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pseudosapient 3 points ago +3 / -0

That's rather oversimplifying (as usual for DF), but yep.

(To elaborate a bit more... on average 75% of creatures were interested in the opposite sex, and both had to be interested to breed, and on top of that some creatures were sterile, and on top of that some creatures were uninterested in marriage (which was a prereq for breeding). Oh, and it was bugged such that setting it to 100% anything would cause it to silently revert to the default orientation settings.)

5
pseudosapient 5 points ago +5 / -0

The writing was on the wall when sexual orientations were added and were so far skewed that it essentially completely broke animal breeding: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7651.

It's too bad... I spent good long hours on DF2012.

4
pseudosapient 4 points ago +4 / -0

If they can start incorporating VR WELL into more normal games that would make a difference

It may be filter-bubble; the majority of my friends see VR support as a negative. As it means dev resources were poured into VR as opposed to other features. Ditto, a VR-only title? If it's standalone, skip. If it's part of a series, either skip, or often give up on the series as a whole.

As long as people see VR that way there's a countering push to a game incorporating VR.

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pseudosapient 9 points ago +9 / -0

I feel... vindicated? That I decided against buying one because it had been bought by FB regardless of their prior promises.

But man. Are they trying to kill VR? Because this will further push away precisely the sort of techies who would otherwise recommend VR to people.

2
pseudosapient 2 points ago +2 / -0

One of those drops in the bucket was me. I have unsubscribed and moved on.

Their show was mainly interesting precisely because there were multiple people, with a range of views, that still civilly discussed issues together.

The nail in the coffin was how terribly the whole thing was handled. A tweet, not even by the official Timcast channel? Followed by silence? And the show being cancelled for that day? And then just 'for personal reasons'?

Yeah, no thank you. That's exactly the sort of thing that I would have expected Tim to call out had someone else done it. And then Tim did it.

If they had, oh, had Adam mention on-show that he was leaving, and continued having their usual discourse for the rest of that show? Things might have been different.

As-is, the entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. From the outside, regardless of what actually happened, it was indistinguishable from them having a fight and breaking up. Rather ironic for a show whose main calling card was precisely that they had multiple different views and yet could still work together and discuss things.

1
pseudosapient 1 point ago +1 / -0

The interesting thing is, that's arguable.

Many previous models and predictions used relatively naive models of social contact that didn't take real-world social network effects into account. The node degrees tend to be tail-heavy (a few people who have a lot of contacts), the nodes tend to be heavily clustered (groups of nodes that have lots of contacts within said group but relatively few outside said group), the graph tends to have a surprisingly small diameter ('6 degrees of separation' - it takes surprisingly few hops to get from any one person to another), etc, etc.

So, what do you get when you combine this sort of network with disease models? Interesting behavior. The disease very quickly spreads to the most social people, and you get exponential growth for a while. But the interesting thing is that the disease ends up selectively pruning precisely those nodes that would help it spread between cliques. Which means that R goes down much faster than expected given the overall percentage of people infected, and often ends up hovering around a linear regime after the initial phase.

It would be interesting (although I doubt we'll ever see it) to study and see the responses to 'how many people have you had contact with in the past week' (or somesuch) for people infected with COVID over time. My suspicion would be that you'd see a similar 'rise near the start as it climbs the popularity ladder, then decaying over time' effect.

1
pseudosapient 1 point ago +1 / -0

Why do you care what a deranged lunatic that judges your message based on your post history has to say, or thinks about you?

I don't.

I do care about otherwise-moderates who never see an argument because it got brigaded (or banned) over post history.

1
pseudosapient 1 point ago +1 / -0

It's growing, slowly.

The downside of this scheme is that it's a lot more annoying to set up hosting / dns / etc than just to add another row to a database somewhere.

The upside is that it's a whole lot harder for one entity to take down other entities they don't like (aside from the whole .win single point of failure).

7
pseudosapient 7 points ago +7 / -0

My statement is an unpleasant fact.

So is the modified slogan in Animal Farm.

3
pseudosapient 3 points ago +3 / -0

As Reddit showed so prominently, a favorite technique to prevent rational discourse is to attack the person instead of the argument. ("You post on T_D therefore your argument is invalid", or just mass-banning anyone posting on a sub you don't like.) This is partly why they desperately try to avoid anonymity in general, and why they like to make account creation as difficult as possible.

