When people ask a farmer how they’ve managed to keep their tractor running for 50 years

“The secret ingredient is crime”

I think you might be cutting a little hard if you’re having such intense feelings about food. Hope you can find a way to fit some comfort food into your diet.

Wubba lubba dub dub!

When you stand up and lock your knees

To me the ring feels more like heroine or cocaine or something, you know one of the drugs that just make people feel good. The hobbits had no real ambition for more than a good life, and they pretty much all already had that, so when Bilbo or Frodo used the ring it was like “heh, nice” and then they went back to their great life with no desire to use it again. Of course they’re basically microdosing while they carry it so they eventually start to incur the cost. Frodo only really starts to get corrupted after months of grueling travel and suffering, and losing hope of ever returning to his life in the Shire. Everyone else has all these obligations and ambitions that weigh on them, and much like regular people they’ve given up varying degrees of their happiness to further those goals, so the ring would feel like getting back everything they’ve sacrificed and being happy again, or for the first time for some. The metaphor is a bit of a stretch, but I think it fits broadly with these magical artifacts that corrupt people. Just like cocaine, heroin, meth, morphine, or whatever, they give people a feeling that they can’t just get over. It’s biology, they hijack the reward system so we have no choice but to push the feel good button unless we can overcome the urge through willpower or getting whatever feeling the drug or magical artifact is replacing naturally. Some people only get so corrupted but some just keep going, chasing the dragon and replacing more and more of their life with the fake feelings of the drug or magical item.

The many flaws of d&d is why I strongly prefer gurps.

Never meet your heros. Stephen Hawking went to Epsteins island, apparently. People are complex and multifaceted, and most have darkness inside them that their public image obscures.

Yo ho yo ho a repeat of history for me.

Those are colors

I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.

Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.

I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.

You want something done right, do it yourself why not.

I doubt they could at this point. With how much time has passed since Blizzard was any good, the people and culture that produced their best stuff are gone. It’s more like a company of theseus now, it’s name being the only vestige of what once was.

Say it

Which is exactly how the elder scrolls has been since Daggerfall at least. The only difference is you didn't have any specialization choices until Skyrim with the perks.

I fully agree with you and that sounds like a great idea. It sent me down a chain of thought that I find interesting. Say we implement this, CEO A does their job, but shortly before their time is up, they discover something awful. They are about to leave, so they want the next 1-5 years to be rosy, so they do some extremely unethical bullshit to ensure that and hide the problem just long enough for the next guy to take the fall. CEO B, who took over when A left, figures out the awful thing, but it’s been long enough that they kind of have no choice but to continue the unethical bullshit, to ensure their compensation when they leave. And so on with CEO C and D. That’s a feasible possibility to me and I also just realized they probably do that now, just on a shorter timescale. All in all I’d say the long term shit is probably better on the whole. Ooooor we could do something besides give one schmuck executive feudal authority over a bunch of people’s livelihoods. Maybe like some kind of democratic system.

It’s fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it’s bad for everyone except Google.

I don’t doubt that mathematically, but practically that sounds like it would be functionally equivalent to just retraining the model. Like if it were more efficient to just calculate the model weights based on input data, that’s what we would do, there would be no need to go through the training process. We could just start with a completely untrained model and calculate the difference between that model and one that was trained with all the data. The more I think about it the more I doubt that mathematically. The feasibility of this would depend heavily on the details of the model and how it was trained. Lots of times the order in which the data was presented during training has an impact on the final result, so there’s no guarantee your subtraction would achieve the same or even similar result as retraining without the specified data. Maybe you can reference some papers on the topic.