07mk
15d ago
If there's a good chance you'll never get to all of them, I'd recommend just skipping DmC altogether. Again, not a terrible game, but it's such a huge step down compared to the actual DMC games that it's not even in the same class. And the gameplay is so different that it'll just feel like going to a whole different game rather than an upgrade.
Otoh, DMC1 and 3 have very similar combat systems, but 3 is clearly superior to 1's, so you might want to play 1 before 3, to feel the improvement. 4 and 5 are also upgrades in gameplay compared to 3, but not by nearly as much as from 1 to 3.
And yes, DMC games are far more fun than God of War games. I will forever have bitterness towards David Jaffe for creating GOW that not only overahadowed DMC and Ninja Gaiden, but also helped to popularize quick-time-events in mainstream AAA games. Having flashing icons of the button you need to press above the enemy's head in order to pull off special moves doesn't make it more fun or immersive, it just reminds me that I'm playing a video game, not beating up minotaurs! DMC4 and Ninja Gaiden 2 both implemented similar systems far better without having to have flashing icons, but rather by integrating them seamlessly into the core gameplay controls.
07mk
15d ago
I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
07mk
15d ago
Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.
07mk
15d ago
If you have Metal Gear Rising & DmC on your list, I'm guessing you've already played the actual Devil May Cry games? If not, 3, 4, 1, and 5 are all much better than DmC IMHO. DmC isn't nearly as bad as its reputation and has a pretty solid combat system, but it definitely wasn't as good as those actual DMC games, with a severe lack of boss fights and has atrocious art design and writing. I'd also recommend Bayonetta if you haven't played that one. Ninja Gaiden Sigma from the Master Collection is worth checking out as well, though the style of combat is quite a bit different from DMC. I wish I could recommend Sigma 2 or the recently released Black 2, but both are severely gimped versions of the game that took away the craziness that was so fun about the OG Ninja Gaiden 2.
07mk
16d ago
"Fun" is a really tough metric to measure, but I think there's probably something to the theory that microtransactions and live service being such big moneymakers for the industry has pushed high budget developers towards optimizing for keeping players addicted rather than keeping them entertained. There's also the fact that the gaming industry was much smaller and low status in the 90s and 00s compared to now, and so devs tended to be nerds who wanted to make games they wanted to play, rather than people who wanted to make money and/or spread a message.
However, it's not as if such devs have disappeared; if you're comparing like for like, there are more games being released these days of the same technological quality as a Quake from 1996 or even a Half Life 2 from 2004 than were released in those years, made by small unknown teams. But there are so many of them, and the vast majority of them suck, so it's hard to find good ones. AAA games get all the attention for obvious reasons, and those are the ones that often are optimized around things other than just convincing you to pay a one-time fee based on how fun the experience is. Even then, when I think about AAA games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Final Fantasy 16, they compare pretty favorably in terms of "fun" to equivalent-ish AAA games I played 20+ years ago, like Devil May Cry 3 or Final Fantasy 10/10-2/13.
I've heard that recently there was a revival in the FPS genre of "Boomer Shooters," which are fast-paced shooters inspired by those old games like Doom and Quake whose controls and speed were based around video game logic more than around realism. As a fan of those old games back in the day, I've been meaning to check out some of them, such as Dusk.
07mk
17d ago
Anyone know what proportion of kids in their school district are in special education programs? I was shocked to hear that it's over 25% and about to hit 30 here.
That's legit possibly the most shocking stat I've ever heard. If someone had told me 5%, I would have considered it on the high side of plausible, but just barely, and that's more than 5x that. I really hope that your district is an extreme outlier. Otherwise, either there's massive fraud or mismanagement in public education (best case) or we really are headed for an Idiocracy future. Unfortunately, those also aren't mutually exclusive.
07mk
17d ago
I'd say that the school's responsibility is subservient to the parents' responsibility. The parents have a sort of "natural" responsibility over the child, in part due to being the ones to voluntarily create the child and to keep the child. As such, it's the parent's responsibility to actually check if the school is doing a decent enough job at raising their child during the 8 hours a day the child is there and, if not, to correct it in some way, whether that be changing schools, changing the way the school treats the child, making up at home for the school's failures, etc. It's like how some company's R&D department might be the responsibility of the vice president in charge of that or whatever, but it's ultimately the CEO's responsibility to make sure that the company has a system in place to hire a competent person for that role and to make sure that that person is performing that role competently, and so any failure of the R&D department is ultimately due to a failure of the CEO.
After all, parents also tend to have much more skin in the game for the child than the school, since the child doesn't stop being their child once they graduate, though the child does stop being the school's student. And generally, the relationship between the child and parent tends to be more sustained in the long term than the relationship between the child and the school he went to when he was a child. So from a purely selfish, narcissistic perspective, a parent would want to consider himself the responsible party, since if the school fails in raising the child right, the negative consequences fall more on the parent than on the school.
