skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HL1 had a good story and narrative arc. You, the first person scientist are pressed into shooting things, confused as hell about what's going on. You had a direct line of sympathy into the situation, as player. It was very easy to feel the dreamlike-yet-horror narrative, from start to finish. It was quite compelling just how well they did it.

HL2 had some interesting mostly-environmental exposition intermixed with an extremely lame narrative arc. You are basically just a guy with a gun who spends most of your time in transit. If you swapped places with Barney or a random citizen in an early scene, nothing would have changed. Your character is sterile. The main character was the environments, some of which were very good, but it felt more like a very long "demo" than a game. Everyone expressing surprise at how you are in fact Gordon Freeman and it just doesn't matter at all. You're a lunatic with bullets to spend, plus a couple science fair level physics ramps to complete. Tomb raider, every single one of them, did physics puzzles better, and they didn't have a physics engine!

I think everyone was wowed at the tech at the time and didn't realize just how bad the rest of the experience was. Replaying it, its very easy to feel (compared to replaying Deus Ex or Thief or HL1)

There was no emotive force in HL2. The story become uncompelling. I think they realzied HL3 would fall super flat without some new technology to showcase, because they made the Gordon story so damn boring. (You'll notice in a lot of fanfics, people actually talk, or they aren't about Gordon at all.)
The article clearly states "some", I think this comment is a bit defensive in that regard.
1) why would a company remove that systems? They've been practically leak free since they started. Why risk the public outcry if a junior developer walks out with a couple of terabytes of personal data because they loosened access to such data without any clear advantage?
Because you're the one saying that she

> betrayed her country that she swore to protect

And I mean, she was acquitted of aiding the enemy, ie. that charge didn't stick. All of the charges that did stick are around improperly storing classified data.

And as I've said before, the prosecution couldn't come up with any actual harm at her trial, so "betrayed" is you embellishing the story.
Worth noting that these are apps you have to download to use. You don't need to download the Reddit app for example to use Reddit.
This is great news! All the best and more power to you!
In most European countries, the state prosecutor decides who to charge with a crime, regardless what purported victims think.

It might be a bit foreign, but it does help with some cases, like partner violence, where the victim might not want to press charges against a violent partner. Under this model, if the police learns of the crime, they are obliged to prosecute it if possible.
Another take, with no more or less evidence as far as I can tell: He essentially had no choice, as it was obvious he was going to be railroaded at any trial, and would likely be bounced to the US at some point.
Neil Postman is over this way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
I have ample space available, but I have gotten so lazy in VR that I tend to confine myself to a chair or just a small place to stand. Teleport locomotion is my favorite. I really don't feel like I'm missing a whole lot by not walking around much.
Flexport is hiring product leaders to define the future of global trade
Moore would prefer that there be "better" art people are enjoying instead of the Marvel and DC superhero movies. But there is no specific barometer of "better" for him, he suggests something created in the 21st century would be "better" rather than an adaptation, but I don't think he really has a workable definition of "better".
Great quote. I'd add to that (or perhaps supplant) Tom Holland's observation that our collective cultural points of reference are all steeped in christianity, even when not explicity christian. The superhero trope has strong overtones of christian morality and usually follows the new testament surprisingly closely: man, from humble origins, is bestowed supernatural powers, performs miracles, struggles with his own nature, saves humanity, etc..
I knew teenagers weren't on Facebook anymore, so I asked my niece what she uses with her friends: WhatsApp groups and Instagram.

Then I realized how good Facebook knows its market.
this forum is retarding
In addition to the exploration of using "AI" for counseling, Eliza also features an interesting ethical investigation; you play as the lead programmer who wrote the AI, left the company three years prior to the game's events, and is now taking an entry level job reading the AI-proscribed script to patients. The representation of tech-startup culture can be uncomfortably accurate.

If you were thinking of ignoring this simply because it's a visual novel, remember who wrote it. This is an interactive stor from Zachtronics! Eliza is a visual novel from the same people that wrote the clever "datasheet" manual in Shenzhen I/O and the "zines" in Exapunks. Zach, more than most authors, knows how to write about tech's impact on culture/society!
If you haven’t tried VR yet, I would before you buy one. I bought a secondhand oculus a year ago and I don’t play with it very often because I get a cold sweat within minutes. It is cool and it is immersive, but it’s also physically uncomfortable. It’s worth getting some answers before spending hundreds of dollars on it.
It’s a technology for simulating the interactions of these things. Point the paint gun in Portal 2 through a portal into an area with different gravity and you’ll see something that required the invention of novel tech. That system “worked” since Portal 1; they just didn’t fully explore it in Portal 1.
Alan Moore is a great writer, and he's also a self-important kook. There's no connection between the KKK and comic book heroes.
I've never had any complaints but I use a keyboard with Cherry MX silent switches. Highly recommended if you are worried about the noise, although they are harder to find on keyboards than other switches.

