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A Tesla driver says he crashed his brand new Cybertruck after the brakes stopped working
  • Look, the car may or may not perform basic car related functions, who can say. When you're moving fast and breaking things you can't be concerned with theoretical problems like the some of the very first functionalities ever introduced to cars, or whether or not the car will decide to literally move fast and break things on its own.

  • The fentanyl machine line
  • Someone showed him an industry ad video for the sort of big sensor array things they install in some border checkpoints and he couldn't comprehend any of it apart from seeing a big thing moving and hearing someone claim it helps find hidden drug compartments.

  • Workers & Resources: why do buildings cost money?
  • How does this work? Where am I getting the initial funding? Who am I? Who authorised this? What is this madness?

    In the second campaign, the backstory is that you're basically supposed to be an eastern european country that was colonized by a western power that built some infrastructure to aid in resource extraction, except you revolted against them, gained autonomy, and established a socialist state of sorts, with your objective being to attain autarky and modernize the scattered villages throughout the country.

    So there at least, I'd guess the $2,000,000 balance is from seizing the US-backed dictator's wealth, and the 10,000,000 rubles you start with were either the result of selling captured western equipment to the Soviets or a sort of hands-off foreign aid grant from alternate timeline more-liberal-brained Khrushchev.

    Well, the workers aren't going to go wageless/salariless regardless of whether or not they are working on the project, and I don't think that there even were contract workers in the USSR.

    This made me think of two things, one related to the game and one not. The first is that nothing domestically involves currency that you deal with, all the money is foreign currency used for trade; that means that your internal economy is running purely off some kind of labor voucher system and abstracting away both the wages workers earn and what they spend on goods and services as an overall balanced and isolated system.

    The second is that AFAIK starting under Khrushchev (IIRC) there was a tacit acceptance of a so-called "second economy" in the USSR, which involved comparatively small scale private exchange for crops grown in personal plots, craft goods, and contract services like repairwork that existed outside the centrally planned institutions.

    Tangentially, that's making me think about the centralized state-run farm equipment depots in the game, and how one of Khrushchev's more notably hair-brained and disastrous reforms was privatizing that sort of thing so that farmers had to own and maintain their own tractors, which made maintaining them way more expensive and reduced overall agricultural efficiency since "idk lmao everyone do it for themselves" is much worse than having centralized depots staffed by mechanics whose whole thing is maintaining them and who have all the tools and materials on hand to do so in one place. Also that contemporaneous to that in China, farm machinery was rare and the rural communes weren't really communes yet, so the farmers who'd managed to get access to tractors and the like quickly turned around and became private contractors who'd go and use the tractors on other farmers' fields for compensation and within just a couple of years of that being the status quo it was already creating a problematic wealth inequality between farmers in general and the sort of contractor tractor-kulaks that had to be addressed by the state.

  • Workers & Resources: why do buildings cost money?
  • From where?

    A neighboring country, either Soviet or Western depending on the currency you use for this.

    Firstly, why does your state not have construction workers?

    Because you don't have local construction coordinating offices and vehicle depots yet, so you're relying on outside help.

    Secondly, why can't you requisition the workers from the USSR or another planned economy?

    You do, but they want compensation. It's kind of a gamification of... Actually, you know what? Given the time period it defaults to (starting in 1959), I'm just gonna blame Khrushchev. Maybe it's an alternate history where he was even more revisionist and did more Gorbachev level dipshittery with trying to liberalize the central planning.

    A more realistic answer is that you're entirely independent and just maintain neutral terms with both the Soviets and the West, so even though you can freely trade with both neither is going to come in and build things for you or make any sort of demands of you. Which is ludicrously unrealistic considering you're sitting on huge deposits of oil, coal, metals, and uranium, but that's city builder logic for you.

    Why can't you source it from your own state? Why are your options limited to either producing the resources within the city,

    You're running an independent border republic roughly the size of something like Andorra, maybe a little bigger. Everything outside your borders is foreign, even the Soviets.

