will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

Seems unlikely.

As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”

I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

You have to jump when you’re doing it, too. if you touch the ground before it finishes, it won’t work and you’ll just get shocked.

If you clear some post-game optional challenges, there’s a special move you can unlock that does it easier, but that’s only useful if you want to do NG+

Hours on the centipede man, you say? Once you get into the deflect rhythm, they’re very satisfying. Fill their posture right up and then finish them. But without the timing, you’re going to take a lot of chip damage or get posture broken yourself :(

Sekiro is one of my favorites. I like that it’s not really about leveling, and it pretty much gets right into it. I could pick it up today and blast through a new game.

Do you know how to do the lightning reversal? There are a handful of bosses that it really counters.

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

I think I remember some doge goon asking online about using an LLM to parse JSON. Many people don’t understand things.

Microsoft sucks and I don’t want their shit. They’ll probably cram AI into it or otherwise shit it up.

Game pass is obviously the first stage of classic enshittification. They’re trying to be good to users to get them into the ecosystem. Abuse comes later. Don’t let them change games into a subscription service where you have to keep paying forever. Think longer term.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I see what you did there and I’m not going to fully fall for it.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

Opportunity costs still exist

Also never heard of it, but if it was exclusive to china that explains why.

Any word on the gameplay? Main line borderlands games are kind of mediocre, so I don’t imagine an MMO would be better.

Spotify kind of sucks. I’ve been buying music from the musicians (mostly via Bandcamp) for years. Buying one album a month for like $8 means is cheaper than a subscription, and I now have a huge library of music.

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

Parents often take time off from work to grieve. Classes are often disrupted when a student dies abruptly. This isn’t Skyrim where someone dies and forty seconds later it’s “Must be hearing things”. Plus, as I said, letting the kid die means the resources spend raising and educating them are wasted.

My point is that “oh if he dies it only affects the family” is stupid.

If I’m on my land I’m gonna do whatever I want. I’ll get drunk and do donuts on my lawn. Maybe I’ll set off 10 pounds of tannerite in my backyard because that’s what people do in the middle of nowhere.

[mean words] Edit: I take that back. I’m hangry. I don’t like rugged individualism but that was uncalled for

Should my mom not have allowed me to practice my drums in the barn because the audio was escaping the property and the neighbors could hear faint drumming in the middle of the day sometimes?

Non sequitur.

If it’s on private property who gives a shit. If your idiot son wants to build a structurally questionable tree house and the parents don’t do anything about it and he dies that’s on them.

it’s on all of us, because all the money and effort that went into educating and raising that kid is wasted. Plus the rippling effects outward from everyone who knew the kid grieving.