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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

    However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

    You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.



  • It’s hard to buy candy for yourself as an adult because you know it’s nothing but love handles and tooth decay in shiny wrappers. But if it comes into your orbit once a year without buying it, it’s tempting.

    Of course, when my kid was small he basically didn’t bother eating it at all. He’d get like 100 pieces of candy and they’d linger around until Christmas. When I was a kid we’d get pillowcases full and it’d be gone in days. Not sure if that’s a generational thing or if my son was just not very motivated by sweets.


  • The current exploit was found with AI and released (after it was found and kept secret by the original dev in the hopes of keeping GTA VI runnable) but the other infrastructure is still basically the same as it ever was. Post jailbreak, running the Linux ELF loader you’re booting a pretty standard Linux kernel and distro.

    If you’re interested in PS5 Linux, I wouldn’t let the drama over the exploit get in your way.

    That said, until it can reboot without involving another Linux machine to deliver the payload, it’s a fun trick but you might as well just buy the SoC for $250, a Steam Machine, or build a PC to have a better supported Linux flow.





  • Totally fair. I honestly didn’t like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship “in range” on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.

    Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they’d destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway…



  • There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

    The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.


  • Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.

    Economists don’t know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

    Oh shit, it’s religion again.