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monotremata

@ monotremata @lemmy.ca

Posts
2
Comments
186
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.

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  • Most of the games I liked back in the day don't really hold up, though. Like, I loved the NES version of Strider back then; it had a strange and intriguing plot, I loved the trappings of the dragon-shaped space station and the plasma sword and the magnetic boots that let you walk on the ceiling, and I was a total sucker for any hint of metroidvania-type progression. But when I try to play it now, I notice the controls are awful, the collision detection is janky, the level designs are dull, and the "triangle jump" is nearly unusable.

    Whereas I tried Clash at Demonhead, and that's surprisingly decent. A little simplistic, sure, and it bogs down as you get further into it, but it's pretty amusing. Same with Guardian Legend: I can't get through it, but I can definitely see the appeal. Edit: it may have been clear from context, but these are ones I didn't play back in my youth.

    I do love indie stuff, though. I just played through Alwa's Legacy, and that one is quite good. (Some people might find it too easy, but I tend to appreciate that at this point. I don't have the reflexes I once did.)

    So I tend to agree that there's still great stuff around. I just don't think nostalgia is the whole story with retro games. I think a lot of it has to do with the retro games being the work of a big studio, even though the mechanics today would be relegated to an indie studio. There are subtle ways that affects the experience, that I think people are unconsciously aware of.

    But yeah, there are great games out there today, especially on PC.

  • What's something you know about philosophy?

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  • Definitely related, yeah. Lakoff was primarily making a linguistic observation, but he did think it was reflective of the way humans really think about these kinds of categories, and that seems right.

  • What's something you know about philosophy?

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  • My favorite is Lakoff's category theory. He notes that philosophy largely pretends that categories are defined based on rules of inclusion and exclusion, but in fact human thinking is mostly based around categories defined by a prototypical example and various relations to that example. So, e.g., a penguin and a sparrow are both birds, but a sparrow is more like the prototypical bird, since it's smaller and it flies.

    Many of the great philosophical questions over the years have been about trying to decide on precise rules of inclusion and exclusion for categories, even though the closer people look, the less it seems like there's a meaningful boundary (e.g. "life" vs "non-living," where you start to see things like viruses, prions, etc. that don't fit cleanly into either category).

  • Hippity Hoppity

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  • Probably a Funkey? There have been various others (PocketSprite?). Anything smaller than a Miyoo Mini is really too small to practically play on, though. And even that is pushing it for my aging eyes.

  • So much for the lawsuit

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  • They ported Half-Life to PS2. And the sequel was on everything.

  • Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

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  • Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y'know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I'm not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y'know, passive index fund investors.

  • Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

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  • No, my understanding is that they're bringing in revenue on token generation, but it's exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they're afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they've reduced the amount they're subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.

    I can't find a good citation for this, though, so it's possible I'm mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they're operating at a massive loss either way, and it's a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.

    In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That's...we'll have to see what happens on that front.

  • Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

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  • It's particularly funny because I'm pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren't taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.

  • Apocalypse Bunker Fails as Wealthy Residents Turn on Each Other

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  • I guess I didn't drill down into the exploitation aspect, yeah. The people actually doing the jobs I don't know how to do--mining, farming, sewing, etc.--are at this point almost entirely disadvantaged people in other countries, who are being woefully underpaid and subjected to terrible conditions. (A lot of farming is also done here, but it's still by exploited foreign workers, so...) And a bunch of that relies on other systems too, like farming being done by as few workers as it is depends on fertilizers from the petrochemical industries, which are hurting people EVERYWHERE. I wouldn't be able to afford anything if it weren't discounted in this way. Even if there was no actual apocalypse, and only the exploitation went away, it's not at all clear to me that I would have a way to keep myself alive.

  • If Europe has started experiencing over 40°C heatwaves frequently, then this planet really is fucked

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  • If the AMOC shuts down, all bets are off.

  • Apocalypse Bunker Fails as Wealthy Residents Turn on Each Other

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  • I mean I'm about a billion dollars short of being a billionaire, and I don't know how to live without exploiting labor either. I can't farm, I can't hunt, I can't identify edible berries, roots, and mushrooms, I can't sew beyond fixing a button. I know a lot about mechanisms, but it's far from clear to me I could do anything useful in that field once the electricity is out, let alone once source metal starts getting hard to find. Everything would get so much harder so quickly. Hell, I don't even know how to dig a latrine that'll prevent the water supply from being contaminated, assuming we can find a water supply. (On the plus side, sources of pollution in water supplies should start to fall apart pretty fast.)

    I dunno. I just think everyone thinking about the collapse wildly underestimates how hard everything will be. I can't really picture my sorry ass lasting long at all.

  • Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand”

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  • We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.

  • What's the worst part about getting older that young people don't know about?

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  • I mean, redraw this graph as "happiness" vs "year of birth" and it'll look way less optimistic!

  • It's like evolving, just backwards.

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  • thanks!

  • It's like evolving, just backwards.

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  • So is it being used as slang outside the context of describing people as non-Jewish? I grew up in Skokie, IL, so I was familiar with the yiddish term, but I haven't heard this new usage. Are non-jewish kids online using "goyim" to refer to outsiders of some other in-group?

  • T-Mobile Just Ripped 8 Million Customers Off Their Grandfathered Plans – and Raised Their Bills

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  • The catch is that it's "unlimited" in that sense that the mobile companies have made people accept now, i.e., deprioritized. I'm on Visible, which is Verizon's MVNO; my plan has unlimited deprioritized everything, and it's $25/mo, with $5/mo discount for the first two years so I'm actually paying $20/mo for now. It's mostly good enough for my purposes; I'm usually on Wifi anyway. When I was leaving a protest and turned my phone back on, I couldn't get enough access to check the bus schedule or text my family, so that was frustrating; dense crowds are a problem. But I was previously paying like $130/mo for Verizon, so it's more than worth putting up with. I got some mesh radios for emergency comms.

  • Whats the most disgusting thing you've ever put in your mouth?

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  • It still cracks me up that they at one point released a Thanksgiving themed Malört. It had flavorings like cranberry sauce and turkey gravy. I realize they were just playing into the social media coverage they'd get for such absolute fuckery, but god, they really know their beverage's core brand is just "disgusting, but with alcohol."

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  • The noise is created by cooling, and AI data centers require so much more cooling that it's hard to even compare them. The kind of server rack that would run something like Lemmy might draw 8-12kW of power. A new nVidia NVL72 rack for AI workloads, running the new B300 gpus, draws about 132-140kW. All that power ultimately has to be removed by cooling. You know how a regular laptop is basically silent, but a gaming laptop running something heavy will make quite a racket with its fan? It's like that, but scaled up to the size of Manhattan.

  • What TV shows are absolutely worth watching?

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  • I'm not a huge Marvel fan, but I really enjoyed Legion. Pretty much all the content warnings, though.