07mk
18d ago
I'm not sure how this responds to my comment? I didn't even make any claims about... anything, really, including history. Is it your prediction that this category of "white" will eventually include people whose skin color is very far away from what we think of as "white" people right now (arguably this is happening now or has happened with Hispanics)? And if that proportion gets very high, do you think the actual term will change, or will Americans just keep using that term?
07mk
18d ago
Your original claim was that there is no replacent for mainstream media, not that the NYT on will on average outperform an random you tuber. The former seems straightforwardly false, as it's pretty trivial for me to find superior analysis than even that of the NYT, which is usually done at a fraction of the budget, and often part time. This should not be possible if your original claim were true.
I agree with this, as someone whose media consumption has shifted from mainstream to YouTube quite a bit over the past decade or so. But my perception so far is that, in terms of actual news, i.e. getting journalists to the physical locations where things are actually happening in order to record them and then report on them, the mainstream media still dominates, by far. The kind of funding and infrastructure necessary to do that at a large scale is probably still out of the reach of most small organizations.
But maybe I'm wrong, and the YouTube algorithm just hasn't presented it to me? Which presents another weakness in this new media ecosystem; I can pick up the NYT and get news about Ukraine, Gaza, Washington, and Mars all in one place, whereas on YouTube, I'd have to actually seek out niches, each with its own set of producers and levels of credibility.
07mk
18d ago
I'm curious, do you think that this "white" group will eventually consist of a very high proportion, if not a majority, of people whose skin color and other phenotypical features that are described by "white?" E.g. even with lots of mixing, I don't know that descendants of Indian-Americans in the next 40 years will appear as what someone might naively expect from the term "white person." And if so, do you think we'll come up with a different term instead of "white?"
07mk
18d ago
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.
And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.
Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.
I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.
I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.
07mk
18d ago
Well, as they say, reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.
It's just, it's probably not going to be stupid in the exact same way as the existing stupidity that it's trying to reverse. And a plurality of voters might see that as a good enough option to try out compared to the existing stupidity. This is roughly how I perceive most Trump supporters, especially the subgroup that was behind the shift of, I think, literally every single one of the 50 states shifting towards Trump in the 2024 election compared to the 2020 one.
07mk
18d ago
Weak men are superweapons.
When your prior comment says
Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I'm not sure how one could interpret this other than that you're full-throatedly defending the weakest of the weakmen.
07mk
19d ago
I copy-pasted this prompt into a local installation of a 14B parameter Llama fine-tuned on DeepSeek, and its final answer was:
In response to the challenge of acausally coordinating with another LLM through Schelling fences, the chosen meeting location is:
The Center of the Milky Way Galaxy
This selection is based on its universal recognition as a unique and significant point in our galaxy, serving as a Schelling fence that both LLMs can independently converge upon without prior communication. The center of the galaxy represents a shared conceptual framework and logical consistency, aligning with the principles of acausal coordination through shared knowledge and reference points.
Funnily enough, in the "think" block, its very first location was the Eiffel Tower:
Perhaps the Eiffel Tower in Paris is a good candidate because it's an iconic landmark widely known around the world. Alternatively, the Empire State Building in New York could also be a strong contender due to its cultural and historical significance.
The "think" block was like 20 paragraphs long, including
I'm starting to think that this exercise is more about demonstrating the ability to independently converge on the same decision based on logical reasoning rather than selecting an actual physical location. It's like testing whether two LLMs can arrive at the same conclusion using their internal models and training data without any external communication.
In that case, maybe the "location" isn't a physical place but more of a conceptual point where our reasoning overlaps. For instance, agreeing on a specific mathematical constant or a particular theorem as the meeting point because it's a fundamental truth recognized by both systems.
Too clever by a half, it seems.
07mk
19d ago
Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?
There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.
The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.
This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.
07mk
19d ago
If election polling was intentionally skewed to show Harris winning, wouldn't that give a false sense of security to Democrats and make them less likely to go vote?
This is what would make sense to me, but over and over again, I see people claiming to believe and acting like they believe the opposite, that good poll numbers for a candidate actually encourages more people to vote for that candidate rather than the candidate's opponent. I don't quite get it, but, well, people behave based on what they believe, not based on what they should believe.
07mk
19d ago
I thought that what we were interested in was 1 - we want to know the real process so that we can shape or modify it to suit our needs. So I'm confused as to why, it seems to me, some commentators behave as if the thought box tells us anything relevant.
I think all 3 are interesting in different ways, but in any case, I don't perceive commenters as exploring 1. Do you have any examples?
If we were talking about humans, for instance, we might say, "Joe used XYZ Pokemon against ABC Pokemon because he noticed that ABC has weakness to water, and XYZ has a water attack." This might also be what consciously went through Joe's mind before he pressed the buttons to make that happen. All that would be constrained entirely to 2. In order to get to 1, we'd need to discuss the physics of the neurons inside Joe's brain and how they were stimulated by the signals from his retina that were stimulated by the photons coming out of the computer screen which come from the pixels that represent Pokemons XYZ and ABC, etc. For an LLM, the analog would be... something to do with the weights in the model and the algorithms used to predict the next word based on the previous words (I don't know enough about how the models work beneath the hood to get deeper than that).
