darthelmet
@darthelmet@lemmy.world
- Comment on God of War Ragnarök - PC Launch Trailer 1 week ago:
Even for the single player games?
- Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election? 4 weeks ago:
2 things:
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Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.
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People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.
Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.
So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.
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- Comment on DuckDuckGoose 4 weeks ago:
Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.
- Comment on Elden Ring is "the limit" for From Software project scale, says Miyazaki - multiple, "smaller" games may be the "next stage" 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on answer = sum(n) / len(n) 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Anon doesn’t like Elden Ring 2 months ago:
I like the games in spite of the dumb stuff like this. I fully recognize a lot of it is really bad design.
It is very frustrating though. Setting aside the silly NPC quests, it’s so disappointing finding some cool looking item or spell only for it to be practically useless.
- Comment on The Star Trek Adventures first edition Core Rulebook pdf free for Saturday, June 22 3 months ago:
Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.
- Comment on Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be? 3 months ago:
Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.
But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.
- Comment on Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity? 3 months ago:
Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.
- Comment on Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity? 3 months ago:
Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.
That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.
- Comment on Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity? 3 months ago:
Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:
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In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.
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In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.
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In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.
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Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.
Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.
It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.
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- Comment on Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity? 3 months ago:
I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.
- Comment on Why has no one thought of this before?! 4 months ago:
Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.
- Comment on Zero to hero 4 months ago:
Well I’m convinced. That was a surprisingly well reasoned video.
- Comment on Zero to hero 4 months ago:
Does “nothing” “exist” independent of caring what there is nothing of or in what span of time and space there is nothing of the thing?
There’s always been “something” somewhere. Well, at least as far back as we can see.
- Comment on ‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles 4 months ago:
I mean, how we got here probably can inform us as to how we proceed. But ok, fine. Ignore the first part. Answer the 2nd part.
- Comment on ‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles 4 months ago:
There are struggling “capitalists” that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business. And then there are rich as hell “workers” like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can’t. And I think most people don’t have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.
Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.
There’s also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn’t fall from the sky. It isn’t just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.
So how do you address the problem: “Rich people don’t pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much.” I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can’t make the government adopt these policies?
This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you’re doomed to keep asking the question “Why don’t they just do this?” It’s not a new idea, but it’s still relevant.
If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.
- Comment on ‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles 4 months ago:
The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.
Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.
Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.
Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.
Use ~bribes~ campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.
No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account 4 months ago:
I tried a 2nd time and no dice on a manual review. Same automated message.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 4 months ago:
Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 6 months ago:
- Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.
-Will edit with more in a bit.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 8 months ago:
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 8 months ago:
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 11 months ago:
I figured it just made sense to lean into it once I realized what it was. I didn’t go FULL murder hobo, but I ended up doing enough to trigger a bunch of special quest stuff unique to the Dark Urge. I still think this was probably better as a 2nd play through, but I was pretty satisfied with all the content the game had to fill the gaps caused by me… suddenly cutting off some quest lines.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 11 months ago:
I’ve been playing the Cyberpunk DLC and just finished that last night. Aside from some annoying bugs that was pretty fun.
I’m nearing the end of my first BG 3 playthrough that I’ve been streaming with a friend. We decided to go Dark Urge and it’s made this kind of a weird first playthrough. It’s been fun but I think in hindsight it would have been better to have a more normal first run then go back for this. Also, found a kind of funny bug (?) in the vampire boss fight. The boss has some property that says he can’t be moved by physical or magical means. But when I threw that legendary spear that has a knock back AoE, it sent him off the cliff and that was the fight aside from mopping up the ads.
Aside from that I’m always playing TFT occasionally. I climbed higher than I ever did before: 200 LP masters before I hit another funk and started backsliding.
- Comment on The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion 11 months ago:
I was playing the new DLC recently and I encountered some brand new bugs that I didn’t see on my first playthrough. Sometimes after completing a quest, the game would just lock me out of certain features like the map, journal, inventory, phone, etc. only way to fix it was to reload.
- Comment on Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives 1 year ago:
They’ll stop updating the game whenever the Attack on Titan anime actually ends.
- Comment on Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives 1 year ago:
It’s crazy how successful they’ve been off just making and selling a good indie game. They’re still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?
- Comment on Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses? 1 year ago:
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.