ultimafan

Interesting to think about- would it really matter if the casino was loading their dice? Craps allows you to bet for/against almost every possible bet and you usually have people playing pass/don't pass and come/don't come on the same table. Offering weighted dice to screw some players out of their money is probably going to result in the other players making just as much if not more back. Superstitious players absolutely would notice a "streak" and switch their bets to match it, and the casino isn't going to be able to swap/take away the dice without killing the vibe and making those same players cash out.

Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.

I don't order from the app, didn't know there were discount there. I probably won't use the app anyways, I think it's ridiculous having to install an app for every fast food place just to get better prices, I'd rather just not go anymore than do that.

And is the meal before/after tax? I distinctly remember last time I was there a few months ago being shocked that the price came out to about $15 per person all getting meals.

I feel like this is 100% it. We used to go to McDonald's pretty often as a cheap but tasty treat. Being able to grab a few burgers, orders of fries etc. to feed a whole family for significantly less than it would cost to go out to eat at a "real" restaurant.

Now it's go out and pay $15 per person at McDonald's for crappy, inconsistent food that doesn't even taste that good anymore and eat it in a dirty McDonald's location with crazy homeless people making a scene not 10 feet away from you. Or you pay $17-18 per person to go get a big, juicy, well-made burger from a proper bar and grill with clean seating and family atmosphere. It just makes absolutely no sense to go to McDonald's unless you're on a road trip at weird hours of the night where nothing else within miles of you is open. Taco Bell, KFC and others have had similar problems for us.

We've gone from eating fast food two or three times a month to eating it maybe once or twice a year after the pandemic.

It seems like a high hurdle in today's world but I still think developers (or inventors of anything really) should think if the benefits of what they're making really outweigh how their invention will actually end up being used.

It's not a large leap of logic for anyone in touch with reality to realize that if a general purpose vision AI is going to be able to predict photo locations bad actors are going to use it for that and a lot of them will be people that would otherwise not have had the technological knowhow of accomplishing it themselves.

I know I probably come off more than a little bit insufferable about this but I'm tired of seeing novelty inventions pop up, everyone has fun for a little bit geeking out over them then they're mostly forgotten outside of niche applications until they show up back in the news when they've been used for the latest sextortion/blackmail/catfishing/whatever scam.

I've definitely noticed that there's a huge trend of technology at any cost apologists on HN that can't pause to imagine the real world impacts of how AI products they're championing will actually be used.

It's terrifying that people exist that have no problem making the world a shittier place and hiding behind a cover of "well it's not the technology that's evil but the people abusing it" as if each tool given to bad actors doesn't make their job easier and easier to do.

Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?

There's little doubt in my mind that for every person on websites like /pol/ that's taking the piss with subversive "be as offensive/absurd to the status quo as you can" style of humor there's at least one other person that's internalized those kinds of views as a genuine belief system.

I don't browse 4chan anymore though I did used to (a lot) years ago. Take what I say as anecdotal evidence but I used to chat with a group of people I met through a former friend that seemed to start with a similar mindset to the one you have and then went down the pipeline over a few years of unironically espousing the most absurd abhorrent kind of thoughts you'd see on /pol/ and feeling 100% justified in doing so. They had gotten so used to seeing and interacting with such content day in and day out that it became normalized for them and they started to think that such a large forum existing with people saying similar things validated the way they began to think and act.

I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.

That helps but there's still a huge burden on the community who end up having to self moderate. I think one of the biggest issues today is that cheating is not so easy to uncover anymore. It could just be rose tinted glasses or just lack of knowledge among the public about what cheat developers were up to but 20 years ago I don't really remember it being such a prevalent issue. I'd see rage hackers, spin botters, people blatantly using god mode or flying out of bounds or wall hacking but never heard much in the way of the kind of culture that seems to be prevalent now. It feels like there's plenty of extremely subtle cheats out there today and even "microcheats" that don't do much other than tweaking certain values by 10%~ in a way that gives a significant advantage to players with enough skill to leverage their play style around that without it being obvious that they are in fact cheating. And you'd go paranoid trying to catch them out because people are much more clever about how they use them.

With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment.

I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.

Sadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're not the ones who paid for / installed them.

