Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

Mostly art things. I’m far from qualified to speak to it as an expert, I haven’t played either version yet, but have friends who are very passionate about the topic.

I think the easiest way to explain it is to refer to this Miyazaki quote:

Most people don’t believe me when I say this, but a certain kind of refinement, elegance, and dignity are very important to me. I’ll usually tell the designers that flat-out grotesque or splatter type designs will not get past me. This has everything to do with my own personal sensibilities, and it is something that I apply to every design that I approve.

Even if you just look at the tutorial boss (I clipped a a YT side-by-side for you here), the changes they’ve made here to add detail are basically all… grotesque. Gross hanging flesh, some weird hanging nipple thing, it’s a very different interpretation of the original than what I believe was intended.

This is obviously just one example, but it’s this type of change that bothers purists. Now, mind you, I don’t think this makes the remake trash or anything, but if you’re interested in Demon Souls historically as the beginning of the Souls franchise, this kind of change is essentially revisionist history, and it’s disappointing to me that the original game isn’t also available in some way besides buying an old PS3 or emulating the game.

100%. I’m also honestly a bit worried about any remaster they may announce. Bluepoint did a wonderful job in many areas with Demon Souls, but there were definitely some “enhancements” that didn’t exactly match the authorial intent of the original.

Ideal world, I’d love both, good access to a high quality original, and a top-tier remaster of a classic.

Fortunately ShadPS4 looks to be saving the day here, by giving us the ability to emulate the original with patches to fix the glaring issues. Still sucks if you’re sitting there on PlayStation though.

All that said, I don’t expect anyone to touch the original officially. From Soft have moved on, and Sony holds the publishing rights. If BluePoint isn’t interested, it’ll continue to be the elephant in the room.

Eh, it’s because of what Bloodborne is, and the state of it. Improper frame pacing with a 30FPS cap, even if you bought a new PS5 to play it (because it’s not available on PS4).

A cleaned up patch for newer gen hardware to unlock it would be enough, but a remaster is more likely to appeal to Sony.

I think it is a problem. Maybe not for people like us, that understand the concept and its limitations, but “formal reasoning” is exactly how this technology is being pitched to the masses. “Take a picture of your homework and OpenAI will solve it”, “have it reply to your emails”, “have it write code for you”. All reasoning-heavy tasks.

On top of that, Google/Bing have it answering user questions directly, it’s commonly pitched as a “tutor”, or an “assistant”, the OpenAI API is being shoved everywhere under the sun for anything you can imagine for all kinds of tasks, and nobody is attempting to clarify it’s weaknesses in their marketing.

As it becomes more and more common, more and more users who don’t understand it’s fundamentally incapable of reliably doing these things will crop up.

30% / 0% / 70%

Dang, this full out fooled me. Concerning, I guess we’re here now. Lots to catch once you’re aware of it, but totally passed by me while scrolling, even as someone who’s well aware of AI Image Generation, even in an image that’s intentionally ridiculous.

Yeah, this is the problem with frankensteining two systems together. Giving an LLM a prompt, and giving it a module that can interpret images for it, leads to this.

The image parser goes “a crossword, with the following hints”, when what the AI needs to do the job is an actual understanding of the grid. If one singular system understood both images and text, it could hypothetically understand the task well enough to fetch the information it needed from the image. But LLMs aren’t really an approach to any true “intelligence”, so they’ll forever be unable to do that as one piece.

Yeah, I don’t think the idea is a total non-starter, but I’d definitely like some details. How will this be limited to ensure it’s not being used by investors and house flippers? How will this be ramped down once the housing market settles to avoid it being permanently “priced in”? How will this be paid for and how much will it cost?

Unfortunately American political debates right now are more of a pissing contest about rally turnout than they are about actual policy details, because that’s what sways the voters on the fence for some reason.

Honestly I really don’t think that’s effective either. Giving people more money to buy something generally just means the market will respond by charging more money for that thing. The assistance will effectively get “priced in” given time.

It’s honestly the weakest part of the Harris/Walz platform for me. Trump plan is utterly insane top-to-bottom though, and they’re just using immigration as a scapegoat here, which is… something.

Ah, he recommends saving 1000$, then tackling your debt, then building to 3-6 months expenses. Which is… fine, I agree with the principle of it, but that number is definitely one of those things I’d consider being more flexible with. The amount I think you should save before tackling your debts depends on a lot of factors.

