Wand of monster summoning until there’s no more space in the room was the cheese I recall using.

Yeah, boss fights in general kinda stink in that system, but you’re there for the story anyway. Needed more effort to show a sense of progress and maybe some UI elements to add drama, maybe even the cliche second health bar.

Yeah. Dragonspear doesn’t hold a candle to candlekeep. Linear and lacking character.

Chat GPT came out in 2023. To the extent there was a bubble in 2021 (crypto and EV come to mind) those frothy parts of the market have deflated.

Thought it was worth adding to your comment that getting rich by taking extraordinary risk may not be “optimal”, and that looking at upside outliers is a bad way to decide what to do with personal finances.

If what you’re advocating is buying well diversified, low fee, investments with a long time horizon then carry right on though.

35 billion of 213 total. Wouldn’t call that most. I would guess it’s more important in it’s share of profit (but maybe not even right now with the capex explosion) or of profit/revenue growth.

Not just in this field. Crap is drowning out real work in the sciences as well as arts. Both in terms of where funding goes as well as the output. It’s a cultural disaster.

Projection? Risk is played on a network with vertices representing the territories.

Isn’t “intelligence” so ill defined we can’t prove it either way. All we have is models doing better on benchmarks and everyone shrieking “look emergent intelligence”.

I disagree a bit on “toys”. Machine summarization and translation is really quite powerful, but yeah that’s a ways short of the claims that are being made.

A normal full time job including holiday is only ~140 hours a month. Assuming you believe their user stats too that would be pretty grim. You probably shouldn’t though.

11 billion engagement hours a month! Does anyone seriously believe that lol. And still not profitable! What do they need, ever human beings every waking hour to spin a profit!?

Yeah, again this is just semantics, a 401k in British English is 100% a pension. A UK defined contribution “workplace pension” is just a tax sheltered retirement account until it is annuitized, which is common and sensible but not necessary. The annuity is technically a totally different product, offered by life insurance companies (who interestingly with reference to above conversation would typically hold very little equity exposure backing it). Brits also call the equivalent to the social security retirement benefit the “state pension”. It’s a catch all for assets you use in retirement. Whether that’s used to fund an investment drawdown product or a life annuity or just taken out and splurged on a Ferrari makes no difference.

About half of the US population is enrolled in a pension even today…

https://www.unpri.org/private-retirement-systems-and-sustainability/private-retirement-systems-and-sustainability-united-states/5990.article#%3A~%3Atext=The+US+is+the+world's+biggest+funded%2Cactive+(working)+members+and+10.3+million+retirees.

Not true of UK defined contribution, you can do what you want just like a 401k, though it may be disadvantagous for tax purposes.

It’s pretty normal in British English to use pension as a synonym for retirement account, though I can see why you don’t like that.

Didn’t knights of the old republic have farkle in too? It’s a good game, and I guess just unfamiliar enough to bolt into a fantasy setting.

God help the partners of patient gamers (the ones that aren’t gamers themselves)

That’s his whole schtick though, I bet 90% of people end up with the “good” ending and it rings hollow and everything just feels like his chickens coming home to roost. I really into the Arthur morgan/Joel from last of us type: sympathetic but ultimately shitty character getting what they deserve and it feels fair but still sad. Fucking brilliant story telling in both cases.

P.s. I totally agree that the gunfights are almost always immersion breaking.

Some of your examples of harmony involve fourth wall breaking, which is interesting because I had always thought of the harmony between game and story as about immersion You’re right though, being seen as a player for what you are trying to do is the essence of harmony. That is if you’re trying to immerse, being wrenched out of it is bad, but if you’re taking the piss, the world should take the piss right back. Hard for a game to do both, but I had vivid memories or baldurs gate 1+2 characters talking to their “omnipreseent authority figure” that walked that line perfectly.

Yeah, the main story could have been so great if it had more non murder ways to progress. Or made your murders fewer so as to feel as impactful as the deaths of characters around you were. I it’s defence though it has brilliant moments where they’d really woven the game mechanics into the story. Mega points for minigames and the mission where you get drunk.

“own” I thought we were just licensing them?

Guess it depends how you define “bad”. In my eyes a good business does well by everyone: staff get well compensated and have a good work environment, customers get a good product at a fair price, suppliers get their invoices paid, owners (if not a coop) get some ROI and their name on the door. Trump has only ever managed 0.5 out of 4, ergo bad businessman.

Although with the overt politicisation of BLS I think I’ll be with you in trusting ADP more going forward. Going to be super interesting to watch any divergence from now on. I guess it could be that some of the YTD difference was some internal power struggle that was unwound by the revisions leading to Trump sticking his oar in, but I think that’s a conspiracy theory until someone gives a quote to that effect.