  • Workers & Resources: why do buildings cost money?
  • When you buy buildings you are buying the resources, having them shipped in, and having foreign contract workers come in with that to actually build it for you using their equipment. It's just it abstracts this away for the sake of gameplay. It's like when buildings are purchasing and importing the goods they need, it's abstracting the actual delivery of them from outside.

    It may be a game setting to enable a more complicated build option (so if you're still in the tutorial campaign this may be disabled, I'm not sure), but if you look down at the right corner where you have "finance with rubles" and "finance with dollars" boxes, there should be a third one to the right of them that uses local resources and labor. That doesn't cost money (directly, but if you're filling warehouses of material with the auto-import purchase option that will cost money) but requires construction offices staffed with transport and heavy construction vehicles, as well as busses to take workers to the site, and you need to be sourcing all of those things from somewhere.

  • I want a Monster Hunter spin off called "Hunter Monster" where you're the monster killing hunters
  • IIRC it established two separate levels of the disease that's basically the same as the later ghoul/feral ghoul divide in Fallout. So there were vampire zombies that hunted people - including each other - and ones that had managed to stabilize the condition with medical treatment. He hunted them indiscriminately, and it was the latter group that managed to take him out with an organized military strike on his fortified compound.

  • How does mass transit in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic actually work?
  • I don't know what the problem I was running into was then.

  • How does mass transit in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic actually work?
  • I don't know what the deal is then, because that was the very first thing I tried: setting up a route between bus stops expecting them to work like in Cities: Skylines only to watch as empty busses just circled around between stations and never, or almost never, picked anyone up even when there were people waiting there. It wasn't until I learned you could target individual buildings as stops that busses started filling up.

  • How does mass transit in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic actually work?
  • No, "If a citizen is unable to find a building that they're looking for in walking range, they will instead walk to a nearby public transport station where they wait to be picked up by a vehicle, and willingly disembark at the first station that has their desired building in range"

    I have not been able to get that to work. If the route just goes through stations no one ever boards and it just cycles empty busses indefinitely even with full stations. It's only when I start pointing the bus at specific buildings that they start filling up and working as expected.

  • How does mass transit in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic actually work?
  • people walk only a certain distance of i think 100 meteres

    I think this depends on the type of path they have? Like they'll budget their route to walk for up to X amount of time to reach a location, and the distance is determined by how far they walk in that time? The furthest I'm seeing for "within walking distance" of some buildings is just over 450m with the full 100% walking speed paths along the whole route. Unless this is further modified by a game setting - I went into the campaign (not the tutorial one) with whatever settings it defaults to.

    you get a bus depot, buy the busses, and then assign them all routes there.

    Right, with the caveat that the routes themselves have to be pointed at buildings to drop people off at, not just other stops. If a bus isn't going directly to a potential workplace, school, or shop no one will board it and it took me entirely too long to figure that out.

    Like bus stops (and I assume passenger rail platforms) aren't set up to shorten pathfinding to desired locations, they're a place of last resort that unfulfilled citizens go in the hopes that a bus that can take them to a desired location type shows up at some point.

    And to answer my own question: they do seem to just teleport home when they finish a task, they don't gather to be brought back. That's another unintuitive thing coming from Cities: Skylines, that traffic isn't like a back and forth sort of thing for anything but the dedicated vehicles that go through specific routes. Maybe citizens with personal cars are different? Or maybe this a mechanic hidden behind one of the settings, idk.

  • How does mass transit in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic actually work?

    So I get that it's not like in Cities: Skylines where it's used for pathfinding by people traveling around and instead is like "people go stand at the sad and unfulfilled person station in the hopes that a carriage will arrive to take them somewhere they need to go," but what happens then? They have an "I would like to go do a job at the job factory" travel goal and an "I would like to go shopping" travel goal, but do they also have an "I would like to go home" goal or do they just teleport back home after doing a task?

    Do I need to coordinate them returning home or just being delivered to places they want to work and shop?

