conciselyverbose
@conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on EXCLUSIVE - Ubisoft Wants to Change the 'Far Cry Formula' with Far Cry 7 and Maverick 3 days ago:
The problem is that there’s a formula.
Games are supposed to progress over time, not just feel like annual copy pastes covered with RNG map spam.
- Comment on Happy birthday, peon 6 days ago:
Yeah, I really have no particular interest in taking my birthday off.
- Comment on Outer Worlds 2 no longer exclusive to Xbox, is now coming to PS5 – WGB 6 days ago:
Because their market share is so bad that they can’t make their money back on their own hardware.
- Comment on Funko gets community noted 1 week ago:
They did it on Funko Pop’s behalf, at their direction.
It’s perfectly fine to also blame the partner, but Funko Pop ultimately bears 100% of the responsibility for the actions they instigated.
- Comment on Percentages 2 weeks ago:
The thing with that is that it’s actually a useful generalization to make in a lot of scenarios.
If you know nothing about the distinction between two possible outcomes, treating them as equally likely is a helpful tool to continue with the back of the envelope guess. Knowing this path needs 5 coin tosses to go right and this one needs 10 is helpful to approximate which is better.
Your example is obviously outside the realm where you have zero information, so uniform distribution is no longer the reasonable default. But the idea is from a reasonable technique, taken to extremes by someone who doesn’t fully get it.
- Comment on What Brain Injuries Have to Do With Criminal Behavior 2 weeks ago:
If you’re intrigued by the article, Behave by Robert Sapolsky is heavy, but doesn’t assume a huge amount of prior knowledge and goes into a whole bunch of environmental (and genetic, and several other) factors that are meaningful predictors of violence and other problematic behavior. He approaches through the lens of a large variety of different fields through the book. Determined is also pretty good, and spends a meaningful portion of the end of the book specifically discussing the relevance to the legal system and other approaches to crime. I prefer Behave, because he doesn’t sell me on his core thesis that free will doesn’t exist, but either works on its own.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
Than you had a dogshit education.
That’s not how competent teachers work.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
A test that punishes a correct answer is wrong.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
No it wouldn’t. Ban is exactly, perfectly, correct.
If you considered taking points off for ban on a multiple choice test you’re a bad teacher with a flawed understanding of the language.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
You’re missing the point. I’m saying that there are contrived situations where there are privileges that are not access that you could suspend without the word “ban” making sense.
Any case where you block access to anything for any length of time can correctly be defined as a ban.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
A temporary ban is a ban.
You could suspend specific privileges within a club, without suspending all access. That’s the only case where suspension would make sense where ban would be odd.
You can’t “suspend” access when access is available to the general public. You suspend a privilege that’s not the default. It doesn’t make sense to suspend something that is the default. Taking away access requires proactively preventing it, not removing a membership.
- Comment on Why do we use the term Ban when it's temporary? Why not the more accurate, Suspension? 3 weeks ago:
They’re not synonymous.
You don’t suspend a customer from a bar, temporarily or permanently. Suspension implies membership, or access being limited. Your membership to a club can be suspended. Your access to Walmart can’t be. You’re banned from the store, whether for a year or a lifetime. As there’s no barrier to entry, it doesn’t make sense to suspend the privilege of access.
This is all ignoring that banning a person from a limited access club is also perfectly fine, because the definition of ban is applicable either way. There aren’t really many situations where suspension would be valid but ban wouldn’t. Maybe some small subset of privileges could be suspended where “ban” is a little weird, because general access is still permitted.
But temporary ban makes perfect sense. (Ignoring that it’s been standard terminology for 30 years.)
- Comment on CAN SOMEONE MAKE AN APP ALREADY 3 weeks ago:
lol I use video of my TV to blow up my brother’s phone with sports highlights all the time. If you crop them they don’t look that bad.
- Comment on You know what, fuck you [un-Jags uar icon] 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, I see that, too, but at least everything else is all smooth curves. The hard angle on the g makes it stick out as super different.
- Comment on You know what, fuck you [un-Jags uar icon] 4 weeks ago:
That font is awful. The G looks completely unrelated to any of the other letters.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 4 weeks ago:
lol the problem with Destiny is they turned it into a treadmill.
Elden Ring can easily take more than 100 hours on your first playthrough, and different builds significantly change your play style.
BG3, similar deal. Subsequent playthroughs are probably going to be accelerated, but there are a bunch of different story choices you can make that feel different, the party members have their own story lines, there’s a special custom character called Dark Urge that’s intended for a later playthrough that has it’s own twist, and you can change the strategy of encounters a lot with different party constructions.
Rimworld calls itself a story generator because you’re going to fail and have people die and whatever, but every game plays out different, there are a good couple scenarios, and there’s expansions and mods you can add on top of that for variety.
