Lurker > adjl

Seems like a good time to bring back this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2sDx0Y_I-k

GranTurismo posted...

why do you believe they are in the ballpark?

Because they have both a reasonable understanding of how bone structure in extant animals influences the sounds they make, plus a reasonable understanding of dinosaurs' bone structures. Put those two together and you can get a decent idea of how dinosaurs would have sounded. There's still room for soft tissue to influence things further, and that tissue won't necessarily be obvious from fossils, but it's still quite possible to make some solid guesses from the information available.

rjsilverthorn posted...

While you'd think that was the case, the psychology says otherwise.

Indeed. Even if you've consciously acknowledged the trick, your first impression of the number will still be that it's smaller than it actually is. You pretty much have to actively stop yourself from thinking it's lower at all times to avoid being influenced by it, and the simple fact of the matter is that nobody can maintain that all the time.

I do, however, make a habit of preferentially supporting businesses that do price things honestly.

captpackrat posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az2FwW_3Ygs

TWIN WATERFALLS OF TEARS

If we say that the 1st percentile covers everything below 1% (or 0-1%), then 99-100% would be the 100th percentile. That's more commonly called the 99th percentile, though, or occasionally you'll see it broken down asymptotically with fractional percentiles (99.5th, 99.9th, 99.99th, etc).

SinisterSlay posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/9238-got-a-gaming-quality-pc
89% of gamefaqs users play on PC. So most of their polls ignore 89% of users? What?

89% of users have a PC, not 89% of users game on PC. 19% don't have a PC that will play games (presumably, this just means anything remotely contemporary, since it doesn't take much to play *some* games), another 25% have one that's showing its age, and 45% have something reasonably current.

Beyond that, though, having a gaming-quality PC does not necessarily make PC the primary gaming platform for those people, which is reflected in the annual poll about people's "platform of the year" and the occasional "what platform did you spend the most time playing" poll. A non-trivial portion of the userbase spends a decent amount of time playing on PC, but it's definitely not 89%.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll?search=cry

I've heard terms like "99.5th" percentile to describe the top 0.5%, so I'd suggest that there are actually infinite percentiles.

In the context of that Oxford definition, though, just think of "in the 90th percentile" as being in a group that comprises 1% of the sample population, ranked 90th if ordered from lowest to highest. Colloquially, people tend to interpret that by counting from the top instead of the bottom (though it's often as "you're in the top 10%" and not "you fall into the 10th percentile from the top," which is vaguer than perhaps it ought to be, but no less accurate than somebody saying "I'm in the top 10" when they rank 10th), but that's just a matter of frame of reference, not a failure to understand the concept.

When you ask them if their mom likes their new girlfriend and they just get awkwardly quiet.

That's the thing that bugs me the most about US health care: If it were a matter of the government spending very little money on health care and leaving everyone to fend for themselves, and that's why availability was so terrible, I'd disagree with that as a matter of moral principle, but it'd at least make sense and could be justified under a different moral framework from mine. But no, the government spends twice as much per capita as anyone else (which is a lot when you've got that many capitas) and has jack shit to show for it. It's a waste of money and they fail to provide adequate care, which is just lose-lose all around and absolutely nobody should be okay with that regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

Yellow posted...

I think most people could learn advanced calculus... Given enough time.

I've never seen this formally recognized, but I generally get the impression that everybody has a certain point in math after which it stops coming naturally to them and they have to start taking it seriously and actually practicing to push further than that. For some people, that's basic addition. For me, it was intermediate calculus. For some, their limit hasn't actually been invented yet. I fully expect that that point can be shifted with teaching that better aligns with a given individual's optimal learning style, but there's still going to be a soft cap somewhere.

