My personal take here is that playing defense is a losing game and that we really need to kick off another 1968 movement. A counter culture that is infecting and firmly against Russia and conservatives.
I was actually arguing from the opposite side and thought that the game's climax was too much :)
If it would have ended with that "present" left outside the tower door, that would have been a great ending and left me wondering what actually was going on or if there was anything going on at all.
But the whole
::: spoiler spoiler
coven of horned cultists conducting some sort of ritual and chasing you for no good reason
:::
destroyed the magic and made me assume that the story teller just made up a silly, over-the-top ending in the context of the "satanic panic" some 30-40 years ago.
Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).
It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola's "Litterbug" campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting "personal responsibility" over "regulations.")
It's "up to the consumer" to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.
As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.
Oh, I played that recently, too. I didn't have any high expectations for Firewatch, but liked the idea that it's a "true story" sent in by a player.
But the ending, well... it was like an "but then nothing happened" ending where the story teller artificially made up some wild climax in the mindset of the "satanic panic" hysteria that gripped the late 80s/90s. Still, if I see it as an indie game, it's okay.
No shit. And it's not even because he's cleverly engaging with his base, he's just an equally dumb and easily manipulated conservative moron who takes all his opinions wholesale from Fox News.
Oh yes. Alan Wake was such a surprise, like 1980s Stephen King. All those well-connected hints and mysteries. I have yet to play Alan Wake 2, but I loved the first part.
In Doom 2016, the protagonist gave me those "been there, done that, saw it all before" vibes towards humanity's attempt to use hell energy. He swats anyone away who advises him to wait, be moderate or let them try something else first and simply does his thing. I just don't get what's up with the protagonist in Doom Eternal. It feels like some design-by-committee fake badass who does inconsistent things, he suddenly got that "Fort Grayskull" (or is it the "Power Rangers Fortress"?) place and does whatever the Vega AI says. It feels so whack.
I don't exactly hate the game, but the planet-hopping has segmented it too much and exploring a thousand empty terrains each with 3-4 generic caves/camps grows old quick. I don't know if the main story would have picked up speed any time soon (I retrieved 3 or 4 of the thingies they collect), but I haven't launched the game for a few weeks now.
I thought it was a guaranteed hit, but it turned out to be a really bad arena shooter where you make colorful resources shoot out of enemies and are forced to run into the middle of enemy groups, exposing yourself to attacks from all sides that don't count because you're repeating 5 kill QTEs ad nauseam - the only tactic the game allows.
I think Taylor Swift is married to a player of one of the teams competing for the superbowl.
She previously encouraged young people to vote (but not for whom), which would be bad for Republicans as they're unpopular with young people.
Right wing media cooked up a theory that the super bowl was fixed so the team of Taylor Swift's husband would win, resulting in Taylor Swift being called to the victory celebration where she then would endorse Joe Biden.
As far as I take it from this thread, the team actually won, but the endorsement didn't happen, confusing conspiracy nutters everywhere.
That example is so perfect I assume some Trump zealot somewhere is using it at this very moment.
Just yesterday in a thread here on Lemmy.world about his NATO remarks, I read a comment: "Trump said he'd pull out of NATO and accused Europe of not paying its bills in order to... strengthen NATO by motivating countries to pay more and it's Trump's merit alone that Ukraine can resist Russia's attack now."
While I'm in none of these groups, having survived the rock'n roll-, black mass- / satanic(1)-, killer videogame-, terrorism-, social justice- / SJW-, safe space-, socialism-/communism-, antifa-, cabal-, satanic(2)-, CRT- and woke-panic, I feel underrepresented.
I agree that a lot of human behavior (on the micro as well as macro level) is just following learned patterns. On the other hand, I also think we're far ahead - for now - in that we (can) have a meta context - a goal and an awareness of our own intent.
For example, when we solve a math problem, we don't just let intuitive patterns run and blurt out numbers, we know that this is a rigid, deterministic discipline that needs to be followed. We observe and guide our own thought processes.
That requires at least a recurrent network and at higher levels, some form of self awareness. And any LLM is, when it runs (rather than being trained), completely static, feed-forward (it gets some 2000 words (or 32000+ as of GPT-4 Turbo) fed to its input synapses, each neuron layer gets to fire once and then the final neuron layer contains the likelihoods for each possible next word.)
Is this a case of "here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party" ?
But it's good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren't thinking/reasoning "AI" that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text ("context"). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.
That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.
I'm not up-to-date with current NAS systems anymore -- I'm running an older QNAP NAS (TS-453), and it has their proprietary "Container Station" which can run web applications in Docker + LXD containers. Not FOSS, though the containers very much are and can be moved to other systems.
As an alternative, FreeNAS/TrueNAS sells NAS systems where at least the software side is FOSS. They're quite expensive, though.
The prices of other brands also quickly breach silly levels, but a basic 2-bay NAS is about ~$250 for QNAP, ~$200 for Synology and ~$1000 for a TrueNAS. Without hard drives.
If you're not interested in the data storage side, a Mini PC w/Proxmox (popular Docker/LXD container engine w/browser-based management) or even a direct install on a Raspberry PI are possible for under $100.
My personal take here is that playing defense is a losing game and that we really need to kick off another 1968 movement. A counter culture that is infecting and firmly against Russia and conservatives.