Yeah, it’s like she wanted to avoid the Tolkien fantasy cliches but somehow ended up making it even more cliche and lame.

Looks like the current votes in this thread don’t really appreciate just how fast total permutations of large sets grow. It’s one of the few things that can dwarf that number for the total number of atoms in the observable universe.

But we’re talking permutations of sound combinations that can be of arbitrary length. Going by that alternating consonant/vowel pattern above (which simplifies it because you can have consecutive consonant or vowel sounds in words and phrases), the numbers of pairs would be 120,000. That’s less than 100,000, so for each pair in a phrase, you add 5 0s to the total possibilities. 2000 / 5 is 400. Unless I screwed something up, that means the maximum length of a query is 400 consonant/vowel pairs before you have to introduce gaps (which goes against the random noises that got responses). Halve that because it can start with either a consonant or vowel sound.

A rough estimate of the number of sounds in the above paragraph is something like 225, and I simplified my count by ignoring consecutive consonant sounds (which it is full of).

Like yeah, 10 to the 2000 is a huge number but when you’re dealing with permutations, you use up numbers very fast. A more popular counter example is the stat about the total number of permutations for a deck of cards, where they say if you shuffle it well, you probably have a unique sequence of cards that has never been seen before. Iirc, that number is within a the ballpark of the order of magnitude of that total atoms in observable universe estimation. And that’s just with 52 possibilities and no repetition (calculated by factorial, whereas sound combination possibilities grows even faster and isn’t limited to 52 options).

To put it in perspective, that’s just over 100 years out of 4.5 billion the earth has existed. Or 300 million years or so complex life existed (that mostly wouldn’t be able to fathom the core concepts you’d need to know to even understand what having an air fryer means, where I’d consider “figured out that forest fires can contain more delicious food in some places (where intensity is high enough to cook plants and animals but not enough to turn them to charcoal)” to be pretty smart). Or several million that hominids have existed and using stone or better tools. Or several thousand since we figured out how to manage our food production rather than depend on always finding it. Or several hundred since we got much better at harnessing energy.

Also, I’d push back on a) the invention date being more relevant than the mass release date, and b) early convection ovens counting as “air fryers”, so that 100 years should probably also be reduced.

Yeah, true. I mean, there’s probably some that do, some that are in denial themselves, some that think they are on the winning side, and some that think anything negative will hinder the process. The formal parts of the process itself could have been coopted by the ruling class such that therapists are trained to perpetuate the system like cops and teachers are.

I’m going to push back but only slightly, as I agree that society itself and this hierarchy we’re stuck in is the root of a lot of mental health problems, maybe even the biggest sole contributer.

But where I’ll push back is that improving your mental health is different from improving your material situation. Both are important. The latter is about survival and between the two, arguably the far more important one. But the former is about how you react to the latter.

If you’re having panic attacks each time you think about your material situation, that’s going to make it much harder to deal with that situation. If you have trouble motivating yourself to get out of bed, that probably also affects your ability to do anything about your situation. If you lose your temper to the point where you destroy objects or relationships around you, that doesn’t help either.

Or on the perception side, if you’re constantly paranoid about everyone around you to the point where you don’t let anyone get close, it can help to recalibrate your expectations or where you draw your line for not trusting others.

Or if you recognize a pattern of using or manipulating people and want to break it or figure out why you keep returning to it.

I think in regards to how society is, therapy can teach you acceptance. I don’t mean “accept that this is the way it is and that it is fine”, you don’t have to do that second part. But the first part is true: the world is the way it is and unhealthy reactions won’t punish the world or change it, nor will allowing your nervous system to go into overdrive.

Whether you want to change it or just find a place in it, you need to first accept it for what it is, for better or worse. Then when you have that foundation of understanding and healthy coping skills, you have a much better chance of accomplishing, well, anything. Note that that is relative, I’m not going to try to push BS platitudes like “you can do anything!” It’s just “if you have a healthy mind or healthy ways of dealing with an unhealthy mind, you’ll have a better chance at doing anything compared to if you don’t”.

Anyways, therapy is one potential path to that. I see therapists as guides for a journey of introspection and getting to know yourself better as well as understand how you interact with the world and find new ways of doing so. Ultimately you are the one that needs to walk that path and the destination is still this reality, just with a healthier way of seeing and interacting with it.

Fixing this shit will involve a lot more than therapy, but it will require healthy minds.

Though I also don’t think the “gee thanks I’m cured” mindset is a healthy one. While I agree that it’s easier said than done, mental health is heavily influenced by your mindset and deciding “this won’t help” can be the reason why it doesn’t. Part of getting better, an essential part of it, is deciding that’s what you want and fighting the part of you that wants to just keep going like you have been because you’re comfortable with your habits, both good and bad.

Personally you had me at “top 5 tourist destination”. That just sounds like a miserable experience.

Seance results for someone trying to make contact with someone from gen z: nothing; they let it go to voicemail. You need to use an ouiji board because they are text only.

Maybe, but they’ll patch that as soon as they notice people doing it, forcing you to slightly modify the method because they aren’t very good at their jobs, plus every now and then an update will just revert your changes for no apparent reason.

Hollow Knight (both orig and SS) and Gravity Circuit, though Gravity Circuit did end up working the 2nd time while both HK games failed to launch without error message. I see each of those games on gog.

On the one hand, I agree. But on the other hand, that leash has led to pretty bad places many times over the centuries. I’ve come to believe that there’s some truth to the “humans are kinda shit” premise of Christianity, just that sometimes it redirects that shittiness and other times it directs it (or individuals do in its name, since Christianity itself isn’t an entity).

