Khrux

To add to that, if weight loss peptides like Ozempic are working, let them work.

My mother, in her late 60s is obese. She was forced to retire early due to this, she has had lifelong self image issues due to this, and she’s very aware that it’s both robbing her ability to enjoy her later years, and years of her life. Until this year, she was staunchly against taking Ozempic due to potential side effects, but the reality is that the side effects of Obesity are so much worse.

For an analogy, there is a lot of evidence that the quantity of people who need to wear glasses has increased because in infancy, children are not looking at distant objects, and irreversible damage is occurring to their vision as a result. Of course this is something we want parents to consider in how they realise their children, but it would be monstrous to then deprive that person of glasses because the fault is societal.

Everything on your list is the equivalent of encouraging children to exercise their eyes, and is absolutely the best way to treat obesity, but medication should be considered as a treatment beyond this.

Yeah, it’s pretty acceptable in any activity where those with interest in it are predominantly of one gender, because the sample size inevitably biases them to win.

I often think about the surprising accurate assumption that many women in game development are trans women, sometimes used in transphobic rhetoric, but there is an obvious through line between people who are socialised male but feel out of place ending up in less social, online hobbies (coding and gaming) due to that blend of expectations and ostracization.

I’m a teacher and it’s pretty obvious from a young age how almost all gendered skills are entirely that way due to social expectation.

There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.

There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.

When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.

In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.

I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.

That’s exactly it, we expected better. Regardless of if one likes his music or hates it, he’s built a brand on being a decent human being. Basically every story of him before this week has been one of positivity, I’m pretty sure his rider has always been something like a glass of water and packet of crisps, he’s donated a lot to good causes and generally stood up for those who need it.

Billionaires are parasites on society, and Kraft is the kind of man who influence global politics and facilitate ethnic cleansing to line his own pockets, and nobody is surprised by that.

Sheeran showed that the moment anything is on the line, his entire brand of kindness can be bought. I actually believe he thought he was making the non-decision in this, but that was clearly motivated by a desire to keep his brand out of a situation that is basically a for-profit genocide.

Unless he gets up on stage tomorrow’s show and makes a statement with some balls, his entire persona dissolves, and that is his brand. Sadly we all know he won’t.

Day 100 of me mistaking this guy’s tweets for Edward Snowden until after I read the tweet.

As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.

These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.

I’m close to a similar point, my PC has been Linux for a couple of years but my old surface book has been on windows 10 (with some 6 year security update thing that was mentioned during the time Win 10 was dropped).

The main reason I haven’t dropped it is that I sometimes use it for work or uni, so compatibility and other people being familiar has been a priority but I’ve graduated and got a work laptop so it’s probably time to drop Windows outright.

I’m actually pretty lukewarm on the Witcher franchise. I’ve read all but the most recent book, tried the show for 2 seasons, and played all the games. As much as people hype this franchise as some sort of rival to A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings, it absolutely falls short.

That said, the Witcher 3 specifically deserves all the love it gets. I actually boycotted it for a few years after release because the graphic downgrade it had after the early gameplay trailers came at a time of extreme manipulation of this sort from other studios, but eventually picked it up with both DLC in a sale, approaching it with a lot of cynicism.

Not only does Hearts of Stone tell what I’d consider the best witcher story, Blood and Wine is a fantastic post-game to the franchise in its vibrant pageantry romp through a riviera; it’s just a happy environment to end Geralt’s story in.

I would consider myself a Lord of the Rings fan, I’ve read the books maybe 3 times through and read The Silmarillion once.

I forgot the ring makes people invisible.

In the film, we see the ring shrink to Isildur’s ring size when he hold it, and it remains that size when Déagol finds it, after thousands of years without a carrier.

If you put it on a chicken, it is also gonna get really small, like chicken fingers small.

I’m not sure if this is a pro or con.

I forgot Gemini was an LLM and thought this was hate for people born May 21st - June 21st, that they are dumb due to trepanning.

It is my first distro where I’m not dual booting to Windows.

I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.

Don’t worry, they make them look like people as a silly game, we’ll be chased down the street by drones.

I played and modded Skyrim at the wazoo back in the day too, and haven’t touched it in a decade. It still holds a really special place in my heart in a worldbuilding and lore space that nothing I’ve played since, newer or older has sated quite as strongly, including other elderly scrolls games.

I’ve just started replaying it, as there is basically an entire story’s worth of high quality expanded mod content to explore, plus the original game has faded to a point of re-enjoying it. I’m probably going to introduce my partner to it with my own riff on the Gate to Sovngarde modlist.

The thing is, I don’t care for the next game. I have no trust in Bethesda to make something that scratches the itch that Skyrim did, I don’t expect it to be moddable in the same way looking at the creation club, and I literally expect it to be an objectively boring game.

If I want more of the elder scrolls experience I fell in love with, I have it in the old games.

I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.

I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.

TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.

I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.

That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.

Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.

Funnily enough I actually have Firefox open by default whenever I boot up my PC.

I have no taskbar or desktop items. I always default to a specific workflow of pressing the windows key (or whatever we call it for Linux), and searching for everything. I have since early windows 10.

I realised that 90% of the time, I was opening Firefox, so now it just opens. I have a pretty minimal toolbar setup for it, so it’s basically just an address bar that automatically focuses when I start typing.

One day I’ll set up something where I have multiple search hotkeys for web search, file search, application search, music etc, that will sort of replace this.

27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.

I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.

Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.

The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.

I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.