    Edit: for that matter, how does refueling work for trains and busses? Do they just autonomously seek out fuel stops when they need to, or do I need to micromanage that somehow? Scratch that, I just watched a bus go to a gas station unprompted, through I'm still unclear on whether trains will find a fueling station or if they need to be routed through one.

    9
    Dr. Disrespect apologizes after sexting minors with epic bacon swe*ring
  • Why is it that men who get the tinniest taste of wealth and power open palm slap the "become a pedophile" button?

    I think it's because it's not distinct from the typical predatory and pathological sexuality that a lot of men are socialized into, and how entrenched the infantilization of women is in misogyny in general. They already see women as lesser beings to be owned and used as they please, and have internalized the idea that wealth entitles them to do this and protects them from consequences, so it's a simple matter to expand their range of desired victims from adult women to teenage girls.

    And that phenomenon is everywhere in American society and has been deeply entrenched for longer than anyone today has been alive. It's an integral part of American patriarchy and it's only in the past couple of decades that there's been any serious - or at least successful - effort to stamp it out.

  • Three Ideas to Beat the Heat, and the People Who Made Them Happen
  • Ah yes, three "experimental approaches": a grift, another grift, and the barest minimum dose of states actually maybe doing some fraction of the established and time-tested method of actually addressing the problem.

  • The US is cooked. It really is.
  • I prefer habeneros or brazilian starfish peppers (those in particular are great - I grew some one year and they were basically the perfect pepper to slice up and add to a pizza) myself. I really need to start growing hot peppers again.

  • The US is cooked. It really is.
  • Pineapple covers two (sweet and acid) of the four major flavor-carrying categories (sweet, acid, salt, and fat) and cooks up to have nearly as much of a sort of substantialness as cooked tofu or meat does. These characteristics make it mesh neatly into basically any dish and allow it to serve the same role as a wide range of other ingredients as long as one's cognizant of what it's adding and what the substituted ingredient would have added.

  • The US is cooked. It really is.
  • "Hawaiian pizza" is mid because of the ham, and also because it's usually like unripe frozen or canned pineapple. What you want are slices of fresh pineapple on a pepperoni pizza with onions and chopped garlic. Oh, and fresh basil leaves underneath the cheese and pepperoni to protect them from the heat - the onions and pineapple on the other hand go on the very top so they get the most intense heat.

  • The US is cooked. It really is.
  • pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping, you should be mocked and shunned from society.

    Americans will wash their food down with straight corn syrup but cry if some fruit touches their savory dinner treats.

    The correct answer to "will adding cooked pineapple to this dish improve it?" is always "yes, that will always improve everything whether it's a burger or curry or pizza or soup or rice."

  • Thoughts on spirit ashes in Elden ring?
  • Yeah. Then for the ones that don't, you just use the dragon communion seal to cast stone of gurranq until they die.

    Or at least that was the go-to when I played through. I'm going to start a fresh playthrough on the current patch, as soon as I can manage to kill the damn grafted scion in the tutorial again. I did it on what went on to become that arcane whip character back then, so I just need to shake the rust off and get back into the swing of the game now.

  • Thoughts on spirit ashes in Elden ring?
  • as a strength user seemingly was impossible to do anything without a not strength build.

    A strength build in elden ring is kind of hardmode in its own right. You get some really strong options for some bosses, but you're still generally stuck with slow melee weapons that you basically have to already know a fight very well to use. I went into it the first time with an ultra-greatsword build and did mostly fine up until reaching some of the later bosses, while my second playthrough I went arcane with dual whips and just rolled everything without trouble.

    Which makes me wonder if the game was intentionally balanced around players using them for every boss fight.

    It definitely feels like it. The game actively pushes it in your face and says "here use this," they're a frequent reward for clearing dungeons, and there's even some quest content that requires you to use them to make things happen. They're not mandatory, but they seem like the expected choice. Especially since there's the tradeoff that they make bosses more erratic and rarely do all that much on their own - they're a force amplifier when used right, but it's easy for them to make a fight harder and then die without contributing.

