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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • If you haven’t played Inscryption, just ignore everything else and do that first. It’s the most innovative deckbuilding game I’ve played, but saying more would spoil it.

    Ascension is a short-ish one I’ve sunk a lot of hours into. It’s sort of like dominion meets Magic. The expansions make it a lot more interesting, but the full package is pretty cheap. It was designed by an MTG pro player who was sick of exactly that.

    Black book is excellent, and managers to put a compelling narrative spin on a TCG.

    Monster train is a good “it’s like slay the spire, but not slay the spire” option for when you just can’t look at another shiv.



  • I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

    Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

    Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

    Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

    It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.







  • I see both sides.

    They’re probably going to completely (and intentionally) collapse the labor market. This has never happened before, so there is no historical prescedent to look at. The closest thing we have was the industrial revolution, but even that was less disruptive because it also created a lot of new factory jobs. This doesn’t.

    The public hope is that this catastrophic widening of the gap between the rich and poor will force labor to organize and take some of the gains through legislation as an altenative to starving in the streets. Given that the technology will also make coercing people to work mostly pointless, there may not be as much pressure against it as there historically has been. Altman seems to be publically thinking in this direction, given the early basic income research and the profit cap for OAI. I can’t pretend to know his private thoughts, but most people with any shred of empathy would be pushing for that in his shoes.

    Of course, if this fails, we could also be headed for a permanent, robotically-enforced nightmare dystopia, which is a genuine concern. There doesn’t seem to be much middle-ground, and the train has no brakes.

    The IP theft angle from the end of the article seems like a pointless distraction though. All human knowledge and innovation is based on what came before, whether AI is involved or not. By all accounts, the remixing process it applies is both mechanically and functionally similar to the remixing process that a new generation of artists applies to its forebears, and I’ve not seen any evidence that they are fundamentally different enough to qualify as theft, except in the normal Picasso sense.

    Interesting times.








  • I’ve got a few fun ones:

    At night, my cat sometimes gets the zoomies, so I have a projector pointed at a wall with a motion sensor. When he goes on his tear through the house while we’re sleeping, the projector turns on and plays a video of strings moving on the wall. This tires him out without him screaming at us to play with him. It turns off again after a few minutes with no motion.

    The lights and Roku screens in my office are on a motion sensor, but are also linked with a seat sensor so they don’t turn off when I’m at my desk. Sitting at the desk also sends a Wake on LAN packet to my computer. Sitting at my electronics workbench changes the lights to bright white with another seat sensor.

    Lights (HA), desktop wallpaper (with Wallpaper Engine), and in-computer RGB (using OpenRGB) change from blue/pink during the day to dark red/orange at sunset so being in my office late doesn’t mess with my sleep.

    A macro button next to my keyboard disables my screens and turns on a fan pointed at my VR area for workouts.