The less history you have, the less likely it is that someone can find something in your past to attack.

2
pseudosapient 2 points ago +2 / -0

Exactly. /. was, once upon a time, decent, and I included it in my rotation.

It slid downhill, but I did still check in every once in a while. But some time recently it passed my political-silly threshold. So I stopped going entirely. Which probably further contributed to the decline (in the same sense that a raindrop contributes to a storm).

3
pseudosapient 3 points ago +3 / -0

Ah yes, the classic "further entrench large companies then complain when you only have large companies" approach.

It's much more feasible for a giant company to enforce something like that - and to defend when it isn't - than some small website somewhere.

It also allows relatively easy false-flags of small companies.

21
pseudosapient 21 points ago +21 / -0

Straight out of Animal Farm:

All animals are equal
, but some animals are more equal than others

6
pseudosapient 6 points ago +6 / -0

Bullet time is not transgender.

If you want to believe your own spin on things? Sure, go ahead. That doesn't magically make it so.

6
pseudosapient 6 points ago +6 / -0

Yep, follow the comics. Because appeasing the mob went so well for them.


Does anyone have any suggestions for decent RPG systems? My current DM has been doing Pathfinder, but we're wrapping things up and they've expressed interest in trying something different. (Pathfinder is an annoying mix of overly bogged down in some areas and underspecified in others.)

We're currently somewhat seriously considering AD&D, but at the same time there's got to be something out there with a decent amount of content that isn't just D&D / spinoffs. (Content more as in templates / bases / game mechanics / lore then as in e.g. fully-fleshed out campaigns.)

10
pseudosapient 10 points ago +10 / -0

That's fundamentally at odds with intellectual property rights though.

Correct, hence why many people object so strongly to it. Even the term "intellectual property" is a rather loaded term.

That's like saying stealing books isn't theft just because it can be reprinted.

Incorrect. If I steal a book, you no longer have it, and it costs you resources to replace it.

1
pseudosapient 1 point ago +1 / -0

Probably couldn't afford double the work for motion capture.

3
pseudosapient 3 points ago +3 / -0

Ah yes, the classic dilemma.

Monolithic kernels are relatively quick, but one random obscure bug in some obscure option of some obscure entry point (ok, I know setsockopt isn't that obscure) and you're game over from a security point of view.

Microkernels are much better from a security standpoint, but context switches ain't cheap (and keep getting more expensive lately).

Exploit mitigation techniques can slow things down, but very seldom actually stop an attack, merely make it harder. And generally come with severe performance penalties themselves.

Are there any actual decent solutions?

I've been thinking recently about a microkernel optimized for many cores - that is, built around shared mailbox memory between processes, where most of the time the kernel isn't directly involved in IPC, and kernel communication is also mailboxed - but the concept rapidly runs into throughput limits once you get a chain of dependent processes larger than the number of cores. Also, NUMA throws a wrench in the works, as communicating between cores ain't cheap either.

7
pseudosapient 7 points ago +7 / -0

Even in this story, it was an idyllic place for 20 years before this barbarian came in and wrecked the place.

Precisely. Just because it's a decent 9-5 today doesn't mean it will be that way tomorrow. It's way too easy for someone to come in and raze the place for their own short-term gain.

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pseudosapient 9 points ago +9 / -0

I mean, the question is how many 'average redditors' there are in the first place.

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pseudosapient 8 points ago +8 / -0

These horses do have training to be somewhat spook proof.

But at the end of the day, if the choices are a) hurt the horse that the police officer is sitting on (which in turn potentially hurts the police officer too!) or b) deter someone who decided to charge at a police officer...

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pseudosapient 25 points ago +25 / -0

18200 people [supposedly] fucking upvoted this

These figures are unverifiable and Reddit has a vested interest in making them larger. Take them with a grain of salt.

3 people spent real money on it too.

Or one employee didn't spend money on it. Or one employee gave credits to someone who didn't spend money on it.

1
pseudosapient 1 point ago +1 / -0

The subs - even if I still could put up with Reddit - were never nearly as good as SSC itself, although I could never articulate particularly coherently why it was better.

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