Lmao yes.

But now you can talk to your phone! Yeah it could already do that. But now it can misunderstand you and fuck up what you wanted it to do! Jup already did that as well. But now it can misunderstand you in new and mysterious ways! You son of a bitch, I’m in

Or the: “Hey Gemini move my 4 o clock”

First of all, that’s as easy as dragging the appointment to a different place in the calendar which takes less time and shows you what other stuff you have going on. Second of all, rude! Don’t just move the appointment. At least call or ping me on whatever chat system we both use. Not because it’s required, but it’s good to treat other people as actual human beings instead of you being a Karen Main Character. Third of all, move it where? When are you going to have the appointment? It’s AI, not fucking magic, but the people who want your dollar probably want you to think it is magic.

Those commercials are the worst. If this is the best idealized scenario they can come up with, the product must be real shit.

The thing that annoys me about this, is the BS Monsanto is pulling puts GMO in a bad light. Humans have been genetically manipulating crops and animals for thousands of years. But in the past it was a messy, slow and imprecise process. These days we have the tools to quickly and precisely adjust what we need to adjust. This is and has been critical for supporting the number of people alive today. Faster growing crops, with better yields, more resistance to diseases and climate change. GMO is absolutely a tool that we need and should continue to use.

But these days so many people believe that when a crop or animal has been genetically modified, it’s somehow less healthy to eat. There has been a real wave of people who listen to social media about what is healthy and what is not. Blaming things that are perfectly fine, neutral or even good for you, on a precieved poor health. In reality we (especially in rich countries) are healthier than ever. These people look to things like ‘organic’ or weird diets such as Paleolithic (but instead of berries and nuts they eat like a cows worth of meat each day) to improve their lives. Companies that used to use chemicals created by mixing some precursors in a clean reactor, are switching over to organic sources. This might sound like a good thing, but I’ve seen them genetically modify insect that already create the chemical they need in their shells to create lots of that chemical. The insects get bred, boiled and filtered and the chemical is extracted. This leads to a less pure product, with more contaminants, a larger cost, a bigger impact on the environment and more bio-industry. And it’s often a chemical that’s very common and has been in use for over 50 years with zero impact on health.

Well you might say, let people do their own thing, it’s a free country right? Yes, but also no. People having weird diets or listening to Facebook to put olive oil on a dry patch of skin is fine. But it’s a slippery slope. These people are losing their faith in science and truth, but instead rely on whatever people say on social media. A place where more and more scammers are active, saying whatever just to get clicks, get sponsors or actively scam people out of their money. This slope then extends into something like homeopathic medicine and nature healing. Which has convinced people in the past that needed real medicine to instead opt for the “natural” option. People have died because of this.

In the past I was still in the camp of let the people chose, who am I to say what is the truth for other people? I don’t have all the answers, if they want to do something stupid, that’s on them. I also do stupid stuff all the time, just in other ways, should I be disallowed from living my life as I want to? But then the pandemic happened and the people listening to social media instead of science and government started to shout we shouldn’t be in lock down, we shouldn’t use masks, we shouldn’t vaccinate. So my view changed, it’s so easy for people to trust what’s being said on social media. Foreign actors abuse social media to influence the people, destabilize countries and impact elections. Scammers convince people of nonsense, just to get a few bucks. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I have started to believe we actively need a solution.

Seeing a large company like Monsanto abuse GMO in the ways they do pisses me off. We do not need to feed the fire against using tools like this. We desperately need those tools if we want to continue to exist in the numbers we are today. They should be made an example of and their abuse should be stopped.

I have issues with calling it the war on science. It’s way too close to the war on xmas, which only exists in the minds of delusional right wingers.

Edit: I also found out it’s the title of a book written by a washed up “scientist” and Epstein friend, filled with right wing propaganda. We should never ever use this term.

How does this work, if one person is sharing their screen, does the client get to see? Because it seems more like remote gaming kind of thing? Where the client controls the game/app running on the server?

One little snag: You need to be signed into Windows with a Microsoft account. Using local accounts won’t allow for the updates.

