

I didn’t expect to like Balatro as much as I did. I’m a big fan of deck builders but the poker theme was not super compelling to me. But wow, I’ve had a blast with it. Just boils down to a really good set of mechanics and some ridiculous fun builds. I don’t think it will hold my attention as long as like Slay the Spire or Monster Train but it was well worth the price.
Thanks for confirming this, all the rage around this game is exhausting. I loved the first game, would probably place it in my top ten of all time. I have no complaints about omg actually having to traverse the world. It’s the way the game is designed to play. If there are paid workarounds to play it a different way it doesn’t affect me or anybody else who loves this kind of game.
The original dragons dogma had poor quality of life features and its arguably a large part of the appeal. No fast travel, no multiple saves. If you didn’t like your little ai character you had to advance pretty far to change it (and the same with fast travel, it sort of existed and was a surprisingly cool unique system but you had to get through a lot of the game for it). I’d compare it in a lot of ways to the first dark souls as far as not following gaming industry trends.
I was hoping dragons dogma 2 was more of the same honestly, I don’t think I care if travel stones can be purchased or whatever. Is it a bad game for those that liked the first one?
AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.
Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.
Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.
But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.
Kenji Lopez-Alt has a cool video where he uses American cheese as the emulsifier to make some less-melty cheeses participate in a grilled cheese. I have been using it more for its emulsifying agents than anything lately: https://youtu.be/CD8UTr5mMVk?si=n5xOumvtBqromQtB
If you don’t think anything unethical happens in the production of porn I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s getting better but exploitation, sex trafficking, revenge porn, etc. have been a thing since pornography was invented.
AI porn at least does not necessarily need to consider consent. Plenty of AI porn involves animated figures or photorealistic humans that don’t represent any identifiable person.
The only hang up I have is producing images of actual people without their consent, and I don’t think it’s a new problem as photoshop has existed for a while.
They’re probably losing money now and just trying to build a user base as a first-mover. They accept donations and subscriptions with fairly minor benefits, but I imagine hosting and serving sizable AI models is not cheap.
They’ll probably have to transition to paid access at some point, but I don’t see it as particularly unethical as they have bills to pay and do attempt to moderate content on the site.
I tend to agree generating adult content of real people is unethical, but probably less so than how a lot of real porn is made. I don’t think there should be open avenues for sharing that kind of stuff online, and their rules should be better enforced.
Half a trillion dollars over seventy years is nothing. How large is the waste site compared to the habitable surface? A few square kilometers is nothing.
The power needs of a small country is also essentially nothing over a seventy year span.
Nuclear energy is not ideal but it beats the hell out of coal plants, and it gives us a bridge to something sustainable. Solar has its own drawbacks and no nation is going to maintain a bunch of floating panels out in the ocean.
Hellraiser: Inferno. Producers should not have latched on to the Hellraiser franchise (I think it was a script rewritten for the purpose), but it has this cool premise of a guy entering an alternate, surreal reality.
I love the Hellraiser franchise and don’t really consider this part of it but I do rewatch this movie every few years for the cool daily-life-twisted feel.
So, kind of interesting, Deepseek spawned off of a Chinese hedge fund named High-Flyer. As I understand it, they originally acquired their H800 array for crypto mining and decided to do this as a side project.
My theory is that they knew how its introduction and later releases would affect these US AI companies, so the hedge fund engineered all of this to buy the dip.