  • NPR journalist experiencing ai heresy
  • I remember trying it for some very basic TTRPG campaign prep

    When I was GMing I really liked GPT-2 for just churning out some nonsense to fill in unimportant details on the fly while just riffing on ideas with my players to build sessions. Like sometimes I'd have a good idea for a run, and other times I'd just ask the players what sort of run they want and workshop ideas with them till we got an idea we liked, then I'd (openly) get some stilted and bizarre blurbs from GPT-2 to give a little backstory and flavor to that.

    But that was also relying on how flawed and weird GPT-2 was and how well the absurdity of its gibbering meshed with the tone we were setting. I feel like if one were to try to use chatGPT for the same thing it would just be dull instead of producing entertainingly absurd nonsense.

  • This is currently the top post on r/stablediffusion: some dipshit animating corporate logos in the most creatively empty and vapid way possible using AI, as a hobby

    As a bonus it's set to like the most generically safe corporate music possible, too.

    Fuck you just know he's doing it like that in the hopes of getting attention from businesses and getting hired to make shit like that for them, that's why it's such empty and pointless bootlicking.

    Added horror is that for the foreseeable future this is gonna be the new face of corporate branding, until it starts to be seen as vulgar and archaic and cycles back to stark minimalism after another decade.

    15
    "Ok as promised, made a Waifu-Tamagotch prototype, 100% powered by offline SD."

    This isn't the most egregious shit I've seen from the SD community, but goddamn if it isn't some of the highest effort pure-cringe shit.

    5
    The stable diffusion subreddit is being flooded with low effort AI generated meme post and its causing a big controversy with its users lmao

    Here's one begging the mods to curtail all the AI generated slop in the AI slop generation sub.

    Another post asking how to filter out all the low effort memes, and another providing a link to hide them.

    The meme in question is also some vaguely racist riff on the weird facebook spam pictures, focused on an african child making things out of garbage.

    It's just really funny the bitter fighting that's happening between "don't ruin this useful informational sub with the literal fruits of its efforts" !wojak-nooo people and the !soypoint-1 "lol lmao slop machine go brrrr" !soypoint-2 trolls.

    1
    Diegetic Materialism - applying dialectics to expand on the idea of Diegetic Essentialism [effort post] [also kind of a bit]

    So by now we probably all know about the concept of diegetic essentialism (tl;dr: treating a piece of media as if it were a whole and complete thing that exists in and of itself within itself when analyzing it, instead of only what the author actually shows), and we can see that it's both a real phenomenon that both fandoms and critics do a lot to the point that it's something that needs some level of criticism.

    Now, as the essay itself says, diegetic essentialism is a part of how media is consumed and parsed, and I could describe it as a sort of object-permanence for fantasy where you have to assume and work with the fact that a story isn't and can't go over every bit of progression in detail and so you have to assume that things are happening in the background, the character is still there if the camera pans off them or they aren't mentioned by name for a paragraph or a page, etc. So its point is more that it should only be a part of the actual act of consuming media, and you shouldn't do that "remembering that stuff off screen is there and stuff is happening offscreen" thing when analyzing a work to try to divine exactly what "really" happened offscreen in the fictional story.

    With the release of Starfield, it became apparent that this is an incomplete perspective. For anyone who is not familiar with that, Starfield presented a high-tech, "utopian" society of space-car-brained fascists of several flavors, none of whom know what a phone is, and where despite having functionally limitless resources everywhere you look 90% of the population are either unpersoned homeless people you're legally allowed to hunt for sport, or the footsoldiers of one petty warlord or another. The official, explicit author explanation of the setting is that it's cool and good, and that it's a hopeful and aspirational future. The horror is all whitewashed and toned down, and internal criticism of the nightmare dystopia it's created is extremely weak and soft.