I feel this wholeheartedly. I remember booting up games like Morrowind just to walk around towns I like, explore the wilderness for hours, spend absolutely unreasonable amounts of times on quests and just generally not give a damn about how efficient or optimal my build/skills/gear or way of doing things was. I'd just pick what sounded cool and bumble my way through things.

Now when I do find the time to play games I feel like I'm always beelining between any two given points, not stopping to take in the sights or enjoy the atmosphere, worrying about doing things "right"." It's definitely diminished my enjoyment of video games. If I could I'd find a way to trick myself into viewing games the same way I did back then regardless of the fact that I'm not putting in anywhere near as much, or as frequent, amounts of time into a savefile.

If the goal is to truly change societal worldview and not just rack up "winning" dunks on an acceptable target that doesn't matter.

Human beings don't tend to enjoy being insulted and ostracized. Telling someone to "put up with our abuse or you're one of the bad guys" is going to make you seem unhinged and unreasonable to anyone you are trying to win over. Saying "well, we bullied them into the arms of the opposition, so they've proved our point and we can retroactively justify all the hate we gave and will continue to give them" isn't a very strong argument to bring them over to your side either. People deal with perceived threats by banding together with others they feel have their back. The left gave up an appreciable chunk of the American voting base which is fine if they really don't want to pander to them, but complaining that a voting group is acting in their perceived best interests when their two options are between a group that's verbally and culturally hostile towards them and makes no indication that they aren't going to do anything but get MORE hostile towards them (just look at some of the vitriol posted in this thread) and a group that embraces them with open arms and puts on a reasonable facade is silly. What else do people really expect?

>Democrats and centrists were nice and respectful for years

This is only really true on the political level, not the cultural/social level. Politicians on the left have been significantly more respectful than their counterparts for a long time now. But the same can't really be said for the sentiments of their voter base or the media/education curated towards them. For a large amount of people what they see and experience in their day to day lives does more to color their beliefs than what a politician says that they have no relation to and might see a few sound bites of here and there running up to an election.

The left has to learn that telling a prospective voter repeatedly that they are the enemy won't make anyone want to support them unless they're already believers. It'll just push them towards the side that's offering to call them an ally.

I don't know why people are down voting you, your observations are something I've sadly noticed happening for a long time now.

The perception of Christianity among people who don't identify with any religion or people who fall into more "liberal" circles has absolutely been tainted by sects/members of Christianity that do not at all represent the teachings in the Bible. There is justifiable resentment towards these groups that spills over into unjustifiable resentment towards Christians as a whole.

I can't count the number of times I've heard, living in California, either said directly to me by someone who didn't know I was Christian, overheard in a conversation, or discussed at some event completely out of pocket claims or insults towards Christianity that most people would find absolutely inappropriate to say about other groups.

It doesn't bother me because I understand where those people saying it are coming from. But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.

Rational or not rational, it just doesn't feel good as a human being to receive hate and disdain for something you consider an irreplaceable part of your life and worldview.

This doesn't apply solely to Christians and is really something the left has been doing for a long time and why it's been "losing" the propaganda war to the right and seeing so many people who formerly wouldn't want to associate with the kind of rhetoric found there today at least passively accepting it. Rhetoric of the left seems to far more often embrace (at least on a smaller scale between people) snark, putdowns, wholesale "intolerance" ie making individuals feel some combination of bad/guilty/stupid/backwards for "ignorant" views instead of engaging with them openly. The right uses an approach of playing the "reasonable" man that is open to discussion, support, of all views and then slowly getting people to get on board with the more radical ones.

Dune 1984 had a lot of faults, that's true. It's been ages since I've seen it so my memory is hazy on a lot of it. I do vividly recall the duel between Paul and Feyd at the end though, Sting absolutely knocked his performance out of the park. When I look back on that scene now it feels like a great example of cheesy lines delivered with absolute, unashamed sincerity.

I feel the same way about Villeneuve's last few movies, I don't think it's that controversial, I've had some people agree before. He seems to be very good at visual, audio effects, 2049/Dune both looked and sounded absolutely great at parts. But the writing, dialogue and respect for the source material is absolutely subpar, Dune part 2 was especially laughable and bad enough that the first time I tried to watch it I walked out halfway. It seems to be a trend in movies/shows that regardless of how alien the setting is everyone talks like how someone in Hollywood THINKS intellectual teenagers imagine themselves talking like when they've had several hours to think of a witty comeback to some situation. Too much snark, too many quips, too many jokes,it's like the idea of a movie taking a silly or absurd concept seriously for more than a minute without baiting a laugh from the audience is something to be embarrassed about.

