scratchee

@scratchee@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I respect choice for the name of the game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand now you’re focused on an academic definition in the game theory sense, personally I don’t think this has much utility in considering actual games, but I’ll acknowledge that by that definition you’re probably correct. I suspect by that most “AIs” in games wouldn’t pass the bar of counting as an agent, even generous definitions that would accept a flow chart would probably concider most AIs to be part of the game state rather than another player (eg the nazi soldiers in wolfenstein aren’t playing to win, they’re set dressing for you to kill). The opponents in Civ are more likely to count as agents perhaps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I respect choice for the name of the game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  AIs in games are just flow charts, that’s almost universally true, almost nobody has put an actual maximiser in a game. But I suppose maybe that counts if you’re feeling very generous.

  The map in pressure wash simulator is certainly not dynamic as you describe, I was speaking a little sarcastically, but you could call it asynchronous gameplay, it was crafted by the developer anticipating your play. but no, it cannot respond to the players actual decisions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I respect choice for the name of the game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends if you define game ais as “agents”, otherwise your definition of game only allows multiplayer games.

  Or you could say the opposing agent in powerwash simulator is the map itself, their “win condition” is overwhelming you with dirt and hiding it in weird places.

  As someone who hates multiplayer games (minus coop games I play with friends, but coop breaks your definition too) I am bemused to discover I have never actually played games except maybe back as a kid when I played goldeneye and the couple times I might have played lol or similar before concluding it was crap 😄

  Maybe a better definition of “game” is needed. I suspect the underlying point you’re trying to make is that this game requires no skill and is therefore little more than a Skinner box, that’s a valid criticism in my book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I respect choice for the name of the game⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  FPS games are the same, just repeated finding and clicking on things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK hospitals bracing for once-in-a-decade flu surge this winter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems like they would have to prepare for it more often than it comes, given their predictive models are imperfect, so that makes sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In 750 deprived areas of England, healthy supervised breakfasts are being prototyped in Primary Schools with government funding before a full rollout.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Same rule as long running meetings, actually. Could call it the unified law of mandatory snacks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨chicken mcnugget theorem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally everything is mathematics or an application thereof, their lane is the entire fucking road.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last youth centre in one of England’s most deprived coastal areas faces closure⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All else must pay to support the tower of aging population, it will inevitably fall, but we must make it as tall and top heavy as possible, and make the base as thin as we can, all so the fall is as spectacular as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ? What are they even doing?

  We’re clearly superior, who else could speed run the mass extinction end game?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Three prisoners charged with murder of child killer Kyle Bevan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I prefer the monsters locked in cells forever. Not for the monsters sake of course, but for the rest of us. It’s the final proof that we’re better than the worst we could be, if we refuse to ever execute anyone when there’s an alternative. Thankfully they’re rare enough that we can afford to lock them all up and treat them “well”.

  Needless to say, execution by fellow inmate isn’t good enough, I want us to be better than that.

  The n the other hand, fuck that guy, I largely agree with your sentiment, if not the result.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨same, honestly⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Tldr: drones/uavs spook bears, probably not a good tool for bear based science, or indeed for anyone else to observe bears.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your favorite case of a game making fun of you?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Outer wilds, if you manage to

  Tap for spoiler

  Break the universe

  You get the end credits but with a kazoo rendition.

  Like, “well done dipshit, I guess this is the end”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MPs urge minister to adopt definition of Islamophobia amid rise in hate crime⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Assault is already a generic crime. But random assaults whilst serious are just a form of crime that hurts the country a bit but not a lot (individuals might get badly hurt, but a low level of assaults is just a nuisance from a societal level).

  But hate crime is different, hate crimes beget hate crimes, and even a low level can grow rapidly, and once you have a racial/religious/whatever conflict you’re stuck with that for a few generations, so hate crimes are incredibly dangerous for society, so get stomped on very hard.

  That’s the theory anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that matches my understanding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Golden⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Treasure insects! Broach type iirc.

  Good eating on them!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on your specific denomination of pro-life. I think some consider even the morning after pill to be a form of abortion.

  But yeah, for everyone else it’s a definite win, including the less extremist pro-life crowd.