Part of the issue, then, is that school doesn't necessarily give everyone the tools and opportunities they need to put in the extra effort to move past their soft cap, including failing to recognize that those people are soft capped and insisting on grading them in a way that compares them to people who aren't, but another big part is that there just often isn't much point in putting that effort in. If I'd applied myself, I could have done a math degree and taken my math ability much further than I did. I just didn't want to. My major was Biology; even the basic calculus I took was just to satisfy the math credit requirement in a way that wouldn't bore me as deeply as the actual "get your math credit requirement even if you suck at math" class would have. I took intermediate calculus mostly for fun, then when it turned out to be something I had to work hard at, I chose not to go further in math because it wasn't fun anymore.

If we're framing math's primary value for most people as a sort of mental exercise (which I think is quite valid), I think it's important to recognize that while everybody can benefit from exercise, not everybody needs to push themselves to exercise at a high level. Analogously, you can be in perfectly healthy physical shape but never even consider getting to the level of being able to run a marathon. Casual exercise is still beneficial, whether it's physical or mental. In cases where gym is graded, a lot of times it's a matter of grading whether or not people put effort in rather than whether or not people excel the the activity by some arbitrary metric, and I think that philosophy has more merit in math than most curricula recognize.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Have there been any Great Lakes "naval battles"?

There were a few during the War of 1812, simply due to how massively advantageous control of the lakes was for getting around the area and the fact that both sides were effectively starting from scratch as far as building a navy went (the British navy was overwhelmingly stronger than the US one as far as sea battles went, but the challenges of getting large war ships up the St Lawrence meant most of the ships that fought over the Great Lakes had to be built on site).

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/great-lakes-war-1812

The lakes were mostly demilitarized after that, though.

Count_Drachma posted...

That said, we don't know the gender of the student. It's very explicitly not listed (or, at least, I didn't see it)

You have to dig a bit, but he's stated to be male deeper into the article. Between how buried it is and the decision to outright identify the teacher as having been charged with rape, I half wondered if it was actually a female victim and a female abuser, though lesbian child sexual abuse (at least cases that come to light) is exceedingly rare.

I did quite well up until second-year Calculus, at which point it stopped coming to me intuitively and I stopped pushing further because I didn't even need most of what I'd built to that point, and that was over a decade ago now and I've forgotten most calculus beyond the Power Rule. Still, I'd say I'm still much stronger in math than the vast majority of people, understanding concepts that most people never grasped (even if it would take a bit of a reminder/practice to actually apply them) and being much faster and more capable of mental math than most. Obviously, I don't compare to those that actually majored in math and/or turned it into a career, but that's such a tiny minority of the world that it seems weird to use them as metric to evaluate myself. To that end, I don't really know what rating I'd settle on.

I guess the strategy is to just make the province completely unlivable for anyone that doesn't realize what a bad idea this is, effectively removing any chance that she gets voted out.

darkknight109 posted...

No one would ever describe a male teacher having sex with a female student as "banging" her.

At least, not anyone that wasn't describing their exploits to a fellow predator.

You can get surround sound from vinyl, unless you're specifically talking about music that's been deliberately recorded to be a surround experience, which is a pretty small subset. By its nature, surround sound is also not the most practical, being quite expensive for a decent setup and extremely limiting in where you have to listen to it.

SinisterSlay posted...

Yeah I can't figure out why. Every time I see how they are made and played, I can't help but see them as inferior.

It's a sound quality thing, mostly. In particular, most music recorded prior to the late 80's was recorded with the expectation that it would be played back on vinyl, so listening to it on vinyl is the "right" way to do it if you want the intended experience. Practicality considerations mean that only listening to music on vinyl doesn't make a lot of sense, but I can definitely see the appeal.

Now, cassettes? Those are marginally more convenient than vinyl, but that's the end of their value. CD's rendered them totally obsolete by being more convenient and having better sound quality, and that's only become more true as digital distribution has mostly replaced CD's.

Metalsonic66 posted...

