No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Steve Hsu, an older theoretical physicist (Caltech '86), former university physics administrator and entrepreneur notable for getting cancelled from a VP position at Michigan State for tolerating the wrong people and ideas, being an advisor to BGI, the world's leading genetic sequencing lab and also leading an effort to create a number of genomic predictors for various conditions.
In short, he's big both literally and metaphorically, pretty competent if I go by his predictions over the years- (he has had a pretty good blog for at least 15 yrs), and he's soliciting CVs for an effort to restore the reputation and function of US government scientific institutes and state universities.
The Trump transition team seeks highly qualified individuals for government roles. One of the main goals will be to restore competitiveness and meritocratic values to institutions like NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD, NIST, Dept. of Education, etc.
Through these institutions, the new administration intends to enforce these values on our university system.
Intro
Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.
A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.
It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.
It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.
Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.
As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.
For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||
Rules:
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Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.
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For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.
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Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
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Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.
[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.
And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.
**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.
Ok, there was supposed to be text in the top near the link, there isn't, some I'm pasting the summary of the linked post here.
Peter Watts, the Canadian SF writer known for writing endearingly depressing SF books and promoting the idea consciousness is not essential to sentience has been forced to re-evaluate this position of his following a recent experiment by proponents of the Free Energy Model of consciousness.
Now it appears, at least to him, there may be an intrinsic link between subjective experience and problem solving by intelligent systems.