You joke, but it has been successfully argued in court that advertisers can lie to you because no reasonable person would believe that advertisements are truthful.

I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.

Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).

Corn beats it out, and by some reckonings so does rice. Pumpkins too.

There are a few more exotic plants like tigernut and duckweed that are supposed to be really high, but not many people eat those as a staple crop. Palm oil and sugar cane are supposed to be super high too, though you probably don’t want to be eating huge quantities of straight oil and sugar.

Finally there are a few tropical trees like jackfruit and breadfruit that produce enormous quantities of calories once mature. They have a huge advantage from their large leaf crowns and root systems (that they don’t have to periodically regrow like annual plants) + the tropical weather allowing production for the entire year.

In biblical scholarship, this is referred to as eisegesis, where you read an interpretation into the text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.

This has reached such a level among US Christians that they often pick out single sentences to quote with little to no regard for the rest of the text it’s come from. Like, never mind reading the book with the context of its origin in mind, or even the context of the rest of the book, when the context of the sentences directly before and after the thing you’re referencing are being ignored.

When this is the text that’s being referenced: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+4%3A9-17&version=NIV

There’s nothing wrong with multi grain bread of course, but that’s clearly not some sort of special holy bread recipe that will bless you if you eat it.

It’s not AI, it’s neural network models

These used to be called AI before people decided that only LLMs and Diffusion models were AI. Both of which are types of neural networks.

This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that’s easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.

FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:

1. When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.

2. The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.

Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.

Counterstrike was originally a Quake mod, then a Half-Life mod, before Valve hired the modders and made it into a standalone game.

This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.

It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.

To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.

I remember the days when bugs in x86 CPUs were almost unheard of. The Pentium FDIV bug and the F00F bug were considered these unicorn things.

Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn’t be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Of course that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be thinking about whether we’re using software efficiently and for good reasons. Plenty of computations that take place in datacenters serve to make a company money but don’t actually make anyone’s lives better.

The vast majority of the time they don’t give a shit when they ask this question, they’re just testing your willingness to kowtow. But this is especially true when its a fucking burger king.

I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.

So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.

Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.

Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.

But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?

Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.

When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct?

Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).

Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.

So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.

At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was that without these elements the player was much less likely to explore of their own volition (not just because its the opposite direction of a waypoint) and think about the level design. Speaking of waypoints I remember the first group of people really complaining that the arrow in Bioshock is even more egregious than waypoints, though IMO the way it encourages you to unthinkingly follow it is actually quite thematic.

Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.

I have actually played Portal. I had a section where I mentioned that Valve games were an exception to this sentiment, then I deleted it and forgot when I wrote the last part of my previous comment.

But anyway, I’ll admit that I was really thinking more about the time period from 2005 to 2015.

So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games. They did do some very innovative things when they first came out, but just like modern military shooters took regenerating health and the two weapon limit from Halo while leaving behind all the other gameplay mechanics that made that work, so too did many games adopt the open world and the general way you interact with it, while removing anything interesting. By “the way you interact with it” I’m referring specifically to the map unlocking, the collectables, the village / territory faction control, and the “heat” system that spawns enemies depending on how much attention you are generating.

IMO those sorts of games were very much the other side of the coin from CoD-likes, and the problem was that while the extremely linear levels of CoD-likes were too restrictive, these open world games had no structure at all. In games like Blood, Quake, or what have you, encounters are designed to flow in a certain way, with each one having its own flavor and favoring certain approaches over others. In some games you can even think of enemy encounters as a puzzle you need to solve. Level design and enemy placement of course form the two halves of encounter design. In good games this sort of thing extends to the structure of the game as a whole, with the ebs and flows in the action, and different gameplay happening in different sections so the formula keeps getting changed up. But in games where the level design is an open world that let’s you approach from any angle, and where enemy placement is determined on the fly by a mindless algorithm, there is no encounter design. At the same time the way enemy spawning works is actually too orchestrated to have interesting emergent gameplay. For example, if an algorithm made an enemy patrol spawn an hour ago, and the player can see it from across the map, they can come up with their own plan on how to deal with this unique situation. If the player gets one bar of heat and the algorithm makes an enemy spawn around a corner they can’t anticipate that at all, its just mindless. This has implications for the gameplay itself (no enemy can be very tough or require very much thinking or planning if you’re just going to spawn them around a corner) but also, as previously stated, the entire structure of the game.

As for the other games you mention, I want to bring up Bioshock in particular. Its true, that game is a master class in presentation and aesthetics, and a game I would highly recommend, but its actually one of the games that I remember people complaining about when they said gaming was better in the 90s. Specifically the way Bioshock is very dumbed down compared to its predecessor System Shock, both from a general game and level design standpoint, but also because of the inclusion of vita chambers and the compass pointer that leads you around by the nose. (One place I will give Bioshock points though is that it has way more of an ecosystem than most imm-sims with the way enemies interact with each other; it even beats out imm-sim darling Prey 2017 in this regard).

This is admittedly a way more niche complaint than people complaining about QTEs or games being piss/brown, but it was definitely a smaller part of the much larger “games are getting dumbed down” discourse.

I could talk about Crysis and Spore too, but this comment is already really long. I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.

You’re right, as is so often the case when people talk about a decade I’m thinking more of its latter half and the beginning half of the next one.

But in my defense I did say “the mid to late 2000s”.

I have a few more thoughts, but I’ll have to make another reply in a bit.

20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.

Here’s how I see it:
From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew all their minds that a game could both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.

Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.

Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.

From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.

Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.

From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.

Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).

Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.

I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:

• Parvati says she’s not interested in physical affection, but I don’t recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she’s better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn’t mean the same thing.

• I also don’t recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?

• how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?

Yeah, it doesn’t actually make much of a difference:

Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS’s job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.

Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they’re probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can’t violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.

The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:

1. Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.

2. If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn’t make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.

3. If you’re running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?

With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that’s long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.

In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.

Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they’re both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).

If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that’s small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.

I don’t daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my “favorite”.