That’s a helpful perspective. I appreciate it.

I still have a lot of work on the underlying math because I didn’t put in near the effort I should have in any of my actual classes, but I do genuinely want to get over the hump.

lol the problem with Destiny is they turned it into a treadmill and stopped putting the work into character and level design.

Elden Ring can easily take more than 100 hours on your first playthrough, and different builds significantly change your play style.

BG3, similar deal. Subsequent playthroughs are probably going to be accelerated, but there are a bunch of different story choices you can make that feel different, the party members have their own story lines, there’s a special custom character called Dark Urge that’s intended for a later playthrough that has it’s own twist, and you can change the strategy of encounters a lot with different party constructions.

Rimworld calls itself a story generator because you’re going to fail and have people die and whatever, but every game plays out different, there are a good couple scenarios, and there’s expansions and mods you can add on top of that for variety.

Just the first couple that come to mind. I’m not near 1000 hours on any of them, but they all have a lot of content.

I think speculation and guesswork is perfectly fine. It’s part of a path towards an answer. However, that speculation and guesswork needs to have its uncertainty clearly indicated.

Make guesses. Speculate. But make it clear (to others, and yourself) what you’re doing so the guesses aren’t given more weight than they deserve.

All the time.

Pretty much never intentionally, though. I’m just bad at keeping up with people.

Your general explanation is all good, but it never seems like any of the platforms built for live events really have issues delivering content. I don’t think the issue is so much that streaming live broadcasts is insurmountable as it is that Netflix specifically doesn’t have their architecture managed in a way that works well with big live events. They lean heavily on having their content cached close to the end users and don’t have a lot of experience at real time.

I said it elsewhere but it felt like he meant for the final empire to be standalone, then was scrambling a bit in the well of ascension to keep the plot going.

But then some of the part I thought felt slow paid off in the conclusion, so IDK. I like the pacing in most of the rest of the stuff. It’s just the introductions. Like Tress of the Emerald Sea, for example, it took so long for her to actually start her adventure.

I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty “premium” hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.

My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I’d like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.

Right now I’m way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I’d say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they’re set at the inflection points in the planet’s history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There’s a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.

But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.

Not at random retailers anywhere in the world, but yes, if you get the same quality story for a third of the launch price, that matters.

It’s half the reason I never buy Nintendo games. Metroid isn’t inherently “worse” than indie metroidvanias, but it’s the same caliber game for twice the price (and the sales are less discounted by dollar value than the indies are on top of it). That does make it a much worse game for gamers, and it should get heavily docked for that.

Anything with microtransactions is cancer no matter how good the underlying mechanics are and should be completely banned from consideration.

Why wouldn’t it be taken into consideration?

Bad monetization and excessively high pricing change the experience for gamers. There’s not a lot of chance they’re willing to say “microtransactions make a game ineligible” like they should, but cash grubbing microtransactions change what a game is, and they can’t just not acknowledge that at all.

TorrentFreak has really been spoonfeeding Nintendo’s nonsense positions about emulation everywhere lately.

I’m not an Xbox guy.

But if the PS Portal was $400 and played PS4 games natively plus did streaming like it does now, I would have been all over it. I like my steam deck, but there’s a benefit to games hyper optimized to one system.

If those sites think that being linked to is a service they’re providing Google (which demanding payment implies), then Google is just fulfilling their wishes.

Mostly audiobooks, 2x speed, a lot of hours a day. I do use an ereader sometimes. I’ve started collecting (just regular hardcover, mostly) physical copies of some of my favorites, but I don’t really read them like that. When possible I read entire series from beginning to end consecutively. Audiobooks and visual reading are generally different books.

Mostly mystery, in a wide variety of settings, tones, levels of intensity, but some pure fantasy. Nonfiction is mostly psychology, but some science, other stuff as well. (180 new books this year), but I re-read as much as I read new. I don’t set goals or anything, just use the “goal” to see the number each year out of curiosity.

Mid-30s, IDK. I read a bunch as a kid, then stopped the habit through high school and college and took a while to get back into heavy reading.

Just for the hell of it, if you want a well researched book about the value of all sorts of Rest to dispute that specific point.

All LEDs are backlit, and a full 1080p on a 7 inch LED screen is a dogshit reading experience that will make your eyes bleed in about 2 minutes. If you manage to find a terrible OLED at a low price, it’s still emissive and still absolutely terrible for reading.

Free is obscenely overpriced for using a budget LED tablet as a reading device. It’s terrible and has nothing going for it. Don’t pay a penny for a device you intend to read on with any display that isn’t epaper. You won’t read on it because it will be a torture device.

“AI” long predates LLM bullshit.

Hallucinations aren’t a problem with the actually medically useful tools he’s talking about. Machine learning is being used to draw extra attention to abnormalities that humans may miss.

It’s completely unrelated to LLM nonsense.

Except the summary is almost always literally the content the sites ask the sites linking them to show.

They have “please show this preview instead of a boring plain link” code.

It’s a decent book overall. If you’re interested in the theory behind choice architecture it’s worth a read.

But yeah, read it a couple months ago and remembered it specifically addressed this question.