Yeah EU VAT opened up a whole can of issues. It’s super complicated and annoying, with all sorts of weird exceptions. The exact opposite of what VAT was supposed to be. EU countries should have just gotten their shit together instead of this patch work.

I’ve actually seen that fraud in action. People used to ship around huge amounts of phones and CPUs, because they were high value, but took up very little room. A truck full of pallets of tray CPUs could be worth a huge amount.

I think now most of the holes are patched. But for a while there were special rules surrounding phones and CPUs just because they were often used in the fraud scheme.

The real genius behind VAT is that it isn’t just applied to transactions between business and consumer, but to all transactions. The rule is normally very simple, it’s applied to all transactions, with few exceptions. The rate can vary, but those rules are also usually very simple. The trick is: When a business has a transaction with another business, VAT is still applied, but the selling party has to levy the tax and forward it to the government and the purchasing party can ask the government to give back the tax they paid on the transaction.

This may seem a bit convoluted, where the tax goes through the government only to end up back in the business. But this ensures the tax is applied always. Normally a profitable company would sell their products for more than the components they purchased. The difference between these two is the value added. And by getting back less from the purchases as what they have to pay for sales, the tax is only applied to the value added. And for consumers it functions as a sales tax, being applied to all transactions and no way around it.

This system is way harder to mess with than any other form of sales tax. The rules are simple with few exceptions and thus very easy to reinforce. It’s also a more fair system, where each party in the chain pays a part instead of the consumer paying for all of it.

In the end the consumer pays most, but as the taxes are supposed to be used to make their lives better, it seems like a fair deal? Now if you have a government that’s more about filling their own pockets than actually doing what they need to do to improve the lives of the people living there, well then you are going to have a bad day. But that doesn’t happen in civilized countries right?

Uhm AKSHUALLY it’s a cloak and not a dress. Jeez don’t lie about my waifu like that!

Intel actually bought AMD Radeon GPUs for their Hades Canyon (Kaby Lake G) platform. It was a NUC mainboard with a full Intel platform, combined with an AMD Radeon GPU. The Intel CPU and the GPU (including HBM2 memory for the GPU) was all on one package soldered to the mainboard.

I think they did a couple of follow ups on that as well, because it worked very well.

Please note our ancestors most certainly used a whole range of materials for their arts and crafts. It’s just that the clay pieces tend to survive best, so we found the most of those.

The fixed camera was a staple in 3D horror games. I think it started with Alone in the Dark (1992)? But there might even be something earlier that started it.

Man fuck those Ninja Gaiden birds

I haven’t done a whole lot with the crests as I found the starter crest to be very versatile and I got used to the moveset. I have played around with the Beast crest which is really fun, allowing you to just go ham on enemies. However I found against bosses the Beast crest doesn’t work at all, as the damage taken is too large for the lifesteal to overcome. Unless you are dodging and weaving, which defeats the purpose of the Beast crest a bit.

The patches that have been release will probably help a lot of people with the bosses as, if I understood correctly, they’ve decreased the contact damage. This will help a lot with the feeling if boss fights being unfair due to hits taken are often compounded by subsequent contact damage. On many occasions I’ve gone from 4 health, doing OK to dead in less than one sec. This can feel very unfair. Especially after going through a long and annoying run back and then 2 easy phases, just to get to the hard part and die right away.

It feels like if one were to simply be able to practice the hard part, bosses would be defeated much faster. The runbacks (which often include shortcuts it must be said) combined with long easier phases contribute to a feeling of unfair difficulty. It also makes things take up more time than needed, leaving people to feel like the game is wasting their time. Or difficulty for the sake of being difficult. As the video stated, difficulty is a tool that most be wielded carefully.

When doing for example a SL1 run in a Souls game, the player must play at a high level without many or even any mistakes. Boss fights will take longer and the stakes go up. The difference is, one chooses to do these challenges. Often only after already mastering a game. For many people Silksong feels like being thrown into the deep end, without being able to properly swim.

You misunderstand. I was limiting what I said to act 1, just like the video did. The things you are talking about are in act 2. I’m glad to see it gets better in act 2, however I’m not as far into that yet. Most people running into these issues will quit before beating act 1 most likely, so it’s kind of a moot point.

I simply can’t believe those damage numbers. I was talking about the nail upgrade in the town. Is there some other upgrade I’m not aware of? All the low level enemies seem to take the same number of hits. In Hollow Knight the upgrades to the nail were very noticeable. The nail upgrade in Silksong felt like it did nothing at all. Bosses might have gone from 16 hits to 12 hits per phase, which is still a whole lot of hits. Especially as windows for damage are brief and far in between and bosses have 4 phases typically.

Edit: checked the damage output and whilst sources provide conflicting information, it does appear the first upgrade is 80% as stated. However it does not decrease the number of hits enemies take, due to a poor lineup in health and damage. So only a few enemies actually take less hits with the nail upgrade, making the upgrade feel pointless. For bosses the difference is obviously huge. But with perhaps the exception of a single boss, usually you fight the boss with the damage you’ve got. Very few people would be counting the hits (although I did at times to see if I was progressing). So there is little frame of reference in this case.

I agree with a lot in this video, but disagree on one key point. You can go explore somewhere else and get upgrades and stuff.

I really liked this aspect in Elden Ring, where the bosses could get pretty hard, but you could always just go explore. Explore the lands, level up, find cool weapons and upgrades to get really OP. Then return to the boss and kick their ass. Once you’ve put 500 hours into it, you do challenge runs like SL1. But if you only want to put in 100 hours, you can easily beat it, no matter your skill level. The exploration feels great, the world is interesting and there is a lot to find. As compared to the previous Souls games where the game would just put a big roadblock boss in your path and good luck getting past it. Or a game like Nioh that gives you a tutorial boss, with which one struggles a bit but then beats pretty fast, only to almost right away throw in the next boss which is so hard about 70% of people quit on him (according to stats I’ve seen).

However, I feel like this doesn’t apply to Silksong at all. You can go explore and get a whole lot of stuff, but a lot of it seems totally useless? You can get one damage upgrade, which does fuck all (haven’t looked it up, but feels like 15% maybe?). The different crests are really cool, but won’t help you beat bosses. There is maybe 1 full mask or 2? But as everything does 2 damage, that’s only 1 extra hit. The secondary weapons are mostly useless and as the video said, you need to farm resources to be able to use them.

I consider myself pretty good at these kinds of games. Not great, but pretty good. I’ve played the fuck out of DS1, DS3 and Elden Ring. I’ve beaten Nioh 1. I’ve done SL1 runs and all sorts of challenges in DS1, DS3 and Elden Ring, I’ve done randomisers etc. I’ve beaten Hollow Knight 3 times, the third time I did 112%.

For Silk Song I’m about 20 hours in, I’ve beaten Act 1 and did pretty much everything I could find (not spoiling myself on anything). I’m part of the way into Act 2 and I don’t know if I want to play anymore. Every enemy is a bullet sponge, requiring a lot of hits to get out of the way. Everything does so much damage. Simply exploring and finding shit feels like a slog. I’ve had many completely unfair deaths where I got booped by an enemy only to fall into a pit of spikes and die. You go from full health to death very fast. And the bosses just keep on getting more difficult. It feels like a grind instead of fun.

On the other hand, I love the way the game looks, I love the boss music (not as much a fan of the level music, too much atmospheric, too little actual music), I love how smooth it feels to play. And I love the world and want to explore it all. That’s where I disagree with the video, I’m not in the rage quit phase, I’m in the this isn’t fun to play phase.

Maybe I’ll continue, I know I have the skills to beat the game. But if I’m not having fun, what’s even the point of playing anymore?

The one we used to have for our cats would make a little jingle before dispensing the food. Whenever that jingle went off the cats came RUNNING!

Isn’t he just like a rich douchebag now? Why do we care about this asshole? And why does he do this kind of thing? I’m sure the injured people will be happy some rich fuck in his castle says he cares.