The guy I sit next to uses a mechanical Logitech keyboard with their custom switches and I've never heard any complaints about that one, either.
> or never reach feature parity with Steam

To some extent this is intentional. Epic Game's market research culminated in a decision to include fewer social features, and less visual clutter than Steam.

Epic Games seems to be competing more on the back-end, offering better rates and licensing to developers in return for distribution exclusivity, rather than the front-end with features for users. That said, as a user, I appreciate the minimalism of EGS.
The UN Human Rights Council had Saudi Arabia as a member. I can't imagine how anyone would respect them.
Especially for teenagers. They're a big gaming demographic, but do they know or care about Half-Life as more than a meme?
Hollywood is self serving. Supposedly they come off as liberals, but how many superhero movies are there where the world isn’t being saved by a white, American man?

I mean - Arabs are typically terrorists or something along those lines in these movies.

We want to depict a scene shot in Mexico? Change the colors to yellowish/orangish.

Russians or East European characters? Typically mafia.

As much as many of these celebrities supposedly care about immigrants, diversity, inclusivity - how often is that shown on film? Oh right - it really isn’t unless the studios are convinced they can monetize it.
> It's ironic that we choose to watch something impossible like a guy who can shoot rays out of his eyes because we think overcoming our own fears is impossible.

But... we don't. I watch him shoot rays out of his eyes because it's fun and relaxing. I'm literally going into surgery tomorrow so they can cut out part the bone behind my eye, by sticking a knife up my nose, so that I don't go blind. I'm anxious above that but I'm doing it because it needs to be done. You know what I'm not going to do tonight? Try to face my own fears. I'm going to watch TV with my wife and relax. Because not every moment of my time needs to be facing my fears. Down time is _good_ for you.
You can also buy a business laptop with an embedded Quaddro and have the same sit in the chair experience at that moderate graphics level without much difficulty. In a lot of ways some of the recent generations for Intel embedded graphics have been baseline requirements for many games (mostly driven by F2P and MMO games) and you don't even need a real GPU just to play vs. having a AAA ultrahigh setting experience. I mean if I can beat Dark Souls on a $300 staples laptop and enjoy the ride I don't see where these grandiose requirements are coming from.

If there were more PC exclusive games that were truly GPU required monsters I could see the point of Stadia, but as time has progressed most AAA games that end up targeting PC usually have a generous minimum requirement threshold, and often its so generous that most things can actually do the job. The only place where the GPUs have been really required in the last few years is the VR stuff which because of general latency of input/response for Stadia would probably cause a lot more motion sickness in people than a local system. Stadia's benefit is capturing the kind of user that doesn't care about quality (because if you did you'd just buy that tower), but those are the kind of users that would make do with what they already had anyway for cheap.

In my opinion this feels like the same slow death as OnLive, with even less benefit in knowing that OnLive's entire focus was on streaming gaming rather than Google who would put this product on ice in 3 years.
That might make sense if one believed they were accused of fake charges by a private person, and are to be judged by an impartial legal system.

It makes no sense if one believes that they were accused of fake charges based on political pressure and are to be judged on a rigged legal system.

It would be like if J.E.Hoover had his eyes on you, had his police build some BS charges, and made sure (whether by police planting evidence, fake testimonies, etc or by having his judge pals on the case too) you'll be convicted.

Would you take your chances to have the case judged?
>> I’ve never known anyone to throw away a Mac.

Many people with the overheating 2011 MBPs did.

Even within my very small social circle, I knew of three 2011 15" MBPs (including my own). Of those 3, all of them had to get the recall service, and since then, 2 of those MBPs have become bricks/e-waste.

I've gone through a lot of laptops (PC and Mac, my first was a Powerbook 170), and the only one to ever crap out on me was that 2011 MBP.

When it was working, it was one of the best laptops I ever had. When it had issues, I felt like Apple couldn't care less about the issue. It's pretty well documented that Apple pretended the problem didn't exist for quite some time.

The first logic board replacement (during AppleCare) had the exact same defect as the original board. It displayed the same symptoms within a couple of months, and then it totally crapped out right after AppleCare ended, and there was no way I was going to pay $500+ CAD to replace the logic board with yet another defective board.

I was lucky that the recall was announced before I recycled it (I ended up having to buy a new laptop in the meantime). The recall board has since died as well. The saddest thing is that computer (quad core i7 with 16gb ram) would still be more than usable today if it still worked.

