I honestly don’t know how. Any non Nintendo 3D game it’s instantly super obvious. And any game at all it’s obvious if you just try to navigate a menu with it.

They make the $10 Chinese junk alternates look amazing by comparison.

This really shouldn’t be mind blowing. It’s pretty obvious that proper planning can absolutely result in utilizing dev time effectively. There are loads of underlying technologies you’re using and you don’t have to have the next project fully planned to improve your systems and get prepared for it.

And how much money do you think you’re saving by firing people and hiring a new team 6 months later? Recruitment costs money. Hiring costs money. Onboarding takes a lot of man hours from your whole team, which costs money. And you lose all the institutional knowledge and familiarity, so you lose efficiency, which costs money.

Especially when it doesn’t even work lol.

I’m not just talking about the drift. The actual intended product is ludicrously imprecise out of the box.

It changed gaming. The steam deck probably doesn’t happen without the switch. It clearly demonstrated the market for a handheld that manages large scale 3D games with complex mechanics.

But the joycons suck at more than connectivity. Straight out of the box those joysticks are fucking terrible, and they degrade hard and fast.

He explains that “cutting-edge AI capabilities” are now available for every company to buy for the price of standard software. But that instead of building a whole AI system, he says many firms are simply popping a chatbot interface on top of a non-AI product.

Well, yeah, because that’s what LLMs can do.

We’re not near the point where it’s reasonable or intelligent to allow “AI” into the driver’s seat. There are specific spaces where machine learning can be a useful tool to find patterns in data, and you would plug that model into normal tools. There are plenty of normal tools that can be made more user friendly with a well designed LLM based chatbot.

There are not a lot of spaces where you would want an ML model and and LLM interface, because there’s just too much extra uncertainty when you aren’t really sure what’s being asked and you aren’t really sure where the underlying patterns of the model come from. We’re not anywhere close to “intelligence”, and the people selling something claiming they’re “doing real AI” are almost certainly misrepresenting themselves as much as anyone else.

I’m always skeptical of anything LLM, but this looks like an interesting use case on the surface.

Fuck everything about blocking the hardware and hardware mods, but if it’s true that he was packaging games with it, you don’t even get to any of that, because they’re probably going to get every dime he has for “selling” their games.

My point is that the “early access preorder” really just means the sale date is 3 days earlier than you’re claiming or whatever.

So if you buy it you get it before if you buy it?

That system is an even dumber one (and not unique to this game).

I wonder how much the reasonably common “being assigned this stance to write about” assignments play a role in this.

I went to meaningfully above average schools by a lot of metrics, including spending, and I still did way more “persuasive writing” assignments where I was handed a conclusion than ones where I was free to draw my own and justify it. So I was literally taught to do this and basically had to unlearn it.

Getting a date might be easy.

Is getting a date with someone who wants to do more than have sex with them a time or two?

The difference is that they can boil the frog gradually.

Traditional media tries to move people, absolutely. But a newspaper has to address the crazies and try to convert people into crazies in the same paper. If they’re too extreme, more moderate people can see that right away, and it’s easier to minimize engagement with it.

With social media, you personalize the content surfaced. You start by making it seem mostly sane, with an out there idea here or there. Then, as they start to engage with the slightly mild stuff, you move the “mostly sane” in that direction, and the “mild” moves a couple extra steps. Now, you’re part of a movement. Everyone around you is changing their beliefs, and the new ones aren’t that far off from your previous beliefs, so why not follow?

6 months later, you were always pretty left/right-leaning (cognitive dissonance, baybee!!!). But it looks like the consensus is finally shifting your way. It’s just a small step further right/left, and everyone around you is making it too. The world is changing for a better, so let’s be that change.

Having an expansion for an MMO be in early access seems super weird.

I understand the communication that it’s still not as polished as it will be once the community beats it up a little, but the nature of an MMO is to kind of pressure a certain type of player to instantly race through that content. Once it’s available, it “counts”, right? They’re not rolling back outcomes or anything? It’s live?

I don’t do much dessert any more.

Carrot cake with a lot of cinnamon and cardamom and cream cheese frosting is the biggest exception. Or just like chocolate chip banana bread.

Oh wow I just caught the dyslexia bit. The rest was so bad I just blew right past it.

Fair warning: This is complete nonsense:

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn’t believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

“Word recognition is a preoccupation,” he said. “I don’t teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.”

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

He dismissed my question.

“The purpose is not to learn words,” he said. “The purpose is to make sense.”

Cognitive scientists don’t dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can’t accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

“My science is different,” Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It’s important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there’s decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

This seems super dumb to me.

Admittedly I never had issues reading, so it’s hard to put myself in their shoes. But even still…

I started to highlight bits to cut out and highlight as the key points, but it became pretty quickly that that link already is the executive summary. It’s already basically in outline form, and a super quick read.

You don’t need to rely on the headline.

Is web of trust still a thing?

That was intended to be kind of a distributed way to determine who didn’t suck.