I feel like maybe there's some unexamined assumptions here. I want to agree with part of this but it's so one-sided and narrow and playacting at being shallow and sophomoric.
Anyway in the article's favour I do love a good irredeemable Shakespearean villain. Give me a vampire-capitalist and stick a stake through their heart. I love it. That said, I think the writer is just pretending to not understand how sympathetic or anti-villains might be constructed with a particular work's themes or thesis.
Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.
There are plenty of small independent publications and online journalism outlets that survive off donation drives, subscription patrons, and volunteer citizen journalists. There are even totally independent citizen journalists that report on community sources. Unfortunately, honest journalism is something that society currently has a limited carrying capacity for, but that capacity is not zero.
I think the problem is centralised "big house" journalism. I've only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn't ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There's a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.
I believe NASA ultimately had to scrap the idea, but the cloud 9 buoyant cities idea is an old one, tracing back to Bucky Fuller and Earth, and it's vastly more plausible than trying to make Mars habitable. Or even the Moon! Venus has Earthlike conditions if you exploit buoyancy to settle in the goldilocks area of the atmosphere.
Inside you are two humans. One wants to befriend every animal. One wants to eat every animal. You are named Terry.
I can't really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian...
Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.
Absolutely revolting.
I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation's team. I didn't like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a "MOBA mode" plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.
5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).
In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They've recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.
Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it's presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.
I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.
I'm not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).
Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn't mean it's good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?
I've deleted and redrafted this several times now... but am I unreasonable for being weirded out and a bit offended by how out of touch rich-and-powerful-people journalism is? Canada, like Australia, is soaked in blood. This is just public image laundry for a country with the same genocide cops and resource extraction monstrosities as all the other colonies, and I'm guessing most of the people reading a niche link aggregator aren't really the target audience.
If things like this are going to try and memory hole the crimes of a state, we should conscientiously memory hole crappy fluff pieces like this. Who's moving to Canada? Who has the ability to initiate infrastructure projects or run funding requests up the political ladder?
If nothing else, just as a personal request. I just spent a long time trying to stay calm and articulate (or relative to my original state upon reading this) because this really made my blood boil.
Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security
Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you're exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly "better" winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don't).
Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.
Yasumi Matsuno's career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.
I write a lot of spreadsheets for games I play, so adapting them into more sophisticated software is always something I chip away at. Good opportunity to learn how to implement concepts in new languages too. Right now I'm writing a Warframe simulator in Racket.
Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they're neuron-like. Saying they're mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that's a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They're both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.
Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as "resources" and "consumers" are privileged.
Not better and cheaper, but cheaper faster and worse. And that's what a lot of dodgy business care about.
I remember when I thought that Bungie self-publishing would make them less evil. But no, they've actually become innovators in being the actual shittiest company that isn't Plarium Games. Maybe they have their eyes on the top spot though? Is that what they're building up to?
According to Owncast's documentation, object storage services can be used to distribute live streams to viewers, even though it's arguably an abuse of object storage for streaming.
Can't really find documentation on this. Manual configuration is fine. Since I just stream as a social hobby, I'm looking to minimise costs.
What's the least expensive way of ensuring security like hiding my IP? Will cheap object storage suffice?
I know SteamOS is "kind of" immutable to some degree, but how's it going over on say Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE MicroOS or others?
edit: should also be clear, I'm wondering about SteamVR support too.
The first four days were miserable, but having been playing since, and also having played over the second closed beta, it's exactly what I wanted.
What does everyone think?
Looking for fourth to sixth generation console games, and old arcade and X68000 games. Saturn is out though.
Currently have and enjoy Smash Remix and Fighting Vipers 2.
Looking over my personal usage stats and my clan's usage stats; and contrasting with the community usage stats, I noticed something interesting. One of the least-used archetypes, and one rife with frames with bad or polarising reputations, is the hybrid damage buffer/CC frame. Meanwhile these are really popular in my Alliance, as we have a few stalwarts spreading the good word. (I'm doing my part for Banshee propaganda.)
I can say that the usage stats reflect a sentiment I hear a lot: "just use <purported best frame>". In this case, Nekros and Octavia dominate this particular role at 3.2% usage apiece, reflecting community belief that Octavia is the best frame in the game and renders other CCs useless. Meanwhile there is a harsh dropoff in the buffer/CC archetype after Octavia (or Nezha if you count him). The next most used is Mag at 1.5%, then Frost and Zephyr at 1.1%. After this, the rest of the archetype all have less than 1% usage.
Other support archetypes are in a similar place: the healer/buffer is dominated by Wisp, and the damage/CC archetype by Khora.
A second factor is the "death spiral". If a frame has a bad launch or a rough patch as the meta shifts around them, they seem to never shake that bad reputation. For example, year on year, even with extensive positive coverage, Zephyr sees very little change in equip time. Yareli is Turbomurder Water Nezha now, but it's still a common sentiment that she's squishy and has poor damage potential. Everyone has an opinion about Sevagoth even though nobody plays him.
A third factor, and I think another kind of death spiral, is unappealing meta builds. For example, Nyx is dominated by Assimilate builds, Banshee by glass cannon builds, Caliban's meta being a complete mess, one-button Frost and Loki builds, and so on. People don't invest into the frame because it has been typecast and the builds ossify, and if the builds aren't fun to play, nobody invests or experiments, and the cycle repeats.
So, that's my take. I'd love to hear your opinions!
Prior to Duviri, I put in some time acid testing boilerplate builds to get all my frames to scale into SP Circuit. I'll summarise the work here. I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments. Hopefully this will be of some use!
As a bonus, none of these require energy->shield mods or Decaying key, although using either or both adds an extra layer of survivability.
Infinite Scaling
Condemn helminth! Easily the comfiest and most reliable way of shield gating, as it CCs enemies and shield gates most frames in just two or three targets affected. The ability has a "soft" slam animation that has reduced priority over double jump and parkour, so casting during a double jump or bullet jump will keep you airborne. It's also a one-handed cast so does not interrupt reloads, and you can shoot mid-cast.
The important requirement is that you need to compensate range or strength on Overextended or Narrow Minded builds, or use the next helminth option.
Pillage helminth. Unlike Condemn, provides absolutely no CC, so I only recommend this on frames that have some kind of innate CC such as a slow, distraction, confusion, etc. Also a full-body cast so it prevents movement and other actions, and comes in at twice the casting cost.
Infested
The heck faction... until now. Silence helminth completely reduces them to melee, which should not be a problem with Warframe movement. Just don't get in a slap fight with any Disruptors or Toxic Ancients (or Venomous Eximus).
Silence prevents grapple hooks and Osprey clouds, as well as all Eximus casts. The only remaining mechanics are the Ancient stretch arm attack and MOA goop and clouds, but the MOA attacks do fixed low damage, so no biggy.
I just want to face tank to level 300
Health Conversion from Simaris, Arcane Blessing from Conjunction Survival, and your choice of Fractured Blast (same build constraints as Condemn) from Citrine, or Lycath's Hunt from Voruna (preferably don't dump stat Duration). Frames with inbuilt DR can go quite a bit farther than that, but even Banshee or Gyre can facetank with HCAB strats.
But I'm Inaros or Lavos
This section is theoretical, since I don't have Trickery.
Desiccate, Ophidian Bite, and Dagger heavy attacks force finishers, so you could use this with Arcane Trickery to stay invis. Otherwise possible helminths are Resonator (from Octavia), or Shooting Gallery (from Mesa) + Muzzle Flash augment.