I’ve been playing through the first Hollow Knight and don’t know why I slept on it for so long (but am glad I did as I get to currently experience it).

Cuboid Keeper was already on my wishlist and showed up as the cheapest game at 1.59 CAD. Notable because it currently has a 100% positive rating (though only 11 reviews). Released in 2019, too. I added the game to my wishlist because the same people (person? Website seems to suggest it’s just one guy) made Eventide Matter, a short space resource gathering/building/upgrading game.

Ah glad you mentioned that because I had the base game on my wishlist and saw it for under $2 and just added that.

But now, looking more closely, I’m a bit confused. I see the DLC bundles, but only one of the DLCs (other than the soundtrack) has a price, though the others are a mix of Free and N/A. Going into bundle details does show a price for the N/A ones but I’m just confused about what’s going on there. Are the DLCs only available through the bundles and that’s why they don’t have their own prices unless you dig a bit?

Anyways, they are all 90% off.

Though with the way valve handles bundles, at least it isn’t really an issue, whatever is going on. It’s refreshing that they don’t try to nickel and dime you and even warn you if you have a game in a cart when a bundle with that game is cheaper (because you already have the other games and it still gives you the bundle discount without needing to buy those games again).

Yeah, it was way less friction than I was expecting. It went smoother than some windows updates do (specifically the ones where they just reset settings to their shitty defaults).

Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.

Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.

Hell, even the fact that the term “African American” was invented because “black” was considered offensive. Judgement was baked right in (or at least assumed to be by enough that this somehow got popular) to using their skin colour as a descriptor.

Which then led to many people being called “African American” despite having no connection to either Africa or America.

Yeah, I got a wii U game fairly recently and panicked when I fired it up because it wanted to access the internet to look for updates. Luckily you could just skip past that and still play, but it made me wonder about the newer games that are just download codes and how they will be handled. Though I already have a good guess.

It’s annoying enough that they didn’t patch either the systems or games to not bother trying connecting to servers that no longer exist. Though now I’m wondering if anyone cooked up some home brew servers they can redirect DNS to that at least say “connection accepted, nothing new here, grey out the options that depend on this being real” if not attempt to support actual features.

Hell, even with smaller projects, you’re going to have debug cycles and if AI is driving those cycles, it will be acting as a new coder for each invocation (which happens multiple times per prompt for systems like claude code).

So you’ll get shit like duplicate helper functions, other code not using those helper functions anyways, debug code added and then not removed, errors and warnings using a variety of styles, overly verbose and redundant arguments, support for enhancements that don’t even make sense in that context, confidently incorrect assertions about what is and isn’t happening or possible, etc.

My manager wants me to make a presentation that sells some AI debug solution but the hand holding I have to do for it to actually understand and not give useless conclusions means I don’t even believe in it. Or the case where it did help, turns out it didn’t even use the tools provided by the solution and was just CC.

I’ve mentioned the cycle of being impressed with what these LLM-based systems can do and feeling like I might have been unfairly critical, and then running in to a major issue that justfies the earlier critical view. Last times I mentioned it, I said I was in the impressed (but skeptical) part of the the cycle. Well, I’m back to the “this might just be a complete waste of resources” part of the cycle.

The metaverse isn’t VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.

It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn’t solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a “I want to live in a ready player one world” and didn’t have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don’t even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).

I bet that’s just the name they entered for the organization. Does it even have to be tied to anything real or do DNS registrars just accept any string for that field?

Used game market.

I got an external one so I could access the various discs I burnt over the years. Been slowly (though not very consistently lol) ripping the data off of the older CDs and DVDs with the intent of writing some m-disc blurays. Been surprised at the lack of errors on the older discs, but the new discs should eliminate that worry. Even if they don’t last the promised 1000+ years, it’ll be a problem for future generations to deal with.

Though the quality of my former prized files is kinda shit to the point where I’m already wondering if I even really care about losing most of it. I mean I did fine without any optical drive for like a decade or more.

This is another one of the windows negatives. There’s no real standard for tools that debloat or remove the MS malware and decent chance that you end up getting more malware in the process (that might even do what it says it does in addition to installing who knows what, so it’s not even immediately obvious that it might be a good idea to go back to the “wipe storage and install OS” step. Thing could even revert some of the settings later on to encourage users running an updated version of the script (not that I think most would bat an eye at their “OS optimization script” being a thing that continuously runs and auto-updates) and it wouldn’t even be unexpected windows behavior considering how passively hostile they already are with users trying to reduce their stupid shit in windows.

Not being able to meet demand is not botching.

I didn’t say it wasn’t a privacy issue, just that those are two reasons that some would probably just accept that shit.

Just like most of us accept the spy devices we already use because they allow communication and internet access and only a tiny portion of people go out of their way to try to reduce that (though due to how cell phones work at all, you can’t avoid the simple “this is where their phone was at this time” tracking, which might be “vicinity of cell tower” or “about right here” depending on whether any triangulation was involved).

I wish statements like that made LLMs explode.

Yeah they went all in on what was at best a fancy tech demo. But it’s also kinda typical of this late stage capitalism where everything is sold on its best qualities in a way where the sellers can avoid questions or feedback about the average or worst case quality, which is absolute shit. Should be no surprise really in this world of minimum bidders who know there’s no real consequence for going over budget because it was never possible in the first place, as long as you limit the budget increases such that sunken cost fallacy kicks in. LLMs are just the pinnacle (so far) of that.

Even the AI-based AI detectors are bullshit.

Funny thing is I already thought of two angles that might make people willingly use that:

1. Sex coaches review your recent experiences and give you advice (good or bad, just like other life advice fields).
2. Proof of consent so neither party can change the story after the fact. Though the proof won’t be at a scientific rigor level so it won’t help as much as people will hope, though it probably will clear up some less complex cases and complicate the shit out of others.

Yeah, but does that site differentiate between speeding and parking tickets? In my area you can rack up any amount of parking fines and the most it’ll do is you might need to pay them off before you can renew.

But yeah, you get points for speeding past a certain amount over the limit, running lights, and other violations that concern the way you move (on public roads, parking lots are free for alls, though a DUI is a DUI even on private property).