taps the sign

It’s on the list of commercial failures in video games.

Do the githzerai reject violence? They have a whole order of psionic warriors called the zerth. I got the impression they think violence should be used responsibly when it is necessary to defend the freedom of sapient beings against tyranny—they certainly don’t regret the rebellion against the illithids, for example.

This article is about the big gap in similar games that occurred after the release of Icewind Dale 2 in 2002. And as the article says, it has nothing to do with their popularity among gamers, it was due to retailers throwing their weight around. There weren’t as many good options for direct-to-consumer sales at that time, so you had to sell the game to retailers before you could sell it to customers.

I thought I knew which study this was talking about, and I was going to say “Yes, it’s to help with situations where surgical intervention is needed to put the bone back together” but I went and found the article I read and that one was a team of American and Korean scientists, so I actually don’t know about the Chinese one. I assume it’s the same idea, that it’s for use in surgical situations.

The one I thought it was talking about was this one, which is a cool idea but still has some kinks to work out.

I’m almost positive that what actually happened is that the response the chef cut off included an instruction to mix the ingredients, but he cut it off before it could say that. I bet the LLM doesn’t get any feedback about whether or not the voice module got through the whole response, so it couldn’t account for him not having heard it. He probably could have gotten back on track by saying something like “I haven’t mixed the ingredients yet, let’s start over.”

The ingredients list it was going through before he cut it off probably mentioned the pear too, which would have been a good time for him to say “We don’t have a pear, is there a sauce we can make using only the ingredients visible here?” but he was afraid of going off script.

I’m not saying they definitely weren’t cheating, but I have definitely hit some shots in my time that seemed impossible. If you fire enough rockets at corners that you think someone might come around, or in games with snipers that penetrate cover, take blind guesses through walls, you’re going to get lucky eventually.

Edit to add: just saying, the line is blurry indeed. But I think if I got kicked over it, I’d be a good sport about it! “Got kicked for cheating because I was too l33t” would be such a good story. I’m sure some people have had it happen.

Ah, but they don’t have an F1 car, they have a Dallara GP2/08, which was used in the GP2 series! An entirely different thing!

It’s a very faithful remake of MGS3. You can play with classic controls or modern controls.

If you play with the classic controls, it’s basically the same game, plus a few new collectibles. The new controls come with a modern camera system and some balance changes to accommodate the increased player freedom (the tranq gun has bullet drop in this mode, for example). You can change between control modes during the game, but doing so will reload your last checkpoint.

So it’s good, because MGS3 was good, but it’s not $80 good. And like the article says, at $80 for what is mostly a graphical upgrade you would expect to get all the bells and whistles… but some of them are conspicuously missing.

I assumed he was on a range, but they should both be wearing hearing protection in that case.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is trying to remember where she parked.

Yeah, the exact question they’re studying is:

“When you used alcohol during the last year, how often did you use it in each of the following situations?…When you were alone.” Response options were 1 = “Not at all” 2 = “A few of the times” 3 = “Some of the times” 4 = “Most of the times” 5 = “Every time.”

And they’re comparing the “not at all” responses against all of the other ones. I understand they’re analyzing data that already exists, so they don’t get to go back in time and start asking a different question in 1977 when the survey begins, but I’m not sure how useful this is to the current analysis without some qualifier like “When you had three or more drinks in one day.”

“Roughly 4 in 10 young adults who drink alcohol report drinking alone at least once in the past year,” said lead author Kasey Creswell, associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

Only 4 in 10? 6 in 10 young adults who drink alcohol never have a beer or glass of wine on a cozy evening in? I would have expected it to be the other way around.

I swear the cane sugar Dr. Pepper tastes different from the HFCS kind. Maybe it really is possible to differentiate 50-50 glucose-fructose from 45-55 glucose-fructose? Or maybe the corn syrup carries other flavor molecules?

Or maybe there are other differences in the recipe.

First, you have recreational use turned off, right? If it’s on, they’ll take it when they want it AND when it’s scheduled.

If they’re only taking it on schedule, try adding an extra day.

That said, I try to be careful about smokeleaf use because it has a big negative effect on productivity. I try to save it for managing mood crises.

Sorry I didn’t mean to imply that, let me rephrase: I am surprised that ChatGPT can hold convincing conversations about some topics, because I didn’t expect it to be able to. That certainly makes me more concerned about it than I was previously.

I am somewhat surprised to hear that people are talking to ChatGPT for hours, days, or weeks on end in order to have this experience. My main exposure to it is through AI Roguelite, a program that essentially uses ChatGPT to imitate a text-based adventure game, with some additional systems to mitigate some issues faced by earlier attempts at the same (such as AI Dungeon).

And… it’s not especially convincing. It doesn’t remember what happened an hour ago. Every NPC talks like one of two or three stock characters. It has no sense of pacing, of when to build tension and when to let events get resolved. Characters regularly forget what you’ve done with them previously, invent new versions of past events that were supposed to be remembered but had to be summarized to fit within the token limits, and respond erratically when you try to remind them what happened. It often repeats the same events in every game: for example, if you’re exploring a cave, you’re going to get attacked by a chitinous horror with too many legs basically every time.

It can be fun for what it is, but as an illusion it wears through fairly quickly. I would have expected the same to be the case for people talking to ChatGPT about other topics.

The filibuster rule doesn’t apply to bills that are part of the budget reconciliation process.

I hope not, I don’t know how I’d break the news to his girlfriend!