and the anime style is just an aesthetic choice), Backpack Hero could fit the bill: You've got a limited number of opportunities to make money, and when a shop does come up, you can't afford everything. There are other ways to get items, but managing money is still part of it.

Revelation34 posted...

That would be an interesting concept for a turn based roguelike game. Have a set amount of enemies per area that only drop a certain amount.

Quite a few roguelikes already do either something conceptually similar to that, or that exactly. As a fundamental concept, roguelikes are about being given a limited number of opportunities to make choices about what will make you the most powerful, which is pretty much exactly what you're describing. Most roguelikes with shops have a theoretical maximum amount of gold you can get before reaching them, which means you're making decisions about which shop items are worth buying now vs. saving that money for something that might be more powerful later.

SinisterSlay posted...

Then being forced to buy new equipment in each town is also meta gaming. You even have to know to go grind for money in most games to afford all the upgrades, or know which ones you actually need.

It can be, and I would in fact say that a game where you're forced to grind gold to keep your equipment up to date is forcing more metagaming than is ideal. Ideally, fighting a "typical" number of enemies, finding a "typical" number of chests, or otherwise doing a "typical" amount of whatever method accumulates gold should leave you with enough money that you'll have to make decisions about whose equipment to upgrade, but give you enough upgrades that - provided you're smart about how you use them - the gameplay that follows is a moderate challenge.

That's exceedingly vague and relies on a lot of assumptions about "typical" play, but that's what I mean when I say it should be balanced in a way that doesn't push the player to draw on their knowledge that they're playing a game to exploit the game mechanics. Buying new equipment when you reach a new town makes diegetic sense: If your characters were acting on their own, they would want to take advantage of that upgrade opportunity to better prepare themselves for the next leg of their quest. It also makes diegetic sense that they won't have enough money to buy everything (while also being an interesting gameplay choice, in which you have to choose between spending your limited money now or gambling that your current power level will be enough to tide you over while you save up for something better later). It doesn't make diegetic sense to exploit infinitely-respawning enemies to grind up enough gold to buy everything and not have to decide which upgrades matter most. You should still be *able* to do it, since that kind of control over character progression is fun, but you shouldn't be *forced* to do it by having the game balanced around immersion-breaking levels of grinding.

Now, a ton of games don't manage to get that balance perfectly. You're almost always going to end up doing some non-diegetic grinding in any RPG, and by and large the RPG-playing community accepts that. But games where you fall significantly behind if you just try to play in a way that feels "normal" are still going to rub some people the wrong way, which is understandable.

What if I already know I don't want your dick even without seeing it?

Lokchan posted...

How do I know if I caught the diabetes? I don't mean like contagious just I don't language well.

Talk to a doctor, they'll do a couple of blood tests that will measure how your blood sugar is/has been behaving and work from there to diagnose you.

Lokchan posted...

Also, is there such thing as z or x axis vertigo? Like spinning in a direction that's not like a swivel chair?

Yep, you've got three semicircular canals on each side specifically to detect rotation in all three axes. In turn, that means they can malfunction in any axis.

Maxing your level immediately is more what I'm calling unambiguous metagaming. That's not exactly normal gameplay. Beyond that, though, even if the game explains the junctioning mechanics, it can still fall into metagaming territory to put deliberate effort into maximizing what you get from the mechanics. In turn, if you're going to suffer if you don't put at least some deliberate effort into maximizing what you get from those mechanics, that means the game is forcing you to do some metagaming, and that's not everyone's jam.

It can be tricky to strike a balance between having interesting/unique character growth mechanics (generally a good thing) and having those mechanics force players to think about the game as a game they're trying to win instead of being able to immerse themselves in it (generally a bad thing, at least with RPGs and other games where a big part of the appeal is immersing yourself in the world and story). The latter is metagaming, and it's very much a spectrum instead of being a clear binary division. My understanding is that FF8 isn't too bad in that regard (it's no Oblivion, for example), but it leans far enough in the metagaming direction that some people dislike it for that.

SinisterSlay posted...

But it tells you to do that.

It tells you to max your level immediately?

SinisterSlay posted...

Every time I play FF8 I quickly went to that island with high level monster and maxed my level. It made the game more fun, had more magic to draw, and didn't make anything more difficult.
s*** you mostly just spam limit breaks by raising your max HP to 9999 and leaving yourself at 2500. You get a limit break every turn. Junction enough defense and attack and the game is a cakewalk even at max level. This isn't even meta gaming.

