Let’s see… when I was 4 I got a Sega Genesis for my birthday. It came with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Granddad took me shopping to pick out two other games for it. I picked Sonic the Hedgehog and Ms. Pac-Man, and both were bangers. The Genesis port of Ms. Pac-Man had a bunch of alternate modes with different mazes.

I became a big fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog games. I got Sonic 3 for my next(?) birthday, and Sonic and Knuckles the Christmas after that(?). I was convinced that Lock-On Technology was going to be the future of video games!

Not particularly, no. Unless doing the things I want to do, and not doing things I don’t want to do, counts as principle.

From NPR:

Over the years, Webber learned how to write, fish and hunt. Videos on a YouTube account believed to belong to Webber show him firing guns using his upper arms. He wrote in a 2023 Today piece that he “even taught myself how to drive by racing go-karts.”

Surely this is just a marketing stunt they pulled in the hopes of temporarily pumping share prices or something? Despite their claims that it can be optimized before release, I think there is basically no way they get it running at playable frame rates without a second dedicated graphics card on current gen hardware. They’re going to release it with terrible performance, promise to improve it, a few people who have dual 5090 setups will try it but almost everyone will ignore it, and the promised optimizations will either never materialize or they’ll be much less impactful than promised.

“The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI,” Huang continued.

He seems to be thinking of it as basically a post-processing effect, but it’s certainly the least performant one ever devised. Even if it’s true that the art teams can tweak it to get exactly the effect they want, I find it hard to believe they’d ever be able to get it running on the hardware they’re targeting, so it will just be an expensive novelty for games that want to promise the most bells and whistles.

Edit: Wait I just saw this,

“It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,” he said.

What is he on about? Surely it’s not really mucking around with stuff earlier in the rendering pipeline? That would make it completely different from all previous versions of DLSS, why would they call it DLSS 5? I don’t think he understands how it works at all.

“Tubular” is from surfer lingo right? It makes a lot of sense when you realize they’re comparing whatever cool thing you’re talking about to a wave like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1mXQaSA3-rE

Where do they even get 30 people who can cast 3rd-level spells? That’s like an entire region’s supply of 5th-level characters. Are they in Eberron and using mass-produced wands of counterspell? Maybe they’re the entire high-threat response team of a major empire or planar metropolis.

I’m trying to game out how many of my characters it would take to rescue the player if that’s really 30 5th+ level antimages, and with that many counterspells on the field I think the answer is that they could probably shut down every spellcaster I’ve ever played, at least for long enough to take out the primary target. The only D&D character I’ve played who really has a hope of accomplishing anything is a very high level 4th edition fighter, and even at near-epic levels things still look dicey because I bet those guys are all packing a bunch of other spells like hold person and only one of them has to hit to really mess up his day. Maybe if he teamed up with the high level half-celestial paladin of freedom from 3.5…

Actually I just remembered you have to see your target to counterspell them, so actually some people like the 3.x Sublime Chord would be in the clear as long as they cast improved invisibility while out of sight, but I’m betting the anti-mages are prepared for that too, somehow. It might even things up though!

It looks like the patch has improvements for the server, so you might look into upgrading!

One option:

• Every time an item is unloaded, save the in-game date and time as part of its data.
• Every time an item is loaded that has historical data, check that timestamp.
• Use the time difference between now and then to calculate whether fires have burned out, whether the temperature should have returned to the ambient temperature, etc. You could also assume some kinds of contaminants wear away after a certain time: water dries up, biological substances degrade, etc. If item degradation is ever implemented, potentially you could roll for damage to items that have been unloaded for very long periods of time, although you’d want to know if they were supposed to be exposed to weathering, etc. and you might not have good data on this. Or if food spoilage is ever changed so that items being carried or stored in barrels should still spoil, you can check for rot this way too.

This is how Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead checks if food has rotted or fires have burned out while you were away from an area. There’s a possible edge case here where an unloaded unit acquires an item that should still be dangerous, but then is saved by it taking long enough for them to return that the item becomes safe, but that’s probably okay—it’s hard to imagine how you’d set it up, and even if it happened the player probably wouldn’t notice.

Okay, I’m gonna ask: why is reddit not social media?

Me not that kind of orc!

If you can’t discuss sexual orientation and gender identity are they also planning to eliminate psychology, anthropology, sociology…? It seems difficult to engage in any discipline that studies humans without talking about those things.

According to the linked article it prevents the use of Samsung Pay and access to the Secure Folder (an extra layer of security you can enable that requires a second PIN to be input before you can access certain apps and files). This seems pretty reasonable, the goal is clearly to prevent access to especially sensitive data if someone has stolen the phone.

No, this is the first time it has been available to the public. It was acquired by Riot Games several years into development, they decided to scrap most of the original work and start over in a new game engine, work on the new engine severely delayed reimplementation of previously completed features, which kept pushing the release timeline back, and eventually Riot canned the project.

Last year the original founder purchased the rights to the game from Riot, they went back to the original engine, and they got a working early access build out in like six months.

I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.

We are currently clear on opsec

I wish I could recommend the character creator for Phantasy Star Online 2, because in theory it’s great, with the ability to mix and match clothing layers, recolor clothing, fine tune your body proportions, select from various faces, etc. Most importantly, you can attach accessories to your character however you like and adjust their scaling and rotation in ways that let you repurpose them. For example, for a while I was using a head ornment, scaled down, rotated, and clipped into my face, as a pair of fangs, and it looked pretty convincing!

I can’t actually recommend it though because the process of actually collecting outfits and accessories is FOMO gacha hell. (Gacha items purchased with “AC,” the real-money only currency, can also be bought secondhand from other players, but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for them, and you can’t trade items bought with “SG” which is the premium currency that can also be earned in game.)

Mark Epstein told Newsweek the individual was not Clinton. He did not provide any additional details about the identity of “Bubba” or the meaning of the emails.

From the article.

I guess it’s not exactly the same, because it sort of is related, but I always get tripped up on “ancillary” because it is a totally inoffensive English word… except that the Latin word ancilla means “slave girl.”

I’m not a climate scientist, but this is my understanding: the Earth doesn’t heat evenly, because most of the sunlight falls in the tropics. The ocean currents are an important way that heat gets redistributed. If the current collapses, the temperature difference between the equator and the high latitudes will increase, because heat will travel more slowly. Trying to fix this by adding more greenhouse gases would result in the equatorial regions becoming uninhabitable before it thawed out Europe—kind of like how if you microwave a Hot Pocket and it’s heating unevenly, you can’t fix it by microwaving it more, that just makes the already-hot parts scorching.

This doesn’t jive with my life experience at all. If my family could have “programmed” me, I would have turned out very differently. Also all my siblings are wildly different people.

The development of living beings is a messy process and there are significant uncontrollable elements.