Honestly… I kinda can. This is an extreme and unlikely scenario, but there’s a few things that make me think it’s not impossible.

A) Trump has publicly promised to back out of NATO.

B) Trump is generally very pro-Russia.

C) Trump has generally had poor relations with Canada.

If the US backed out of NATO, they’d have a lot of military power sitting idle, and NATO would be significantly weaker, as well as doubly occupied in Ukraine. Russia would certainly be interested in such a thing happening, given the strategic importance of Antarctica, and how much it would take eyes away from them. I also don’t doubt for a second that Trump would love to exploit our natural resources, especially oil, and the military importance of the top of the world. Not to mention it’d be an excuse to continue creating expensive military contracts and posturing as tough.

This is of course, mostly fantasy, but Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.

Twins can be very close, especially as a kid with no concept of twins or sense to pick out distinctive details.

My father has a twin brother who lives far away, with the most obvious difference between them that my father generally keeps a beard. One night, when my Dad shaved and came to tuck me into bed, he was met with an “Uncle so and so, when did you get here?”.

Of course now as an adult, I’d be able to tell them apart no problem, even if they did dress and style the same. I’ve observed their mannerisms and minor cosmetic marks with a keener eye as an adult. But as a young kid who couldn’t even clearly tell his own father from his twin, I find a kid being unable to recognize a chance encounter he wasn’t expecting very believable.

Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

Exactly, play by the original rules, and play aggressive as all hell. You don’t need almost any property, it’s just fine to mortgage everything but your main set, the goal is to get one very developed set ASAP.

Not only is this a pretty effective way to win (a conservative player who lands once on a very developed property is basically out of the game), it also makes the game progress much faster, especially if other players are willing to concede before the bitter end. 2 or 3 players like this, and you’ve actually got a recipe for a decent time.

Mostly art things. I’m far from qualified to speak to it as an expert, I haven’t played either version yet, but have friends who are very passionate about the topic.

I think the easiest way to explain it is to refer to this Miyazaki quote:

Most people don’t believe me when I say this, but a certain kind of refinement, elegance, and dignity are very important to me. I’ll usually tell the designers that flat-out grotesque or splatter type designs will not get past me. This has everything to do with my own personal sensibilities, and it is something that I apply to every design that I approve.

Even if you just look at the tutorial boss (I clipped a a YT side-by-side for you here), the changes they’ve made here to add detail are basically all… grotesque. Gross hanging flesh, some weird hanging nipple thing, it’s a very different interpretation of the original than what I believe was intended.

This is obviously just one example, but it’s this type of change that bothers purists. Now, mind you, I don’t think this makes the remake trash or anything, but if you’re interested in Demon Souls historically as the beginning of the Souls franchise, this kind of change is essentially revisionist history, and it’s disappointing to me that the original game isn’t also available in some way besides buying an old PS3 or emulating the game.

100%. I literally bought Echoes of Wisdom on Switch day one, dumped it, and played it in Ryujinx, installing mods to increase settings.

I have the money, and am willing to part with it, but prefer a PC Quality experience. Heck, I’d even pay more for a PC version that didn’t have shader stutter and had real PC options.

That said… I don’t expect it. Nintendo is very stuck in their ways, which has pros and cons. On the one hand, we’re getting good traditional game design, no layoffs, and no micro transactions, which is wonderful. On the other, we’re getting outdated hardware that’s just powerful enough to support their game design ideas (although we’re even seeing the cracks there now), and a diehard dedication to the old console exclusivity model.

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.

100%. I’m also honestly a bit worried about any remaster they may announce. Bluepoint did a wonderful job in many areas with Demon Souls, but there were definitely some “enhancements” that didn’t exactly match the authorial intent of the original.

Ideal world, I’d love both, good access to a high quality original, and a top-tier remaster of a classic.

Fortunately ShadPS4 looks to be saving the day here, by giving us the ability to emulate the original with patches to fix the glaring issues. Still sucks if you’re sitting there on PlayStation though.

All that said, I don’t expect anyone to touch the original officially. From Soft have moved on, and Sony holds the publishing rights. If BluePoint isn’t interested, it’ll continue to be the elephant in the room.

