It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren’t missing anything the game has to offer.

You’ve hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you’ve hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you’re likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.

That’s gonna be excruciating if you insist on “100% completing” the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you’d like to experience the whole game.

I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.

All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷

ANC is based on playing a “negative” of a pressure wave picked by the microphones in phase with the original wave.

That’s the theory, but it’s almost impossible to do in practice. Your microphone and speaker are imperfect at capturing and reproducing sounds. The phase timing is incredibly sensitive. You only have milliseconds to do the processing and generation.

That’s why practical noise cancelling relies on feedback loops. A second microphone inside captures the result of the cancellation, and based on that adjustments can be made to the negative signal. This allows you to correct for lots of sources of error and achieve quite a good result. Of course, for a sudden noise like a gunshot, by the time the feedback loop can really kick in, the noise is already over.

Bose also makes really nice ones. It’s been a while since I tried a Bose but the QuietComfort 35 II were really solid headphones. Little bit less bassy than the Sony (which is a question of taste), very comfortable, and the noise cancelling is quite good.

I haven’t tried the apple ones. Knowing apple products, it’s probably really good but way overpriced.

The noise cancellation is good for constant noises but not sudden ones.

This is kinda the nature of active noise cancellation, unfortunately. Blocking out sudden noise is just technically very challenging. Works great for airplane noise, not so much for crying babies.

Sony’s XM line is in my opinion just about the best ANC headphones money can buy, in terms of noise cancelling and sound quality combo. I can understand your point about them getting sweaty. Part one of blocking noise is good sound insulation, which tends to hold in heat as well. I live in a colder climate so that works out well for me. You could get in-ear ones, although obviously they don’t block out noise as well.

And the upside down flying is simply due to gliding mechanics, no?

Not sure what you mean by this. But planes still generate lift when flying upside down. Wings with a symmetrical curve can also generate lift. Flat wings with no curve at all can also generate lift.

Pressure differences are definitely involved. That’s the only way air pushes against things, after all, so the fact that there is a lift force implies a pressure difference. However the cause of the pressure difference is rather complicated.

Some things to think about: symmetrical wings, with the same curve on bottom and top, can fly perfectly fine. Flat wings, with no curve at all, don’t fly quite as well but with the proper angle of attack can also generate lift. Additionally, planes fly perfectly well upside down.

If this curve explanation were complete, how could those things work?

Just a mistake I think. Americans are so steeped in gun culture that when they hear calibur, their brain goes immediately to gun calibers. Autocorrect also might play a role.

When your audience is five years old you don’t really need to go anywhere with it.

Recommend looking into moissanite also if you like diamonds but don’t want to support the industry. Very similar looking, better in some ways. And because it hardly occurs naturally at all, you can only buy synthetic.

I don’t really care about the declarative/imperative thing, to me how many commands you “really need” is beside the point. This is essentially the same argument as the people who say “git is not complex because you only really need checkout/commit/push, just ignore all the other commands.” This doesn’t matter when the official documentation and web resources keep talking about the other billion commands. Even home-manager has this warning at the very top of the page that basically tells you “you need to understand all the other commands first before you use this,” and “if your directory gets messed up you have to fix it yourself.”

These are exactly the same kinds of problems people have with git.

The confusion arises because there are 5 different ways to do the same thing, the non-experimental methods shouldn’t be used even though they’re recommended in the official docs

I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but you’re kind of illustrating exactly the point I was making about conceptual simplicity and atrocious UX.

Nix has the same mix of conceptual simplicity and atrocious user interface as git, but somehow magnified three times over. I’ve tried it multiple times, but could never get over the unintuitive gaggle of commands.

Micro services always require more maintenance, devops, tooling, artifact registries, version syncing, etc.

The initial transition is so huge too. Like, going from 20 to 21 services is no big deal, but going from 1 service to 2 is a big jump in the complexity of your operations.

Might be talking about the United States specifically. IIRC the constitution denies individual states the right to mint coin or issue bills of credit, that is a prerogative of the federal government.

It’s just the hot new release of the week. Gaming “journalism” sites need to get clicks for their ad money so they pump out shitty filler articles non-stop about whatever is popular. I mean, look at this shit. Before this it was Helldivers.

That doesn’t mean energy has a weight.

No, it literally does mean that. If you put light in a box of mirrors the total weight of the box will literally increase by an amount equal to the energy of the photons. If you put some radioactive material in a theoretically perfectly sealed box from which no heat or light could escape, and weigh it while it decays into radiation, the weight will not change.

This applies to all forms of energy. A spring is heavier when compressed. An object gets heavier when you spin it, or heat it up. Sunlight hitting the earth most definitely makes it heavier. In fact, the sun hits the earth with about 4.4*10^16 watts of power, corresponding to about 0.5 kilogram per second.

The numbers are different because the site doesn’t naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single “package.”

One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking “which distribution has more software available.”