So they essentially hired you for no reason and then had to come up with something for you to do?

Companies and individuals play by different rules.

When a big company purchases software a team of people from both parties (whose entire job and career are based on doing this) negotiate with each other to decide exactly who is liable for what and to what degree.

When you purchase software you agree to let the company fuck you over at their leisure because you literally do not have enough hours in the day to even read everything you agree to, let alone understand it, let alone argue with it. And even if you did you don’t have enough bargaining power to make a large company care.

Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.

I mean I’m bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they’re too corpo.

I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.

This is an example of how appearance-based and feeling-based a lot of the activities of businesses are.

If you look at previous social orders its very obvious how much activity served a social function vs a real physical need related to survival. The pyramids, for instance. While there’s a bunch of things you could say about their role in the ancient Egyptian religion, and the effect of the make-work on Egypt’s economy/society, I don’t think anyone could argue that a giant pile of stones could physically help anyone put food in their belies or keep them warm at night; and when you get right down to it it seems pretty clear to me that the root cause of the pyramids is the ego of the guy in charge.

And yet there are many people who will tell you that everything a modern business does is maximally efficient. I would argue that this is pretty clearly not the case. One of the most blatant examples is dress codes and air conditioning. Cooling a large office building is not a small expense, and yet many businesses opt to have their employees wear hot suits (even their non-public facing employees) and turn down the temperature lower than it otherwise would need to be. You could extend that idea to the design of the building itself: a glass box is not the easiest thing to heat and cool. You could even extend it to the existence of the office building in general: while larger buildings are easier to heat and cool per unit area than a bunch of small ones (because of the square cube law), and there are certainly benefits to agglomeration, many office buildings are enormously tall and therefore enormously expensive (as construction costs do not grow linearly with height). Additionally, a lot of these buildings are built on some of the most expensive land that exists, which balloons their cost even more. I’m not saying that I think high rises are completely useless, but I do wonder if they need to be as common as they are, especially now that the internet exists (but lots of other people have talked about that).

Its interesting to note though that because businesses are supposed to be efficient, and the more efficient they are the better they are (more powerful, cunning, brutal, manly, etc) businesses adopt an aesthetic of efficiency. The use of LLMs is one example of this (using a new technology has the aesthetic of efficiency even if it measurably makes productivity worse) but it extends to a lot of the things businesses do. Even a lot of their architecture and industrial design fetishizes efficiency without actually being efficient, IMO.

The teeth are going to learn that sometimes life isn’t fair.

Clearly its correlated because neurological injuries cause you to want to play golf.

Even if you use an honest-to-god land line how long is the distance your call has to travel before its running on the same fiberoptic lines as the internet?

Reminds me of this video.

The author speaks directly to the reader about this:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

She laments her inability to make Omelas seem like a real place, to convince the reader that such a society could actually exist, and invites the reader to try in her stead:

But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

Finally, after some more description she again directly speaks to the reader to ask them if Omelas seems real:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

When the answer is “no” they add the detail of the suffering child, which is necessary for all good things that occur there. How exactly torturing a child results in the city’s scholars being smart or ensuring good harvest is not explained at all, and yet by some narrative alchemy the setting is transmuted from something meaningless into something interesting.

The non-subtextual point of the story is that we as a people cannot imagine even a fictional setting without injustice. The subtextual point of the story is that we cannot imagine a society without injustice, fictional or not. Just as the people of Omelas described in the last section convince themselves that the injustice of their society is necessary, inevitable, and futile to fight against, so to do we convince ourselves that the injustices of our society are the same way. And yet there is some hope offered in the titular ones who walk away:

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The author admits that she herself cannot imagine “the kind of place they’re going to”, in other words the kind of society that is not based on exploitation but is not an impossible utopia like the Omelas described in the first section, something that could exist in the real world (it seems the author failed to convince even herself). Nevertheless these people who are not her “seem to know where they are going”. This is an invitation to the reader to try to do what she couldn’t by herself: figure out how to structure such a society.

So, you can see what I mean when I say that its funny that this story that laments our inability to engage with anything but suffering and exploitation, is engaged with almost exclusively by talking about the mechanics and moral implications of the suffering that it uses as an example of this very tendency.

The funny thing about that story is that its not supposed to be some sort of moral quandary, the suffering child isn’t the point at all. And that’s not subtext, the author straight up speaks directly to the reader and says its not the point.

And yet its practically the only thing I’ve ever heard people mention about it.

I think they meant to say superfluid helium.

I mean, if we’re making up a story about a kind of demon it probably shouldn’t be a healthy relationship.

A succubus sucks your soul out through your crotch, which feels great until it doesn’t. That’s why its supposed to be a scary monster.

The post says, “until you die of natural causes”, but for a counterpart to a succubus I think it would much more appropriate if it was able supernaturally influence you to reduce your worries and make you more and more dependent on it (just as a succubus can supernaturally charm its victims). Gradually you care about less and less as you lose all motivation, and at the end you don’t even bother to struggle as your soul is ripped from your body.

This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.

It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.

To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.

I remember the days when bugs in x86 CPUs were almost unheard of. The Pentium FDIV bug and the F00F bug were considered these unicorn things.

This is the case for a lot of inventions.

The American way

nonlethal methods

Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.

Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99E01tgOGw