Eh, it’s because of what Bloodborne is, and the state of it. Improper frame pacing with a 30FPS cap, even if you bought a new PS5 to play it (because it’s not available on PS4).

A cleaned up patch for newer gen hardware to unlock it would be enough, but a remaster is more likely to appeal to Sony.

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

I think it is a problem. Maybe not for people like us, that understand the concept and its limitations, but “formal reasoning” is exactly how this technology is being pitched to the masses. “Take a picture of your homework and OpenAI will solve it”, “have it reply to your emails”, “have it write code for you”. All reasoning-heavy tasks.

On top of that, Google/Bing have it answering user questions directly, it’s commonly pitched as a “tutor”, or an “assistant”, the OpenAI API is being shoved everywhere under the sun for anything you can imagine for all kinds of tasks, and nobody is attempting to clarify it’s weaknesses in their marketing.

As it becomes more and more common, more and more users who don’t understand it’s fundamentally incapable of reliably doing these things will crop up.

30% / 0% / 70%

Dang, this full out fooled me. Concerning, I guess we’re here now. Lots to catch once you’re aware of it, but totally passed by me while scrolling, even as someone who’s well aware of AI Image Generation, even in an image that’s intentionally ridiculous.

Honestly, makes sense, the active voice version is just… more efficient and easier to parse quickly.

Yeah, I don’t think the idea is a total non-starter, but I’d definitely like some details. How will this be limited to ensure it’s not being used by investors and house flippers? How will this be ramped down once the housing market settles to avoid it being permanently “priced in”? How will this be paid for and how much will it cost?

Unfortunately American political debates right now are more of a pissing contest about rally turnout than they are about actual policy details, because that’s what sways the voters on the fence for some reason.

Honestly I really don’t think that’s effective either. Giving people more money to buy something generally just means the market will respond by charging more money for that thing. The assistance will effectively get “priced in” given time.

It’s honestly the weakest part of the Harris/Walz platform for me. Trump plan is utterly insane top-to-bottom though, and they’re just using immigration as a scapegoat here, which is… something.

Eh, you’re applying generalizations universally. These last couple weeks, I literally bought Zelda Echoes of Wisdom day one, even bought NSO vouchers so I can buy the next big game that comes out. Day one, I dumped the game from my own modded switch, and started playing it on Ryujinx rather than on my Switch.

I modded the game to change the resolution to always 1080p native, remove the double buffered vsync issue to smooth out the framerate and let VRR work, boosted LODs for better distant assets, and swapped the UI for Xbox controls. Ryujinx also let me play at 2x internal resolution, so I could run the game at native 4k.

My game looks sharper, runs smoother, and is a lot of fun to tinker with. I’ve had a blast checking gamebanana every day for new mods, or for Ryujinx patches. I love it, and I’m preferring that experience to Switch. I’m also getting fun stuff like discord rich presence, and being able to record with my GPU driver, stream my gameplay to discord, play with a controller I prefer to a Pro Controller, everything.

I’m also looking forward to tinkering with mods for unlimited echoes once I beat the game. I’m more than happy to pay for the game, but this is much more fun for me, and trades blows with the real hardware experience well enough that I’d much rather play here than on Switch.

Yeah… even worse, it appears the admin didn’t even announce it, this is just one of the developers clarifying what the admin probably did.

As someone who uses Ryujinx, I literally spent the afternoon curious about an error I was getting while updating about the build server being down “probably because it’s building a new version, check back in a few minutes”, only to find a Twitter screenshot of this linked in slack that evening.

Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role “senior full stack developer”, not because they’re particularly senior, in some cases we’re literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.

Ah, he recommends saving 1000$, then tackling your debt, then building to 3-6 months expenses. Which is… fine, I agree with the principle of it, but that number is definitely one of those things I’d consider being more flexible with. The amount I think you should save before tackling your debts depends on a lot of factors.

I also don’t necessarily agree with saving that amount in two blocks, we personally saved 1000$, paid the most pressing card off, and then saved another 1000$. I think it makes sense to adjust that minimum emergency fund number as your situation evolves.

Just another case where I find he works fine as a starting point, but where most people shouldn’t follow his advice to the letter.