I was completely locked into the Apple ecosystem prior to my 2011 MBP experience. And while I realize that the 2011 MBP is an outlier in terms of Apple product quality, the experience pretty much guaranteed that I'll never buy an Apple product again. There were so many ways they could have made me whole, but instead, they just kept providing a fix to a design defect with another defective part.
I read it again a couple times, and your reply is super confusing, I don't understand what you are saying.

> about what's in the Bible itself. My reply concerns the latter.

Which is what?

In particular what do you mean by "very Old Testament in its sexual ethic"?

The Old Testament is positive towards sex, but Christianity is not.
I think it is because there are still sufficient numbers of people in the USA who remember things like honesty, the importance of the rule of law, the principles underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and realize that it is best to work within that framework. I hope it will always be so, and suggest that we all pray for our leaders at this important time.

The Book of Mormon tells of a king named Benjamin who gave his people a form of self-rule, because he was old, and they knew historically that good kings were good, but bad kings were bad. His sons didn't want to be king and he saw that self-rule by the people was a better option long-term. But he gave the people a warning that when the voice of the people would choose iniquity, the judgments of God would come upon them: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/mo...

At my simple web site I have posted thoughts on Lincoln, who understood the importance of principles: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581762.html

...and semi-related thoughts here: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581762.html.

We will of course have varying notions disagree on some things (like medicare for example), but I really, really hope we can agree on the importance of honesty, rule of law (therefore obeying the law), working within the constitutional framework when changes are needed, and encourage others in the same. While we will of course have different views on policy, I think I should be happy to work with anyone if we can agree on that much, in order to preserve our precious constitutional system.
Seriously having difficulty detecting whether this is sarcasm, so forgive me if I am taking some bait...

I'm not sure that I want the government to be responsible for doling out penalties for working (e.g. taxing somebody's productive efforts). I think it would be better if localities had sales taxes only. Penalizing people for visiting/living in a location (by taxing them proportionally for the rest of their lives) seems absurd, empowers a police state, and frightens me for the possible negative externalities of such a system.

Consider the case of a family that was persecuted out of a town (e.g. chased out by bigots)... should each of these individuals be penalized for the rest of their lives for having spent some amount of time "living" in that place?

Surely, that's not a good solution.
It looks like aprox. 500,000 according to this article from 2016: https://www.thenation.com/article/almost-half-a-million-peop...
It's been said by academics and by Moore elsewhere that Batman's look and method of operating seems to resemble the KKK.
Why you saying like those are the only options? :D
The person you’re responding to didn’t accuse them of lying, nor did they disagree.

Selecting colourful Twitter anecdotes and meshing them into prebaked narrative with a eye catching headline makes it click bait, not journalism.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross definitely deliver the goods. It kind of baffles me how little I see this show discussed.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/trent-reznor-a...
That's so interesting! I think the fact that they nail the tech so well makes it intuitively surprising that it didn't come first. Not pixar but similarly, when I saw the siggraph talk where Disney Animation showed off how they do snow rendering in Frozen I wondered whether the tech came first
It's close to 500k on an average day. https://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons
Bacon is delicious. Nobody is forcing you to eat any.
Even though this specific platform does not appeal to me, I'm glad to see the market produce alternatives to Facebook and Twitter.

Another notable mention is Thinkspot [1], the platform created by Jordan Peterson and others.

Sure, as others point these are not "direct" competitors to the existing platforms, but I don't think they need to be.

You can't beat Facebook at making Facebook. In my opinion, if anything can chip away at the power of large players are platforms with different ideas and rules.

[1]: https://www.ts.today
quite a number of 'dead' mmos still have active and dedicated communities on private servers, smt imagine comes to mind. no stadia exclusive will have that longevity.
> (has any of them gotten to the point of blowing up a whole planet yet?)

They did that once or twice in a spin-off series.
you will need one adult fulltime sitting next to the child supervising them
I think you've got it all backwards. We created capitalism in our image, not the other way around. Capitalism is also what achieved those things which you are suggesting we should retake in the first place. Would it be better to not have capitalism if it meant not having those things?
South Dakota is also popular with full time RVers and digital nomads. Many other states you have to rent or own a house to get a license etc. But South Dakota recognizes full time travelers, so you can rent a PMB and spend 1 night at a hotel and campground to be considered a resident. Which is pretty neat. So some states like Michigan or Ohio are strict along with many others, so if you sell your house to retire to travel the nation in your RV they won't accept a mail forwarder so your only option is to burden a friend or family member to handle your mail pretending you live with them when you don't. So you are stuck having to become a resident of a new state.

