Conservatives do well because their ideology is compatible with the interests of capital. No party that is a serious challenge to those interests can win any notable power through elections in the US.

As far as the idea of focusing on local races: If your main concern is immediate and substantial action on climate, what good would winning a local race do for you? Yeah maybe it would be easier to get a left wing candidate on a school board or whatever, but that’s because it holds no meaningful power.

Not that I think they have any particular chance of success at the national level. I’ve just found that “local races” argument… most charitably put, confusing, less charitably: bad faith or willfully missing the point.

It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.

One of us always tells lies. One of us only tells the truth.

I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.

Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.

Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:

• Letting you use a mouse on the menu.
• Adding a basic search filter.
• Letting you hotkey some echoes.

Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.

Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.

The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.

EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.

Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.

The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.

But aren’t people carbon based? We should just compost them instead.

OOTL: I’m confused. What is this? I’ve been using Firefox for years and I have no idea what this button is/was or why people would be annoyed by it.

Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)

The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?

Probably JoJos? Or maybe Monogatari? How many episodes does that have? There are a lot of seasons.

Because when I explore I want to go see something new and interesting. Half the time in Elden Ring I’d just run into something I’ve seen before. It made it not feel good to explore.

I don’t blame them for this, but this is the reality of making a project this big in scope. You can’t possibly fill it with good content. They made one of the like top 3-5 best open world games, but it’s still stuck with all the same drawbacks as open world games.

I just want them to go back to making more focused content.

Is this Italy’s version of athletes being sponsored by Mc Donald’s or Coke?

Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Idk. There’s something going on in how humans learn which is probably fundamentally different from current ML models.

Sure, humans learn from observing their environments, but they generally don’t need millions of examples to figure something out. They’ve got some kind of heuristics or other ways of learning things that lets them understand many things after seeing them just a few times or even once.

Most of the progress in ML models in recent years has been the discovery that you can get massive improvements with current models by just feeding them more and data. Essentially brute force. But there’s a limit to that, either because there might be a theoretical point where the gains stop, or the more practical issue of only having so much data and compute resources.

There’s almost certainly going to need to be some kind of breakthrough before we’re able to get meaningful further than we are now, let alone matching up to human cognition.

At least, that’s how I understand it from the classes I took in grad school. I’m not an expert by any means.

Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.

That is how I used to play all the other games. I just stopped having fun with it in Elden Ring.

Yeah. My fundamental problem with things like UBI, reform/regulation, etc is that it leaves power in the hands of capitalists. Maybe in the short term you get some gains for a broader segment of society like during the height of union power in the US, (recognizing that even that was imperfect because of segregation) but in the long term capitalists can keep using their wealth and power to chip away at those societal gains. The only way to counter this while maintaining capitalism would be perpetual political activism, but that’s simply not feasible. People need to sleep, eat, work, and live their lives. Corporations don’t. They can hire lobbyists and lawyers to keep chipping away long after everyone else goes home.

Fair enough. But most of the time when I finally beat the bosses it just felt like I found the right spell/weapon and got a bit lucky. I’ve yet to get that sense of relief and achievement that the earlier games gave me.