I have no idea if humanity would be better off with or without religion. I don’t need it personally but others having it might make everyone’s lives better simply because they don’t think they can get away with some things so don’t try them.

Oh real Sherlock Holmes here deducted that Pizzacake is annoyed by some people. Did you manage to uncover her hidden stash of comics and decode the secret meanings she subtly inserted into every single one of them?

That’s if you even consider AI generated frames to be “good graphics”.

I love beautiful graphics. I’m not picky about them and don’t insist on photorealism only (Valhala is a beautiful game and uses this strange mix of high and low fidelity graphics), but I do love me some good photorealistic rendering.

I’m not interested in this “AI tries to predict the pixels between actual rendered ones”. It’s just a push towards average, like everything else big data, when it works well. And maybe this one does work well but I still dgaf because I don’t want slop frames.

And I suspect that’s a reason you don’t see true frame to frame comparisons between AI upscaling and that same frame fully rendered at the higher resolution. It’s difficult for random reviewers to get the exact same frame rendered like that so I mostly see frames taken from the same viewpoint, but you can’t do apples to apples comparisons because the scene is dynamic and things other than the camera have changed. But nvidia could generate the same frame both ways for a direct comparison but only seem to want to show comparisons like DLSS off (at low res) vs DLSS on (at high res) or different DLSS versions against each other, which I think is telling.

I don’t get how so many people roll the dice even after seeing the horror stories of how facial surgery can go wrong. Celebrities especially, where they are already doing pretty well on the attractiveness scale. Jennifer Grey had her surgeries in the 90s, so for her I can maybe understand (understand not realizing the risk, her nose looked perfectly fine to me before that), but people still get that shit done today.

It’s always sad to see before and after pics of people getting cosmetic facial surgery because the list of ones that look better in the after pic is tiny compared to the ones that looked better in the before pic, even when the surgery isn’t botched.

Like with porn influencers, best cases I usually see are ones that are still attractive despite their cosmetic surgery, while the worst cases put them deep in the uncanny valley.

This isn’t like Harambe. The way to make Harambe equivalent would be if Harambe was killed because some cop wandered into his enclosure while looking for a missing person and managed to shoot him before Harambe ripped his arms off for trying to taze him.

What’s with the “so I can play movies I own” bit? I replaced blu-rays with movies because I tried to play a DVD in the ps5 and had to switch over to the PS3 because it just wouldn’t play on the PS5. And when I tried to search about it, the results were all fucking useless talking about region locks and shit when all of the items involved were purchased in the same region.

Anyways, the question I’m asking is if you can point me to more information about how the PS5 handles (or doesn’t) movies, the rest of this comment devolved into a rant.

Part of the reasoning when I bought mine was that I wasn’t sure how much longer I could rely on my PS3 to be my bluray player, so this is extra fucking annoying. I do have an external writer that I use with my PC though haven’t tried playing anything through that or hooking it up to my PS5, is that a valid workaround or does it have to be a sony external drive, or even a PS5 specific one?

Bonus PS5 shittiness: I bought a 3rd party guitar controller because I wasn’t sure if my inability to play as well as I used to was me, the system (on my ps3), or the controller I was using. Seems to have been all of the above, aa my skills aren’t at their peak anymore but I’ve been able to do much better after getting that new controller (and fixing it up because it sucked out of the box, eg the strummer would stick because the piece of plastic was too thick for the housing… So many fucking garbage products these days). Anyways, when I was at the “system” part of the equation, I decided to buy rock band 4 for the PS4 and just take my PS3 out of the equation entirely. And yeah, it runs great, but for some reason the PS5 (and only the PS5, PS3 and PC are fine with this) will lose the connection not between the dongle and the guitar, but between the dongle and PS5. The lights show the dongle sees it but it won’t work as a controller again until I unplug and replug the dongle. Wtf. Can’t tell if it’s a bug, Sony not playing nice with a 3rd party peripheral, or the shitty controller not quite following USB spec though in a way that the older implementations can handle but the PS5 can’t.

Also it will pair with my bone conducting headphones but refuses to treat them as an audio device. And I’m considering opening up the controllers I have to take the mics out because I don’t trust them (and wouldn’t want an open omnidirectional mic anyways even if I was playing multiplayer team games, which would suck because everyone else is using an open omnidirectional mic).

Tbh, after the power went out and I tried playing games on my steam deck only to find they wouldn’t launch because… not even sure if it was DRM or because it’s set up to need to download shit from the internet. And last week I brought my steam deck to play while my daughter had a thing going on and same shit, even though I remembered to put it in offline mode before leaving. And on a flight, I had installed a game specifically to play, but it needed to download more content or some shit and wouldn’t run.

While I could probably avoid the annoyance with some sort of script or automation that just runs each of my installed games every so often on it so the DRM shit is refreshed, I am seeing that Steam is already in the bad place for digital rights. I intend to at least start a habit of checking gog for games before getting them from Steam and might start looking in to how to keep permanent access to my top games that I’ve bought and paid for, regardless of what Valve decides.

Also this renews my desire to skip any game with deneuvo, as that also requires an internet connection to validate.

It’s just a repeat of one of my earlier pirating vs using a legit copy experiences. Took weeks to get into some software at work that the company paid good money for. Then, when I wanted to use it for a personal project, I had the pirated copy running the same day the download finished. DRM fucks legit customers more than pirates.

Define “beat it”. Because I’ve reached endings in that game but wouldn’t say I’ve beaten it either.

Obvious response to drone killing lasers is a convex mirror finish, then anyone looking at the drone when the defense system kicks in could be blinded.

Why would they need an excuse? Are you implying that “war crime” has any meaning to them (or anyone else with the power to do anything about them)?