xhieron

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] xhieron 5 points 9 months ago

They decided to sell access to the content in exchange for user information, thereby forcing human readers to choose between surrendering privacy or using other means to access the content, all in order to make up purportedly for a perceived slight by bots. Maybe their motives are pure as the driven snow--and it's their content, so they can wall it off however they please--but I'm confident you don't genuinely mean to suggest that this measure will stop the content from being scraped and fed to LLMs.

[–] xhieron 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Datawalled. >(

[–] xhieron 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

A pretty dress?

[–] xhieron 10 points 9 months ago

That's a game of legal Russian roulette I wouldn't want to play. Eventually he's going to rip off the wrong person, and in the meantime all his victims have the option of sitting on their claims (SOL notwithstanding) to find out if he ever makes any money.

[–] xhieron 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

It's a broad generalization, but it's not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people's mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I'm not, I ain't, but never I amn't--and in real speech "I ain't" is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of "gonna" away instead of the second, so "I'm 'na head to the store; y'all need anything?"

The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you're reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says "let's go" to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you're doing a Mario impression.

[–] xhieron 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't know that company personally, but at a glance it appears to be a for-profit corporation that has been the subject of litigation recently. So... not really what we need.

The funding needs to be going into public schools via taxes, not to private corporations via tuition. We need local oversight by public schools accountable to voters for all education. That company--again, at a glance--seems to be the exact opposite, and kind of part of the problem.

[–] xhieron 23 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Alternative schooling arrangements need to exist, and the pandemic really demonstrated why. They just need to be subject to oversight by the state public schools.

[–] xhieron 2 points 9 months ago

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can't be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. "Being unkillable" or "controlling this space" can't be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you're now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that's a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you'd interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can't punish a playstyle because playstyles aren't that well defined, and you can't create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There's also no energy denial in GW2, and you can't give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1's mesmer--like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don't need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs--stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have--and we need the elites to be "de-elited" so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they've taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

[–] xhieron 44 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Someone willing to pay a juror a $120k bribe is probably also willing to kill a juror who takes the bag of cash and doesn't keep their end of the deal.

Keeping the money and not keeping the deal is a no-win for the juror. Best case scenario, you sleep on your $120k with one eye open for the rest of your stressed out life.

[–] xhieron 50 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Thank you. I've had this conversation with family members way too often. They love their local chiropractor. They always leave feeling so much better, etc. I ask them what he does, what his advice is, and what kinds of questions he asks them, and everything they describe is not chiropractic. It's massage, or nursing, or physician. No wonder you love him: He's practicing medicine.

[–] xhieron 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)
view more: ‹ prev next ›