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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’m hoping they finally figure out the tutorial balance in Wilds. Earlier games had next to nothing for tutorials, and you pretty much had to look outside the game to even understand the basic movesets of the weapons, much less how things like skills work. I think they overcorrected with the recent ones though, it’d be nice if they could get a little better about introducing information in the world instead of constantly stopping the action to make sure the player sees it.

    But yeah, absolutely do not use the OP armor, you’ll only ruin your fun and then have a really hard time once you get to the real fights. The main reason to use it would be to power through low rank if you’ve done it on another platform or something.











  • Temperature is not the problem. No climate scientist has ever worried that plants won’t produce well in higher temperatures. Acting like they’re ‘exploring the consequences of climate change’ is a smokescreen, it’s a way of making it seem like the fears are overblown. They’re testing a hypothesis with an obvious conclusion that’s somewhat related to global warming, while conveniently ignoring the things real scientists are actually worried about.

    The fears come from the other effects of rising temperature and greenhouse gasses. Most of the real scary stuff is happening in the oceans. Things like the potential for massive amounts of algal death and the loss of potentially 60% of the oxygen creating organisms on earth. Plants are gonna grow great when oxygen levels drop to 15% and people have to wear breathing masks anytime they venture to the surface.

    We are absolutely not a hardy or fast growing species. It takes years, for our children to be remotely self sufficient, and over a decade to reach sexual maturity. We have a similar growth pattern to elephants, outside of whales, we’re some of the slowest growing animals alive. We can’t survive extreme temperature swings, radiation, loss of oxygen. We’ve created things to overcome our physical mediocrity, but those things can very quickly disappear for most of the population when the infrastructure supporting global shipping and manufacturing collapses. The fact that we make up such a huge portion of mammal biomass mostly just means we’ll be a great food source for whatever bugs evolve to eat us. Keep in mind that we may be about 30% of mammal biomass, but livestock make up more than 60%. That’s not because they’re small and adaptable, it’s because they’re food.

    This is a ‘transition period’ on a geologic scale. We’re talking about the next 50,000 years at best, it’s not something we’re just to ride out and things go back to normal.


  • Because higher temperatures aren’t the problem, the rate of change is. I assume the worst because we’ve seen it before in the fossil record. The best comparison is the Triassic-Permian extinction. Rapid change in temperatures led to global ecological collapse and the death of 85% of all life on earth. Now, during the Triassic-Permian extinction CO2 levels rose from 400 ppm to ~2500 ppm over the course of ~50,000 years, with an estimated rate of change of around .05 ppm per year. We’re starting out lower at 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, but we’ve already hit 420, and we’re now adding about 2.5 ppm every year, with that number increasing every year. So we’re currently experiencing warming that’s 50 times faster than the most devastating extinction event in Earth’s history.

    The fact that our entire food industry is based around genetically engineered monocultures is just another point of failure. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse to continually keep each generation of plants protected against changing diseases and pests, and because the vast majority of the seed is coming from one company, if something does adapt to overcome the engineered defenses, it’s devastating to the entire global population of that crop.


  • Look at who funded that study, and the actual contents.

    According to this study - funded by the Chinese government, the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions on earth - we’ll see increased plant growth in the short term under controlled warming. Even ignoring the incredible conflict of interest, the fundamental assumption of the study is that we’ll be able to get warming under control and stick to the goals of the Paris agreement, maintaining only 2 degrees of warming by 2070. That’s absolutely absurd. We’ll be incredibly lucky to not hit 2 degrees of warming by 2040 at this rate. Besides that, they are essentially just looking at how plant growth responds to changes in temp and CO2. Of course plant productivity increases with higher temps and more available CO2, that’s not where the problems come in.

    The problems occur when those hardy, fast growing species start really exploding. Cyanobacterial blooms that deoxygenate massive swaths of the ocean, killing millions of fish at a time. Population explosions of pests, contaminating food supplies and starting future pandemics. The ecosystem is complex and interconnected, things will adapt eventually, but the transition period will be catastrophic.

    We are not a hardy, fast growing species. I have no doubt that people will survive, but it’s going to effect everyone, and a lot sooner than you think.







  • But having that tracking shown to you has a very powerful psychological effect.

    It’s pretty well established that increasing penalties for crimes does next to nothing to prevent those crimes. But what does reduce crime rates is showing how people were caught for crimes, making people believe that they are less likely to ‘get away with it’.

    Being confronted with your own searches is an immediate reminder that the searcher is doing something illegal, and that they are not doing so unnoticed. That’s wildly different than abstractly knowing that you’re probably being tracked somewhere by somebody among billions of other people.


  • “Most of the time, when people ask me a question, it’s the wrong question and they just didn’t know to ask a different question instead.”

    “I’ve tried asking ChatGPT “How do I get the relative path from a string that might be either an absolute URI or a relative path?” It spat out 15 lines of code for doing it manually. I ain’t gonna throw that maintenance burden into my codebase. So I clarified: “I want a library that does this in a single line.” And it found one.”

    You see the irony right? I genuinely can’t fathom your intent when telling this story, but it is an absolutely stellar example.

    You can’t give a good answer when people don’t ask the right questions. ChatGPT answers are only as good as the prompts. As far as being a “plagiarizing, shameless bullshitter of a monkey paw” I still don’t think it’s all that different from the results you get from people. If you ask a coworker the same question you asked chatGPT, you’re probably going to get a line copied from a Google search that may or may not work.