That's metagaming. You're going outside of normal gameplay to exploit the game's mechanics to your advantage. It may not be particularly hard or obscure metagaming, but it's metagaming nonetheless.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong to have had fun playing that way. Just that other people also aren't wrong to not have fun playing that way. Not everybody likes thinking about game mechanics beyond face value.

Maximothelad posted...

Want to feel really old? Kids born in 2010 have never owned or used a CD / DVD / Blu ray. Everything is streaming or youtube.

CDs, DVDs, and BDs are still available for sale. Streaming is dominant, certainly, but it's very obviously not accurate to say that everyone under the age of 15 has never experienced such things.

Maximothelad posted...

They don't even know Nintendo beyond a Switch and they only care about Fortnite.

Okay boomer.

Maximothelad posted...

But this sites average ate is 35-50 for it's user base. So HOW do those people not know Chrono Trigger? Even Sega kids know about it.

31% voted that they've never played CT. Per the last age poll in June 2022, 36% of users are now under the age of 34 (67% of users were between 29 and 40, which is very much not "this sites [sic] average ate [sic] is 35-50"), which means they would have been less than 5 when it came out (and therefore not really the target audience for a text-heavy RPG). Even if we do just look at it so reductively as to compare the site's age profile to CT's age, the numbers line up pretty reasonably.

Of course, subsequent ports mess with that a bit, but that gets into the fact that you're grossly overestimating just how well CT sold. Across all versions, it's only ever sold 2 million copies outside of Japan. The only time it's ever broken a 1% install rate was when it sold 2 million copies for the SNES in Japan (an impressive 11.6% install rate). It sold less than 300,000 for the SNES everywhere else (for an install rate of ~0.9%), a combined 700,000 copies worldwide between both PS1 versions (0.68% install rate), and a combined 821,000 copies worldwide on the DS (0.53%). I won't try to do those calculations for the Steam and mobile versions because they get wonkier (you can't reasonably talk about install rate for games on phones when most people didn't buy their phones to play games at all, and it's hard to get a definite answer for how many of Steam's users should be counted), but the bottom line is that an overwhelming majority of gamers - in every era - have never owned Chrono Trigger.

And that's not even getting into your false equivalency between "never played Chrono Trigger" and "don't know about Chrono Trigger."

ConfusedTorchic posted...

or the argument of "but playing like a regular game makes enemies harder!" is just you saying you want easy baby mode where there is no challenge of any sort

I can see it go either way. The biggest criticism I see about that sort of levelling system in general (whether it's FF8, Oblivion, or any other example) is that it's just not intuitive: Instead of levelling up and becoming more powerful being something that happens naturally as you play normally, you have to go out of your way to metagame if you don't want to lag behind. I personally like metagaming and min/maxing and turning games into spreadsheet simulators, but even I don't like *having* to do that.

Basically, there's a difference between "this game will be hard if you don't make sensible levelling choices" and "this game will be hard if you don't look up a levelling guide ahead of time or otherwise collect information on how the levelling system works because that's the only way you're going to be able to figure out what levelling choices are sensible." Everyone expects to have a hard time if they pump Int on their Fighter. Fewer people expect to have a hard time if they focus on levelling the skills they picked as the character's "main" ones (to use Oblivion as an example because it's one of the worst offenders). From what I understand about FF8 (I haven't actually played it), it's kind of borderline in that you don't *have* to metagame much just to get by, but if you don't you aren't going to get much of the sense of power growth that people typically like to get from RPGs and will therefore have a lesser experience than you would with a more intuitive levelling system. For people that like metagaming enough to do a bit of it all the time, it's not a problem, but for people who just want to play normally and not try to game the system to get an edge, it'll be bothersome and mess with their ability to immerse themselves in playing the game. I get why it's divisive.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Well I'm more taking it from the consideration that you can't count on one job for your entire life (usually). Yea it would be great if you found a place you loved, lived right beside it and they never went out of business of downsized you and you could work there until you retire... but I don't know how realistic that is for the majority of people given that statistics list most people only work the same job for roughly 4 years. This restriction will be prohibitive unless you can a) work online or b) rent out parts of the house.

That can be an issue, but bear in mind that if you don't have to pay for housing/utilities in any capacity, that gives you much more freedom to look for a job within 5 miles because you don't have to hold out for one that pays particularly well (really, most areas' minimum wages are enough to live in reasonable comfort if housing expenses are off the table). If you're mostly looking for industrial jobs or other jobs that require large facilities that aren't viable in a dense urban environment, you might have a problem, but any office or smaller-scale commercial work should be pretty easy to find if you put yourself in a dense enough area.

slacker03150 posted...

