saturdaysaint

In voice conversations I tell it not to reply at all or only say “Understood” until I use some kind of code word. Not perfect, but less intrusive.

Fascinating, then, how the head of DOGE has deep financial interests in China. It’s really not out of bounds to suggest that his benefactors could’ve pulled some strings to kneecap the US.

If you use ChatGPT or find it to be a compelling technology, there’s good reason to root for a reversion to the status quo. This could set back the state of the art consumer AI product quite a few months as teams reinvent the wheel in a way that doesn’t get them sued when they relaunch.

This attitude of acceptance is probably the most helpful attitude the vast majority of the time, but I was lucky enough to have parents that radically minimized their possessions in their early 60's and moved into a retirement community, and it has first and foremost been a favor to them. As they've aged a few years, they're just enjoying a wildly unencumbered existence with the bare minimum of regular maintenance chores. They're focused on spending time with the people they want to, not puttering around the house. You're right that this kind of mindset can't be forced on senior citizens and it bespeaks a certain level of affluence, but it is a wonderful way for the elderly to live. I'd encourage children to lay the seeds with their parents before they're elderly and more resistant to change.

I see the relationship coaches of this stripe all over all sorts of social media, and I just rarely if ever see insights that couldn't have been imparted by your average friendly stranger at a bar. What I mostly see are slightly-to-moderately damaged people who are articulate and engaging enough to find an audience of similarly damaged people who their experiences resonate with. This guy seems fairly innocuous (although this kind of rumination can also be unproductive!) but you see a lot of people fomenting bitterness. I would advise anyone I cared about to seek a credentialed therapist before turning to one of these self-appointed coaches.

Yeah, there's room to quibble when it comes to Warzone, but it really doesn't add up to much in my view. The most gamebreaking advantages - The Roze skin and the broken Mac-10 blueprint - were basically accidents when it was a fairly young game (< a year old), and almost all of them were freebies included in the basic battle pass (so essentially free for anyone that plays regularly). Statistical anomolies still come around and "break" the game every once in a while, but it's really reached a point where most of the main weapons are well balanced to the point that I often think I would have been best off sticking with some of the first guns I levelled up.

Most blueprints effectively just make levelling up new weapons a more pleasant experience, maybe saving you 1 - 2 hours for $20.

I play Fall Guys and Warzone, both of which offer cosmetic modifications that are unlockable both through gameplay and by purchasing them. IMO, the cosmetics are little more than flair that add a little bit of fun and personal expression to the experience. Along with the "Battle Pass" model, where users are rewarded for regular play during content "Seasons", these mini-economies incentivize people to play regularly (which improves multiplayer games on a lot of levels) and incentivize the developers to continually add content. People that get these cosmetics enjoy having a distinctive profile in a social experience they spend a lot of time in and subsidize gamers that enjoy robust free experiences (e.g. kids/teens who provide a lot of excellent competition). It's all a win-win-win-win in my book.

I'm 41 years old and have fond memories of the old days of packaged buy-once games, but the modern battle pass/cosmetic standard seems like a much more realistic way of having a consistently updated experience with strong engagement year-round.

This line of argument doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. First of all, it's quite pedantic and naive to assume that governments and medical bodies in the richest and most advanced countries haven't worked through similar issues of causality with innumerable other diseases. More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior years that have yet to be explained by anything else.

I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.

To me the best explanation for this is as mutually-assured-destruction insurance if Microsoft takes the biggest title in the Activision portfolio, Call of Duty, away from Playstation.

As a Sony fan, I'm cautiously optimistic that the relationship could be more fruitful than that. I don't know what Sony's creative secrets are, but they seem good at ushering high quality, interesting games with broad appeal into existence, sort of akin to what you see at HBO or Pixar. I would love to see them exert that influence on a big multiplatform game.

That's hours of "testimony" from conspiracy theorists who all have long records of making flagrantly incorrect statements on COVID. Johnson's big leadoff panelist was a Texas cardiologist who is far from a respected authority in epidemiology and seems to be courting attention by disputing every best practice that ER doctors and the scientific community have agreed works best with acute COVID patients and hyping up silver bullet drugs that have shown limited effectiveness in the best studies. I recommend everyone look up "Dr. Peter Mcullough" and getting a whiff of his reputation before investing any of their time in that panel.

Kids. We have 2 toddlers and are expecting again. Both of us had parents who were teachers, which meant their working hours lined up perfectly with our school hours and holidays. Raising multiple kids is pretty tough if you don't have that luxury! Tracking doctors, dentists, caretakers, after school activities, etc was exhausting, and for virtually all of these you need some kind of backup plan. Especially with a third child, there would be virtually no way for us to handle,say, a COVID wave. My wife is high earning and our tastes are pretty humble.

At one point, this might have been a hard decision, but COVID and a child on the way feel like we've had an extra nudge in this direction. The labor market is so tight and my specialty is in enough demand that I feel like I could jump back into my field in another few years if it makes sense for us.