This is definitely something that surprises me when talking to younger people (being fine with their partner talking to people of the opposite sex on social media) despite the pains it seems to often cause. I've talked to multiple men and women who said a relationship ended over online infidelity that started out innocently enough (they're just friends, online conversations mean nothing, I'm just passing the time). Maybe they are afraid of seeming over controlling but it's something that seems to have been normalized as "okay" yet often leads to issues.

People see social media as a disconnect from real life but in my eyes looking at it within the context of what it's replacing it seems like incredibly inappropriate behavior. No one would ever be happy knowing their partner (of either sex) is having private meetings or conversations in person at all hours of the day/night with strangers of their own opposite gender. So why do private online interactions (keeping your social media door "open" to strangers who may have romantic intent and engaging with them at all?) not raise similar red flags among people?

Interesting to see this presented as a puzzle- I've never thought about it academically, but knew the answer immediately from hands on experience. Slipping metal bearings over metal shafts when the inner diameter of the bearing is less than the outer diameter of the shaft is a piece of cake if you throw the bearing into a toaster oven for 15-20 minutes first. It'll drop right on right down to the base no problems. When they're unheated you wouldn't be able to get them on and down even with a significant amount of brute force hammering.

>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"

The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.

That's true but YouTube has been a godsend. There's been some mid 2000s cars owned by family or friends I've helped them with (including a transmission swap) where we weren't able to get an entirely satisfactory answer from a service or repair manual but we were almost always able to find several hour videos of random guys on YouTube willing to talk their way through even fairly major jobs and even mention hangups/practical advice for doing it the way the manual wouldn't tell you to but will make the job easier in a home garage setting.

It's definitely not a hard and fast rule for everything. You'll find older cars with head scratching design and poor engine bays. And newer cars with more room and sensible design than you'd expect. But as a general rule from experience the exceptions seem to be mostly outliers.

The empty space in older cars is definitely a big contributer to how much simpler it was to work on them. Plenty of project cars I owned or worked on that had more than enough room in the engine bay to actually STAND inside between the frame and engine with the engine / wiring / hoses still present and both feet planted on the ground.

Much less daunting and convenient to work on an engine or replace a part when you don't have to take off (and potentially break) a million other parts to get at what you want to replace and you actually have the room to see what you're doing instead of blindly groping around for something vaguely shaped like something you've only seen a picture of.

That and the absolute sheer amount of electronics in modern cars. Older cars had the absolute bear minimal amount of wiring to the point that it was entirely plausible to more or less keep the wiring schematic in your head and even (speaking from experience) redo the entire wiring harness front to back on your own with a few different colored rolls of wire from a hardware store yourself.

I can't imagine how people getting into the hobby now with newer cars feel looking at the unholy mess of endless amounts of wiring, sensors, mechanical parts all jammed together in tightly packed space efficient layouts probably designed by someone purely working on them in a digital space. On the bright side at least they have youtube and better resources on the Internet to look up how to actually do something though.

It's my understanding (though I'm far from an expert) that vehicles aren't convenient in a lot of places around the front because the roads aren't great (and weren't great to begin with even before the shelling/bombing started) and because the springtime mud conditions in Ukraine can be borderline impossible to drive through with both Western and Russian vehicles. There's no short supply of photos online of all kinds of tanks/transports/trucks from both sides completely stuck in (and even rescue vehicles coming in to pull them out getting stuck as well). So it doesn't really surprise me to hear news of donkeys or other animals being used taking off around the time the seasons are changing and winter is ending.

It wouldn't make much sense to pay big bucks for a hummer/mrap/apc style vehicle for short hauls if it can't even make the trip without getting stuck in the mud and getting hit with a drone.

What about the use of donkeys is strange? I've been hearing a lot of ridicule surrounding this the last few days and I don't really get it. Russian army seems to do a lot of weird, inefficient, or baffling things but why are donkeys a sticking point?

US army also used donkeys in places where vehicles were inconvenient in Afghanistan and DARPA spent millions on developing a robotic donkey replacement for those kind of conditions that ultimately failed to be a replacement for the real thing.

