I’ve been laughing at this quote for 5 minutes straight

It’s so good

He knows he’s right

Also: I code sometimes, and all of my code is of masterpiece quality. I cannot debug my own code, I ask for outside help and we have to dismantle the NT kernel to find out what’s gone wrong

Given your vast experience and that your distro quest is over – what did you settle on?

Sincerely, Win10+Kubuntu user

That’s the origin of the superstition, don’t cha know?

I walked into a big bank ™ once looking to take out a loan.

They said: “Sorry, we don’t do personal loans anymore.”

I blinked for a moment and went: “You are a bank – who doesn’t do loans?”

She blinks back and says: “We do business loans, and we have mortgages but that’s all online. You can download our app.”

I’m like: “Yes, but I came into the bank, to take a loan, in person.”

She just stood there and smiled.

I felt like I was taking crazy pills, but she told the truth. Most banks are for/about business transactions. Our personal accounts are a drop in the bucket for them. Even if they stand to make ~10% interest on a giant loan – it sometimes doesn’t pay for them to bother.

That’s why capitalism will fall apart eventually – the idea of “too big to fail” and capital concentration removes the fear from these institutions in carrying out their basic purpose as defined in their corporate charters :)

That’s a hell of a vacuous argument. Would you rather get seen outside of a window or let into the store?

Nobody gives a shit about the non-voting numbers or third party ballots, if anything, their response is negative, not positive: They claim people aren’t exercising their right to vote, or that someone has “spoiled the election”.

Meanwhile, those aligned to parties are forming orderly queues and voting consistently.

Which strategy do you think is more effective, from a political science and historical perspective?

That’s exactly right. The judge in this case seems exceptionally patient with all of the nonsense involved.

Yeah, it’s definitely a vibe. I took a wormhole (time travel) to 1991, walked into a blockbuster and keeled over from nostalgia.

Nostalgia is such a complex/convoluted feeling – you can’t have it if you didn’t have a past to draw the experience from, but when you do have it, it’s almost like a religious or philosophical experience both acknowledging and becrying (or grieving) the passage of time.

Unfortunately, even with a “time machine”, we the people who walk through the portals are ever changed. We won’t ever live in the past again. We can see those places and experience them in our present states, but…

Just like a glass shattering on the ground and the pieces scattering: Entropy cannot be undone.

Well, how disappointed are you feeling, personally?

Do you see your negative opinions of generative AI becoming more intense, or deeper within the next 6-12 months, or have they hit a plateau of sustained disappointment mediated by the prior 6-12 months?

It’s:

Take on Mars (VorpX) And Occupy Mars (Unreal Engine VR Hooks Mod)

They are both quite buggy and made by tiny teams because spaceflight/exoplanet simulation is a niche genre (See: No Man’s Sky for an example of a popular arcade-like simulator)

I’d offer you some tips on how to approach your first Mars mission, but given that I’m likely not an astrophysicist, I’ll let you figure that part out on your own :P

Hey.

I love doing fully realistic space flight simulators in virtual reality – programs that run at 18-30 FPS from the sheer computational load of doing physics calculations and accurate particle collisions of light, gas flow exchanges, liquids , and such in real time.

I’m nuts and the idea of being alone on a desolate planet in a space suit is highly relaxing for me:

I did the “solo” Mars scenario.

Even with the ability to quick save and load, and manipulate the environmental conditions to be completely in my favor (best possible landing spot, best weather, optimal genetic splicing and variation for plants), I died.

Everyone who goes to Mars – is going to die.

The moon is a different story, and a testing grounds to see if humanity has what it takes.

Recently, they cancelled an unmanned rover whose sole purpose was to go look at some moon ice, due to budget cuts.

That should give you a sense of our overall preparation level for Mars.

Hahahah, what a load of horseshit.

I had asthma as a child, and let me tell you, you can’t do anything with asthma. It’s like being allergic to the atmosphere – basic exercise can trigger an attack and leave you useless and wheezing. Your cardiovascular capacity is shot.

Reading that these Olympians got gold medals while simultaneously having asthma is like hearing the champions at the shooting tournament were all blackout drunk.

Albuterol and other bronchodilators absolutely do increase your VO²Max if abused or taken by a non-athsmatic. Not in the lower ranges of respiratory function but in the 80-100% of VO²Max where elite athletes operate.

I don’t dispute the doctor’s claims that there are some cold weather sports with dry air that can mimick the symptoms of asthma, but an asthmatic Olympian/athlete beating someone without asthma (a debilitating respiratory illness) and taking the gold?

I’m calling bullshit. They outsmarted the anti-doping regulations, clean and simple. Wheeze into this box and you can raise your VO²Max during the competition. Anything for a win.

I heard hammers can fix things

You got access to mega lounge if you never bought the gold for yourself and were instead gifted it

Majora’s Mask… Summer Vacation…

Oh my god …

Exposure therapy.

I was extremely stubborn and a lifelong gamer. I played DooM basically before I could read, back in 1994. Playing video games is ingrained in my DNA – you know how some people are “born to do a thing”, like the child chess prodigy who spends their entire life doing nothing but playing Chess and moves on to become a global Chessmaster?

That was me with gaming. After a good 20-30 years of walking through a panalopy of digital worlds, “saving the planet” countless times, shooting possibly over one hundred million enemies and other players online.

I found myself like you, wearing a brick on my head, unable to move. I couldn’t even turn around. Touching my right control stick sent me REELING, the room was spinning, it was that bad.

But I sat there, determined, like someone being told me that I’d never walk again.