    Naturally, the fanboys do diegetic essentialism to imagine how it actually does work and is as nice as it claims to be, handwaving over all the fascism and slavery to unironically do the liberal thing that Vonnegut mocked in Player Piano about how even the poorest members of society have fancy consumer goods that make their lives better than those of kings (which in Starfield's case they're inventing from whole cloth, since there aren't fancy consumer goods and no one even has a phone). Now we could just say "this is vapid and horrible on its face" and leave it at that, but that makes for a weak criticism and forgoes a chance to pick apart the brainworms that went into its creation.

    It is for that exact purpose that I synthesized Diegetic Materialism as the answer. Because sometimes one does have to engage in diegetic essentialism to analyze a work, but this should remain grounded in material analysis. That is, if one is treating a work as real inside itself one's focus should be on how its internal cause and effect flows, what the material underpinning of some facet of it is and has to be. Effectively applying worldbuilding and character building criticism to better understand both the author and the work itself - characters should have motivations and backgrounds, setting elements should have causes and histories, and in the absence of these what one can reasonable infer should make sense or at least not betray the author's brainworms.

    For example, the UC in Starfield: it's literally just Heinlein's Starship Trooper fascists, uprooted and set down in a context where they make absolutely no fucking sense. It's a highly militarized, elitist society ruled by a military junta and massive corporations, which locks personhood and rights like "owning property" behind military or civil service (and in a step beyond even Heinlein, there isn't even voting for citizens, the state is simply a self-enclosed military and bureaucratic hierarchy). Despite this, there's neither a reason for any of it nor dissent, nor do they do any of the things that would be required to sustain that system. They're a clean, happy, cosmopolitan society that preaches tolerance and peace and has social welfare programs, while the non-citizen class either lives in rental units in peaceful slums out of sight and there's no need for brutal enforcement or peacekeeping, or they're outcasts you can legally hunt for sport and no one thinks there's anything weird about this.

    It's nonsense, and it gets more nonsensical the more you look at it because there's no cause and effect: why are the happy, tolerant, very concerned about social welfare people locking personhood behind military service? Why is there no dissent to any of this? Where is the conflict between the corporations and social welfare programs? Where is all the violence and immiseration that this society would require to sustain its militant and corporate hierarchy? Its diegesis makes absolutely no material sense whatsoever. Hence why it was the inspiration for "diegetic materialism."

    Tl;dr:

    Thesis: being a dumb nerd who does diegetic essentialism to divine unwritten details about a work.

    Antithesis: saying that's bad and you should stop.

    Synthesis: employing diegetic essentialism as a tool to let you apply materialist analysis in criticism of a work.

    4
    One of my formative memories is when as a kid I'd fallen and hurt myself, and my father tried to impart some New Age meditation bullshit on me to teach me how to process pain and overcome it

    He said something like "focus on the pain, let it turn into water and wash over and away from you," which, in retrospect, isn't actually that bad of an outlook once you understand it, because noticing, understanding, and accepting pain is a pretty good way of dealing with minor injuries (like I splashed my hand with boiling oil 6 months ago and can still see the scar from that, but at the time I just kept cooking and ran it under cold water when I could step away for a second, and my response was to laugh about it and use it as a lesson to be more careful in the future), but goddamn is it the dumbest and least useful shit to tell a kid with a skinned knee.

    Anyways I thought of this because of that other post about hot peppers, because eating lots of hot peppers is what actually taught me how to accept and process pain, since once you've got that capsaicin soaking into your soft mouth tissue literally the only thing you can do is accept it and relax until the pain fades out.

    6
    Yeah, there's a terrible demon inside me that I DO CONSTANT BATTLE WITH for everyone's sake. Its personality is BENDER from FUTURAMA except it MEOWS that one SKRILLEX SONG.

    Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow! Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow! !meow-bounce

    Meowowowowowowow, Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow! !meow-bounce

    0
    Bit idea: Blueanon's Clues: "Look, another clue from blue! It's a Denny's receipt with a funny looking clock drawn on it. That's not how you draw a clock!"

