In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.

AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.

On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.

Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.

Maybe someone has a more specific explanation, but I could imagine it just being shorthands for certain departments.

Like, imagine a hospital where the third floor is dedicated to, uh, new patients, so you press the NP button.

The English pronunciation of Hercules is effectively the same as the German pronuncation.

Important for the joke is that the normal pronunciation for molecules differs, even though it also ends on -cules…

They were trying to show the hero-like pronunciation applied. Think of e.g. Hercules.

It looks similar in structure to JSON:

{
    "attr": {
        "size": "62091",
        "filename": "qBuUP9-OTfuzibt6PQX4-g.jpg",
        ...
    };
    "key": "Wa4AJWFldqRZjBozponbSLRZ",
     ...
}

So, it might be some JSON meta language. I just find it weird that it seems to contain all data, so you wouldn’t use this for validating or templating JSON.

But ultimately, it also means with a handful of regex replacements, you could turn this particular file into JSON. Might make building your own parser almost trivial…

I wish this kind of disclaimer would have been in my physics book in school. Big reason why I didn’t pursue an academic career in physics is because all the quantum stuff sounded like a religion, trying to convince itself that superpositions are real and you can’t measure things, because you just can’t.

Many years later I know that there’s explanations for these things and that some of the illogical things I’ve been told were not nearly as certain or just flatout wrong. Because yeah, we’re still pushing the boundaries of our understanding outwards…

🦀

I guess, why my interpretation is different, is because I’m a developer as well. And to us, modding can be more fun than actually playing a game.

So, if you assume the game will be good, you’ll probably just dive into the modding right away. Especially if you want to ride along the initial hype wave, so that your mods are immediately appreciated by lots of players.

If you do then start playing the game and notice that it doesn’t match your expectations, even if that were an entirely personal problem, that just robs you of your motivation to continue with the modding.

And I guess, that is really what the guy is pissed about. That he wasted time, because the marketing evoked wrong expectations in him.

Personally, I would consider myself wiser than that, because I’ve been burned by Bethesda’s marketing beforehand (Skyrim), but I’m certainly not wishing that kind of wisdom onto other people.

If that helps you discredit his opinion, I guess, he must be.

Well, it sounds like the guy started out by modding the game for a week before really playing it. Don’t think, you can still get a refund at that point…

I watched it on my phone in 1080p60 and the scale didn’t bother me. It’s not like I have to read a lot of text and the precise position of the player character is mostly irrelevant, too. Like, if you get hit by a train or something, the screen will flash red and you’ll react to it, too, so I’ll know what’s going on.

Well, and I don’t look at the screen at all times anyways. 🙃

Would like to see more of this journey…

Humans have this tendency of assuming everyone else is dumb. Whether that’s their neighbor, a different generation, a foreign nation, different skin colors, different religions, different species or indeed extinct civilizations, pretty much everyone is assumed to be barbaric, until proven otherwise.

And so, yeah, it’s usually a revelation like wow, they had calendars, they must have actually been smarter than we thought.

There’s a comic, titled “Loss”, which is infamous, because it’s incredibly fucking depressive. People don’t enjoy being reminded of it. And so, of course, it has become an internet culture / meme thing to do precisely that, but in a sneaky way.

In particular, the comic has 4 panels and an arrangement of characters in a certain, recognizable pattern. So, over time, it’s been reduced ad absurdum to just this pattern.

Well, and in the meme above, it becomes apparent that it’s replicating the Loss pattern, when that fourth panel has the DNA flipped on its side. So, the joke is that we have the pattern-seeking brain for recognizing Loss.

Yeah, that’s true. Maybe you could pull off two or three cycles without hotswapping the brain, but eventually you’d have to rejuvenate yourself by just teach everything you know to one of your clones.

…which sounds an awful lot like just having children. 🙃

Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like the only real way to prevent aging, would be to create a clone of yourself, let that clone grow up until their body is fully developed and then organ-harvest them to replace all of your organs one-by-one, until you’ve eventually ship-of-theseus-ed yourself. Well, and repeat that process every thirty years or so.

Certainly not quite as sexy of a process as some skincare lotions promise…

Hmm, I have no expertise in this field. I recently read that aging happens, because when cells replicate their DNA a gazillion times, then sometimes they introduce slight inaccuracies or mistakes, which I guess, means tons of tiny chunks of our body will have slightly different DNA from what we got born with…?

From the little I’ve just read about telomeres, it sounds like they help to prevent some of these mistakes. Is that you mean?

And “philosopher” is just Ancient Greek for “lover of wisdom”.

Very weird example to me, with the LLM chatbot video. Like, yeah, interacting with an LLM can be interesting, but you’re not going to learn anything meaningful about it.

And when I jumped into the middle of the video, that looked pretty much exactly as I expected, too. The guy was tweaking the pre-query and then chatting with the chatbot to see how it turned out. So, they didn’t do/learn much coding either.

There is all that surrounding technology, which you are inevitably going to learn something about, but ultimately this is what I find so tiring about LLMs. I can learn something about the surrounding technology and tackle a topic which is meaningfully interesting at the same time. Unless I had a problem which a custom adaptation of an LLM could solve, why would I choose to play with it?

It’s also a bad argument, because the concept of things being ‘created’ is an entirely human one. It’s us who decided that if a pile of pre-existing atoms are moved into the shape of a chair, we’ll say that chair was ‘created’.

Aside from this conceptual creation, nothing is ever created in the universe, as far as we know. Atoms don’t ever just pop into existence out of thin air.

I have heard the argument that the universe was just as well ‘created’ in the conceptual sense, so everything existed beforehand, it was just moved into a shape that we recognize as ‘universe’ today.
But that would still mean there’s no argument for a creator and of course, this is simply not what most people mean when they talk about the creation of the universe.

I’m guessing, the rainbow colours are there because prisms are triangular. And to make it look more ridiculous, of course.

The ☤ symbol is a caduceus, which got mixed up here with the Rod of Asclepius, which is a symbol for medicine.
So, it’s related to Hippocrates, who was a physician, perhaps most prominently known for the Hippocratic Oath.