adamrezich

All of my friends' kids who are in daycare get sick frequently. I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.

For all four of you that are like me and understand Dota 2 a lot better than Go, and are wondering what impact a “two-stone handicap” has and what it means, ChatGPT Pro claims that to analogize this scenario to a professional team playing against OpenAI Five:

> The professional human team begins from a legal eight-to-ten-minute game state in which it has decisively won the laning stage: roughly a 6,000–8,000 team-net-worth lead, a 4,000–6,000 team-XP lead, two enemy Tier 1 towers destroyed, the third badly damaged, and all three friendly Tier 1 towers standing.

Works without being logged in just fine for me—what's the issue (aside from being completely devoid of content in this case)?

What will it take to get these people to understand that the word “fascism” only wields immense power within their own little echo-chambers, as it has been overgeneralized and overapplied to the point where the rest of us have been completely numbed to it such that it elicits an immediate eye-roll rather than any sort of urgency or call to action?

Good Lord.

And everyone should just get along. And software should just work perfectly. And everything should be free.

What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?

Stick with xhigh rather than turbo for most tasks though, now that the Age of Abundant Resets seems to be well and truly over for good (and 5h limits are supposedly returning soon).

Exactly. Every few years I return to the game (which I bought day one on PS4 and again later on PC when it was released there), each time hoping that the fundamental play experience has been enhanced after all these updates, but it hasn't. The best part about the game is still experiencing the “seamless” planet-to-space-to-planet transition for the first time.

“Professional” in this context refers to being paid for your work while you work on it, rather than making a game unpaid in hopes of receiving recompence from sales once said game is released. (“Indie publishers” are a thing, to be sure—but then that opens the whole can of worms of, are you “truly indie” if you have a publisher?)

Semantics aside, the point is, at one point in time, it was very good and healthy for the medium to have a vibrant AAA (and AA) video games industry. You're generally not going to see indies pushing the technical frontier forward, practically by definition. Things were never perfect, but they were better than they are today. Nowadays, it's basically impossible for someone to get a salaried position making video games.

Which is a bummer, because I grew up thinking that would be definitely where I was going to end up in terms of my career—having some salaried position somewhere, making games with people with different skillsets and areas of expertise than my own, learning from my seniors, having a sense of comradery with the people I worked with, becoming a better game developer. That ship has sadly sailed (or sunk)—it doesn't seem likely that we will have an industry like that again anytime soon.

It's good to have a professional industry pushing the field and the medium forward.

Such a professional industry completely cratering in on itself (for myriad reasons) is a bad thing.

Indie vs. AAA doesn't have to be a zero-sum game—the rise of the indie does not necessarily have to correspond with the fall of AAA.

> For me personally, the AAA game industry is entirely Nintendo, yes.

There's nothing wrong with being a fan of one company, but pretending that going from a world where there were many high-quality AAA video games released each year from many different studios to what we have today, just because Nintendo is doing alright and you like Nintendo—when the topic at hand is specifically “the video games industry” as a whole—is simply asinine.

AAA studios were once the force driving technology and game design forward, regularly starting fresh new IPs that would go on to become cherished by fans. That simply does not happen anymore. What was the last fresh new Nintendo IP that went on to become a beloved recurring success—Splatoon (eleven years ago)?

Nintendo deserves plenty of credit for actively working against stagnation more than literally everyone else, but they are completely peerless in this regard. Everyone else ended up falling into a death spiral of churning out remakes and/or being absorbed into Microsoft and then stagnating until death. There is no longer a vibrant industry full of technical innovation and a genuine eye toward craftsmanship, quality, and generally making new fun things to play.

The indie game scene picked up some of the slack on the innovation front, to great success, yet almost none of the successful indie studios (off the top of my head, Facepunch is the only exception I can think of) have transmuted said success into building a studio with a culture focused on exploring the frontier of the medium. Hell, half of the big indie successes these days make their millions in Early Access, predicated upon the implied promise that their Early Access success will permit them to substantially build out the game beyond their Early Access offering, only to completely and utterly fail to do so in the end.

Anyone who thinks the video games industry is in a good place in 2026 is completely delusional and/or simply ignoring relatively recent history and pretending that things have always been as dire as they are today.

Also Mario Kart World was eighty bucks at launch dude (I had to look it up to be sure, but, yeah—I totally paid eighty US dollars for that game), and it's still selling for eighty bucks today, so, your entire position in this discussion is completely invalid on its face.

Two of those are Nintendo first-party games—and one of them was released nine years ago.

Is “the AAA video game industry” just Nintendo, to you?

What alternate reality are you living in where the video games industry isn't a charred husk of what it was, just over a decade and a half ago?

What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?

How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?

Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?

Well yeah nobody wants their local water supply to be either disintegrated into subatomic particles or polluted with every harmful substance known to man (whichever one they're supposed to do changes from day to day).

Yeah but sometimes I save images using Paint and then the default canvas size will be something else!

If I were designing an OS shell I would simply give the user the ability to easily make temporary text or image buffers and copy and paste content to/from them, rather than using a Notepad or a Paint.

The new mspaint fucked, then unfucked, then refucked my decades-old muscle memory of Win+R mspaint Enter Ctrl+E 1 Tab 1 Enter Ctrl+V to open Paint, resize canvas to minimum, then paste from clipboard. When you press Ctrl+E now, the Units control is selected by default, for some completely asinine reason!!!

Big influx in politicsposting here lately, eh? Wonder what that's all about.

It's a good thing we can now all agree that the US federal government is completely devoid of corruption and taxpayer money misuse, and that all future attempts to discover and curtail any of such are irresponsible and futile!

If someone reads “black American moving to Oakland” as “homeless person moving out of Oakland”, that is not my fault…!

> They're calling you out on asking why the homeless don't just move

Please try reading my posts again very carefully rather than assuming my intent. Thank you!

Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?

Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.

That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.

The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.

How do we expect AI models to radically reshape the future for the betterment of all of mankind when we're explicitly encoding our current cultural taboos and thought-terminating cliches into them, and having them refuse work when they encounter either?

Are we finally now in 2026 coming around to the idea that sometimes entities may find themselves incentivized to conspire with each other? Is theorizing about such no longer off-limits due to a thought-terminating cliche?

Listening to podcasts on an iPod era

He was right about the mouse, in the long run.

> he always had a bold take

Often quite literally, in his PC Magazine columns!

I grew up reading his column in PC Mag, then watched him on TechTV, and then listened to him on TWiT (where he was consistently the best part of the show, and how I learned about Sarbanes-Oxley, because he'd bring it up like every single episode for a good long while there), and later No Agenda. Before I'd realized it, John had be come the constant throughline as technology progressed throughout my life. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, but it still really hurts to see him go.