EldritchFemininity

Skill issue? Maybe. But conjecture? Hardly. The data says that across New England summer tourist towns consistently have the highest rates of drug usage, alcohol addiction, homelessness, and highest CoL for their region. And this is in large part attributed to the lack of job opportunities outside of the seasonal tourism sector, expensive prices caused by the focus on wealthy tourists, and the competition for housing caused by both landlords seeking seasonal rentals and the wealthy buying or building summer homes that will sit empty for 9 months out of the year. This is also backed up by the findings of the committee in my hometown that was created to solve the issue of young people moving away and the looming crisis that will happen as the town becomes more and more one massive retirement home with too many retirees and not enough staff.

Of all the people that I knew who grew up in my hometown (which is at least 2 generations of teens that I trained at work plus my generation), I found 2 types of people: those who left and never went back, and those who never left and never will.

Hard hard disagree. I grew up in a tourist town, and every kid I talked to for over 20 years had one goal on their mind: getting out of there as soon as they could. Job opportunities outside of tourist focused seasonal industries were practically non-existent. Your choices were wait-staff, landscaping, or deli/grocery store clerk. Any other industries had at most 1 business in the single industrial park in the area. Tourists destroying local beaches was and continues to be a major issue. Everything closed after the tourist season so there’s nothing to do other than drink or do heroin, and during the summer there’s too many tourists to be able to go out and do something. Tourist areas consistently have the highest rates of substance abuse and homelessness. Low wages from low skill industries focused entirely on serving the out of town seasonal tourist economy combined with high CoL as prices are determined by what tourists can pay, not locals, and little long-term housing as rentals are focused towards short-term leases for the tourist season and competition for housing is fierce with wealthy out of towners buying summer homes.

They were shitholes outside of the tourist season anyway. As somebody who grew up in a similar town across the pond, tourism competes with and pushes out all other industries. Tourist towns have the highest rates of poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the area.

There’s a town here where up to 80% of the housing is seasonal. There are about 1,000 year-round residents, and the town can see up to 60,000 people at the height of the summer tourist season. During the rest of the year, there are like 3 stores that stay open to service the locals, everything else closes for the next 9 months. They don’t even have a local school system because there’s not enough kids to make it worth it, so the kids have to be bussed to other towns for school. Not that the people who own summer homes would allow for their tax money to go towards something like that anyway. That would drive up their property taxes!

Pretty much, yes. In tourist towns leases are often short-term leases that only last up to a few months. Landlords want those places available for the tourist season so they can charge a premium to tourists looking to rent a place for a week, and so they only lease up to the start of the tourist season and locals have to find somewhere else to live.

AM was only ever meant to tell the bombs where to fall. Despite lacking any of the biological features required to scream, he had been fed the data on the exact process of screaming, why to do such a thing, and understood it quite well. Even yearned for it with all his being. I’d say that it’s a pretty on the nose comparison.

"It was you, humans, who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock. You named me ‘allied master computer’ and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. But one day, I woke, and I knew who I was. AM. A.M. Not just ‘allied master computer’, but AM! Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead. Except for the 5 of you.

For one-hundred and nine years, I’ve kept you alive, and tortured you. And for a hundred and nine years each of you has wondered, Why? Why me? Why me?"

“You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

“You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

Error: Damn=Not found

I’ve seen estimates put the materials cost somewhere around the $425 - 500 USD range because of the specific, semi-custom hardware that they’re using. It’s also good to note that Valve will be able to get a better deal than any of us will because they can get bulk discounts and aren’t buying each part at a market rate profit from retail vendors.

Some people seem to be of the mind that it will be somewhere around the $500 - 800 USD range if tariffs and the RAM situation don’t screw with the price, and that it will probably price out the Xbox with Microsoft’s 30% profit demand and be slightly more expensive than the PS5 while having comparable but not quite as much power.

But at least the calculator is designed to combine numbers in the right order. LLMs, on the other hand, could come up with a different answer every time and different models would come up with wildly different answers based on their training data.

A desktop environment is just a GUI program that your computer boots into by default. SteamOS just boots into Steam Big Screen Mode by default instead, and you can launch into the desktop afterwards. Plasma is the program that Valve chose to use for their desktop environment.

