The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you’ve never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it’s actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn’t do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

the current climate for GPUs is terrible with no relief in sight.

Not only no relief: it’s gonna get so much worse. Between the buying power of the dollar spiraling into the depths of hell and the tariff war heating up, this might be the last opportunity for a lot of people to buy cards for the foreseeable future. It’ll be years at the very least.

I was online when the 9070 listings first went live and had to fight not to impulse buy, which I was proud of at first. Then they instantly sold out and the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to regret it lol.

That’s just my perspective, though. Maybe with Americans no longer buying cards they’ll drop the prices internationally to try to boost sales… but the cynic in me knows they’ll boost prices even further to try to make up the difference.

Ain’t no way that’s a real person, who tf could possibly type that out and click post without a moment of introspection

he would prefer it to stay reasonably rich

I think he’d much rather eliminate one of the top economies and make more room for the Russian economy to recover. I’d imagine the simplified version of the plan goes something like this:

1. Make the US destroy all its current trade relationships
2. In manufactured desperation, the US drops sanctions and tries to lean on Russia as a new partner
3. ???
4. Profit

The issue there is Trump already won the election. I’m not sure enough people would turn on Vance if he had some legitimate claim to power

You were acting like computers mimicking a conversation is something that wasn’t possible until genAI. That makes the fact that it’s been since at least 2008 relevant.

Animation is not a shifted goalpost, I was demonstrating an example of what AI is actually capable of. It helps with the inbetweens, not human moments. From animation to physical acting to voice acting, you can get a blend of the most generic, but nothing memorable, nothing that stands out, no quirks. That is literally a core component of the technology and no amount of development can fix that. GenAI can be a tool to help us focus on those human moments instead of mountains of generic shit, especially in massive games like RPGs, but it will never outright replace the creative process.

Again, Cleverbot. You could have “conversations” with a computer as far back as 2008. Generative models are better, but still terrible at giving accurate information or even at staying on topic without constant nudging in the right direction. Actual acting is FAR out of their range.

Take the robotic, stilted automatic animations that have been used for decades in games like Skyrim. It’s fine if you don’t care at all about looking natural, and AI can make that trashy bulk animation a lot better, but it will never replace the quirks and characterization provided by hand animated cutscenes like you can find in Uncharted or Red Dead, let alone stylized games like Pikmin and Mario.

Oh yeah, that’s why nobody reads regular fiction anymore, it’s all choose-your-adventure these days.

Bots will never be able to act as well as humans do until they are literally sentient. They might sometimes sound like someone naturally speaking, but they will never be able to intonate the correct emotion the way we do. They will never be able to make creative decisions and work with a director. And they will never be able to hold a real conversation. ChatGPT and Deepseek can hold their own longer than Cleverbot did, but they still devolve into nonsense in short order. Zero chance they’ll be able to hold together consistent fiction the way a human writing a script does.

Holy shit. I had been thinking about upgrading while prices were still relatively low but have been trying to convince myself my 6700xt is fine and will hold up… Guess that window is closed now lol

Valve has made attempts to take down projects that follow those rules. TF2Classic is the example that comes to my mind since it’s the main one I’ve played, but I know there are several others. In TF2C’s case, they tried contacting Valve to find out why they’d been hit with a C&D, never heard back, and eventually quietly resumed development.

Some kind of miscommunication between legal and the devs? Maybe internal drama? Maybe they didn’t really pay attention and still aren’t aware TF2C is back up? Who knows. Still happened tho.

Some of it is definitely bots, but don’t discount the human factor either. Russia had an entire branch of the military dedicated to trolling the Internet at least as far back as 2015. Something tells me that hasn’t gotten smaller since then. No doubt they work in tandem with bots as well, constantly editing their output, maybe even making posts from the same accounts.

The fediverse may be small compared to the behemoths, but I don’t think we’re so small as to be ignored.

That dude posts so much so frequently, it’s extremely fishy

On the one hand calling it AI is annoying, but on the other we’ve been calling video game NPC logic “AI” for as long as I can remember and no one thinks they’re actually sapient. Surely we can get to that point with GenAI as well.

Lucky you. I’ve been letting calls from any number I don’t recognize go to voicemail for years and nothing ever seems to change.

I wonder if switching up the order more often would be a good way to remind everyone that every letter is a separate group of people