From what I hear, vinyl is making a big comeback

Vinyl's been making a big comeback for like the last two decades. For several years, we've been at a point where hipsters have shifted to getting their music from cassettes because vinyl is too mainstream.

https://imgur.com/VxVo0BM

jsb0714 posted...

How old do you think people in this chat are?

Old enough to want to retire.

ReturnOfFa posted...

Always found the controls snappier than the other games people say improved on the formula (at least in that gen)

I think it was Yahtzee's video on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk that got me recently thinking about the idea of traversal as a core part of a game experience, and I think SM64 is a good example of that. The camera's janky and the level design is dated such that later games definitely improved on the formula, but Mario's options for moving around just plain feel good. I think that might actually be the biggest reason a lot of people were disappointed with Sunshine, since while FLUDD added some interesting new traversal tools, they just aren't that enjoyable to actually use. They're all consistent with how you'd expect movement based on pressurized water to work, but that means they feel sluggish and can't really be used for anything really interesting. It's been too long for me to really compare, but I seem to remember Mario's non-FLUDD movement also not being quite as snappy, but I know people praised the non-FLUDD sections for being better platformers, so I might be misremembering.

Thinking about it more, both Galaxy games were quite a bit floatier, just as part of their focus on interesting level design within the concept of traversing round surfaces with wonky gravity, and then 3D Lane/World were both much more focused on platforming level design than on free-form traversal. Odyssey, however, was an absolute blast to move around in and had a world that was brilliantly designed to reward players for experimenting with the movement options they were given. That might actually have been the first Mario game to really improve on the traversal side of SM64, and that was a big part of why I loved it as much as I did.

Yellow posted...

You're running out of time though, so place it soon if you want.

Lok's Canadian, so Thanksgiving was a month ago. He should still get on it soon if he wants one for Christmas, but if he just wants a turkey snack some time in the next few days there shouldn't be any demand issues.

You're not a real game.

I think I liked how they were handled in Age of Calamity best. They were still silly, but also managed to be a genuine threat and have some interesting story beats around them.

Contactless IR thermometers have been a thing for a while, but they really took off during the height of Covid, where they were used as a quick, safe way to screen for potentially infectious people. I can't say I've been tracking the prices, but I expect that massive spike in demand caused production to be ramped up to the point that they're now pretty cheap.

MajinUltima posted...

I took one look at the uglification they put Alexstrasza through in order to appease the twitter/reddit culture that will whine about an attractive woman, then gush all over some excessively sexualized male. You cannot convince me there is "good stuff" in dragonflight.

"They made the dragon lady less sexy. Automatic 0/10 expansion."

Shinebolt posted...

Outside of that specific example its just not being that diligent on beating the main story of a lot of games. Kind of just got to the finale and just stopped because I always wanted to be prepared as possible for the final boss.

I used to be so bad about this. Not necessarily trying to be prepared, but trying to get as much side content as I could done before beating it. The problem is that a lot of the side content dragged a bit and I lost interest and stopped playing the game, often mere minutes before the final boss. At one point, I had 14 such games when I forced myself to finish them off before playing anything else. I've been better about it since then.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Not every evil needs to be compared to other evils. I recognized Nazis and white supremacists as the pinnacle of evil already.

The only comparison I'm making is to provide an example of an analogous problem that's still relevant. It's not a question of being better or worse, it's a question of whether or not they matter in the modern world beyond academic questions of historical accuracy.

Lokarin posted...

What I don't get it why people are complaing about the $90 early access fee... ... it's early access, you don't HAVE to get it.

Broadly, because it's manipulating FOMO, but there are some specific factors as well. For those that enjoy racing (which a lot of people do in MMOs), being a few days behind is an insurmountable handicap. For a story-centric game, waiting a few days to start can significantly increase the risk of being spoiled. For a community-based game, the community ends up split between early adopters and latecomers for the first little while. For a server-based game, starting early means players don't have their first experience soured by launch-day queues and crashes. For any game with quasi-competitive progression of any sort, being around to take advantage of day one bugs/oversights before they get patched out can give players a huge edge. Journalism-wise, the early access fee is basically mandatory for anyone that doesn't get a review copy, which effectively amounts to paywalling critical reviews to fluff early metacritic scores (since reviewers that are liable to properly criticize the game generally don't get sent review copies). Sure, you don't HAVE to get the game early, but there are plenty of reasons to be upset by having that be paywalled, both personally and as a general criticism of the industry.

