Mnemnosyne
@Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Who would win: every human in the world vs. every animal in the world? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.
Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.
People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.
If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.
- Comment on Who would win: every human in the world vs. every animal in the world? 2 weeks ago:
If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.
Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.
- Comment on Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' 1 month ago:
Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.
So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…
Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.
- Comment on Archaeology 1 month ago:
I feel like it should be simpler: did the culture the body came from have good enough records in other ways that we would be unlikely to learn anything by digging up the body that we couldn’t learn by studying other records? Then leave it alone.
If they failed to keep good enough records, and knowledge would be gained by the study, then study away.
- Comment on pick your side 1 month ago:
Science is blue because in every 4x game I’ve ever played the science icons are some form of blue.
- Comment on Soup 1 month ago:
Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.
Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.
…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.
This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.
- Comment on Not happening, dude 1 month ago:
Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.
- Comment on History time: Instantly adjustable… 2 months ago:
If I’m not mistaken, adjusting lug refers to twisting a part of the handle; a similar design of razor my grandfather had, not as old as that one but still old, had such an adjustment. It wasn’t the same part that held the blade down, the blade was still fully secured and supported after doing this.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
There are very few humans who would not be depressed if they were the last person on earth. Even the most introverted among us are still, well, human.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 4 Isn't Next For Larian; Something Bigger Is Coming | Spot On | Gamespot 3 months ago:
They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…
But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.
- Comment on Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI 5 months ago:
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
- Comment on Assuming the earth is flat, how many people are part of the conspiracy 6 months ago:
If I understand correctly they have some kind of explanation where the sun works like a spotlight or something. But it also requires light to curve in weird ways to make any damn sense, soooo…
- Comment on GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour 7 months ago:
I’ve put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let’s use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I’ve played each of them for about 2,000 hours…that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let’s be generous! Let’s count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that’s at 10% off. I’ve bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let’s try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That’s about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I’ll take it!
Granted, since most games don’t hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren’t going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I’m willing to occasionally pay these days.
I’m all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!
- Comment on GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour 7 months ago:
To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you’d stop playing.
- Comment on I'm not asking to be rich. 7 months ago:
Oh, my point was the relationship is so close you might as well not make the distinction. Money does buy happiness, simple as that. Just as I would simply say that the heater warms me up.
- Comment on I'm not asking to be rich. 7 months ago:
That’s an excessively pedantic way to put it. That’s kind of like saying a heater doesn’t warm you, it warms the air, which warms you.
- Comment on Total War Warhammer 3 devs will remove Steam users starting boycotts 7 months ago:
Or they could lower their corporate profit margin so neither is necessary. Don’t make excuses for them and act like there’s not a huge amount of money being hoovered up by profit.
- Comment on Brought my Chromecast with Google TV to a Hotel, TV is framed. 8 months ago:
Back in the day they used to do similar things. I have disassembled, with tools, some hotel mountings and such, so I could hook up my Super Nintendo or PlayStation back then.
- Comment on Idris Elba: Actors in video games like Phantom Liberty is 'sign of the times' 8 months ago:
Might just be me enjoying Nimoy in most everything, or maybe ta just that Civ 4 is still the best of the series, but I really liked his lines in that one.
Lots of memorable ones but “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy” always sticks out as one of my favorites.
- Comment on Is there a reason I should donate a kidney to a stranger now, rather than just waiting till I die, at which point both kidneys will probably be donated to strangers anyway? 10 months ago:
But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway. So the difference is that a different someone else gets to continue existing.