Stomachs aren’t necessary… You can jump straight to the large intestine. Even humans can survive like that

Obviously, they’re useful. It’s another stage of digestion, which means more energy and nutrients are extracted from your food. It widens your viable food sources, just like chewing does

Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out

By getting in early, and having a lot of child branches on the tree of life

I once got on the topic of the moon lending with a creationist co-worker. He said he wasn’t sure, but that if it happened we should be able to see it from satellite pictures. So I said “yeah you can”, pulled it up, and zoomed in on a landing site. You couldn’t see footprints or anything, but you could see the shadow of the flag next to clearly man-made debris

I showed him exactly what he agreed would be proof in a difficult to fake form, and it just temporarily nudged the needle for him

Now, I fight conspiracies with the opposite conspiracies.

Earth is a 4D hypersphere, the earth isn’t hollow, Agatha is just another part of the surface reached by holes

The elites are hiding all the best vaccines, like the ones that cure cancer

I respect it. We think of the Olympics as this Grand international unity thing, but it’s not. It’s a for profit entertainment company

It’s not the best in the world, it’s hundreds of feeder organizations that submitted the paperwork, and the people they chose to select

No one had submitted paperwork for Australian breakdancing… So she and her husband did

It’s art - intentional or not. Skilled or not (it was not). I don’t even know what county won breakdancing… But that couple made an impact on the world, undoubtedly. I could do some of her moves and anyone would instantly recognize it

I’m not sure customers are falling for it - this is why voting with your wallet doesn’t work. People rage against games that launch in an unfinished state, particularly when they’re full price. Steam reviews often incorporate price point - statements like “don’t buy this at full price” or “this might have been worth it at $20, but this is not a $70 game” come up a lot

Sales for AAA games are way down, we just saw the biggest failure in gaming history. Casual reading of steam reviews show people clearly have different expectations based on price, Twitter sometimes explodes with anger at specific moves (like Helldivers requiring PSN) and they back off (temporarily), but they always go back to the bullshit

The feedback mechanism of “voting with your wallet” doesn’t communicate this message. Metrics show purchases, refunds, and active users… That’s what fits on a spreadsheet. They see a game failing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve understood why

AAA studios don’t want to understand what makes a game succeed or fail - they just want a formula to min-max ROI. They want strong numbers at launch, but they also want to minimize production costs, and they treat costs (like developers) as line items - they learn the wrong lessons, because they aren’t concerned with the creative part of game design. They want to be the next Madden or assassin’s creed, they want to figure out how to get players to pay $70 + micro transactions (or better yet a subscription too), but they also want their employees to be interchangeable cogs they can push to burn out then replace

AAA gaming is dying from this, but it’s an oligarchy at this point - large corporations are unable to understand nuance or truly innovate - these are things people do when they have autonomy. They don’t do team building or R&D anymore - that’s a gamble that sometimes pays off big, but not in a quarter or two. They aquire then kill off what made the team work in the first place - any individual can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, but by nature they keep the decision making far removed from the people actually doing the work

But then someone will see a spreadsheet and calculate the “missed” revenue, and whoever made that decision either gets replaced or given strict orders next time

Even if they manage to dig their heels in, it will come up again and again. It looks like a money shaped hole, and so organizationally they’ll keep coming back to it

It is a great way to make games, many indie games do this. A team can do this, but a corporation can’t - subtlety doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet

That’s the thing - AI isn’t about size, it’s about categorizing the state of the world. If you can understand an action in context and possible responses, a Markov chain can learn and respond appropriately with the processing of a calculator - it really doesn’t take much

Which would you pick - one person who will support you when the world turns against you, or a few tens of thousands who are rabbid fans so long as you keep saying what they want to hear

An explosion is pure entropy. It’s high energy releasing to a low energy state in an uncontrolled manner

We climb down the energy slope very slowly to reverse entropy and create order

The universe is like us - temporary order emerges as it slides towards entropy

The comments in a healthy social network are the only way to get near the truth at this point. I read the comments before the article at this point

Because you can do kinematics two ways. You can look at it by speed*mass, or by energy - in both cases it quickly gets way more complicated when you move beyond spherical cows in a vacuum, but both are equally valid. There’s trade-offs to each approach, but the answer should end up the same

Just like how you can say a rod from God or an asteroid impact is x kilotons of explosives, you’re looking at the energy being scattered on impact. If you set your reference frame to Earth, you only have to look at the relative speed and mass of the other object and you get a reasonable estimate. You could also factor in how much the earth moves from the impact, factor in how much the atmosphere, water, and soil “soften the blow”, you could theoretically look at how the movement of other celestial bodies gently tugs at both as they impact, the resistance of the materials moving through the earth’s (and sun’s) magnetic field, and endless other factors

Ultimately, models are extreme simplifications, as are measurements. The universe doesn’t care about units or numbers, the universe works on ratios. Numbers aren’t real - they’re a mental shortcut. Something exists or it doesn’t, there isn’t two of anyone as far as reality is concerned. Our universe cannot be compressed beyond itself without losing information

You probably don’t care about how much torque your car has on Io, but reality does. 10k tons of TNT is not remotely going to be the same as a nuclear explosion, but humans will only see a mushroom cloud and destruction over a similar area

But models are useful - they predict well enough to give us a starting point.

I think an individual opinion can matter, even k the face of commercial success

But here’s the thing - “I don’t like it” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t tell me why you don’t like the beetles, your opinion is less than worthless

Personally, I think the beetles were great, and I think rush of rain was too. It was the first rouglike platformer shooter I’ve ever heard of… The beetles consistently pushed boundaries, doing it once doesn’t put you on their level

On the other hand, the beetles were able to to that because no one was there to tell them no. I agree with the sentiment - games are art. I’d happily overlook a dozen failures for each success

They’re trying to hedge their bets. Nintendo effectively dropped out of the home console market, Microsoft has transitioned away from the console, so Sony is dipping a toe in

Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job

You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture

You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through

Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management

Fuck the webcam, what about the mic?

Agreed, but I think it’s more than that

I don’t think he’s offering them plane tickets. That means they have enough wealth to move there - it would instantly be a shot in the arm for the Russian economy. They’d get a captive market, and he’s not even inviting them to be Russian

That selector also means they’re more likely to have useful skills, and the messaging is targeting people very susceptible to Russia style propaganda - he could censor their connection to the outside world, and they’d thank him for it

Also, if NATO arms hit American civilians, that would be a powerful message to reduce international support for Ukraine or NATO.

They’re too valuable. They’d pay off for him immediately, and long term he’d have an isolated community that is just begging to chug the Kool aid

That’s just because you don’t understand economics well enough

See, we print extra money when we create debt, which is a great big brain way to scale a very stable and very logical system. It scales with debt, which is basically wealth, right? And as long as everything always grows, people and enterprises are essentially taxed by the banks for everything that produces the underlying things money represents the economy grows. And everyone knows you either grow or die, that’s just basic biology… Why do we need a system that makes money after we’re dead?

How else would you do it? Have the government print money? How would they know how much to print? Math? Economics are too complex for math, otherwise the economic models I believe in religiously would make accurate predictions.

The solution is obvious - we just have to capitalism harder.

I’m split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy’s problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it’s already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it’ll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug