If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income.

One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.

This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.

Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.

I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It’s like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don’t have plumbing.

If people’s basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn’t really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don’t need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

Are they remaking it with the same bizarre D&D 3.x rules system? I think I’d pass. Those rules were bad.

Good. Escalate further. I want to see musk sobbing in fear before the lights go out of his eyes.

The whole “most startups lose a lot of money and fail, but some will be wildly successful” model is kind of rotten. Especially when the "wild success " often means breaking laws or becoming consumer hostile.

You have to remember a lot of people are colossally stupid, but still are in positions to make decisions.

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

Oh yeah I got a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard for it, worked fine. One or two crashes, but mostly just fine.

Pray to Saint Luigi for guidance.

How I feel about mana depends largely on how quickly it regenerates. It can be just a reskin of spells-per-day or spells-per-encounter, or it could be something more interesting.

DA:O had unlimited mana potions, which meant essentially you spend a small amount of time to refresh mid fight. Not very deep tactically, but more or less fine.

I don’t think resource management is really a thing most people actually enjoy. Most people don’t like timed missions, so you probably don’t want to use that to prevent people from resting a lot. You don’t want to soft-lock players by letting them blow their resources too soon, so they can’t win the fight but don’t have a way to restore. The dark souls style “you reset at the checkpoint but so do the monsters. Keep trying until you get it right” works for me, but a lot of people hate that.

There are so many ways you could do magic, and it’s a bummer that vancian magic takes up so much space.

DND just isn’t as good and universal as people think it is, but it’s hugely influential anyway.

Side note: DND is balanced around like 6 “medium” encounters per day. You’re supposed to slowly trickle down your resources. Turns out most groups do one encounter per day on average, and then the system doesn’t work very well at all. There’s lot of patches (eg: gritty realism) but the problem remains people don’t seem to want to do that kind of cadence.

I meant how in poe1 and 2 might (the stat) is 3% more damage per point, so it’s hard to feel the difference between might 10 and might 15. Does +15% of 10 damage make a meaningful difference? It’s probably the same as +12%, right, or is there decimal damage too? I guess when multiplied by power levels it’s a bigger deal, but that’s kind of opaque.

Also “like proficiency bonuses on crack” is deeply funny to me as someone who played DND 3e. Base attack bonus every level, skill ranks up every level, oh so many memories and not all of them good.

I really liked poe2 and would play a third one.

I really liked that they made powers per-encounter instead of per-rest. Per-rest really doesn’t work well despite DND trying really hard. It especially doesn’t work well without a human steering to prevent things like “you killed everyone in the castle, now go rest for 8 hours before opening the final door to the boss”. Or you can programmatically enforce that, but players don’t like that. Mostly because it sucks to do like an hour of stuff and realize you’re too low on resources to win, and have to reload.

I’d probably prefer the stats to be coarser or more meaningful. It’s hard to get a feel for “3% more damage”. Especially when the base damage is like 5-15.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.

That seems fine to me.

Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.