    "Looks like there's something written on the back of it. It says 'Trust the plan, Jack. Patriots in the, uh, the thing.' Wow, that's a relief! Remember to voooooote!"

    0
    Hexbear started not loading at all in firefox on linux, but does in chrome, and it does in firefox on windows. Anyone have a clue what's going on or how to fix this?

    Twitch is the same way, but youtube is working fine. Hexbear loaded correctly when I first installed this distro, then it just stopped working the next day without anything being changed.

    I remember seeing someone else mention a similar problem a while back, but I couldn't find that post when I tried searching for it.

    13
    After playing with stable diffusion for a week, these are my conclusions. First of all, 90% of the stable diffusion community should be gulaged, at least. [CW: mentions of pedo shit]

    From the grifters, to the chanlord fascists, to the pedophiles, to the people whose only crime is just being too cringe, the community is a toxic morass that is completely unsalvageable. And the creepiest part is how it's all just beneath the surface, hidden in plain site. For example, if one browses checkpoints on civitai you'll inevitably run across galleries showing off how well the checkpoint can do porn in one image, and then the next image will be a SFW picture showing off how well it can generate children, with the creator saying something like "remember to add words like loli and child to the negative prompt when generating NSFW pictures just in case," in the description.

    Then there's this absurd gem from a wildcard collection that I poked through to learn how wildcards work (turns out it's literally just a list of options broken up with newlines; and dynamic ones are the same but can be nested until no wildcards or dynamic prompt syntax remains). But before you click this spoiler, I want you to imagine what race.txt contains, really think about what an AI guy would put in there, then see how close you were:

    british czech european french german hungarian icelandic irish italian jewish polish portuguese russian [russian:japanese:0.3] spanish swedish ukrainian welsh That's right, it's 100% weird euro brainworms splitting hairs between flavors of european, and one context switching prompt that switches from russian to japanese 30% of the way through generation to make sure that the one non-white entry starts off white. Not sure why he even bothers, since most of the checkpoints are so overtrained on white women that they will always spit out extremely pale figures regardless of what the prompt says.

    .

    Second conclusion: stable diffusion itself is actually a pretty fun toy, as long as you ignore the community. Fighting with it to make it not suck is an engaging challenge, and hitting the generate button to see if you've succeeded is like pulling a slot machine lever. Learning how to control this inscrutable eldritch machine is indisputably fun, despite everything around it.

    Third conclusion: stable diffusion is fucking terrifying, and at this point is actually good at what it does with modern checkpoints. SDXL is obviously a step up, but even SD1.5 has been refined to the point that it's starting to lose the obvious tells as long as it's used right. The state it's in now is absurdly different from where it was six months ago and almost unrecognizable from where it was a year ago.

    Fourth conclusion: stable diffusion is a horrifyingly addictive skinner box that mainlines psychic damage directly into your brain. It's an infinite gacha machine that you pay for with electricity and time instead of microtransactions. It's like introverted doomscrolling. It's so captivating that it's consumed almost every waking moment of my life for the past week, and I've only escaped by sequestering it onto a linux partition and breaking my stable diffusion install on windows in a way that would take a conscious effort to fix while trying to optimize it.

    Fifth conclusion/summary: stable diffusion is a cognitohazard being actively shaped by the worst people alive, and there's no solution in sight. There was some faint hope that Nightshade could slow it down, but so far the buzz around that seems to be that it actually improves the models because its concept poisoning introduces noise that prevents overtraining while still helping to refine it, but then that's coming from the stable diffusion community so that's unreliable info at best.

    Still, the fact that something open source and completely uncontrollable has become as good as stable diffusion already is and that there's every indication it will only continue to be refined and improved on is almost a relief, compared to the alternative of it being exactly the same but also the private and fully enclosed property of corporations run by the literal worst people alive. I really can't help but take some solace in the fact that open models are competing effectively with the proprietary ones, and may even win out. I sure as hell don't want see those OpenAI ghouls come out on top, because even if most of the stable diffusion community is irredeemably awful at least some it is just sort of cringe.

