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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2709 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Scott wrote that well but I think he slants the reader’s perception of the device by describing it in biased language. It’s magical, it’s tucked away, the brain mass decreases (?). A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices. It’s funny that his go-to example of loving freedom is actually loving a well-designed, consciously-created walled enclosure, in which intelligent designers have predetermined what choices you will make to give you the most satisfaction. Were we to imagine the development of a device that granted optimal happiness, it would have to include the enjoyment of picking, but that’s a trivial design problem to solve (do what video games do).

I’m tempted to say that humans do not actually like freedom ever, in any sense. They are misattributing what they like to the concept of freedom. They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm. They like exploring novel spaces, but only when there are enjoyable things to find. These are all confined activities that lack freedom, and they are most satisfying when they have been designed for us.

the brain mass decreases (?) (...) A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions.

No. The story describes earring hijacking body and no longer being advisor, but instead of controlling body directly, skipping conscious mind. As in, some alien intelligence killing you and taking over your body.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be. Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

Though

The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

(on the other hand "usually" is a big issue anyway - if less usual end being successful mass-murderers or similar than even on purely utilitarian grounds it would be hard to justify)

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

If the mentor's first piece of advice is "stop listening to me" and then they proceed to run your life, that would be mighty sus.

Especially since in normal mentorship relationships you eventually get everything you can out of it and/or your mentor fucking dies and you become the mentor. In the story you are just following orders forever.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

No, there's a bound on how minutely a mentor can influence your actions. Scott's decision to take it all the way to the absurd, to have it dictating muscle contractions and phonemes to you, was an exercise in examining just how much influence we can take on before we do lose our agency. It's contemplating the line between mentee and thrall, where most would be distressed at the prospect of becoming a thrall if sufficiently warned at the beginning.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

Yes. Teachers and mentors can be useful only to the extent they're moving you to be able to make decisions and understand problems on your own. Otherwise, at best they're just moving you from place to place, more often just babysitting you. Outsourcing your ability to evaluate evidence is costly no matter who or what is doing the evaluation; outsourcing the process of doing evaluation is impossible and is just simplified badly in this thought experiment.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices.

Depends very heavily on the environment and game. I've gotten the GregTech bug again, and in one sense, yes, there are a limited number of options, and the worst of them are still not going to reach out and club you in the head, and broader modpacks can make that even more varied. There answers are available, but even the most hand-holding of modpacks won't run you through the full process, and outside of skyblock most can't.

Okay, that's an extreme case, and most games aren't Minecraft-likes. We're looking at 2012, so what about Mass Effect? There are build options, but most of them suck, and you can still beat the game with a bad one. There are choices, but most of them are wrong, and you can still make bad choices and win. And by Mass Effect 2, a lot of the 'bad' decisions were just delaying, like trying to do literally anything with the stupid scanning mechanic. You can't choose to survive schtupping Morinth Because Radical Freedom, and often the dialogue options were extremely constrained. (Indeed, some explicit advice from the in-game advisor is wrong, in ways that kill the character giving the advice..

But Mass Effect's designers don't know what would give me the most fun, and not just in the sense that they eventually dropped the ending to ME3. A lot of people loved the Vanguard charge builds, and other people (myself included) found them absolutely obnoxious to play. Some people like having all the morally-cleanish people on their team with all of their Personal Issues being solved, and other people like to intentionally make non-optimal decisions because they say better things about the story.

((In my case, I'm trying to automate a GregTech skyblock factory solely using Create for long-distance item transportation. ngmi, but I find it fun.))

If you're referring to his comment, Douglas Scheinberg was comparing the earring to video game walkthroughs, and that's got meaningful difference. The exact point where this hits varies from person to person -- there are people who don't like mechanics spoilers as simple as 'wiremill or plate bender' for gregtech modpacks, while other people are fine with getting romantic advice for their GarrusXShepard playthrough -- but eventually you've gone from guide to backseat driver.

They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm.

I think this is not wrong, but it's incomplete. For most people, there is a necessary component of variation and surprise that is vital to make something feel like entertainment rather than chore.

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Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age, and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age,

DA:O was great, I've played through it multiple times (I think I installed the Fade-skip patch after my second playthrough, though)

DA2 was meh. It's peak BioWare companions, and I didn't like the companions in the game.

I didn't even try DA:I

and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Alien(s) and The Terminator are two perfect dilogies and I'm glad they haven't made any sequels to either franchise. That just about sums up my feelings about DA4.

I played DA:O and DA:I. DAII is on my to-play list, though I'll admit it's been there for a while. DA:O was the one I played the most, if with pretty normie gameplay decisions for most runthroughs and complaining about The Deep Roads pacing every fucking time. As gameplay matters, both are very happy to let you take subobtimal decisions, but it's also far more punishing than Mass Effect: most of my runs used Arcane Mage approaches, because I found that origin most interesting, but Arcane Mage could faceroll hard and readily challenge nightmare difficulty where Shapeshifter-only struggled on medium and even easy, especially with some of the unavoidable fights. And fights were long enough that struggling was less fun.

While DA:I suffered a bit from throwing in random game mechanics to fill time, it really built on a lot of the setting ideas. Cole explores a lot of the spirit world stuff better than Wynne did, imo, and as much as Iron Bull (and the game in general) suffers from the Drizzt problem where every named member of a race is explicitly defying the stereotypes (and explicit rules, given the Qun!) rather than just being more complex than the stereotypes, he was still executed as well or better than Sten as someone you'd actually want to work with. Actual combat gameplay was a lot more even, both in highs and lows, and there's a bit more handholding for character builds.

It's good to hear that DA4 hasn't been cancelled, since it'd been pretty much incommunicado for a while now, and there's definitely some interesting balls left in the air after DA:I that would be pretty frustrating if they never land. The series has been a lot less than Mass Effect, for better or worse -- I don't think anyone expect the Big End Game Decision from DA:O to mean the last game in the series will want your save file, even if that necessarily cuts off a large portion of the lore and characterization space (eg, warnings that killing all the Archdemons will cause an apocalypse don't work great if one of the archdemons is in a Schrodinger's cat, Cole's loyalty quest limits what DA4 can do with him short of declaring one choice canon). But if that means the game also doesn't devolve into choosing between three big lights at the end, I'm willing to accept weird retrocanon.

I never even considered having the fan particles run along the length of the belt! What a great idea.

Running a single fan over a long belt like that is slower for cooking than the traditional lava ring fed by smart chutes, but if you're already throughput limited elsewhere (in this case, both the press and the burners for the steam engines are pretty slow), this approach is a lot better at limiting unnecessary entities. Not sure where I first saw it, probably someone's Create:Above and Beyond play?

Create is an absolute blast of a mod for having little options like this, and for having most of them simultaneously be very hard to guess would work from scratch and obvious at a glance after it's been done Oh Of Course. Using Item Drains as one-block unpowered belt alternatives is one that I only learned about just a couple months ago, dropped offhand by Beardstone in the middle of an otherwise very typical build, and it cleans up so many builds.

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