Just the first couple that come to mind. I’m not near 1000 hours on any of them, but they all have a lot of content.
- Comment on Oopsies 5 weeks ago:
It’s a decent book overall. If you’re interested in the theory behind choice architecture it’s worth a read.
But yeah, read it a couple months ago and remembered it specifically addressed this question.
- Comment on Oopsies 5 weeks ago:
In fact, the truth is surprisingly simple: much depends merely on what happens if people don’t make a decision, something called a no-action default, or simply a default. The countries on the left of the graph ask you to choose to be an organ donor, and those on the right ask you to choose not to be a donor. If you do not make an active choice, you are, by default, a nondonor in Germany and a donor in Austria.
Dan and I wanted to understand this. We started by asking a sample of Americans whether they would be donors or not by presenting them with a choice on a webpage. One group, the opt-in condition, was told that they had just moved to a new state where the default was not to be an organ donor, and they were given a chance to change that status with a simple click of a mouse. A second group, the opt-out condition, saw an identical scenario, except the default was to be a donor. They could indicate that they did not want to be a donor with a mouse click. The third group was simply required to choose; they needed to check one box or the other to go on to the next page. This neutral ques-tion, with nothing prechecked, is a mandated-choice condi-tion; it’s important, because it shows what people do when they are forced to choose.
The effect of the default was remarkably strong: when they had to opt in, only 42 percent agreed to donate, but when they had to opt out, 82 percent agreed to donate. The most interesting result was from those forced to make a choice: 79 percent said they would be a donor, almost the same percentage of donors as in the opt-out condition. The only difference between the group that was asked to opt out and those who were forced to make a choice was that we forced the respondents in the mandated-choice condition to pick either box before they could go forward. It shows that if forced to make a choice, most participants would become donors. Otherwise, if they were given a default, most simply took it, whatever it was.
From Elements of Choice by Eric Johnson
It’s more complicated than the one example, and he covers it further, but as a rough guideline, it looks like forced choice and opt out are similar in this case. Which would make sense because the opposition is mostly religious and strict religious people are more motivated to opt out.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.
- Comment on Microsoft made me sign in on their Xbox Accessories app to update the firmware on my controller 1 month ago:
Sony does hardware features well pretty much across the board. It completely changes the experience without dominating it.
Third parties seem to either halfass it or ignore it.
- Comment on Microsoft made me sign in on their Xbox Accessories app to update the firmware on my controller 1 month ago:
Almost every game that uses the speaker is even more annoying.
- Comment on Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages 1 month ago:
Don’t be pieces of shit and you won’t owe refunds.
- Comment on Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages 1 month ago:
It runs with higher priveleges than you have and can see anything that happens on your computer.
- Comment on Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages 1 month ago:
Adding kernel malware after the fact should entitle every single owner who requests one to a full refund no matter how long has passsed.
- Comment on Eat lead 1 month ago:
The weirdest part to me is thinking the timeless omnipotent god that the Bible explicitly says considers a thousand years less than nothing actually literally meant that he created everything in what we’d perceive as 7 days when talking to whatever arbitrary scribe wrote down the creation myth for him.
- Comment on [Shams] Brooklyn Nets are waiving former No. 7 pick Killian Hayes 1 month ago:
The level between college and the pros (in pretty much every sport) is massive. Being able to succeed with limited body construction against other people with similar limitations is a good sign, but professional sports are grown ass men, many of whom spend 5, 6 figures on assistance optimizing their bodies, and playing a much more advanced game with much less room for error.
Draft picks inherently have to be projections of a pretty serious amount of future development just to be playable at all. You basically need a guy to double his capability or whatever to be relevant.
- Comment on Anon reads a book for school 2 months ago:
I read everything I could get my hands on (and still do), except the shit they assigned us for school.
I get “historically relevant” classics are a thing, but students don’t want to read most of them because they’re brutally formal and none of them can relate to them. It’s a chore primarily because the curriculum is all old and because burying 500 layers of symbolism into a story isn’t how people write any more (because it sucks).
If more reading assignments were stories written to actually entertain kids and just asking the kids to put themselves in the character’s shoes and “what would you do”, maybe they wouldn’t hate reading so much.
- Comment on First Steam Deck plugin on Steam will bring GOG and Epic Games compatibility 2 months ago:
GOG is fine and probably won’t interfere, but a paid plug-in for Epic who very well might just arbitrarily break shit because they can seems like a bad idea.
- Comment on My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them 2 months ago:
You used to unlock cool stuff by playing the game.
They removed that whole loop of discovering cool stuff by doing cool things and replaced it with cash grubbing.
- Comment on Does alcohol expire? Specifically whiskey? 2 months ago:
I love crown black. It’s definitely the cheapest I can buy without feeling gross the next day after a couple drinks.