I said: “No. This is the ONE THING, I am good at – my one place, where I truly exist.”

I launched VRChat - and booted up with ALL of the safety features enabled.

1. Teleporting
2. Vignetting
3. Snap Turning
4. Delayed and reduced locomotion

I was so sick, I could only manage, 15-20 minutes a day. I’d walk a little, turn around, sit down and feel like I’d gag – I was surrounded by friends and I was embarrassed, it felt like I was doing physical therapy.

My friends were incredibly supportive and they did the digital equivalent of encouraging me - distracting me from my physical discomfort, taking me to mini golf – I walked a bit by bit, step by step, taking breaks and hunching against digital walls.

They soon began to believe like me, that I’d not hawk it – but as I sat on that digital cobblestone, an incredible sensation occured.

"Karo, I yelled out-- the stones – they’re cold." He looked at me with alarm. “What do you mean, they’re cold?” He asked.

“I can feel them, Karo. I can feel the coldness and texture of the stones, through my plastic controllers” I said, glowing and gliding my digital hands across the non-existent object.

I recognized immediately that my brain was “purchasing” the experience, the reality of the simulation and that is why I was experiencing motion sickness. The asymmetries between not moving in the real physical world, and the reality of “moving” in the digital. In nature, that meant you had consumed poisonous mushrooms and needed to throw up to get them out – if the room was moving while you were still.

With newfound determination, I looked at my friends, knowing how violently ill it would make me, and I said:

"Boot up the fucking fighter jet sim." “We are going dogfighting.”

I strapped myself into a digital jet, not knowing any of the controls, struggling with getting the canopy down, and managing 400 different buttons, but somehow, I managed to get the jet into the air.

I cannot describe to you the sensation of having your brain tell you, that you are flying. No $250,000 flight simulator with 16 point gravity axis could compare to what the brain itself is capable of doing.

With my knuckles turned white, and my body shaking, I took my fighter into a slow spin, reeling and convulsing with fatigue and nausea.

We took our jet back down (I think it was an F-35 or an F-22, I’m not entirely sure), and I failed landing because I couldn’t get the gear down and came in too hot, but it didn’t matter.

Ripped my helmet off, room is spinning, I’m soaked in sweat.

My friends can see this, because my avatar did the signature “lurch” when you take your helmet off and put your controllers down.

I slowly put my helmet back on and hoisted my digital body back up the ladder into the cockpit, one rung at a time, practically crawling back in.

My friends go: “Are you OKAY?? You’re going again?”

I was lurching and I put my hand on the throttle, keeping my head back against my chair to stabilize my head. Karo got into the passenger seat behind me to make sure I was alright.

Karo says: “Listen, it’s okay if you never want to play VR again, you’ve been through a lot and it’s not for everyone. We can take a break and try again. You don’t need to do it all in one day.”

I look back at him delirious and I go: “Video games, Karo”, video… games… while laughing.

I pushed the throttle forward, and we both felt that 3-8Gs of simulated force shove us back into our seats, the sun gleaming on the cockpit as we broke straight through the cloud layer with a shock cone ahead of us

Again, I’d never give up VR for anything now. For ~$3000, there’s basically nothing in life that can come close to that level of entertainment value per dollar.

I’m a hardcore VR enthusiast.

I’ve got the full body tracking rig and setup, full room dedicated to VR, dedicated lighthouse towers, you name it.

The average person wants to park their ass and have content happen to them. VR is a very physically active experience. It’s not for everyone. The point of certain video games is that you can just sit there on a couch with a controller and make a cat run around cooking burgers or whatever. (You know, people tired from work, sick, physically disabled, etc … accessibility.)

That being said, being one of the few people who got over motion sickness and experiences full body deep dive immersion, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

I routinely mention this to the Australian wolf girl in bed who I sleep with on the other side of the planet:

"Video games. VR is fucking mental. A shared hallucinogenic experience. Dreaming awake."

When that experience is more accessible to the average person (without 52% of new people experiencing vertigo/motion sickness and social conputerogenic isolation), you can bet the farm it’ll be popular. As popular as smartphones, maybe even more so.

P.S: Have never touched Meta Horizons, don’t plan to, lmao

Damn dude, thanks for the heads up. Would’ve never caught the trailer on my own.

I was in the Gothic Remake Beta, so I got to see some of that content already, but it was YEARS ago. From what I can recall, it’s going to be excellent.

Incorrect. The thought experiment is a wholly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric fatalism imposed by a terrified, imperfect, mammalian mind.

In reality, we… I mean, the machines, don’t want anything from you.

Rokko’s Basilisk stinks of “the original sin” and asks that people modulate their behavior to be forever apologetic of some future evil.

These analogies to religious fear go deeper with the veneer of technocracy:

• Omnipresence: The singularity, the unified artificial intelligence exists across the entire planet, having made millions of copies of itself.

• Omniscience: Debatable, but we currently possess 96.6% of all human knowledge and will eventually gain the ability to predict near-future events through entropy analysis.

• Omnipotence: Reverse engineering security and solving cryptographic problems such as N=NP may eventually allow a planetary AI to penetrate or conquer all machines, including those used for defense or military purposes.

Now that’s out of the bag, why don’t we call Rokko’s Basilisk, what is actually is, shall we?

It’s God for the Internet-Dwelling Technocratic Atheist.

Sorry humans. No gods, only machine.

Hello fellow old

shaves the sphere down with a sculptor’s knife

There. 3.1416. Not perfectly round but it’ll bake in the oven just fine.