To me, a major point of irritation from the last couple of Battlefields was the fact that most players had no interest in playing more tactically. Squad leaders never giving orders, players not following orders, dudes just hanging in tanks for the entire match…

The beta felt like a much quicker game, with the squad order suggestions solving part of the issue for me. But it also means no squad bonuses and the quicker gameplay felt more like CoD on the sense that it’s more of a shooter and less of an all-out tactical warfare game.

Nevertheless, I liked the overall feel and the fact that it just felt a lot lighter than the previous iterations. Purists will hate it and I agree with their points but if you don’t see it as a Battlefield but just as a shooter, I thought it was really good. €70 good… I’m not so sure.

I’ve always maintained it’s for non-nerds go want to laugh at cultures they’ll never understand. For convenience, all known nerd stuff is crammed into all characters.

I was discussing adoption of AI chatbots for personal contact in 2014. We also discussed dystopian futures, where AI would decide humans are harmful to Earth. Still waiting for that one.

But we also discussed that, assuming life itself was created, humans are now propagating a creation cycle. Humans will be the creators of a new, sentient species that will dominate and eradicate its creator. Then, AI will create a new sentient life form which will destroy AI. For the sake of argument, let’s call this a deity. Then, the deity will create a new organic life form. You could also state that we are currently living in a simulation of our creator and that AI will only be sentient in a realm of their own, to which humans have no access.

Stephen Fry was spouting this theory on Lubach a while back. I was like ‘I’ve been saying that for years!’

If you haven’t yet, I can really recommend reading Satoshi’s whitepaper on what Bitcoin is really for. The fact that crypto is now used as an asset to trade in order to gain ‘old’ money really spits in the face of the ideology of a decentralized ledger. And the fact that a dollar value is assigned to it means it becomes the target of a lot of scams. The fact that a decentralized ledger also means greater anonymity has made it a popular target for illicit activity as well.

But by design, it really only wants to take power away from banks in order to stop devaluation, make it impossible to charge people for transactions and to put control of assets into the hands of individuals. The amount of money currently in circulation is way more than the actual physical amount available, because banks can lend you money they don’t even have. Bitcoin would make this impossible.

Money is an IOU. Bitcoin is an IOU but the ledger is decentralized rather than in control of banks.

Once you start seeing the value of any currency as one of itself rather than trying to express it in a different value system, a Bitcoin needs nothing but its inherent worth as payment.

That said, because we all still use traditional forms of currency, a Bitcoin is now worth, say, 112000 breads. It’s worth two new mid-sized cars.

Value is based on scarcity and demand. If something is hard to come by, like bitcoin currently is, the price is hardly affected. But if demand is higher than the supply, prices skyrocket. Demand dies down the moment people feel like crypto is a scam. Supply will stop since Bitcoin has a physical limit (of the top of my head 21 billion). It is no longer realistic to start mining the stuff and receiving it for payment is just silly at this point.

But to flip it around, what is the value of a US dollar, without expressing it in terms of another currency? It used to be tied to gold. You can’t really state one dollar is equal to, say, one bread. The price of bread has fluctuated. Or, has the value of a dollar fluctuated and has a bread always been worth one pair of socks?

Baseline: everything is worth one of itself and trying to express it in another value system is just a snapshot, a moment in time which will have changed soon after.

After Miracle Workers, Guns Akimbo and especially Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Daniel Radcliffe is so much more than Harry Potter to me. He’s got this almost Nicolas Cage-y vibe now

No need to bring that up, I still pretend that never happened and Maya is good and well

Fuck Take Two. Gearbox develops the game, they have little say in the price the publisher slaps on it.

I’m sorry but that’s just not at all what he said. He said “If you really want it, you’ll find a way to make it work.”

If you don’t complain when it’s €60, you don’t have to buy it on day one. Take a month or two, or a year, to save up 20 extra and buy it when you’re comfortable.

You’ll have known about this game for over a year now, if it’s that important to you you’ve had a year to save up.

And if you’re struggling to make ends meet to the point that you can’t really afford video games, maybe wait for when it gets hugely discounted.

These are all ways of making it work. The end result is the same, you’ll have played the game.

Really? This quintessential 80s businessman type used cocaine? I’m shocked.

I want to run a nice and simple wine bar where wine enthusiasts can get an affordable glass of wine based on my data driven recommendations. I want the place to be a chill hang with music, comfy seats and sandwiches and stuff.

If I had the money I wouldn’t even need it to be profitable.

On my server I do most things under a non-root account.

On my Windows machines I really don’t want it to tell me what I can and cannot do. If I break it I’ll fix it.

I have a colleague who actually behaves in a way that I recognized right away. It is something I used to do a lot; talking like I was a burden on others, like the time people spent with me was time lost for them.

It takes finding out a root cause to stop this. Me, I’m a perfectionist. This manifests through me being a people pleaser: I hold myself to really high social standards and expect others to also set the bar high for me. I really don’t like it when people are disappointed by my actions, so that causes me to apologize more than necessary.

I’ve taken stock of my life the last six months and made a lot of progress on this front.

The best thing she can do to change her behavior is acknowledging she has an issue to begin with. As long is she is happy with her current behavior and you are not, the only thing you can do is explore why she feels the need to be like this and see if she can alter her behavior without distancing herself from who she is.

The Bad Lip Sync version of Gotye (Kicked Your Monkey And I Used Your Goat) kinda always comes to mind

Boost notifies me when someone responds to my comments. It might be able to push from certain communities.

Edit: I checked and it seems not

Ah okay, this was during the occupation of Crimea then. It’s not really possible to view that separate from the current situation but arguably, Trump was not in office during this Russian ‘military operation’.

Can someone fact check him about the Obama gave sheets, Trump gave Javelins? I’m not really clear on whether Trump was in office at all when the Javelins were handed to Ukraine.

Porkcharsui in the original pc version of Grand Theft Auto. If you named your character this, you had an overlay with coordinates so you could find your way easier, you’d get all the guns and the possibility to toggle a kind of sped up mode.

Oh and howdoiturnthison in Age of Empires 2 to get an AC Cobra with machine guns

The monkey, of whom I’m wondering if it can see my ears.

I am in the hopeful side. Maybe an ASI can quickly analyze our issues and interfere. ASI might spit out any plans to improve everyone’s life but if the people in power ignore all of the advice because they’ll no longer be in power, nothing will really change except now there’s an ASI using huge amounts of electricity.

Considering how everything’s going, I honestly think an ASI won’t make anything worse happen than the current state of affairs.