Chobbes
@Chobbes@lemmy.world
- Comment on This console generation seems skippable 10 months ago:
The thing that always bothers me about people saying consoles are a good deal as the hardware is cheap compared to a PC is just that it gets more expensive really quickly with software. Particularly if you get a digital only console it only takes a few games until you’re at the price of a PC. I just can’t justify buying a locked down system anymore.
- Comment on Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while? 10 months ago:
I mean… Couldn’t rounding be considered a technicality?
- Comment on People who order "a decaff coffee with an extra shot" - why? 10 months ago:
I don’t drink alcohol, so I cannot comment on that.
But that said, I kind of think of coffee as being pretty similar to chocolate. It’s an earthy but bitter flavour that can be nice, often when paired with something sweet and creamy. Also there are nice espressos that are kind of fruity and creamy on their own. There’s plenty flavours that are overwhelming on their own, but complement other flavours nicely. People are also known to like intense experiences, like really spicy foods.
Anyway, I won’t fight you if you don’t like it. That’s totally reasonable :).
- Comment on People who order "a decaff coffee with an extra shot" - why? 10 months ago:
I’m convinced the “ugh, decaf, what’s the point?” people don’t actually like coffee lol.
- Comment on Xbox Player Gets Banned for 1 Year After Recording Baldur's Gate 3 Scenes 10 months ago:
Maybe not on here, to be fair, lol.
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 10 months ago:
Death Stranding is one of my favourite games, but it’s definitely not for everybody… I’d recommend giving it another go at some point, but don’t expect it to change too dramatically.
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 10 months ago:
I fucking loved Hollow Knight but I put it down right before finishing it and… god… I’d have to start all over again T_T
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 10 months ago:
I was never very good at nethack, but the 3.6 nerfs felt very mean lol.
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 10 months ago:
XCOM games all kind of have a problem where you can really screw yourself long term with a bad mission or by researching sub optimally. It’s kiiiiind of awesome because it raises the stakes of the game… But I don’t want to restart and play another 40 hours or whatever T_T.
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 10 months ago:
Wow. Where do you leave off? It’s not a super long game so I’m a little surprised.
- Comment on Anon swims 10 months ago:
Yep! Hell, there’s probably a non-zero amount of arsenic in any pool…
- Comment on Anon swims 10 months ago:
Unfortunate in the sense that it just feels kind of gross is all I mean :). Of course this stuff is unlikely to cause any physical harm to somebody.
- Comment on Anon swims 10 months ago:
This is sort of how everything works, unfortunately! Guaranteeing 0% of something is really hard. Your flour probably has a small percentage of bugs in it, for instance. Urea is a relatively small molecule that I imagine you can find tiny amounts of pretty much anywhere. I would be unsurprised if there was at least one molecule of urea in literally anything you eat!
That said, dear god I hope I’ve never been in a pool that’s 10% urine :(. Those kiddie pools at the water park are probably like 90% urine, though. Sometimes I wonder if by volume adults pee in the pool more than kids, though. I have a suspicion a good chunk of adults think it’s fine or will do it secretly anyway.
- Comment on Steam keeps on winning 10 months ago:
I like what Valve does and I sound like a fanboy sometimes because they just keep doing great stuff… But I don’t fucking trust them long term. I hope they prove me wrong, of course! I also don’t really trust anybody else.
- Comment on Steam keeps on winning 10 months ago:
Well… Not to take away any points from Valve because it’s still a big chunk of infrastructure, but this made me pause… I think steam content is arguably easier to serve than something like Netflix. Netflix has to deal with encoding content and it’s important for streams to not buffer, so it has to consistently stream data at a decent rate (if steam hiccups it sucks, but it’s not a problem where you’re interrupted mid game, at least). Games can be a lot bigger than videos, but I’m not sure how much that matters for this. Storage is relatively cheap and Netflix will probably have multiple copies of each video in different codecs and bitrates which might make more equivalent storage wise? Per hour of entertainment my guess is that Netflix actually has to send more data over the network than steam on average. There’s plenty of smaller games, and people can often spend hundreds of hours in a single game. If somebody rewatches a show they’ll stream it again, but if they replay a game they might still have a copy downloaded…
I don’t know any of the actual details, but I’m curious now how they actually compare! I’d guess Netflix probably has twice as many active users as steam, and I’d guess Netflix uses more bandwidth per user than steam (I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was 10x as much… I think people could easily stream 50gb per day, and I maaaaybe download that much from steam in a couple of weeks on average). Would be curious how it actually works out!
This isn’t to say steam is free to host, it obviously isn’t, I just think Netflix might be harder. I’m a tiny bit worried about Steam’s back catalog long term, eventually it may not be deemed profitable to keep hosting old games “for free”. Like eventually if nobody is buying a game anymore, but people keep downloading it, it couuuuld technically cost steam more to host than they made off of it, and maintaining storage long term costs money too (though hopefully this keeps getting less expensive over time). The margins for Valve are super high, though, so hopefully it doesn’t matter!
- Comment on How do I stop hating children? 10 months ago:
My brain starts to freeze in loud environments. Ear plugs help me too :). It’s a tip that took me far too long to realize.
- Comment on How do I stop hating children? 10 months ago:
I have misophonia and kids are definitely a big trigger in a lot of ways… Screaming, crying, chewing, coughing. It’s anecdotal, but yeah the high pitch sounds don’t play nice with my brain. Misophonia suuuuuuuuuucks.
I also don’t particularly like kids, but that’s not really about the sound. Just not my cup of tea.
- Comment on How do I stop hating children? 10 months ago:
I get that, but for what it’s worth… You really can kind of just dump it on them. They’re not allowed to share it, and they’re often happy to just get to the point sometimes.