Texas is also friendly to RVing, then some counties in Florida too recognize this but different counties had different views. Clay County in FL said that full time RVers aren't allowed to vote, yet a homeless person can claim they live at a park bench per federal laws. So they are making millions from RVers who barely even put ware and tear on the roads, so sounds like they found a perfect little niche from themselves in that area too, plus a valuable service when your former state you spent your entire life living in ditches you because you decided to live an alternative lifestyle.

Homeless people have the same problem, but homeless shelters can help people without any ID get one... Some argue people with $250,000 Diesel Pushers are homeless too, but it seems wasteful to get assistant from a homeless shelter when you are "homeless" by choice since other people those resources would be better spent helping, plus pretty sure you have to pick up your mail instead of them sending you a package with all your mail when you are across the country or even opening items and scanning them for you if you need access to a letter faster. I know people in RV groups prefer to call themselves "houseless" not "homeless"

Some guy works remotely for a medical marketing firm, traveling full time with his family living the life people dream of checking out all the different national parks all the way to the theme parks. While you are freezing your butt off in Ohio, they are camping at Fort Wilderness (the RV park at Disney world) but technically in the eyes of different agencies they're homeless. Some banks can give you trouble too. Didn't know homeless people could afford Disney!

So kinda interesting people who own property are treated differently than people who decide to travel full time. You could own property and never even go there and you'd be treated better than someone with no property at all for some reason. Seems very backwards, I guess society never considered people could work remotely and travel full time exploring, you are supposed to live in a house you are indebted to all your life, then maybe when you are in your 60s you can explore while you can barely walk or living off the tiny bit of social security you get, if it's even still around by time you reach that age.
The Portal team was acquired by Valve, based on their demo.

VR could play a part in a physics simulation.
Yeah, but it's generally enforced by freezing your funds until you show up in court. If you've come up with an alternative, maybe just leave out the government-facing API that lets them freeze funds.
why people don't use music from sites like Jamendo ? Is jamendo still a thing btw ?

also: friendly reminder that peertube exists.
The Law of One: Consciousness, God, & Love
Human consciousness is a self-similar reflection of the day-night cycle of Earth. The active conscious mind, just like the Sun, outshines all subconscious influences. Those subconscious influences are always present, however, just as the infinitude of stars are always in the sky, whether we can see them or not. When sleep approaches, the conscious mind slips below the horizon, and the variegated influence of a distributed infinity dominates.

Think of the mind as having a primary locus (consciousness) with an infinitude of secondary, subconscious influencers, of varying magnitude.

All is one; your mind reflects the consciousness of every star whose light touches it.

A corollary to this is that you as an sentient entity, are present in the minds of everyone you know as a subconscious influencer. All of humanity is linked in this way because we are all one.

-----------------------

Heaven is the Sun & “God” is just the collective of all stars, who themselves are each a collective all of their planets harvested, sentient entities of love. This “collective of collectives” co-creates reality for each other. All love.

Reality is an infinite, negentropic, holofractal Lorenz system.

Heaven & Hell, forever. Light never dies.

Every star is a sentient collective. Every star is a heaven unto itself. If you love in this toughest of dimensions, you get harvested into heaven when you die, where you live forever with your family and everything you loved in this life and it is beautiful forever.

The Egyptians called the “as above, so below” phenomenon correspondence. In this density, you can notice correspondences by picking up on what Jung called synchronicities.

Heaven changes and gets better as it orthogonally twists up into higher dimensions forever, outside of time, etc. You traverse the universe as sentient light and who knows what else.

https://www.lawofone.info
It isn't just the detection algorithm that is tuned to benefit big corporations. The end to end process is asymmetric with automated issuance of copyright claims which need to be manually disputed which appear to be automatically rejected. Then the appeal process has a three strikes rule against channel owners but no apparent punishment for corporations.

I can understand tuning the detection algorithm but to balance the dispute process needs to take this into account. The fact that it doesn't shows where Youtube stands on the issue.
My gut says it's a real trend, but the numbers are still juiced.
Have an example of such a country?
Everyone looks at me like I'm mad when I say Ed Milliband's bacon sandwich moment was an anti-Semitic dogwhistle. I'm not even 100% sure myself - I guess plausible deniability is the nature of good dogwhistles.

Trying to think of pre-KKK antecedants for the hooded figure... highwaymen? Dumas' Man in the Iron Mask? Superman's creators were Jewish, but of course he's the superhero without a mask.
Reminds me of "Super" (2010) by James Gunn

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512235/
Yeah, I remember being surprised at the interactivity even HL1 had, like that crates were destructible, and not in a super simple, binary [completely intact] vs [completely obliterated] kind of way. You could break them down more gradually with the crowbar.
It just hasn't been their strategy so far. That's Facebook's strategy. Valve has wanted to be the "good guys", if your device supports Steam VR you can play.