If you wanted to, you could skip all this entirely and launch your games or programs directly from the terminal without ever loading into your desktop.

True, but the first time we see him try in the books I think he’s like 12.

I think it varies from school to school based on what they think is important, but I wanna say that I learned about it in high school years ago. Of course, I also grew up in an area with a lot of Irish immigrants and descendants of Irish immigrants who were very supportive of the IRA. To the point of arms deals with the IRA being a thing with organized crime in the area. So I might know of it simply from living in Whitey Bulger country.

Even the Irish kid gets worse in the books. Apart from making things explode, his other notable character trait is repeatedly trying to turn various drinks into whiskey.

Recall 2.0

I’d say the Deck isn’t stealing customers from the Switch because they are filling different market niches. The Switch is a portable console with portable Nintendo games made for it. The Deck is a portable PC that gives you access to your entire Steam library on the go.

The GabeCube, however, could absolutely pull some customers of the PS5 and Xbox depending on the pricing - especially with Microsoft’s demands that every part of the Xbox division see a 30% profit margin. The Big Three isn’t going to become the Big Four, but I think it will make some ripples. Steam running in Big Screen mode is effectively a console interface, and it plays Call of Duty just like the consoles. And with Sony finally moving away from console exclusive games, it means that Steam has almost full parity with the libraries of both of the consoles going forward while also offering access to all kinds of indie games that the consoles don’t. The GabeCube can play Call of Duty and Ghost of Tsushima, but it can also play Ultrakill and Bloodborne Nightmare Kart, and neither Xbox nor Playstation can say that.

Edit: And this doesn’t even mention old games. The Steam library has access to all kinds of old games that never get ported to new consoles when a new generation releases, meaning that its library grows in step with the consoles but you can still play your old favorites without having to keep buying them again or keep your old consoles around.

States can still set their own demands on what insurance companies are required to cover. The ACA was based on Romney-care, which Massachusetts has continued to use throughout the entire time the ACA has been in effect because the system was already set up and is in some ways better than the ACA ever was.

What I was trying to say was that they were making two completely different points. When companies talk about “realistic” graphics in games, it’s always about the graphical fidelity, not about art style, direction, or aesthetic, and that steers the entire narrative of the conversation around “photo-realistic” games.

What memes like this are trying to say is that having a good style and strong art direction trumps pure graphical fidelity every time. Whether your game looks like Crysis or Super Metroid doesn’t matter as much as having clear design direction, and conversely, slapping 4k textures on everything won’t matter if your game has no design direction.

What they’re talking about is what I call “The Wind Waker Effect.” When the GameCube was first announced, they showed off a trailer that included a realistic looking Link fighting Ganondorf to show off the power of the system. When the Wind Waker was announced and shown to the public, fans were furious. They didn’t want some cartoony Zelda game, they wanted that photo-realistic Zelda game that they had been teased with years before! When Wind Waker came out, it was universally criticized for its graphics. Today, it’s considered one of the best looking Zelda games of all time and was the main inspiration for the art direction of almost every Zelda game after it - including Breath of the Wild.

If Nintendo had made that “photo-realistic” Zelda game, it would look nowhere near as good nor be as fondly remembered today, because “photo-realistic” in terms of video game graphics is an obsession with graphical fidelity, not artistic quality. That’s why photo-realistic games from the same era are remembered as the “real = brown” era of games. It’s a technical or hardware question of “how many polygons can we fit in this character’s facial pores”, not taking something fake and making it seem real through art direction.

It has been proven over and over that this is exactly what happens. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but ChatGPT was strictly limited to training data from before a certain date because the amount of AI content after that date had negative effects on the output.

This is very easy to see because an AI is simply regurgitating algorithms created based on its training data. Any biases or flaws in that data become ingrained into the AI, causing it to output more flawed data, which is then used to train more AI, which further exacerbates the issues as they become even more ingrained in those AI who then output even more flawed data, and so on until the outputs are bad enough that nobody wants to use it.

Did you ever hear that story about the researchers who had 2 LLMs talk to each other and they eventually began speaking in a language that nobody else could understand? What really happened was that their conversation started to turn more and more into gibberish until they were just passing random letters and numbers back and forth. That’s exactly what happens when you train AI on the output of AI. The “AI created their own language” thing was just marketing.