- Comment on [Steam] Which lesser known games have you bought or are planning to buy in this sale? 10 months ago:
I just want Logan Cunningham to whisper me to sleep every night.
- Comment on Starfield End of the Year Update 11 months ago:
Some of it’s kind of cool and makes sense. Like developers can get heat maps of where players die so they can see which areas need difficulty tuning, and it can also help developers understand where to spend resources on their games in the future, or notice if players aren’t engaging with something so they can figure out how to make that aspect of the game better. I have mixed feelings about it, but I don’t think telemetry has to be evil.
- Comment on Recommend a game for me to play with my partner 11 months ago:
It Takes Two is probably the best jumping off point (as you’ve already been informed). It has enough variety that you can discuss what parts they liked and maybe find the games in that kind of genre.
My partner isn’t big on games, but loves The Binding of Isaac for coop. The latest DLC adds a better coop mode, but the original coop mode with coop babies works well too (and there’s advantages like them being able to fly so they don’t need to worry about floor hazards). I think the fact that they grew up in a catholic household but aren’t religious helped them get into it lol.
- Comment on Recommend a game for me to play with my partner 11 months ago:
My partner had a hard time dealing with FPS movement. Throwing in portals just made it a complete mess. It really wasn’t a good jumping off point, I think it’s good to be weary.
- Comment on Recommend a game for me to play with my partner 11 months ago:
This didn’t really work for us to be honest. It went a little better than most games, but it was too easy to get separated and do your own thing and it just didn’t really feel like we were playing together. Could be a strength, but I don’t think it’s ideal if your partner doesn’t really like video games haha.
- Comment on Recommend a game for me to play with my partner 11 months ago:
NOPE. This might work for some people but my partner couldn’t handle it :/. When walking around in 3D and paying attention is hard portals are just too hard when thrown into the mix. I would kill to be able to play Portal 2 coop, but alas :C. Maybe Portal 2 would be better to start on, they do a better job of introducing some concepts and the story is harder to completely ignore lol.
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 1 year ago:
Okay, I couldn’t look at this table when I responded last night (I thought you were referring to the zip files, not the PDFs at the bottom). Got a chance to look at them on my computer today!
Would you call the point where I_x = 1/2 I_0 the life expectancy at birth? In the life tables you link to (direct link to the 2020 table) there’s an “expectation of life at age x” column which differs! My understanding is that in official metrics of “life expectancy” they usually mean the “life expectancy at birth”, which is calculated in the “expectation of life at age x” column in this data set, do actuaries use a different definition?
In this table “life expectancy at birth” is estimated at 74.2 for men in the USA in 2020. This is calculated in this table by computing T_0 / I_0, which is the arithmetic mean for the ages of death in this period. The estimate for the median age of death in this table is between the ages of 79 and 80. There’s about a 5 year difference between these two numbers, and furthermore only about 40% of the population of men has died by the ages of 74-75 in this table, which is quite different from 50% if we assume “life expectancy” is this arithmetic mean. These are pretty big differences, and I really wish people / articles would be more clear about how the number they’re quoting was actually calculated and what it means! The estimated median age of death from the point I_x = 1/2 I_0 is a useful measure too, but I have no idea what a random person or article intends when they say “life expectancy” :|. I’ve grown to deeply distrust any aggregate measure that people discuss informally or in news articles… It’s often very unclear how that number was derived, what that number actually means in a mathematical sense, and if it even means anything at all.
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 1 year ago:
That marks the median age of death, but I don’t think that’s the definition of life expectancy (though maybe the term is used loosely or imprecisely to mean the median age of death or the average age of death). The definitions of life expectancy I found claim it’s the mean age of death, which would make sense because the expected value of a random variable is the arithmetic mean. That said, the median on the life tables that I have found seem to correlate much more closely to the age of 77 versus the life expectancy at birth which is much lower (78-79 for the median and 74 for the life expectancy at birth for 2020 data)… but the actual paper is behind a pay wall so I have no idea what they’re actually computing for 77 years of life expectancy… my guess is that it’s the median and not the mean, but maybe they’re considering people over a certain age or something… either way, the mean / median getting confused is an issue and I wish people were more clear about what metric is actually being communicated.
I really hate when people talk about averages because nob
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 1 year ago:
Well, the definition of the mean and median of a sample doesn’t depend on the particular data set, and there’s plenty of non-age related causes of death in the world which would logically skew the distribution to the left! You can look at actuarial tables to see this in action:
www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Male life expectancy at birth in this table is 74.12, but you’ll notice that you don’t get to 50% of the population dying until somewhere between the ages of 78 and 79.
This website has a pretty good chart showing the skew for a 2019 dataset:
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 1 year ago:
To me mean = average, so the two statements are the same.
Are you talking about median age of death?
The median is the midpoint of a sample, not the mean.
When child mortality was very high (pre- 20 century) that was definitely the case. I am not so sure that it is now. I feel that average life expectancy will be a lot closer to 50% survival rate (median age of death) than it was in the past.
There are still plenty of people who die young, even though child mortality is less of a factor in wealthy countries right now. Plenty of people die in car accidents at a relatively young age, for instance. I’m sure the median and mean aren’t like 10 years off of each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re 3 or even 5 years off.
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 1 year ago:
That figure is average life expectancy. IE 50% of US man are expected to reach 77.
I can’t access the full paper that this is in reference too, so I’m not sure how they calculate it… but isn’t life expectancy usually the mean age of death? I would expect the distribution to have a left skew from people who die young, which should mean that more than 50% of US men are expected to reach 77.
- Comment on Would you prefer if games had a separate difficulty setting for boss fights? 1 year ago:
Yeah I was going to say… in many cases bosses seem to be easier than the normal fights. The bosses sort of focus on being a novel gimmick with easily telegraphed attacks, which often ends up being easier than normal fights in some games.