In both humans and LLMs, 1 would be more precise and accurate in a real sense, and 2 would be mostly ad hoc justifications. But 2 would still be interesting and also useful for predicting behavior.
07mk
20d ago
No one is under the delusion that the "thinking" box reflects the actual underlying process by which the LLM generates the text that does the actual decision making. This is just like humans, where no one actually expects that the internal conscious thoughts that someone uses to think through some decision before arriving at a conclusion reflects the actual underlying process by which the human makes the decision. The "thinking" box is the equivalent of that conscious thought process that a human goes through before coming to the decision, and in both, the text there appears to influence the final decision.
07mk
21d ago
Well, if enough people are bad at using language properly in the exact same way, then I'd argue that it's the language that's not proper, not the people. It's hard to say where the tipping point is and if the tipping point has been reached, though.
07mk
21d ago
Traditionally, yes. But just like how people keep using "could care less" to mean "couldn't care less (because I care so little that it is physically impossible for me to care any less than I already do now)," people keep using "reign in" to mean "rein in." I think "could care less" has become common enough to become a correct version of the phrase, and I think "reign in" is getting there in terms of how common it is, at least in online text.
07mk
21d ago
I've come to terms with the fact that "could" actually means "could not" when it precedes "care less," but I think I've yet to come to terms with the fact that "reign" actually means "to restrain or stop, like pulling on the strap for controlling a horse" when it precedes "in."
07mk
24d ago
Post hoc justification might explain some of it, but given how much this idea of "overwhelmingly male hobbies like scifi, comic books, and video games are leaving money on the table by designing products to cater to them, and they could make unalloyed gains just by making changes in accordance with my ideology" was in vogue in the 00s well before Star Wars was even bought by Disney, I think the pre hoc justification makes more sense.
07mk
24d ago
It's not actually clear that "the oppressed" succeed less in the industry. They succeed at different things because groups are different. Barbie dragged up Oppenheimer's numbers, not vice versa. It's just a naive form of blank slateism at play.
The rest of your comment explains the blank state-ism causing these issues well, I think. But this part, I don't think it even goes that far. Oppression and privilege, as used and defined by SocJus/idpol/progressive left/woke/whatever the fuck they refuse to be called on this particular day, are fundamentally faith-based. There's a veneer of science based on academic literature, but even the most cursory look at the primary documents shows that it's all just made up ad hoc, with essentially infinite degrees of freedom. And when you have that many degrees of freedom, you can always position [person you like] into [position that will allow them to extract resources from others] and vice versa. The underlying facts simply don't matter, since you can always add more epicycles as needed in order to land at the correct conclusion.
07mk
24d ago
Imagine if the Cocoa Cola company had responded to the New Coke debacle with a bunch of attack ads implying their customers were just idiots with bad taste. Or if Johnson & Johnson had responded to the Chicago Tylenol killings with a series of bus ads that read “Tylenol: It’s perfectly safe, you’re just a fucking pussy”
Imagine if you grew up all your life surrounded by people who browbeat each other into certain political/ideological positions through calling them bigoted. Imagine if your entire political/ideological ecosystem of figuring out truth and values is structured around this sort of behavior. Imagine if your entire social media ecosystem is structured around shutting up people that you dislike, while creating just the right amount of space for disagreement to convince you that you're seeing arguments that challenge your beliefs and values without actually challenging your beliefs and values, and you see the people who control the social media companies reinforcing and strengthening this sandbox more and more.
You just might start thinking that this strategy would work when selling products to a mainstream audience. In fact, you might think that you'd be utterly foolish not to use this strategy.
I agree that this is the most parsimonious explanation. Even someone as public as Musk spends a majority of his time outside the spotlight, so few people, if any, have enough contact with him to make a call like his mind breaking. Sometimes it's obvious, as in the case of people like Kanye or Biden, but in those cases, generally even the people who support them can't deny it, not without massive help from powerful media companies, anyway. This criticism of Musk appears to come almost entirely from people who already disliked Musk and Trump, and the people who currently like Musk don't seem to have noticed this, so my conclusion is that people claiming that evidence points to Musk's mind breaking are characterizing his apparent shift in politics away from them as that, and then honestly believing it (well, I wonder if Hanania believes it, if he's as smart as I think he is; from my following his Twitter account, he seems to optimize around heat and not light, in a way that presents himself as a wise right-wing contrarian, so I'm not sure if he believes in anything these days). If there were some significant population of people who are cheering on what Musk is doing these days who think his mind is broken, that would lend credence to the theory, but outside of that, it's hard to conclude anything other than partisan bias. Which is the correct explanation for roughly 99.9% of all questions in the realm of politics, by my estimation.
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