Iunnrais

Sounds like London is a comparatively nice place to live in WoD land. Huh. Pity it takes a surveillance state to get it.

Please be careful, while the thrust of your statement is correct (not a substitute for a real professional, it can give dangerously bad advise on some occasions and there’s no way besides personal knowledge and expertise to distinguish when it messes up besides hard study and real research), the meme that LLMs are glorified autocomplete is factually incorrect. Don’t be like the D.A.R.E. program and try to scare people away from things with bad facts and lies.

It is disingenuous to say that because the AI system that trains the AI system that becomes the LLM uses “next word prediction” as its success metric, that the LLM itself is nothing but autocomplete. Here’s an example of a next word predictor: a fully fledged intelligent human being who is asked to predict the next word of a sentence. And I’m not saying that an LLM is that, or equivalent, or even close, just that being a next word predictor doesn’t rule that out, and claiming or implying so is simply wrong.

True, use of LLMs is not guaranteed to be correct, and in areas where correctness really matters and you lack expertise to check it, you really should not use an LLM. But let’s not lie to make it sound dumber than it is. It’s plenty dumb enough already.

To be fair, I’m old enough to have been taught cursive, I can read cursive, but it’s a pain in the ass to do so and even correct cursive can sometimes take serious effort to decipher— then you get into potentially messy cursive which is an order of magnitude worse. Cursive was made to be fast to write, not easy to read, and this just isn’t something that’s really needed much anymore. Writing things that aren’t meant to be read just seems entirely counter to how we do things these days.

Not that I hate cursive per se, or think that no one should learn it. It does teach good fine motor skills, it also teaches good letter flow and stroke order which can make deciphering even print handwriting easier, not to mention it can look cool and develop your signature better.

But I do hate trying to read cursive in those rare instances that someone writes something long in it, like a letter. I feel like it’s obnoxious, bordering on disrespectful.

Man… that’s a cultural shift from even just a half century ago…

I would suggest “without good cause” instead of “without meaning”. Related for sure… things without good cause can often have no purpose. But I think it’s the lack of just cause that makes it BS to begin with.

Poe’s Law.

I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.

Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.

To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.

Mentopolis is incredible. Think “inside out” combined with gritty noir. You barely think about it as an rpg (though it definitely is one), feels more like a radio play to me.

I don’t know. I think maybe certain types of jobs, and certain sectors are as bad or worse than Japan, but Japan takes all the bad overworking practices of the worst “grindset” “over achiever” jobs in the US and applies them universally, from the lowest minimum wage worker on up.

That was actually the original inspiration for the character. To take the nazi ideal being, and say, “what if he existed, but was nothing like you.”

All those “subversions” of Superman out there, including Snyder’s interpretation? Those aren’t subversions of Superman as much as simply going back to the original concept that Superman’s creators were deliberately trying to subvert. “What if the ultimate powerful person DIDN’T abuse his power, and was actually a good person?”

The panic at the existence of additional options you don’t use and will never use is, unfortunately, strong in some people. It is what it is.

I also have an iPhone and absolutely would love a 2nd store. I’m trying to figure out how to side load as it is, so I can get a version of YouTube that can keep playing audio while the screen isn’t on. I’d love that. My mother would be in fits of panic at the thought.

I absolutely and completely agree with you. I’m just saying, my aging mother does not. Having the option, to her, would make the iPhone a far inferior product. She is not alone in her opinion.

The scuttlebutt is that buffalo as a verb was only attested very briefly in upstate New York and the Midwest for a brief period of time in the early 1900s. It never spread nationally, and definitely not internationally.

However, checking Google ngrams shows that “he buffaloed” and “was buffaloed”, (to ensure it’s being used idiomatically as a verb and not just in the famous example sentence) emerged in 1900, peaked in the 1950s, but has sustained small but constant use in published print since then. I was actually expecting the ngram to rapidly drop off and never recover… shocked to see that some people still use it as a real phrase.