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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DU
Posts
4
Comments
674
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I> A person can actually, literally, control whether their car hits anything. It’s a solvable problem.

    That is a really silly way to look at car accidents and the tragedies that come out of them. Just because you could rewind time and change what the drivers were doing to avoid a crash happening doesn’t really mean anything about the inherent risk factors to driving. Accidents are going to happen, we live in the real world not the one in which people behave consistently and perfectly and freak unexpected situations never happen.

    Further, most people HAVE to drive their car in order to live their life on a daily basis (getting to work and back being the most obvious need). Driving isn’t a choice for most people at least in the US, so people are absolutely always going to be driving when they really don’t want to or aren’t at their most alert. It is just something we have to do sometimes in order to make ends meet in our lives.

    I disagree. It’s like a gun. There’s negligence, but “true accidents” I’m not sure if I buy it.

    No, you can walk around with a gun, even with it cocked and so long as you keep your finger off the trigger the likelihood of an unavoidable or unforeseen accident is still fairly low. A gun is an inert object that must be compelled to become lethal by the pressing of a trigger. A 5000 pound SUV on the other hand, by simply moving at normal driving speeds in close proximity to other people, consistently presents lethal opportunities that the driver must actively take steps to prevent from becoming realities.

    A gun and a car are almost precise opposites in that respect. A car is like a gun that periodically aims at someone and automatically begins a firing sequence and you have to be paying attention enough to actively intervene and stop it.

  • It’s far easier to get to the grocery store without hitting anything with the car than it is to, say, pass the first level of Super Mario Bros.

    Then why don’t we let kids who can beat Super Mario Bros in their sleep (and thus from your perspective have demonstrated the skill required to learn how to drive) drive cars?

    Again just because it is easy to aim the steering wheel and press the gas peddle doesn’t mean that every time you so much as drive to the grocery store and back you aren’t literally doing the most dangerous (mandatory) activity in most adult’s lives (both in terms of risk to yourself and risk of killing or hurting others).

  • I’m sorry not hitting another flying object in an absolutely MASSIVE three dimensional space that is 99.99% empty is a trivial task next to driving through a busy city in essentially a two dimensional space (you can’t go above or below to avoid hazards) with high speed traffic going the other direction only inches away, abrupt requirements to stop when something pulls in front of you, a dizzying variety of cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and other hazards to keep track of and the constant pressing need to ALWAYS be ready to brake or steer violently in order to avoid crashing.

    Also when air airspace does get relatively congested like say at an airport, there is usually a tower full of people who’s job it is to route traffic so all you have to do is follow their directions and communicate effectively. You don’t have to make instantaneous choices like someone trying to get to an exit across 5 lanes of busy highway traffic that isn’t letting them in.

    Let me put it this way, with an airplane cruising on a level flight path, how long could the pilot let go of the controls and ignore the environment around them before they hit something? That is a difficult question to answer, it could be 10 minutes… it could be more (assuming the aircraft can maintain a cruise speed and level flight). With a car, the answer is simple, it takes no more than 3-5 seconds of ignoring the environment around you and letting go of the controls to hit something. At highway speeds the difference of a second or two can determine if you collide head on with another vehicle at a combined velocity of 120+ mph.

    An airplane pilot rarely is put in a position as risky as driving a car unless they are acting extremely irresponsibly. The rules of flying set out to make it so the pilot ideally never needs the kind of split second reactions that driving requires on a day to day basis (except for perhaps during landing).

    The numbers support my claims too, flying is BY FAR AND AWAY safer than driving a car. It isn’t even close, driving is by the numbers extremely dangerous compared to everything else we are required to do in order to live our lives.

  • Driving is easy in a way that it’s schematic and there are not many rules compared to say aviation

    I just don’t agree with this, flying an airplane has got to be harder in a lot of ways but one way in which driving is more difficult is the the amount of things you can hit while driving and how easy it is to hit those things.

    The entire point of an airplane is to get up into the sky so it doesn’t have to worry about hitting other things when it goes fast…

  • I never said it didn’t suck, but it only sucks because other people are terrible drivers.

    This is the least important reason driving sucks is because other people aren’t perfect at driving. The reasons driving sucks:

    -1. There are wayyyyy too many cars on the road

    -2. In order to try to solve 1, the entire landscape has been devoted to facilitating more and more cars which makes it depressing as fuck to go anywhere because where you are going is functionally the same as where you came from.

    -3. Owning a car is absurdly stressful, massively stressful so everybody on the road at a minimum is stressed about making sure their car doesn’t fall apart and they can’t get to work.

    -4. People spend massive chunks of their lives sitting in cars commuting to work for almost no reason, highways are filled with people everyday stopping and starting, stopping and starting over and over again in traffic using fossil fuels to move several thousand pound objects miles and miles all for nothing.

    It isn’t absurdly difficult at all unless you’re incredibly incompetent

    -5. This bring me to my last point. Just because it isn’t physically difficult to press the gas and brake pedals on a car and use the steering wheel doesn’t mean driving is easy in the slightest. It is one of the most difficult things human beings have ever been expected to do on a daily basis in terms of extreme life ending consequences for losing attention or control for only the briefest of moments. It isn’t hard to drive a car compared to say riding a horse, but driving a car is so mind numbingly frustrating and exhausting in modern life that there is a good chance one day you won’t be paying attention when that freak rare situation occurs and you need to respond instantly in order to not hit another several thousand pound object hurtling towards you with fragile humans inside (not to mention humans everywhere on the street, barely an arms length from your metal box traveling at lethal speeds).

