MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
I am struggling to maintain motivation on the game I'm making (previously mentioned here ). I've spent too much time making stupid placeholder GUI stuff and it's taking too long to get to the cool gameplay features that I actually care about. I am reconsidering my stance on doing everything from scratch. Does anyone know of any useful libraries or stuff that I can import and/or copy/paste that would be useful? For context, it's a turn based grid dungeon crawling roguelite thing, so I don't need any 3D graphics or physics or anything. Just an easier way to have a bunch of menus and buttons that I can stick my game functions onto instead of wasting time re-inventing them all myself. I've never done proper game dev before, I don't have a CS degree, I'm a math dude who self-taught programming to do math research, so I have no idea what exists or is useful, and figured I'd ask here for recommendations before delving into google hell.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
26d ago
In a mathematical sense you can't simultaneously maximize two preferences unless they have a perfect correlation of 1.
Suppose we give this person a choice. Option 1 will make others very happy and well off and prosperous. Very very happy. It's basically a lifetime worth of doing good in the world. But will cause this person to lose all of their wisdom. They will be unwise and make bad decisions the rest of their life. The total good from this one decision is enough to make up for it, but they will sacrifice their wisdom.
Option 2 will not make people happy, but will make the person very wise in the future. They can spend the rest of their life making good decisions and making people happier via normal means, and if you add it all up it's almost as large as the amount of good they could have done from Option 1, but not quite. But they will be wise and have wisdom.
The kindest most loving thing to others is to choose option 1. The most hedonic desire for a person who values wisdom in its own right in addition to loving others is Option 2. Depending on how you balance the numbers, you could scale how good Option 1 is in order to equal this out against any preference strength.
U(A) = aX_1+bY_1
U(B) = aX2+bY_2
Where a and b are the coefficients of preference for loving others vs loving wisdom, X and Y are the amount of good done and wisdom had in each scenario. For any finite a,b =/= 0, this has nontrivial solutions, which implies either can by larger. But also for any finite a,b =/= 0 you can't really say both have been "maximized" because one trades off against the other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Seems more like a soft R? Or no R. It's patronizing and disconnected but still offensive in a similar way that going up to a bunch of black guys and calling them "my nigga". Because that's what they call each other, right? Right? Probably maybe? Vote for me my niggas!
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I broadly agree with most of this as a critique, but still think /u/aiislove is gesturing at something real. And your objection to hard status can be largely addressed by adjusting the definition to be slightly more tautological: hard status is not merely being physically strong or attractive, but is the status you gain derived from those. That is, if we take two men of equal and large strength and manly physical appearance and one of them grows a mohawk and becomes a thug and mugs people, while the other one combs his hair and becomes a firefighter who rescues damsels and makes them swoon, the latter has more hard status.
Or an even better example: if both men become policemen who rescue damsels, but one of them lives in a lefty city where police are hated, while the other lives in a rural area where police are seen as heroes, then both could look the same and act the same but the latter gets more hard status because status is ultimately given from the people around them.
You are correct that power =/= status. But power can translate into status with some coefficient varying with the culture, environment, and how well it's leveraged. But the status that comes from this is still meaningfully different from "soft status" which is derived without leveraging power at all. Or at least, not physical power or appearance, since money can be a form of power, and status itself is a form of power. But I think this two-axis system is pointing at something real even if it needs some refinement to become more accurate and useful.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I don't think it's a war thing. Different archetypes of personality just tend to look certain ways. Have you never noticed? Like nerd glasses or problem glasses, or dark eyeliner, or cowboy boots, or tank tops, or half-buzz-cut, or high heels. You can't automatically and definitively ascertain someone's entire personality from how they look, but you can often make a decent guess. Because people tend to dress like and emulate people they respect and admire, which often happens to be people with similar personalities, so they end up looking similar to each other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
https://www.lovepanky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/lesbian-stereotypes-1.jpg
Not like the short haired butch kind, the feminine one in the pair. I don't think lesbians adhere to the top-bottom dynamic quite as strictly as male homosexuals due, since there isn't a sexual requirement to, but often you'll see a masculine obviously lesbian paired with a more feminine one who sometimes passes for straight but is sometimes almost-but-not-quite-straight-presenting. I dunno, I haven't put a ton of thought into pinning down a strict definition, it's just a sort of vibe I've seen in certain lesbian pairings. But I think it makes sense in theory, given that some lesbians are attracted to feminine features, some will maintain enough feminine features to attract them.