At some point it starts to feel like poor propaganda, this conflict has spawned a number of cases of ridicule along the lines of "when their side does X it's because they're too poor/stupid/corrupt to do any different, but when we do X it's because we're clever/ingenious/thrifty". It's borderline absurd to see people falling for the same kind of propaganda they're railing against.

100%, can we not normalize this kind of thing in multiplayer games played by humans?

My friends and I have quit a number of multiplayer computer games when they've become infested with cheaters and developers couldn't or wouldn't keep up with the arms race of banning them. This is really not that different from someone writing and using an aimbot in a public lobby for a shooter.

If you're going to be writing and testing cheats or AI or bots do it in single player games or private multiplayer lobbies so normal players aren't affected.

I possibly misunderstood you. The way you talked about it initially comparing it to oxy sounded like you were endorsing it as a safe (or legal) alternative. I've seen people endorsing it on HN of all places before and just don't like the way it's often misrepresented as something safe.

I'm still not really sure what your point with the tea is. You don't have to look very hard to see that unregulated kratom being imported from god knows where had a lot of incidents of heavy metal contamination. If this was a well known issue with tea you could buy in stores in the US I'm not aware of it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24681...

And I'm not shilling for anything. I don't think people should be taking morphine recreationally either. Kratom blew up the way it did in popularity because people realized it's an opiate you can order legally over the internet. Your response about the tea to my disclaimer that it's not like the other plants you listed makes it sound like you think it's on the same level of safety as tea which it really isn't and people should be aware of that.

Kind of a silly comparison. Much of kratom's popularity came about because the alternative is illegal not because of how safe it is or isn't. You can't compare fluoride to unsafe levels of lead. And "cessation of tea ingestion" won't give you literal opiate withdrawals.

Calling it a safe way to do opiates is just irresponsible. It's really not that different from how manufacturers more than a century ago invented opioids and called them non addictive alternatives to morphine.

Kratom is definitely something to be wary of. Physical withdrawals similar to opiates with prolonged use and made up of alkaloids we don't know the full safety profile of yet (or at least didn't when it was taking off in popularity.) I would not be surprised to find out morphine is "healthier" for the body. Plus there was that scare around some of the big kratom distributers having batches of the leaves contaminated with heavy metals like lead in products they continued to sell.

Would highly advise people to steer clear of it if not using it for harm reduction though the wisdom of replacing one physically addictive drug with another doesn't seem to bode well either. Not a doctor just my two cents.

Not sure about mainline 40k. But for Horus Heresy (official 40k spinoff of an earlier edition) there was an absurd amount of free or borderline free (think 5$ for a set of files to print an equivalent unit box that would have cost you $60 from GW, but you can print as many boxes as you want) community created content for resin printers. Not just units or vehicle models but also mix and match bits similar to what you're talking about (helmets, arms, legs, torsos, weapons, to customize both official and unofficial models). I remember being blown away by how many of the models were on par with or even better than what GW was offering for a fraction of the price. If you had or knew someone with a resin printer you could print 400-500$ armies for 20-30$ of resin. Most of the group I played with had at least half of their army printed out. And in a lot of ways it's "truer" from a hobbyist point of view because instead of buying a box of generic troops from GW and painting them according to their faction you could wildly customize beyond what the official troop boxes came with with printed bits and greebles. Some people came up with really creative and impressive stuff.

I agree with this in general though of course there are exceptions though from anecdotal experience they're outliers. The amount of people I went through my teenaged and then university years with who adopted the stance of "weed isn't a "real" drug and smoking every day for years on end doesn't make me an addict" when it was clearly affecting their life negatively in a visible way was always baffling. The majority of them didn't start smoking weed to "self medicate", they started recreationally and just got to a point where they didn't WANT to function without it but would begin to associate the "boring" feeling of sobriety as something that needs to be treated.

If the i8 suffers from a similar problem (I'm not familiar with the design of that car) that's equally baffling to me on BMW's part.

A car telling someone not willing to maintain it itself that it's time to take it to a service center is fine and all and probably would avoid a lot of headaches for people that aren't mechanically inclined. But a design that encourages tacking on labor charges or being unable to give your car a quick look over yourself seems awful.