I also don’t necessarily agree with saving that amount in two blocks, we personally saved 1000$, paid the most pressing card off, and then saved another 1000$. I think it makes sense to adjust that minimum emergency fund number as your situation evolves.

Just another case where I find he works fine as a starting point, but where most people shouldn’t follow his advice to the letter.

Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.

But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.

I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.

Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.

And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.

For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.

But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:

• Find a budget you can live with, paying your debts a couple months faster isn’t worth being miserable, and makes it more likely you’ll be able to stick to a budget for as long as it takes.
• Zero-based budgeting (budgeting every dollar at the start of the month) isn’t really necessary, leaving a little loose change that you can allocate later once the month is actually happening is pretty helpful. It’s ok to shift things around so long as you aren’t spending money you don’t have.
• Actually do keep “fun money” or “restaurant money”, so long as you’re capable of including it in the budget without hamstringing your ability to pay debt. If you’re giving more to debt than these things, then you’re probably fine.
• Ultimately just… think for yourself, and make your own decisions, based on your own income and expenses. Ramsey is a decent, if aggressive, starting point (and again, not the best person, he seems to have lost the plot somewhere).

I don’t know if I give it a 0% chance yet. He needed to average 8 points per race, and Red Bull has been all over the map lately.

But yes, this shifts the onus over to Red Bull having to screw up, moreso than Lando being able to do it while they maintain performance. Lando could potentially earn up to 25 points if Max has a single DNF, which would erase this weekend entirely. And we don’t know that he won’t crawl his way up to 5th or something tomorrow either, nor does this necessarily mean Max will dominate tomorrow.

Still lots on the line though, if Max does place particularly well and Lando can’t get into the points, a 20+ points swing in his favour would lock down the WDC pretty well. An interesting race to watch for sure, the end of this season has a much more competitive WDC than last season’s.

Yeah, personally I’ve always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I’m looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that’s… not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.

For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.

That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you’re perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.

Fair, you definitely become more skilled (I put 500 or so hours into DotA 2 years ago), and you can somewhat measure that, but I find it’s not nearly as potent.

My additional issue, if you take a long break like I did, is that the MMR somewhat traps you. When I came back, not only was it extremely frustrating to have the head knowledge about what I needed to do (I.E. denying creeps and stealing last hits for optimal farming) while not having the skill to execute it anymore, but I was also trapped in matches with only players who had the skill to capitalize on those mistakes and destroy me. Add to that the pressure of letting down a whole team of 5 players, and my attempts to get back into the game later were miserable.

By comparison, I’m returning to Celeste right now, and checking out the strawberry jam mod. It’s been incredibly satisfying to see how quickly I pick up and relearn those mechanics, and I’m just crushing the base game levels that gave me so much trouble the first time, while giving me an enjoyable de-rust. It’s been a pleasure to dive back in, and I’m excited to see what heights I can reach, eager to beat the Farewell DLC that I gave up on before and to push myself to even harder modded content.

Maybe I could get a similar experience in DotA, by playing hours of bot matches to relearn fundamentals, and watching lots of YouTube content to learn how the meta is shifted in my absence, but that’s a much different grind than I’m having in Celeste, just enjoying the nostalgia of the game and revelling in how much quicker relearning is than the initial learning. And I never have to cope with any social pressures of letting my team down, or watching my hard earned MMR crumble away as the game repeatedly reminds me how much worse I’ve gotten.

Yeah, very fair. I do think it’s essential for the modern scale, and to be constantly on boarding new players, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but there was certainly a time where we could live without it. I used to love playing unreal tournament with the same friends regularly, and that was much closer to what I enjoy, as I could see myself getting better, even if the skill gap between us was obvious and I never really had a “fair” game.

The games I honestly think have the best chance of beating this are battle royales, where you could probably throw caution to the wind and matchmake fully randomly, or by throwing a set percentage of each MMR bracket into the same lobby, and still have players who can achieve a reasonable amount of success due to luck and who they find to fight and when.

Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don’t see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.

It’s ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don’t get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could’ve never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just… so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.

And this whole thing is just… so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can’t let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it’s not something anyone is going to “fix”. But I’m not hopping onto an endless treadmill that’s never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.

Had a coworker today ask me to change a variable to be in “screaming snake case”. So I google it, and sure enough, take your snake case (example_variable) and put it in All Caps (EXAMPLE_VARIABLE). And now your snake case is screaming. Had me giggling reading the PR feedback, I love stupid programmer naming conventions.

Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.