This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

• upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
• related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
• a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.

One of the reasons UBI games are trash

I parsed that as “universal basic income games” and was really confused. Ubisoft makes more sense

I found the solo play of both Remnant games really unsatisfying. Slow pacing, uninteresting enemies. Is it much better with friends?

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.

I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.

Maybe I spend too much time here because I knew what that was before I clicked it

This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.

But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.

You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names

I bought a couple games on epic when they were cheaper. I don’t think I’d do so again.

• the client isn’t as good. It’s slower, the way it paginates your games (I got a lot of free ones) is annoying. It really wants to show you store stuff
• less (zero?) Linux support
• don’t think it does the game recording steam does
• I don’t think it has the remote play together steam does

There’s probably other stuff I’m not thinking of. It’s just not as good a service.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.

They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.

The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.

one of the original developers recently came out and said it was a huge mistake: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/elder-scrolls-4-oblivions-level-scaling-was-a-mistake-says-designer-so-why-is-it-in-the-remaster

In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)

Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

I recently reinstalled BL3 for a bit and I think I spent more time downloading it (like 100gb for unknown reasons) than I did playing it.

The pacing is bad. Too much walking around or listening to people talk, not enough doing stuff.

The itemization is kind of bad. Like yeah there’s millions of guns but most of them are trash, and looking through a dozen to compare [damage, clip size, reload speed, etc] in that fucking awful UI is tedious.

The gameplay is kind of bad. Most things don’t really react to being shot. It’s just shield and HP sponges.

They haven’t really changed much since like the first game launched in like 2009. That’s like 15 years. Still basically the same game.

It’ll probably sell a bunch of copies because of the brand, and a lot of people are low information, but I don’t think it’ll be good.