[-] Piers@beehaw.org 11 points 8 months ago

On the day it happend I watched the videos being shared by the people participating amongst each other. There were tremendously more than 200 people.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 12 points 11 months ago

Perhaps part of the reason they seem... different... to younger generations is related to the fact that there would have been a higher percentage of unwanted pregnancies for their cohort than the ones that followed.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 17 points 11 months ago

He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.

No he doesn't. He meddles and interferes constantly and convinces himself that he's adding value by doing so. That's why Neuralink is dangerous. Meta or Alphabet or Microsoft or whoever can be trusted to let the scientists and the legal team ensure there's very little risk of everything blowing up in their face horribly. Elon's little empire is constantly on the verge of an absolute disaster. I would not be remotely surprised if Neuralink messes everything up so much that it sets back brain implants and BCI's in general by decades. Purely because Elon can't just supply the people at his businesses with the tools they need then get out of their way.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As others have noted proper good quality fresh truffle is really worth it (unlike all the "it's no nicer than regular food but we've served it on a statue, covered it in gold leaf and sprinkled salt onto it off the top of a bald man's head" fancy food you can spend a fortune on.) Freshly shaved truffle is like if Willy Wonka decided to turn his hand to making the perfect savoury food experience. It smells like the most satisfying food ever and then the instant your teeth slightly penetrate the surface of the shaving it somehow seems to instantly fill every space in your head with that scent at double the intensity and your whole mouth is awash with a uniquly rich and warm flavour.

I love single origin chocolate and was once gifted a bar of Amedei Porcelana (sometimes called "the most expensive chocolate in the world.") It was, unsurprisingly, a perfectly executed bar of chocolate. Texture, balance of sugar to cocoa etc were all flawless. The flavour was delicate and perfectly balanced. It was like the most refined expression of the exact central archetype of what chocolate should taste like. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who would like to experience the most perfectly chocolatey chocolate. Personally I found that while it was a flawless execution of a straight down the middle chocolate and I am very glad to have had it, I prefer a bit more character and so my favourite bar is still the Grenada Chocolate Co 71% (which slaps you in the face with big juicy tropical fruit flavour and is overall not quite as refined as Amedai Porcelana.) Though I've not had the chance to eat either in several years so I suppose it's possible they may have changed since...

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

Because if you want professional game developers to exist then you have to be welcoming to them when they are just aspiring game developers. Kids who play lots of games and want to have a fiddle around with tools for making games are much more likely to do so if there is a way to access them that they are familiar with and already associate with gaming.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 31 points 1 year ago

Regan's administration started the war on drugs. Convicting drugs users of a criminal crime has the effect of taking the right to vote away from people who tended not to vote for the Republican party and allowed them to be legally used as slave labour. At least one member of that administration has explicitly stated that this was a strategic decision to win elections.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 37 points 1 year ago

They also allegedly killed the dogs of one of the victims in an attempt to silence her.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

Masks just aren't inherently a big deal. It's just been made one by people seeking to politicise what should be a universally accepted good (trying to stop the spread and harm of a pandemic/epidemic disease.) People have reframed it as "they" are trying to control you! So vote for me/buy my tat/give me attention and I will protect "us" from "them"! and just about everyone has been influenced in their response to this simple practical health issue in some way as a result. Some entirely buying into the message and insisting there's some insidious reason we're being asked to take simple actions to prevent infection, others simply being a little more lax in their action than they would be if there wasn't a fairly large vocal minority insisting that no action should be taken at all.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

Right ear went to working in a call centre. Left ear seems to be trying to decide if it's going to recover or not from some unaware idiot in Tesco suddenly walking up and slamming his stock cart shut right next to me. I really hope I don't end up with stereo EEEEEEEEEEEEE but it feels like an inevitable matter of time at this point. There goes the left one again....

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there's an unfun thing to do that wasn't the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn't have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.

Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.

So... Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was trying to explain this to someone a couple of days ago. This article definitely helps! I'm pretty excited to see if this is successfully verified or not and it seems we won't have to wait long! This, plus the confirmation of energy positive cold fusion within the last couple of years could really be the defining moments between our current level of advancement and a big step forward.

[-] Piers@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

I remember checking out some Ecco shoes at the mall years ago, didn’t pull the trigger as they were almost $300 but the way the construction as described to me it sounds like those could last 5+ years.

It's nearly always a false economy to try to reduce the upfront cost of footware (and a tremendous number of other things)

The Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic inequality is a famous quote about how over time the more "affordable" option is often costs much more than the "expensive" option whilst also being a worse experience.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

– Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

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Piers

joined 1 year ago