But on further thought, I'm not sure if I've seen it in real lesbians or only games/tv/movies...
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.
2015+ in a nutshell.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I wouldn't say "slaves to". Again, it's not too egregious, and not enough to ruin the game. But their earlier games didn't seem to have this issue quite as badly. Or maybe I just didn't notice as much because they were original fantasy worlds so they weren't race swapping classic mythology.
You can tell throughout the time that they're definitely left-leaning. Bastion had a bunch of stuff about xenophobia and colonialism being bad. I never finished transistor but it was generally anti-establishment. Pyre had a made up religion that was abused by corrupt leaders to excommunicate people they don't like. But it's never so terrible that it ruins things. None of them are ever obvious and stupid ripoffs of current events, and Pyre still has you participating in the religious rituals because it wasn't the religion itself that's bad it's just the corrupt people exploiting it.
And most importantly the core gameplay remains good enough that it makes up for the slightly offputting lefty vibes (with the exception of Transistor, which I didn't find very compelling)
But yeah, they're clearly embedded in lefty culture, if not the actual war part of it. And they seem to be gradually slipping further and further into it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Wait, I think that might actually be the art from Hades 1. Hades 2 is this
Slightly less masculine, slightly more lesbian.
Which I suppose partly undercuts my point about it changing. I think it's largely deliberate. They're trying to portray a sexual character but not like... actually sexy. They're trying to say "this character is sex positive, but we're not trying to appeal to straight white men, because that would be gross.
This also is related to the race-swapping of many of the Olympian gods to be black or Asian. Again, it's not like super obnoxiously egregious: it's not like the story goes out of its way to talk about them being oppressed by the white gods or something. But it's anachronistic in an obviously post-2010 progressive way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
There's also some level of difference in invasiveness and permanence.
Removing your arm to replace with a bionic one, is categorically different from implanting an electrical muscle-growth stimulator underneath your skin, is categorically different from putting on strength-boosting mech armor.
Following the logic only goes as far as your axioms allow, and different axioms will lead to different endpoints.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
The Holy Grail of AI privacy and security is one that's both powerful and efficient enough to run on your own hardware so you have full control over it and your information. In some imaginary world where your implants can run their own computations internally and don't require internet access (except occasionally if you want to download verified updates) then they're safe and secure from external threats.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Hades 2 came out yesterday! I just got into Act 3 on Silksong but........ now I have Hades 2!
Like Silksong, I find difficulty in describing it other than "more of the same game, in a good way". New enemies, new weapons, new buffs, new mechanics, but the same general gameplay loop and overall feel. I especially like that since the main enemy is Chronos, there's a rare event where he ambushes you and temporarily sends you back in time for a level. And back in time is the first game! It's only happened to me once so I'm not sure how robust it is, but it was an instance of an old map with old enemies that would be in the same spot in the run that I was when I got ambushed. That's definitely a cool throwback mechanic.
I will note that the artstyle and characters seem a little bit.... woker? It's nothing too egregious, and it was a little bit like this in the first game, but just the levels of androgyny, the ratio of more female characters, the lore of being Witches, and the weighting of visual sexualization weighted more towards male characters than female ones generally gives off lefty vibes. Heck, Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, and is straight up naked in the game (though conveniently self-censoring with arms and hair) looks like a lesbian.
Again, it's nothing too egregious, and the gameplay and story are still good overall so far. It's just a mild annoyance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
What is the frequency of ICE arrests and/or deportations being false positives? (The person is actually legally allowed to be here and ICE has no legitimate business with them but grabs them anyway). How would I ascertain or estimate this information from an unbiased source? People on the left keep complaining about this and I can't tell if they're being genuine or just Motte and Baileying their objection to illegals being arrested and deported. How do I tell if this is a real issue or not?