Mostly, though, it's just naked, shameless money-grubbing, even more so than most scummy/predatory video game monetization. If they instead framed this as the game costing the premium price and launch and being discounted by $90 a week later, everybody would hate it, but that's exactly what they're doing. The game's done on the "early access" date. There's absolutely no reason everyone couldn't have it then, except that they want to charge for literally nothing on their end. Plenty of content creators will do similar things in the form of Patreon subscribers getting early access to content, but that's generally people who rely on those subscribers to make a living and want to incentivize subscriptions. When multi-billion dollar corporations do it because they're addicted to watching numbers go up meaninglessly, it's just plain greed.

Revelation34 posted...

Unless you're trying to buy a many room mansion $1 million is plenty to buy a nice house.

In quite a few cities, $1 million won't even get you a second bedroom unless you're willing to live so far from everything that you spend another million commuting. Moreover, even if you can get a decent house within the million, doing so is going to eat up a sizable chunk of that million and therefore reduce what you can get by investing the remainder. Retirement entails making sure you have enough income to support yourself without working, and while owning a paid-off house will reduce the cost of living below what you'd be paying to rent, there are still ongoing costs associated with that house that mean only being able to invest 3-400k will put you in a pretty tight position.

That said, while I wouldn't expect to retire on a million, I'd absolutely be buying a house as one of the first things I did with it, and that would put me in a much better position to prepare for retirement. Renting is just too unstable in the current market and will likely only get worse for the foreseeable future.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Yeah so thoroughly dismantled that members of the Japanese government deny the atrocities to this day.

Dismantled enough that the remaining vestiges aren't enough to be a threat to anyone. Denying unpleasant history is bad, certainly, but it's on a very different level from neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups gaining as much power as they have in many other countries. There's pretty much zero chance of Japan actually perpetrating any further war crimes against China or Korea (for that matter, any modern discussion of human rights violations involving China mostly ends up talking about what China is doing right now, rather than historical crimes committed against them). The country that has to worry most about conservative Japanese culture is Japan itself.

Oh yeah, Minecraft's probably on my list as well, I just don't have any way to track my playtime.

It's not particularly surprising that Japan has their equivalent of neo-Nazis, any more so than neo-Nazis are surprising elsewhere in the world. Imperial Japan was so thoroughly dismantled that I'm not too concerned about them gaining any real traction, but I'd still expect them to exist. Ideologies don't die when they get blown up.

If we discount idle games (which I would, by their nature), the only games I've broken 1000 hours in are WoW (~250 days /played between 2004 and 2009), DotA 2 (1470 hours) and Factorio (just broke 1000 a couple months ago before PoE pulled me away). I've probably also managed it in PSO 1&2/Blue Burst, but that's split across multiple characters, multiple memory cards, and split between GC and PC (the latter of which I can't check because I don't have it installed and I'm pretty sure Schthack imploded), so I can't really confirm.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Are you also a holocaust denier or something?

I think it's more that he likes to think he's exposing us as hypocrites for disapproving of Axis war crimes but not automatically considering Israel to be the good guys in the current conflict (because he seems to be the sort of person that believes that being the same ethnicity of victims of a genocide means you can't perpetrate one of your own). That, or he believes that the reason people aren't siding with Israel is because we're all secretly Nazis and he's hoping to expose that by tricking people into admitting that they sympathize with Axis powers. This is at least the second topic he's made asking people's opinions about the Axis' actions in/around WWII.

