I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Sure, but as it happens with multiplayer games, you typically have a friend group that plays a certain game. Getting all of them to switch to another game can definitely be a problem.

Eh, it’s gonna depend on your taste in games. If competitive multiplayer games are your thing, then it is a problem. But sure, there’s lots of people who have zero interest in competitive multiplayer.

Eh, the responses are a bit more varied, ranging from “we have very low confidence, because it did not correctly predict several things” to “it’s the best unifying theory we have, by quite a bit”.

In my opinion, worth a read for folks interested in string theory…

My opinion is kind of invalid, since this is pretty much the only game I play that has items, but well, the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup devs decided to add guns, uh sorry, hand cannons to the game, a few versions ago.

It’s a game with swords and magic, and they did make the guns rare to find, but when you do find one, it’s always a blast (pun intended).

The guns are really powerful, but also noisy which means they attract enemies. And they spit out clouds of smoke, which can obstruct your vision when you shoot too much, allowing enemies to draw close. So, it’s just a really fun risk-reward loop.

Or a bus seat…

Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

…except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.

That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.

Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…

Hmm, I don’t add extra water when I cook spinach. I just wash it, fill up my pot with it, throw in salt and a splash of oil, then the kid on top.

After a few minutes, I’ve got a couple spoonfuls of tasty goodness.

…I did just notice the typo, but I also threw myself away laughing, so I’m keeping it.

My answer is also every industry. It’s like asking what industry could benefit from collaboration.

Today, I was on a networking event for an industry that is currently heavily looking to adopt open-source collaboration, due to cost pressure. And it was such a surreal experience.

You had dozens of human beings in this room, who all understood that collaboration is good. Who understood that the shared goal of surviving as an industry requires collaboration. Who understood each other as human beings.

But because they collect their paychecks from different companies, you had these stupid infights of “our product is better”, as well as monetization always being prioritized higher than collaboration success.
It did not feel like we were working on a shared goal, and rather like each company was just trying to sell their product. Rather than one solution, there were as many solutions as there were companies, each one pitching their solution as the one solution everyone else should agree on.

Yeah, I don’t know what the moral of the story is. It just felt so incredibly stupid.

I do not believe there to be a higher meaning. Nor for that fact to have particular meaning. As such, I also do not assign particular meaning to suffering. But others don’t seem to enjoy it much, so I throw myself with full force against it, because why not?

Yeah, I agree that there could probably be a way to “close” Activities, which doesn’t do the session management, so explicitly just throws the windows onto another Activity (or maybe prompts you when there’s still windows on that Activity), without having to outright delete that Activity.

Deleting an Activity is relatively disruptive, since you may have files linked to it or nicely setup wallpapers and such. And there are a number of places where Activities show up, where it can be annoying to have Activities showing up that you’re not currently using.

I can imagine them being open to that suggestion, if you articulate it well.
From what I saw, they did make a lot of changes to remove the start/stop functionality, but most of it was session handling code. So, it might not be too additional much trouble to add a way to close Activities instead.

As a wise Nate Graham once said: The most reliable way to find out whether people use a feature (and how they use it) is to remove it. The second-most reliable way is to announce its removal.
Well, you did miss the announcement, so it probably felt a bit rude to you, but yeah, you should still consider this the start of a conversation. They’re not hellbent on removing this feature.

I would make a joke that my Christmas tree is still planted on a field somewhere, but it’s not like I’ll get a tree either way…

Yeah, that is also my primary motivation, to not need to interact with hairdressers. 😅

I do also like it a lot, though, that I can just cut it every 2-3 weeks. My hair is a lot easier to take care of when it’s short, and I look sharper, so I can just keep it short all the time.

The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…

Yeah, this explains why they decided to remove it: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/upcoming-changes-to-activities-in-plasma-6-5/

I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.

For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.

To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.

But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.

So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.

Yeah, most errors occur somewhere in a library that you use (because libraries typically do the actual heavy lifting) and in the vast majority of cases, it will give you a (English) string describing what went wrong.

If you can just slap that string into the final error message (or at least into logging), that is so much easier and more helpful than pretending you could possibly assign an error code to each such error case.