Checking 2 boxes out of 4 from the Libertarian dream
The 2016 trouble were triggered by the murder of Harambe. Is it possible that the 2024 trouble were triggered (escalated, really) murder of Peanut and Fred?
My dad still swears it was the red bull and snickers and not the medical ...
Wild that someone would think the Red Bull and Snickers are doing it directly without going through the some-ingredients-in-these-products-are-affecting-your-body route.
If this applies to you, please read the tips in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/
From a certain point of view - isn't this exactly what happened here?
I often go into a Git worktree of one of my projects and mess around a bit to try something out. If I find it's not working, I tell git to discard the changes with git checkout . and git clean -df. What I'm saying is exactly “on second thought, don’t do anything" - while what happens in practice is that Git restores all files to their HEAD status and removes all the new files that are not already in HEAD.
Of course, the difference is that I already have all the work I want to keep under source control, so these changes I've discarded really were that - just changes. He, on the other hand, "was just playing with the source control option" - so these "changes" he was discarding really were all his work. But Git did not know that.
I mean, considering how many times villains have tried to poison the city's water supply - I'd say there probably is.
So we're going back to silencing them, except instead of going after these people themselves you want to go after the channels they use to spread their words. This is what I meant when I said "creative limitation". Instead of treating the principle of the freedom of speech as the broad imperative protecting the spread of ideas - even ideas you don't like, especially ideas you don't like - you interpret it in a narrow technical fashion so that you can find ways around it.
People will keep having kids even if most of them will die
"even if"? Biologically, knowing that most of your offspring are going to die is a reason to have as many kids as possible.
I think you've misinterpreted the picture. These are supposed to be domino bricks. "trans rights" isn't the first brick because it is the most important - it's the first brick because it's the first that's going to fall.
but we shouldn’t be giving all ideas privileged platforms
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it's his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word "news". Which... I don't think is going to be very effective. They'll just do this whole "we can't call ourselves news because the government doesn't want you to know what we are going to tell you" shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.
How did you manage to mix Putin into this one?
I just got clickbaited by the new Twitter logo
Encountering one of these embedded tweets in a blog post, my hand instinctively moved to click the X and close it. That took me to the website.
Could this be a clever ruse to generate more visits? Is Elon Musk actually more cunning than we give him credit?
Looking for a value fine-tuning tool
I have this idea for a certain game development tool, but before I start another side project I want to check if something similar already exists.
An important part of game development is fine-tuning numeric values. You have some numbers that govern things like character motion, weapon impact, enemy AI, or any other game mechanic. For most of these there is no "correct" value that can be calculated (or even verified!) with some algorithm - you have to manually try different values and converge to something that "feels right".
The most naive way to fine-tune these numbers is to have them as hard-coded values, tweak them in code, and re-run the game every time you change them. This, of course, is a tedious process - especially if you have to go through long build times, game loading, and/or gameplay to reach a state where you can test these values (that last hurdle can often be skipped by programming in a special entry point, but that too can get tedious)
A better way would be to write these numbers in configuration file(s) which the game can hot-reload - at least while in development mode. That way you can just edit the file and save it, and the game will reload the new values. This is a huge improvement because it skips the building/loading/preparing which can drastically shorten the cycles - but it's still not perfect because you have to constantly switch between the game and the configuration file.
Sometimes you can use the game engine editor to tweak these while the game is running, or create your own UI. This makes the context switches hurt less, and also lets you use sliders instead of editing textual numbers, but it's still not perfect - you still have to switch back and forth between the game controls and the tweaking interface.
Which brings us to my idea.
What I envision is a local fine-tuning server. The server will either update configuration files which the game will hot-reload, or the game could connect to it via WebSocket (or some other IPC. But I like WebSocket) so that the server could push the new values to it as they get updated.
After the server deduces the structure of the configuration (or read it from a schema - but providing a schema may usually be a overkill) you could use its webapp UI to configure how the values would be tweaked. We usually want sliders, so you'll need to provide a range - even if the exact value is hard to determine, it's usually fairly easy to come up with a rough range that the value must be in (how high can a human jump? More than 5cm, less than 5m). You will also decide for each slider if it's linear or logarithmic.
The server, of course, will save all that configuration so that you won't have t reconfigure it the next time you want to tweak values (unless there are new values, in which case you'll only have to configure the sliders for them)
Since this would be a server, the tweaking of the values could be done from another device - preferably something with a touchscreen, like a smartphone or a tablet, because tweaking many sliders is easier with a touchscreen. So you have the game running on your PC/console, gamepad in hand (or keyboard+mouse, if that's your thing), and as you play you tweak the sliders on the touchscreen until you get them just right.
Does anyone know if a similar tool already exists?
Does it make sense to use a narrative scripting language for scripting the silent parts of world progression?
Narrative scripting languages like Yarn Spinner or Inkle were originally meant for writing dialogue, but I think they can also be used for scripting the world progression even when no dialogue or even narration is involved.
Example for something silent that can be scripted with a narrative scripting language:
- When the player pulls a lever...
- Move the camera to show a certain gate
- Open the gate
- Move the camera to show something interesting behind the gate
- Return the camera to the player
Even though no text nor voice are involved here, I think a narrative language will still fit better than a traditional scripting language because:
- Narrative languages describe everything in steps. Scripting languages will need to work a bit harder to generate steps the actual game engine can use.
- Narrative languages have visual editor that can help showing the flow of the level as nodes.
- The interface between a narrative language and the game engine tends to be seems to tend to be higher level (and less powerful) than the one with a traditional scripting language.
On the other hand, flow control seems a bit more crude and ugly with narrative scripting languages than with traditional scripting languages. It should probably still be fine for simple things (e.g. - player activates a keyhole. Do they have the key?), but I wonder if a game can reach a point where it becomes too complex for a narrative language (I'm still talking about simple world progression, not full blown modding)