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Fuck Cars.
  • They don't need to sit that many. It's not an interstate route that runs thrice a day and carries 300 people in each run. For it to be an alternative to cars you need to have lots of route and they need to be quite frequent - which means less people in each minibus.

  • J.D. Vance 'caught lying' on video about egg costs — with price tag right behind him
  • This does not make an awful lot of sense. The reasons scammers have to filter for the dumbest victims don't apply to politicians:

    1. Scammers don't want to waste resources chasing bad leads. Sending the same email (or emails generated from the same template) to huge amounts of people is rather cheap, but when someone takes the bait at some point you'll need to assign an actual person to deal with it (I'm not 100% sure this reason still applies today, since you can use AI, but it may not take you all the way and it's still more expensive than generating an email from a template) and you'd rather not waste that effort if the chances to complete the grift are low.

      Politicians don't have that problem, because at not point do they need to go one-on-one with individual voters (the bottom feeder activists may do it, but that's a separate attack vector than party leadership going on media). Having the smart voters not buy into these announcements save them neither time nor money.

    2. If someone is going to figure out the scam, the scammer would prefer they do it as soon as possible. Of course, long after the scammer is gone is even better, and not at all is best, but if they can't get away with it - sooner is better than later. If you figure it out as soon as you get the email, you'll just ignore it - and maybe delete it and/or block the address. Most people won't even try to report it, and even if they do there is usually not much that can be done. But if you figure out the scam after you've started to send them money - you are going to want your money back. You'll have more information can potentially be used to track them (like the details of the account you transferred the money to). And you'll be better motivated to involve the authorities. It's safer to filter out the people who are smart enough to do that and make them leave before they have skin in the game.

      If you figure out your politician lied to you - what are you going to do? You can't rescind your vote. You can not vote for them in the next elections - but how is that worse than not voting for them to begin with? Worst you can do is vote for their opponent - but I fail to see why a disillusioned voter is more inclined toward that than a non-voter or someone who voted to a different party. "Yes, they've ruined the country, and if I was their supporter I'd punish them by voting to the other party - but since I didn't vote for them it's not really my problem so I'll just not vote".

    3. Scammers only really need a small fraction of their potential targets to take the bait, because they'll be stealing lots of money from each such target. Having too many victims can actually be risky because it raises the chance someone will do something about them. Maybe even someone competent.

      They can afford to filter.

      Politicians can't.

      Politicians compete against other politicians, and they need a plurality to win. They don't get to be picky. Even in the USA, the number of people with more than one brain cell is enough to tip an election's result. You can't just say "I don't care about the people I can't easily fool" because these people will for your opponent. The 16% who fall for scams won't get you your victory.

  • J.D. Vance 'caught lying' on video about egg costs — with price tag right behind him
  • Yes, but a much more defensible one. To refute a lie of omission you need to present the omitted information and show how it is relevant. To refute a lie of actual falsehood you just have to present the truth and point out the contradiction.

    I'm not saying he's not a liar, I'm just annoyed by his stupidity.

  • I just got clickbaited by the new Twitter logo

    Encountering one of these embedded tweets in a blog post, my hand instinctively moved to click the X and close it. That took me to the website.

    Could this be a clever ruse to generate more visits? Is Elon Musk actually more cunning than we give him credit?

    2
    Does it make sense to use a narrative scripting language for scripting the silent parts of world progression?

    Narrative scripting languages like Yarn Spinner or Inkle were originally meant for writing dialogue, but I think they can also be used for scripting the world progression even when no dialogue or even narration is involved.

    Example for something silent that can be scripted with a narrative scripting language:

    1. When the player pulls a lever...
    2. Move the camera to show a certain gate
    3. Open the gate
    4. Move the camera to show something interesting behind the gate
    5. Return the camera to the player

    Even though no text nor voice are involved here, I think a narrative language will still fit better than a traditional scripting language because:

    • Narrative languages describe everything in steps. Scripting languages will need to work a bit harder to generate steps the actual game engine can use.
    • Narrative languages have visual editor that can help showing the flow of the level as nodes.
    • The interface between a narrative language and the game engine tends to be seems to tend to be higher level (and less powerful) than the one with a traditional scripting language.

    On the other hand, flow control seems a bit more crude and ugly with narrative scripting languages than with traditional scripting languages. It should probably still be fine for simple things (e.g. - player activates a keyhole. Do they have the key?), but I wonder if a game can reach a point where it becomes too complex for a narrative language (I'm still talking about simple world progression, not full blown modding)

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AE
    AeonFelis @lemmy.world
    Posts 4
    Comments 831