@ABoxOfNeurons - eviltoast
  • 5 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • The last time I went to a doctor, they read a list of questions from a form, entered my answers into their system, and then said they’d get back to me in a couple weeks to tell me if my insurance company would allow a follow-up. That appointment should have been a web page.

    Most doctor’s appointments I’ve had recently have followed the same pattern. A good doctor is invaluable. A burnt-out noob doctor following strict procedure is like a worse GPT that your have to meet in a building full of every conceivable virus, and that costs $500 instead of $0.05. A motivated layman with GPT4 and a prescription pad would have beaten 3 out of 4 doctors I’ve seen since covid.

    This is just my experience in the US mind you. Maybe I’ve had bad luck with humans, but I haven’t been impressed since all of the experienced ones retired.









  • If you haven’t played Inscryption, just ignore everything else and do that first. It’s the most innovative deckbuilding game I’ve played, but saying more would spoil it.

    Ascension is a short-ish one I’ve sunk a lot of hours into. It’s sort of like dominion meets Magic. The expansions make it a lot more interesting, but the full package is pretty cheap. It was designed by an MTG pro player who was sick of exactly that.

    Black book is excellent, and managers to put a compelling narrative spin on a TCG.

    Monster train is a good “it’s like slay the spire, but not slay the spire” option for when you just can’t look at another shiv.



  • I’m for defederation at least until instance blocking is available. I’ve already blocked most of their communities from my feed, but comments have been really unpleasant since they federated.

    It’s not really about the ideology as much as not wanting to have to scroll past endless political bickering. Rage addiction is real and contagious.



  • I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

    Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

    Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

    Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

    It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.





  • There’s a difference between allowing speech about a thing and embracing the thing. This is a classic case of embrace, extend, extinguish.

    If you’re interested, I’d look into what happened with XMPP and Google talk. XMPP was a federated chat service. Google Talk became compatible with it, and instantly became the most popular client for it.

    It then broke compatibility slowly, pushing more people from other XMPP clients onto Google talk.

    They finally removed it completely, and because they were the most popular client, XMPP users moved to Google talk to maintain their connections to other users. The protocol basically ceased to exist.

    People are broadly assuming that’s Meta’s plan with threads and Mastodon, because it’s an extremely common way for corporations to get rid of open systems.