The set of all integers is not larger than the set of all odd integers.

The set of all real numbers, on the other hand, is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum

Majestic.

(Though probably not as much if you could smell it.)

There were several on /hfy and /humansarespaceorcs.

I don’t suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.

I’m not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one’s time.

He set The Hobbit (which he wrote for his kids) in the world he’d already built… not because he particularly enjoyed worldbuilding, but because a culturally complex fantasy world with a rich history and mythology was a prerequisite for the epic poetic sagas he felt needed to write in order to properly develop his fantasy languages, which is what he really liked to do, as a philologist.

“There’s no underwear in space.”

He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.

Yeah, sorry, I was thinking from a PC standpoint and sort of ignored the whole console perspective (though, frankly, the console market seems to have been absolutely fubared from its inception, from a consumer standpoint, so anything Microsoft does will probably be as relevant as farting into an ocean of shit…)

Activision Blizzard was already about as anti-consumer as possible, so in this particular case at worst nothing will change, at best Microsoft might actually clean house and there might be some improvements for the consumers…

Luckily, Activision Blizzard already stopped investing in quality and started shafting customers quite a while back, so worst case scenario (in this particular case, your criticism is still valid for most others) nothing changes, best case scenario Microsoft actually cleans house and the market becomes slightly less anti-consumer with one of the worst offenders gone…

With Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies.

Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell (among others) in Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger (1994), for instance…?

Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

Epic store exclusives don’t promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it’s worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won’t be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we’ll be back to sailing the high seas.

The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn’t have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.

In science fiction there’s sometimes a distinction between virtual intelligence (something that simulates intelligence but isn’t really intelligent) and actual artificial intelligence (something really intelligent but created through science and engineering instead of natural biological evolution).

Large language models would almost certainly be VI by those definitions, not AI.

Nah, comparing them to cosmic horrors is giving them too much importance, I think.

I’d rather compare them to, say, the diarrhea that forced that plane to turn around a while back.

No cosmic anything, just a foul horrid unending flow of liquid excrement purposelessly ruining everyone’s day, making everything shittier, and stinking the whole place up for decades to come.

A printer being stupid (and Xerox’s refusal to give him the source code so he could fix it) was precisely what led Stallman to start the open source software movement.

I’d be fine with the world being run by a Commodore 64 running ELIZA. It’d still be orders of magnitude less harmful than the parasites we’ve got now.

Heavy objects tend to be completely OP and are used to cheese combat.

You shut up. Barrelmancy and goblin tossin’ are perfectly legitimate martial arts!