  Tldr: a very hard change to hate, but of course the most hateful people will manage to somehow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Show your pride⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In everyday context yes, but it’s pretty common to use “colour” to refer to frequency outside the visible range, and it’s interesting to consider what interesting “colours” we are missing out on because they’re outside our visible range.

  Silver/grey implies even response across the spectrum, and is the normal expectation.

  If we couldn’t see yellow (red/green) then gold would presumably look silver to us, so are there silver/grey metals that would have an interesting colour if only we could see it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm fine with being stupid⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re free to put the center vertex anywhere, then I’d think you could position it to avoid that…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rachel Reeves ‘plots tax raid on solicitors and GPs in crackdown on UK’s wealthy’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Serious answer: the actually wealthy are too good at tax dodging, so taxing them is rarely effective, plus they can scare governments by threatening to fly their private jets to some other country if they were actually threatened with effective taxation.

  I’ve heard it claimed that the only effective way to run a wealth tax is to do a single massive one off tax with no warning or lead time, that way the cockroaches wealthy can’t run and hide in the woodwork quickly enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ba bum tsst⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ankle [eeoh] sore [us]

  De-emphasising the bracketed bits

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨crop candles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I admit that when you said “big fan” I imagined a wind turbine in reverse.

  Zooming into the picture, I see it’s more like desk fans on sticks. I’m sure they’re bigger than that really, but is it really too much to ask for a windmill that does work that way?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oh cool⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The big sci fi win in stargate is how highly they rated internal consistency and having a scientific basis where possible. Apparently that was mostly because the actress playing Carter absolutely refused to tell bullshit gobbledegook and forced the writers to do it properly.

  It’s subtle, and not always perfectly followed, but if you take the episode where they gate to the black hole, they have significant screen time justifying why the time dilation is so strong when the gravitational effects are so weak. It shouldn’t work that way and they acknowledge that explicitly, but obviously they wanted a fun time dilation story so they call it out and explain it as an unexpected side effect of the gate wormhole. So sure, they sometimes make science do what they need it to do for the story, but they try hard to justify it.

  Star Trek meanwhile barely follows its own rules most of the time, let alone actually acknowledging real physics

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doot doot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus they cleverly evolved ahead of time to be camouflaged against all our plastic pollution, so all their predators keep choking on plastic bags.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hello there⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey now, we have an unfair disadvantage, all the nutters are lumped in with us and bringing the side down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s fair

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The company did many things wrong, it’s an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.

  Most importantly they decided they didn’t need to test the software on their new machines because they’d already shipped previous machines running the software, so they “knew it worked”. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.

  Also they had exactly 1 “very smart” engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, I’m sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.

  Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineers for investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).

  Also they didn’t even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didn’t need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.

  In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).

  Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four arrested in terror raids in West Midlands, Derbyshire and Yorkshire⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess the original claim works if you imagine it along a specific axis only (1 dimensionally) in that perspective you either fall quickly then leave slowly or fall slowly and leave quickly, matching up to a change in velocity along that axis.

  But yeah, I wouldn’t have explained it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You mentioned “from the perspective of the planet” before, and I think perhaps that’s the key, from the planet’s perspective you fall and rise with equal velocities and equal accelerations, but crucially the planet is moving relative to other things and curves your orbit, so whilst you might might have the same falling and rising speeds relative to it, they’re not in the same direction, so you’re velocity has changed, and from an external perspective you’ve gained velocity from it.

  Imagine you start stationary relative to the sun, with Jupiter barrelling towards you (not on a collision course!). From Jupiter’s perspective you fall towards it, and so from the suns perspective you gain velocity opposite jupiters orbit, but you’re not directly head on so it twists your course (let’s say 90 degrees to keep things simple) then as you leave Jupiter it indeed decelerates you relative, but crucially you’re in a different direction now, (from jupiters perspective) you’re pointed right towards the sun, so as you pull away Jupiter is decelerating you in the sun direction (aka accelerates you away from the sun). So you were both accelerated in the anti-Jupiter-orbit direction and then again in the anti-sun direction. Added together those give you a vector which is non-zero, so you’ve gained speed from Jupiter.