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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • Currently playing MGSV on PC. I never got into the metal gear franchise because I wasn’t willing to keep up with the play stations. But it’s a surprisingly good game. A little fan-service here and there (cough, Quiet) but the gameplay is solid. I like how they tie achievements with in-game rewards, things like rescuing a certain prisoner unlocks a new type of weapon or something. It’s a good motivation to complete all the optional parts of the missions. And the missions are replayable, which gives you plenty of opportunity to get the best ratings and rewards.


  • Whether humanity will survive really is an open question. Despite all the rhetoric and protests and promises the annual CO2 emissions have continued to increase steadily. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that we are going to do anything about this before the consequences of our choices force our collective hand. Any report or scientific paper that includes a phrase like ‘there is still time’ is just not accepting the reality of the situation. A year ago James Hansen published Global Warming in the Pipeline where he wrote “Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C”. A 4–7 degree rise over 5000 years ended the last ice age, Ocean levels rose 400 feet. A 10 degree rise in a century or so would be way too fast for most species to adapt. It would inundate the majority of our most populated cities. I could go on, but I get depressed writing about this.


  • Nothing is ever 100% safe. Risk assessment is a big part of federal regulations. (See refs at JSTOR and NCBI) One of the key questions is what is the cost/benefit balance for a product. Kitchen knives are hazardous, but it’s very hard to cook without them, so they balance heavier on the benefit side despite the risks. Radithor is all risk and no benefit, so it was an easy decision to ban it.

    The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here’s a list. The part he left out is the cost/benefit analysis. I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren’t so useful that it’s worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child’s life.


  • I played Satisfactory for a while. Got a little past oil extraction and power generation. I think I was doing it wrong, though. I only made one actual factory, like with a floor and such, and it was one of those little templates you can design and make several of. Most of the stuff I built was just scattered about the map with miners and constructors and smelters just laying about everywhere and conveyer belts connecting them. It felt disorganized and, well, unsatisfying. The transport tube (the futurama style one) was fun, but most of the rest of it just felt like work. That and the fact that there was no provided reason to do any of it caused me to just lose interest after a while. I think the Christmas gift construction tree, where the last item required like 10,000 gifts collected was kind of discouraging too.

    What keeps you motivated to improve, rebuild, and progress in the game? And what am I missing?


  • I did a few years of karate in high school but didn’t get much from it.

    Then, like 35 years later, I started training kickboxing. Did that for a couple of years. Got to the point where I enjoyed sparring, even if I wasn’t great at it. Then the instructor changed the schedule so his classes started at 6am and I started training Judo and BJJ instead. I’ve been doing Judo for close to two years now, but stopped the BJJ when the instructor left town. I’ve learned enough Judo that I can usually recognize when someone is imbalanced enough to require minimum kuzushi and then execute a throw. I can’t take down any of the black-belt instructors, but I can throw other blue belts and brown belts often enough.

    As for why, I need a reason to exercise. I am not the kind of person who will head to the basement every morning and lift weights for an hour. But if I sign up for a class and there’s a group of people who know me and expect me to show up and it’s something I like doing then I will be there every time I can. It’s called a commitment device, and joining a group is the commitment device that works for me.





  • Maybe a relationship will just come to you and maybe it won’t. A lot of the advice you get in these kind of threads is like ‘just be yourself’ or ‘don’t be desperate’ or ‘be comfortable on your own’ or whatever. None of that ever worked for me. I was never able to just be myself or be on my own without feeling lonely and desperate and that made me seem weird and off-putting to potential partners. Honestly it took recognizing my mental issues, getting serious about finding a solution to them, and working on them for a while before I was able to act like a normal human around someone I was attracted to. In the end what worked for me was a combination of Buddhist meditation and some kind of therapy. But everyone is different. YMMV.

    On the other hand maybe you are perfectly comfortable in yourself, are handsome and charming, and have no trouble talking with women, but you just met some women with issues of their own. If so, just try to get out more and meet more people. In that case it’s a numbers game and eventually you’ll find the right one.


  • I think that would actually be really cool. You’re walking through Whiterun and you hear some NPC saying “Did you hear, some guy just ate the soul of that dragon that attacked us.” “What? That’s ridiculous. Where are you hearing these dumb rumours?” “No, really, he killed the dragon then just sucked its soul right out.” etc. etc. An LLM could at least make a conversation like that sound semi-plausible, and it could go on as long as you are listening. Then as the game goes on the rumours just get more and more wild. “I heard he can transform himself into a dragon and breathe fire.” “Yeah, well I heard that he’s the god of all the dragons sent to Tamriel to help them kill us all.” Not that they couldn’t have added that kind of thing with voice actors, but it would just be ‘arrow to the knee’ repetitive and get stale really fast.