(I apologize for this being potentially culture war fodder, but figured it didn't belong in the main thread since I don't have actual discussion or commentary of my own to provide, and am more looking for links to external sources rather than you telling me your own potentially biased opinion.)
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
This only measures the difference in video-game fan-ness in comparison to creative works fan-ness. So would give a false positive for someone who hates all creative works but hates video games slightly less. I suppose you could further modify it by hacking the two measures together, perhaps take this and add a minimum amount of video games liked from the previous rating. But that ends up a lot less elegant.
Maybe the issue here is just the strict cutoff threshold. Ie maybe you take the first score and instead of saying someone > 0.5 is a fan and someone less than 0.5 is not a fan, you say that someone's fan-ness is a sliding scale from 0 to 1. Ie, someone who likes all video games ever is more of a fan than someone who only likes half, who is more of a fan than someone who only likes 0.1 (while still keeping the quality weighting so someone with horrible taste who likes the worst games is less of a real fan than someone who likes good ones).
I'm not building on top of anything. Everything is from scratch in python. Which might be a mistake, I dunno. I'm definitely not having fun making menus drawing rectangles and stuff and it looks super low quality so far. But this way I have total control over the code. Also part of the point is to get better at python for career purposes, so it's hopefully good practice.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I find something about the...Frenchness?... off-putting. Uncanny. It's hard to describe entirely, but a lot of it is in the characters' facial expressions. Sometimes they smile and give each other weird looks and it feels very weird given the setting and the tone of people dying and the apocalypse and what not. But here they are rolling their eyes and giving each other weird French smiles like they're on vacation in Paris.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I definitely like the mathematical approach here, but wonder if it survives contact with subcategories and niches in broader genres. For instance, I would definitely consider myself a fan of videogames but... there's a LOT of different types of videogames and I only like some of them.
Let's suppose as a simplified example that there are 20 categories of video game, Puzzle games, RPGs, Roguelites, MOBAs etc..........
And suppose in our imaginary example that all of them have an equal number of games, and all of the same distribution of games by objective quality. But I only like 9 of the categories. Suppose I like every single game in my 9 favorite categories, but no games in the other 11 categories. Then my score would sum to 0.45 < 0.5.
Is it fair to say that I am not a fan of videogames in general and should only describe myself as a fan of those 9 categories? If it was only one category: suppose I only liked Puzzle Games, then I would agree that I should be called a fan of "puzzle games" and not a fan of video games in general. But if it's 9 different categories across the spectrum that differ wildly from each other then it seems hard to describe my preferences as anything other than a "fan of videogames".
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I am working on making my own video game... for the third time. I've started and abandoned projects like this in the past, mostly because I got bogged down in pedantic issues like making menus and saving/loading that were boring but necessary and didn't get to the actual fun part of my game design ideas, until I got bored.
I have slightly higher hopes for this one, partly because Chat GPT is making things a lot easier. I am self-taught at programming, so there's a whole bunch of features and functions that I just don't know exist or syntax that I don't remember, and I can just ask it "how do I do this?" or "I can think of three ways to solve this problem, which is considered best practice?" and it can give advice much faster than trying to dig through google and stack exchange, and often give me code snippets I can copy/paste for my specific use case. I'm finding the overall experience to be much less frustrating than before.
For the game itself, the idea is a roguelite dungeon crawler combining elements of Blue Prince, Stuck in Time, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. The idea being you have an RPG character with stats, you run around in a dungeon that you generate room by room by choosing one of three options and having to rotate and snap doors together, and then you do actions in each room which have a chance to pass based on your stats and cards you play to temporarily boost them against a difficulty. Each movement, room draft, or action costs you time and energy resources, failures cost health or have other negative consequences, and if you run out you die and have to restart. But with permanent meta-progress. Each unique room/action combination has a familiarity level which goes up each time you do it, and it costs you less energy based on its familiarity level. Additionally, while many of the actions give you more resources and short term powerups within a run, some of them instead cost bunches of resources but reward you with permanent meta rewards making you permanently stronger. So you run through the dungeon over and over again getting a little stronger each time, making it a little further and unlocking a little bit more.
