I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.

Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.

They’d have to tear down all the tall trees in the neighbourhood to make room for the power poles. There’s no way in hell the car-centric folks who live here would approve of that!

When you walk down the sidewalk around my street you walk in the shade of these trees most of the time. Replacing those trees with ugly power poles and overhead wires would ruin the character of the neighbourhood.

They’re not just random examples for some people though. For some indigenous peoples these items are a foundational part of their cultural practices.

How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?

You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.

The commands aren’t very complicated. You’re mostly looking at stuff, taking stuff, or using items on stuff. It’s usually just [verb] [noun] type simple 2 word sentences.

The hard part of Zork is figuring out where to go and what to use where. Navigation in the game is usually by compass directions but the map is not a plain grid, so you can go north and then go west and end up right back ever you started for odd reasons. You’re highly encouraged to make your own map on paper, in addition to lots of notes about things you saw in each area.

The game even includes a maze, a reference to the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure’s “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Navigating it is a real challenge!

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

― Jean-Luc Picard

Sometimes we get stuck in local extrema. The biggest challenge facing the human race is not climate change, it’s collective action. Simply put, we’re unable to cooperate effectively enough on a large scale to be able to deal with these sorts of problems.

My city could invest billions of dollars in building a fully electric streetcar transit network and climate change could still proceed largely unabated due to the actions of other people in other areas. In that scenario, my city ends up losing because climate change happened and we wasted all that money on a system that didn’t stop climate change. This is the worse possible outcome so the rational thing (on an individual level, see game theory) to do is avoid it by doing nothing.

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There are lots of people who use public transit in my city, they just don’t live in the suburbs.

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Wow! I’ve been using the internet since 1995 and I’ve never heard of this site. Thanks! I’m actually interested in learning about mixing drinks!

Yeah and it’ll cost millions to tear up the roads and install overhead wires for the bus, just to service 1 neighbourhood out of hundreds, where hardly anyone uses public transit as it is.

You flood their market with cheap food and you put all their domestic farmers out of business.

Dumping charity on developing countries rarely works. You need to help them invest in their economy. This was shown with that micro loans paper (which won a Nobel prize).

No telephone poles anywhere near my house. Only along main roads at least 30 mins walk away.

All the household electrical wiring, internet, cable TV, telephone, natural gas, and water services are underground.

People love to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They oppose incremental progress and preserve the status quo as a result.

Kinda hard to do that in the suburbs.

If you want lowest possible cost then canned stuff is out. Buy beans and rice in 20 lb bags. Hard to beat that!

The range matters. If you’re taking T prescribed by your doctor to get within the normal range for your gender (regardless of reason, whether you’re trans or if you have T deficiency as a cis man) then you won’t be barred from competition.

Where you cross the line is when you inject T to go above the normal range in order to build muscle and recover faster. That’s what’s considered doping and doctors can’t ethically prescribe that.