SPH - Small plasmid humiliation.

As far as I can tell, it's being tried as a pilot in the EU because the EU just made it illegal to sell people's data without explicit consent. The fee is basically "hey wanna pay us not to sell your data?", with the alternative of not paying but continuing to use the service being considered consent to sell data. I don't necessarily expect it to take off anywhere else that doesn't have such laws, though I guess if they get enough people on board with paying to avoid ads, they might try it. Either way, given that I'm blocking ads for free, I see little reason to pay for an ad-free experience.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Im not answering your loaded question.

So yes.

I might even go so far as to say it's full of beans.

slacker03150 posted...

For the sake of discussion a boyfriend shall be defined as any man you bring to a fevered pitch of uncontrollable ecstasy.

Well then I have 47 boyfriends a night. It's not that hard.

Lokarin posted...

It's now been done in 0 A presses, time sure flies

Yeah, I saw your topic about it a couple weeks ago. Speedrunners are weird.

Lokarin posted...

Mario 64 probably had the most emergent complexity of all the adventure games.

To explain why, first we need to talk about parallel universes.

GanonsSpirit posted...

Anyone that says a million isn't enough to retire off of doesn't know that large amounts of money can be turned into larger amounts of money fairly easily.

With rents the way they are now, you need to be making like 70-80k a year to be able to comfortably afford a median one-bedroom apartment in most cities. You can get that kind of RoI off of a million easily enough, but it's not going to leave you much room for further increases in the cost of living, nor to live anywhere larger/nicer (which you'll probably want unless you plan on being a bachelor forever). To retire comfortably, 2-3 million is a more reasonable minimum.

Having a spare million around would produce a very useful amount of supplemental income, though, so if you get it and keep working you'll get to the point of being able to retire much faster than you otherwise would have.

Yeah, one of From Software's lesser-known games. It wasn't perfect, but it was a pretty good time, and by most accounts I've seen the sequel was better.

I put off buying Lost Kingdoms 2 because it was pricier than most other games, but then it stopped being readily available and I never got to play it. I also was late to the party for Skies of Arcadia and Cubivore, so I missed out on them. One of these days I'll stop slacking and acquire copies to play, but I still regret not getting them when they were contemporary.

I also regretted buying Mario 3D All Stars almost immediately after it arrived (not that I don't want the games, but I've got an N64, GC, and Wii ready to be hooked up whenever I want and can just play the originals), but I've left it in its packaging in hopes that the ostensibly limited print run helps it gain a bit of value somewhere down the road if I keep it in mint condition. I'm not terribly hopeful of that, but last I checked it was still going for as much as I paid for it, so I should be able to at least recoup my losses.

Getting to "boyfriend" in less than a week is pretty impressive, let alone doing it repeatedly for a year straight.

Kanatteru posted...

honestly if you told me i had to replay a 3D mario right now, it'd probably be galaxy

I should really replay... all of them, actually. 64 is the only one I can actually remember replaying in full, and I've done it multiple times. The others, I've only actually gone through once (though to 100% in Galaxy 1/2, which if memory serves involves playing through multiple times).

Another interesting stat from that article I linked is that among those that have committed DV, those that also own firearms tended to be more violent and more likely to use any weapon, even if their firearm wasn't actually involved in the incident(s). The article stops short of trying to draw any inferences from that statistic (as it should, since that's outside of its scope), but I'd interpret that as indicating that owning a firearm emboldens those that are inclined to do violence to go further than they otherwise would (which is also consistent with the statistical reality that firearm owners are more likely to be killed by gun violence).

Translated to the issue of DV homicide during a restraining order, it stands to reason that restricting the culprit's access to firearms reduces all homicide rates because the culprit generally feels less confident about enacting further violence. That's speculation, of course, but it seems consistent with the stats.

The US government condoning the mass murder of civilians under the pretense of fighting brown terrorists? Must be a day that ends in Y.