JeffL

If real people want real people, then why is everyone at the coffee shop, on the train, at parties, and even at the dinner table all looking at their phones? Not all the time, but way too much of the time, imo.

Totally agree. The response to complaining about bad AI in civ is usually about how players don't really want good AI, but for me as the AI randomly shuffles their units around outside your city you constantly pick them off with mutually supporting ranged units, achieving kill ratios in the 20:1 range is so totally unrealistic that it destroys immersion.

I fully believe that the great mass of the bell curve is happy with the bad AI, but for those of us who are a little better at the game, we will keep complaining about how terrible the AI is.

Tesla has lots of showrooms with cars, test drives, and sales people. If you're there and want to buy a car, they direct you to a computer with an Internet connection.

I agree with and appreciate your comment, but I do think there is some validity in the more broad usage of "socialism" that has come to be. To steel man the other sides argument, if you have to pay taxes on an asset, be that the means of production or real estate, or else the government will come and take it away from you, it feels more like renting than owning, and the only thing you "own" is the right to pay rent on the governments asset.

I do definitely think that just labeling every government overreach that one dislikes as "socialism" is not the most useful.

When you are new to it, yes. For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle. I use it extensively on roads I know it works well on, and use it sometimes tentitively on new roads when I'm in the mood. That I spend almost all of my driving time on the same few routes makes FSD very valuable to me. It's probably still not a net benefit if you're mostly driving new places or places where it doesn't work well, but it's getting better.

I use FSD a lot and generally like and feel less stressed and safer. For me, since I dive mostly the same roads a lot, I know which roads and intersections FSD can handle correctly and which ones it can't, so I use it where it works and don't use it where it doesn't. I've personally had a pretty big increase in use over the last year because it's just plain getting so much better. It works in places now where it didn't before.

I have FSD and totally agree with you. I use it about 90% of the time, feel less stressed and more safe. I feel like I have a good idea and where it might have an issue and am super vigilant in those situations but way more relaxed on those same stretches of road it's driven perfectly 100 times already. It's "nice to have" in normal driving conditions and f-ing wonderful when there's traffic.

Insurance for the consumer is lowering your expected value to reduce variance. Gambling for the consumer is lowering your expected value to increase variance. The profit and operating costs for both casinos and insurance companies is the lost EV of their patrons.

Yes, I have it. It's great. I much prefer a quick swipe on the side of the touchscreen to having a giant physical gear selector wasting a ton of space.

I honestly love just about everything about the UI of the refreshed Model S, from the yoke to the turn signal buttons to the on screen gear selector. Only thing I don't like is the horn button for the two times a year that I honk it.

The most fun I've had with ChatGPT is having it make up stories for my five year old with her as the main character. She loves it.

The main thing I'd want in a Civ AI is to be barely competant at combat. Right now, if you can get a couple archers up in time, you can beat an AI army that's 2-5x your size depending on the terrain. Yeah, it feels bad as a beginner when you haven't bothered to build any military and an AI comes and kills you, but a beginner should be playing a beginner mode.

I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.

That's what the developers say, but I think it's part true and part a cop out. The AI in Civ 5 & 6 is just so so bad, that it's only challenging when you play on the really hard modes that gives them all sorts of cheats. And then it's a bit less fun because you're walking the line between impossible because of the cheating and having to essentially exploit the AI because of the cheating.

I don't necessarily want an AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.

Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.

To replace like for like, you go to a thrift store and buy a used shirt for $5. Or not. But a used shirt isn't worth the same as a new shirt.

Every version of the software is tested on thousands of situations in simulation before release and has to pass all the regression tests which are constantly being added to. Surely this is much better than a super limited real world test. (It's also tested in the real world by testers before going into wider release.)

I think they are way ahead of you.