    21
    Redditor, eagerly sharing his AI slop: "I love the look of Rockwell mixed with Frazetta."
    old.reddit.com I love the look of Rockwell mixed with Frazetta.

    Posted in r/StableDiffusion by u/Usual-Technology • 686 points and 173 comments

    I love the look of Rockwell mixed with Frazetta.

    The other day I jokingly referred to Starfield's aesthetic as "what if all old pulp sci-fi art had all been drawn by Normal Rockwell," and I fear that lathed into existence a type of guy who is really into making that nightmarish what-if a reality.

    He's not even the only one, either! (NSFW)

    "I really wish weird old sci-fi/fantasy art was more focused on manifest destiny, togas, and middle aged men who stare vacantly into the distance."

    !speech-r !i-think-that

    I guess this isn't the worst kind of AI art guy, but at the same time I'm immediately very sus of anyone who actually likes Norman Rockwell and immediately associate them with the author of Made in Abyss who cites Rockwell as a huge inspiration for him.

    7
    Me, a fool: "All this cyberpunk and sci-fi about computers being inscrutable machines with a mind of their own was just boomers getting frustrated with a command line UI in the 80s."

    Actual techbros today: "Alright so we've figured out that if you ask the inscrutable machine to do a good job and recite the rote chant of praise and you ritually beg it not to do a bad job, this increases the chances that the literal nonsense it spews forth from its inscrutable depths will be usable. Also we're using this to make the internet completely unusable by any but the most dedicated and well trained, by competing for ad dollars with our mountains of literal nonsense."

    3
    Still can't get over how Starfield is beat for beat just Mass Effect but without the stakes and with even less style or purpose.

    Like seriously, let's look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who's about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what's going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.

    In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who's decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there's an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that's buggy as absolute fuck.

    Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being "so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they're just big dummies they don't know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!" thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid "so yeah it's all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing's going on here and there's nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!" which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.

    63
    Redditor asks "Best AI girlfriend app??" and commenters eagerly provide every possible horrible opinion they can have on the matter.
    old.reddit.com Best AI girlfriend app??

    I've tried some before but it's a little slow to learn and I'm not too keen on paying a subscription especially if the ai isn't able to hold a...

    Best AI girlfriend app??

    I don't even want to sift through it to find the worst highlights. It's just a mix of treating this as a completely normal question and incels gibbering every possible horrible take they could have.

    20
    Redditor asks "Are we entering an age of sorcery?" Comments say "yes."
    old.reddit.com Are we entering an age of sorcery?

    “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke As AI/AGI develops further to possibly create stuff...

    Are we entering an age of sorcery?

    >Using a simple text prompt I can immediately generate any kind of image I want. It’s not that much different than a wizard casting a spell.

    >Yeah, especially if Q* and other AIs can be based in mathematics so it can invent new things that actually work.

    >Even a simple LLM is a window into the Jungian collective unconscious at time of training, but nobody seems to talk about the philosophical implications of what we have right now.

    >The Age of perfect robo wives.

    >For normal humans yes, for those that merge not so much.

    >There’s websites showing how you can build technomagick circuits with batteries and leds and sigils / potentiometers. I don’t know how it works or if it does but there’s a lot on it. Lucifer Faust shamanic technomagick is a book that teaches you actual magick devices you can make I believe.

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    If you had a button of horrifying cosmic power that did insert ethically suspect thing for dubious payoff, how enthusiastically would you push it? main

    Turn every living thing on earth into a catgirl? Lmao sure.

    Every building is now a cactus of an appropriate size and shape? Sure, why not.

    Give me complete ontological power over creation? Hell yeah.

    Drag the very stars from the sky to fall upon us, releasing us from hellworld? You can not imagine how hard that button is getting slammed.

    A deathnote that only works on redditors? Not a button but sure, sounds fun.

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