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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).

    The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.

    Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?

    Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.


  • The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:

    • is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
    • has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
    • has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
    • has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out

    These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.

    My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.

    Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.

    I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.

    I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.

    Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.


  • You’re understanding of “gig work” is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. “Jobs for teens” like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need “real jobs” and not just teens looking for extra money. So you’re wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

    Secondly, OP isn’t talking about working the carwash for the summer. He’s talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they’ve caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated “micro entrepreneurs” 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

    Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It’s a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet’s livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don’t want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.


  • Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it’s a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to “Rich Asshole Island” where there’s no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there’s also no workers.

    Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren’t necessary.

    So no, they won’t leave. They’ll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They’ll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

    In other words, they’ll do what they’ve historically always done when threatened.


  • I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South (“Silicon Bayou” is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

    But I don’t think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for “innovation” is all some variation on crypto, ai, or “being the Uber of $NICHE.” Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or “smart” and you’re all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

    The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They’ve taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they’re using the banner of “privatization” to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.





  • I don’t necessarily think the MM is intentionality going against AI, they’re just following what drives engagement and the mainstream tide is turning against AI (again, AI winter 3.0, here we go).

    However, I did see that “AI causes delusions” article in the NYT together with the very hilarious conflict of interest notice: “The NYT is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.”

    So who knows? It is entirely in the MM’s interests to both write about AI (hot topic, much engagement) and also to make the AI companies look incompetent, reckless, and dangerous because that bolsters their cases against them.




  • Two things occurred to me reading this:

    1. Huge numbers are exceedingly common, but counting particles is the wrong way to find them. Combinatorics is where the real monster hunting lies. When you start calculating complex probabilities or numbers of possible arrangements of things, that’s where the fuzzy boundary between “infinite” and “really, really, really finitely big” starts to blur.
    2. I think looking to CompSci is the right move, but I still don’t see many folks discussing comremovedtional complexity as a real, mathematical limit. We often treat two equal statements as though theres an immediate, single-step, jump between them. But discovering the equality requires comremovedtion/calculation. Shannon shows that information and entropy are the same thing. Comremovedtion is the process by which information is created. Ultrafinitist need to show that there is a finite quantity of information, which I don’t think is true or possible.

  • There are other privacy issues with having an indelible marker as to the origin and chain of custody of every digital artifact. And other non-privacy issues.

    So the idea here is that my phone camera attaches a crypro token to the metadata of every photo it takes? (Or worse, embeds it into the image steganographically like printer dots.) Then if I send that photo to a friend in signal, that app attaches a token indicating the transfer? And so on?

    If that’s a video of say, police murdering someone, maybe I don’t want a perfect trail pointing back to me just to prove I didnt deep fake it. And if that’s where we are, then every video of power being abused is going to “be fake” because no sane person would sacrifice their privacy, possibly their life, to “prove” a video isnt AI generated.

    And those in power, the mainstream media say, aren’t going to demonstrate the crypto chain of custody on every video they show on the news. They’re going to show whatever they want, then say “its legit, trust us!” and most people will.

    These are the fundamental issues with crypto that people actually don’t understand: too much of it is actually opt-in, it’s unclear to most people what’s actually proved or protected, and it doesn’t actually address or understsnd where trust, authority, and power actually come from.


  • It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?

    Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?

    Because 90% of this article is “I asked the AI and it said:” which is not a reliable source for information.


  • Sure, that’s kind of my point though. I was discussing with a friend recently what role restaurants would have in the glorious anarchic communist utopia. We hit on the notion that what we call “hot bars” would probably become much more common.

    It doesn’t make sense for everyone to cook for themselves or be deeply concerned with the logistics of food. It would be efficient for larger kitchens to make regular group meals and you go pick one up when you’re ready to eat. Something like Meals on Wheels would still exist for all the reasons you say, probably sourcing from their own kitchen or from one of the larger group ones.

    I could even see a case for group meal delivery to save time on everyone having to leave job sites to go get food.

    I guess my main point here is that I find it more productive and hopeful to imagine these kinds of futures: where everyone is working together systematically to provide convenience and support for everyone. I also find it much more believable as a possible future than rather some cottage core vision of everyone become subsistence smallhold farmers.

    (Happy cake day BTW! I hope that cake wasn’t delivered!)



  • For all the sudden word scholars here: there is no second word “master” that’s spelled, pronounced, and written exactly the same as the other one but is entirely unrelated to the concept of master\slave. All modern meanings of the word master derive from the same root: magister, meaning an authority or teacher.

    A “master recording” is the authority, the base copy from which all others are duplicated. They aren’t called “slave” copies, although the primary use of the terms in computing did originally use those 2 words. Also as someone else pointed out, you don’t even really make copies of git branches in the same way as audio so the term is misapplied.

    Main is also a bad name, unless you’re working on a solo project with only 1 main branch and some features. As soon as you start collaborating with other people, you should really have individual dev branches or “forks” (be honest, 90% of you aren’t rawdogging git straight from the CLI, there’s a forge website involved as hub) to work on, with an integration\testing “fork”\branch to combine work and a release branch for final code, with each discrete release tagged.

    No gods, no kings, no masters!



  • It’s a fair bit of work to set up, but I replaced Keep with Obsidian.

    I suppose you could just pay for obsidian sync and then basically have parity. I do not. I use syncthing to sync my notebooks (vaults in obsidian terms) between my devices.

    To get my existing notes, I used Google Takeout to get a copy of all my data, but you can just ask for the Keep data. They’ll send you a bunch of json files, which I was able to extract the text of my notes from pretty easily and copy into Obsidian notes.