What's the nicest part of new york? I'll take a penthouse suite, rent out one of the bedrooms and not have to worry about money because I'm sure I could rent that room out for more than my living expenses.

This too. Heck, pretty much anywhere you go, if you end up in a half-decent duplex and can rent out the other half, that'll cover pretty much all of your income needs, given that all potential costs of renting the place out (mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs) would be covered by the arrangement. You don't even need to go for top-end stuff like a NYC penthouse.

Maximothelad posted...

No I'm literally calling out trolls. I won't tolerate them for a second

People can have different opinions from you without trolling. If anything, demanding that people put genuine effort into defending their opinions that differ from yours is itself trolling, far more so than anything else that's happened in this topic.

green_dragon posted...

Plus, they were supporting piracy of recently or even not yet released games. They deserved to be sued tbh.

Yeah, that's no bueno. Pirating stuff that's no longer available for sale? Fair game. Pirating stuff that's available for sale, but it's old enough that the owner has obviously made their money off of it and whatever price they're charging is unreasonable? Potentially dubious, but I'm not going to think less of people for being okay with that. Pirating stuff that's new or not even out yet, undermining the owner's ability to make back their money? Nobody should expect to get away with that.

It's a bit of a tricky one to deal with in the context of "best game ever." When it came out, it was indeed amazing, and since then it's had a pretty huge influence on JRPGs in general. 29 years is a long time, though, and because of the influence it's had a lot of what set it apart from the crowd in 1995 has now become fairly common and unremarkable. To that end, it deserves recognition for how good it was back in the day, but that doesn't necessarily translate to thinking it's a more enjoyable game to play compared to anything else available today.

That's part of why I tend to shy away from picking "favourite" games: It pretty much never actually means that my favourite games are ones I'd rather be playing over anything else in a given moment (given how variable tastes can be moment to moment), and if I'm instead basing it on what impact it's had on my life, that doesn't necessarily translate into a useful recommendation because a huge part of that depends on when I first experienced it.

In this particular case, I'm speaking as somebody who didn't play the game until it came out on the DS, nearly 15 years after it came out. At that point, I found it to be a great game, but nothing really outstanding compared to anything else I could play at the time. I had a good time, but I wouldn't even consider calling it one of my favourite games ever.

Maximothelad posted...

Name 20 games better. We will be waiting.

You're taking it awfully personally that people aren't as excited about your favourite video game as you are.

The soundtrack is indeed top tier. But then that's just Mitsuda in general, and I'd still probably rank CT's soundtrack behind his contributions to the Xenoblade series (though a direct comparison isn't entirely fair with 20+ years between them).

There's a non-zero chance that you were randomly shown some Harry Potter content before this and subconsciously displayed enough interest in it that the algorithm saw fit to step up what it showed you (which may even have influenced your decision to watch the movies). Toss in the Bader-Meinhoff effect (or similar forms of semantic priming) making you more likely to notice HP content now that you've watched the movie, and the fact that you likely displayed more interest in the HP content when scrolling through Facebook now, and you've got a recipe to have your feed filled with it even if you didn't leave any significant opportunities to collect that data.

That, and your PS4 probably communicated that you were playing the movie. Even without directly connecting it to your Facebook, it could communicate that information by relating it to your IP address.

It's not going to hurt you to do it for a day or two, but you generally shouldn't make a habit of it unless you've actually researched how to fast safely.

One does not simply ponder one's orb.

https://imgur.com/Nc34AdB

BlackScythe0 posted...

Unless you work online, this is effectively not possible given that 5 miles isn't enough distance to keep a job.

On the rare occasion that I go into the office, my commute is currently 4 km (2.5 miles). If you take out the question of whether or not you can afford a home in a given location, living within 5 miles of work is only going to be a problem if your work requires you to go to multiple locations that are too far apart to fit them all within that radius.

Tremendously so.

pionear posted...

No you're locked in Forever...

Can I move to a different free home with the same rules? Maybe move within a 5-mile radius each time so I never actually leave the defined radius of wherever "home" is?

Usually Classico. Their jars are great to reuse, too, though at this point we've got way too many of them.

WrestlinJustice posted...

What if I told you that you had a fart fetish? What if I "feel" that you have a fart fetish? Would that be enough evidence?

You can feel whatever you want. You shouldn't necessarily expect to be taken as seriously as anyone who thinks this topic is weird would be, by virtue of the fact that this topic is really weird, and you should generally to try ensure that you develop your intuition such that you can be confident that if you did search for evidence it would support the conclusions you have intuited (and until you do so, try not to rely on your intuition), but I'm not here to tell you what to think. Only to judge you for making a weird topic.