• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 28th, 2023

help-circle


  • It’s tricky, because there’s no hard definition for what it means to “change the world”, either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn’t possible before, and is also reliably useful.

    To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn’t really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn’t seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.

    These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it’s infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.


  • So glad to see another one of your posts! Encountering these in my feed is like stumbling upon an oasis of casual fun in a vast desert of bleak chaos. Always a pleasure!

    I thought you might like to know that your earlier posts inspired me to take my Steam Deck to the next level. I got Heroic Launcher set up and used it to play Art of Rally (purchased on GOG). Both were good suggestions, so thanks! (But in my case, Art of Rally should probably be called “Fishtail Simulator”) I was also pleasantly surprised that it was able to run the original Wing Commander on the first try, but getting the controls fully mapped and comprehensible seems like a larger undertaking…

    Since you asked about games being played: I’m jumping around between stuff a lot lately, but some notable and enjoyable highlights include For the King 2, Guns of Icarus Alliance, The Cosmic Wheel: Sisterhood, and Hexagod.


  • Finally got around to reading the article, and this part was a pleasant surprise:

    …there’s a lot more on the way in the coming weeks, including the return of Game Informer’s print magazine. Our intent is to bring back the magazine bigger and better than it was before, and add a host of membership and subscription benefits, including an expanded scope to our videos, streaming, and feature coverage, while also broadening the range of experts and partnerships we tap to bring you those perspectives.

    To your point, it remains to be seen if they’ll succeed, but it sounds like they are at least trying.









  • I suspect the responses you’re getting stem from the original phrasing:

    what’s the point, evolutionarily, to self destruct after reproducing

    The question has an implicit claim that there IS a point, which people are rightly pointing out is not necessarily the case (as you have acknowledged). It certainly is an interesting question to wonder if there could be some benefit anyway, so it would probably have helped to frame it that way.

    Not saying anyone is required to meet any kind of bar in the level of discourse in a casual online forum, just an observation of cause and effect, for what it’s worth.


  • Evolution doesn’t make deliberate, strategic choices. Random mutations result in new behaviors/properties that may or may not be beneficial, and selection removes those mutations that prevent reproduction from the gene pool. Not every mutation will be beneficial, but as long as it’s not harmful enough to stop reproduction, it can persist.

    If there were two groups of octopuses, one with the self-destructive behavior and one without, then there would be pressure from competition. In that situation, your point would have more of an impact. But without that pressure, there’s nothing to drive the selection. And the mutation won’t occur just because it would be helpful for it to do so - it’s random.

    At least, that’s how I understand it. I’m not a biologist or anything.


  • Trigger warning: explaining jokes in way too much detail.

    The phrasing is a reference to the “Is this a pigeon?” meme (see: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon ). This is meant to indicate that this is clearly not egg_irl, but the topic of the original post seemed like something repressed trans people can relate to in hindsight. It reminded me of a common pattern among eggs where there’s a vague but insistent internal voice (not literally a voice, more like an occasional impulse) telling you to do things that you associate with your actual gender, rather than your assigned gender, with varying effects depending on the person. For example, it generally made me feel uncomfortable without understanding why, leading me to assume I simply didn’t like those things, when in fact that was more or less the opposite of the truth.

    Anyway, these sorts of things can make the idea of an unknown, voiceless, internal personality separate from your surface-level persona resonate with trans people. Add the fact that when you’re deeply involved in gender issues and transitioning, it’s so much on your mind that there’s a tendency to interpret everything as being somehow related to gender even when it isn’t, and it seemed like a good fit for the pigeon meme.