Show the fucking shirt.

It’s not “free.” It’s “have you considered creating a Skinner box that somehow gouges people for more money than any game should cost?”

The Amerikabomber (English: America bomber)

Revolver Ocelot (Revolver Ocelot)

Per Jacob Geller: “It’s a worldview where we base our moral judgements of actions completely on the predetermined morality of the person carrying those actions out.” Claims are not right or wrong… people are right or wrong. A wrong person could repeat facts stated by a right person and still be wrong.

It’s reality as a team sport.

It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes.

How?

For any set of stats, it wouldn’t matter if you got there at level 2 or level 20. Mudcrabs built for an optimized level 10 wouldn’t spawn just because you are level 10. They’d spawn when you’ve spent as many points as you would have, had you optimized to level 10.

The real issue would be “the Draugr are training” kinds of builds. If you put half your points into personality… the bandits did not.

you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up.

… that’s the wrong problem entirely! Complicated leveling was just another minigame to optimize.

If they wanted it to be painless, they could’ve leveled the world according to your total stats. Attack the player based on how much their numbers went up, instead of how often they went up.

The deeper problem in Oblivion was that you could blast goblins with a single fireball at level one, and then when you got stronger and put all your points in kill-stuff-harder attributes, the same fireball against the same goblins just tickled.

Wait what? They even said they fixed the leveling, in the announcement video! This was the one thing everyone agreed was broken, and it barely mattered which mod you chose to fix it, because all of them were an improvement. How’d they fuck this up twice?

Talked shit to some dunmer, didn’t know he was from Maar Gan.

Not including Abigail Thorn.

“We have those?”

Training is transformative use.

It’s not like this ends with authors being paid every time a neural network gets used - we’d see a properly open model emerge. Smaller networks, trained on hand-pruned data, already look like the way forward. Generalization from sparse examples is how any of this works.

If people can’t simply let the robot read every book in the library, they’re not gonna pay for every book in the library. They’re gonna switch to some above-board torrent of public domain / Creative Commons / permissively-licensed content. That didn’t happen first because scaling up worked better, to a point. Aaaand scale prevents competition. Also it was a great excuse to spy on as much private data as possible.

When the bubble bursts, the tech will remain and flourish, and there’s not gonna be much money involved.

Hell yes, Coincident! Congratufuckinglations!

For anyone new to classic Doom runs: you can’t save. There are no i-frames. If two rockets arrive at your location, you just die. This map also has multiple platforming segments where falling off means death… in a game where you cannot jump. This map is not Kaizo Mario kinds of cruel, because Kaizo maps have a gimmick you’re supposed to perform. Some of the fights are pure “ha ha good luck.” There’s recently-unearthed footage of the designer personally beating like a fifth of the map, and even he’s just winging it.

For shorter introductions to ass-reamingly difficult maps, consider Zero Master’s speedruns of Sunder. E.g. Hollow Icon.

It’s a reverse cargo cult. Postmodern conservatism. Reality as a team sport.

Their news is propaganda? All news must be propaganda! The facts aren’t on their side? Facts aren’t real! Their wooden helicopters don’t fly? The ones in the sky are a conspiracy! Surely everybody thinks this way, they tell themselves. They are the clever ones for noticing they’re full of shit. We idiots still believe things can be true.

Corn on the cob. Corn on the kabob.

Never give Nintendo money.

That’s what I’m on about. We have the technology to avoid going ‘hold up, I gotta get something.’ There’s supposed to be a shitty version that’s always there, in case you have to render it by surprise, and say ‘better luck next frame.’ The most important part is to put roughly the right colors onscreen and move on.

id Software did this on Xbox 360… loading from a DVD drive. Framerate impact: nil.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Least of all how you look.

Only legislation will stop this. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Ban the entire business model.

They had trouble increasing memory even before this AI nonsense. Now they have a perverse incentive to keep it low on affordable cards, to avoid undercutting their own industrial-grade products.

Which only matters thanks to anticompetitive practices leveraging CUDA’s monopoly. Refusing to give up the fat margins on professional equipment is what killed DEC. They successfully miniaturized their PDP mainframes, while personal computers became serious business, but they refused to let those run existing software. They crippled their own product and the market destroyed them. That can’t happen, here, because ATI is not allowed to participate in the inflated market of… linear algebra.

The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

Guinan: “More?”

Data: “Please.”

The episode, summarized:

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Data listens to a deck of cards.