    Driving is extremely difficult, look at how stupendously self driving cars have failed to tackle the challenge even when we created AI opponents that can easily beat the best Go players in the world years ago. The fact that wayyyyyy more accidents don’t happen all the time is actually pretty incredible in terms of the daily volume of sustained, unbroken focus it takes from every single person driving to prevent more crashes.

  • It’s actually ridiculously simple to not break the law or get in an accident.

    Driving a car is absurdly difficult, incredibly dangerous, takes only a second of distraction to kill yourself and others and in general is such a nightmare that it is contrary to what you say a miracle that people aren’t crashing into each other all the damn time.

    Like, everybody I have gotten in a car with for the past 10 years invariably will get stressed out significantly by the unavoidable chaos of driving enough to visibly become emotional about it even during a short drive. Driving is miserable.

  • I mean I get it, auto-aim can be frustrating, especially if you can’t find a game you like that doesn’t have it, but on the other hand a bit of good auto-aim de-emphasizes just being extremely good at aiming which makes every other aspect of the game more important and satisfying to master, which I think you can make a good argument for being a good thing when it is done right.

  • Isn’t it so nice when you think “I would like to edit an image on this computer” so you simply download an image editor and edit the image.

    Best part of FOSS, the software is just there waiting for you to use it. Which sounds like a stupid statement to make, but proprietary software only allows you to use it after you have jumped through any number of meaningless hoops.

    They don’t even give you any fish for jumping through the hoops either, which every time I tell that to a dolphin they just start laughing at me like I am a fool.

  • Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.

    Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold by somebody so long as it is publicly available on social networks), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby have the power or an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?

  • Do you think going to medical school destroys someone’s artistic abilities?

    I imagine it certainly tries to select for people who aren’t artistic and instead heavily favors minds that are good at memorizing vast amounts of information and following rules, but no of course not. What destroys the capacity of medical professionals to make good educational or therapeutic games is the system they are operating under, the system that got them their degree, and enforces the structures of how they must operate in a medical system providing medical care.

    The system is absolutely, categorically incapable of actually valuing what artists bring to the table and the more an artistic endeavor gets involved with this system the more it will have its innards scooped out and it’s soul crushed.

    If we want video games for mental health, keep the medical system as far away as possible. The video game industry is already a dumpster fire it doesn’t need more people coming into the industry to call the shots who don’t have any expertise in creating art.

  • If video games are only art, they cannot treat clinical depression.

    Wow…

    This is the same boring argument people make about music theory being so incredibly important to making music that impacts people and yet music theory can only attempt to describe why something worked, it can never provide blueprints for inspiring art that actually changes people.

    This is ultimately the problem with scientific thinking applied to art, science can only ever value what it can measure and the first thing any artist will tell you about making art is that literally every part of the process matters to the end product. Scientists, going into this process with the objective of creating something that will create a specific measurable effect are always going to butcher the whole thing, because they aren’t trained to listen to their subconscious and intuition in the design of subtle elements that don’t seem relevant to the metrics that matter.

    And seriously…. are you honestly making the claim that art made for arts sake cannot help patients treat their clinical depression? Hahahahahaha just ask all the depressed healthcare professionals being brutally exploited and ground down by a for-profit healthcare system what they do after work to help recover their mental health, they binge tv shows made by artists (or play video games :) ).

  • And you really think that non-medical professionals are just as good at treating mental health problems than medical professionals?

    No I am claiming medical professionals and ESPECIALLY the medical industry in all its incredible dysfunction is laughably equipped to create video games that will meaningfully impact people in any fashion.

    Video games are art, you need artists to make them. I am ok with medical professionals being consulted but the way that expertise is valued in modern capitalism you know the artists are going to end up being steamrolled by an inherent bias towards STEM thinking even when the scientists are completely out of their wheelhouse trying to make an interactive work of art.

    I am not anti-science and I would never tell someone with depression to just stop feeling sorry for themselves. I have been hurt way too much from the other side to ever want to do that.

  • Can you provide sources and proof of this? That game development led by medical professionals results in video games that are any more effective at positively impacting mental health than similar games from similar genres?

    There isn’t any, because it is hogwash. An artist doesn’t need to understand science to make a video game that makes people feel happy and calm, but a medical professional DOES need to understand how to be an artist to do so. There chances are MUCH higher that the artist is going to solve the problem, they just won’t know why like the scientist will.

    All these apps and games I have seen developed by companies trying to target video games as a treatment all utterly fail to understand how complex, subtle and ultimately mysterious game design is. This isn’t something that can be solved with a formula or the scientific method, this is game design, it is an art form and must be approached fundamentally from the angle to create a work of art that will repeatedly engage people.

    Using actual medical science in the development of video games used as therapy is a hell of a lot better for people with depression than just playing Peggle.

    “Just playing Peggle” is funny because countless people and a Popcap issued study report that Peggle is an immensely calming experience. The original Peggle and Peggle Nights among those who have played them are almost universally described as being one of the most anodyne, calming experiences in video games.