This is one of my favorite gameplay loops in roguelites and dungeon crawlers in general. I know a lot of people don't like grinding, but I love it if it accomplishes a certain balance between grind and skill, where your progress is determined by a combination of how much stuff you've unlocked and how well you do, and doing well gives you more rewards faster. I don't expect the game to ever get polished to a point of commercial viability. Maybe if it reaches a sufficiently playable state I'll present it for free on GitHub. But the primary goal is just to make my own perfect game tailor-designed towards my own preferences where I can keep adding more content and more upgrades whenever I reach the end.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
It's baffling that this progressive idealogy has been allowed to persist within the black community and survive contact with deadly consequences. Luxury beliefs are ones that privileged people can hold because someone else has to pay the costs. It does not baffle me that lefty white people believe that black people are oppressed and should fight back against the oppressive beliefs, because this doesn't cause lefty white people to get killed. It does not baffle me that college educated black people believe that they are oppressed and their lower class brothers should fight the police, because the college educated black people are much less likely to get themselves killed. It does not baffle me that black people believe that white people owe them and they should be given free handouts from the government or are morally blameless when they steal things, because this benefits them.
It does baffle me that lower class black people who get are at risk of being killed by police believe they should fight the police. This is not a luxury belief, this has deadly consequences. This is the kind of thing where skin in the game usually causes people to set aside their silly biases and obviously false platitudes and go "oh crap, this is wrong, something needs to change." Even if they verbally adhere to the same ideology, people at least turn hypocrite to avoid the consequences themselves. Someone who claims that homeless people should be given free homes balks at the thought of actually sharing their own home or neighborhood. People who want more government spending even if this requires higher taxes almost always want the taxes raised on someone else. The ideologies mutate into the most consistent and coherent form that just so happens to be compatible with avoiding negative consequences for the believer. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors but you shouldn't physically fight them because they'll kill you. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors that you should fight, and then not actually fighting them and hoping someone else will do it. I am baffled at them actually fighting the police in non-negligible numbers. The ideology, at least the version of it held and professed by black people, should have mutated to avoid this outcome the majority of the time. But it hasn't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I absolutely agree. I think the vast majority of discrepancies in racial outcomes and behavior are cultural, even if genes probably play some non-zero component (my personal estimate is somewhere around 80% culture 20% genes). Such that, even if cultural interventions couldn't completely solve every issue entirely, they could solve most of them and should be paid attention to more.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way
Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it. But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway. Part of being a civilized adult is the ability to set aside your instincts and short-term desires and impulses in favor of the rational, long-term concerns. When I was a child and my brothers would annoy me I would hit them to make them stop. After getting in trouble enough times I learned not to do that. I don't enjoy obnoxious and annoying behavior any more than I used to, and if possible will seek non-violent solutions to end it such as politely asking, or avoiding people who do it. But at the end of the day if I am near someone being deliberately obnoxious and I can't extricate myself from the situation then I will suck it up and deal with it instead of violently attacking them. Because I am an adult and I have the emotional maturity to do that.
Every middle class white child is taught to be respectful and defer to the police. Because your natural instinct is to fight people who oppose you, especially when they're in the wrong, and this instinct leads to predictably bad results, so it requires being taught the correct behavior in this scenario so that you know when to suppress your instincts instead of following them. I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else..
I partially agree with you, but would shift 80% of the blame for the establishment of this environment to the left. The left made Nazis cool again, by being simultaneously awful and anti Nazi. 99% of people's experience with Nazism is bad people on the left equivocating between Nazis and normal people on the right. If Trump is a Nazi, and Elon Musk is a Nazi, and Joe Rogan is a Nazi, then someone who likes all of those guys is going to think Nazis are pretty cool. Or at least, make jokes in that direction. People are going to feel comfortable pretending to be a Nazi, because what's the worst that's going to happen, some angry leftist is going to accuse you of being a Nazi? They were already going to do that just by you not supporting open borders.
When you spend ten years crying wolf, and telling everyone all their pet dogs are wolves, don't be surprised when kids grow up thinking wolves are cool, and the dog lovers start wearing wolf shirts and howling to mock you.
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