legend

I liked it a lot, with the exception that its break point is deeply unsatisfying. If they finish part 2, then I think the total product will be fantastic, but it really does feel incomplete as it is right now.

I am for the first time in a long time, optimistic about Halo! But I still haven't played any myself yet!

I'm sure developers have made bad rebalancing decisions at various times. But a game without any rebalacing is probably doomed and then the only resolution is people move on to a different game or sequel. I suspect you probably don't actually need NFTs for a game. Just digitally sign whatever content you were thinking about using as an NFT and let the users hold onto their own data.

Games are constantly rebalancing mechanics and it's tremendously easy for a game developer to just say the game no longer supports a certain version of an item that you "permanently" own. The whole idea is just inconsistent with how games work and are iterated on.

Untold legions of scientists working in academia studying this problem who make absolutely shit pay for the level of expertise they have with no financial connection tied to vaccines vehemently disagree with you. Stop thinking this is a profit-motivated conspiracy. Your understanding of vaccines is terrible and you should stop thinking you know better. You really fucking don't.

Not sure I'm sold by it. But they're clearly trying to do something with it, so that's something.

I don't think that was the message anyone meant to convey. The message that was meant to be conveyed is if public adoption was aggressive and happened before resistant variants took hold, we could make it a thing of the past much like we have with so many other viruses. But that didn't happen, and the fear many of us had about that resulting in an incubator for more difficult variants to spread is exactly what happened. If you thought vaccines ought to mean you're almost surely safe from a virus regardless of what the rest of the public does, and that this vaccine in particular was unusually ineffective I think you have some misconceptions about vaccines in general, not just this vaccine. First, no vaccine is 100% effective and you should never think that just because you got a vaccine that you'll be totally immune from any infection regardless of who and how many people you interact with. If you compare to times in the past when the majority of the public gets vaccinated that might look like it makes you 100% immune only because of the compounding effect of everyone being more resistant. This is one reason why getting adoption from the whole public was so critical. The extra silver lining worth mentioning is that you are, at least, much less likely to have very dangerous symptoms if you are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection. Second, vaccines are not able to handle all possible variations of a virus, so you often need to hit the virus hard and fast with vaccine adoption to prevent resistant variants from evolving and becoming dominant. Letting a virus evolve in subpopulations is a very concerning event. You may notice that people who get "the flu shot" vaccine still can get the flu. That's because the common flu has so many variants and evolves so quickly that the medical community has to forecast and guess what they think will be the dominant evolving flu strain in advance and give people a flu shot for that specifically. But often times they guess wrong and people get infected by something else. And of course I don't think flu-shot vaccine adoption is as high as we would like, at which point see point 1. The bottom line is medicine has *no* silver bullets for viruses that can save you independent of any public behavior. Our success at stopping a virus in its tracks can only be achieved by coordinated public effort. And that is precisely why you should be very worried: the US is filled with misinformation and people playing political games with medical health. Science can provide the road to success, but the public has to be the one to walk it.

It remains in an individuals interest to get vaccinated. But everyone would have been much better off if everyone who could get vaccinated did as soon as they could.

To put this another way, the way this pandemic has unfolded as made me feel like Hari fucking Seldon. Except I don't have a plan to mitigate it.

The vaccine mostly met and slightly exceeded my expectations. Exceeding because they got it available so quickly. The public's gross and ignorant anti-vax position that resulted in a continued mess also, sadly, met my expectations.

Seems like everyone likes it, but for some reason it did nothing for me. Maybe I'm tired of rebooting Batman, or maybe it's just my mood right now. But at the moment, meh.

Not bad. Ico

To be fair, this boards history has had plenty of drama, but we all stick around because we're a bunch of psychos. So welcome to the mad house!

They only say her name a couple or times or something, so it's easy to miss, but as soon as I heard it I got pretty giddy

My wife hated Gaia as a "character" but I liked the idea Asimov was playing with.

FWIW, Trantor and the empire are explored a lot more in the prequel novels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. There are changes, but this is why I say they are clearly trying to wrangle the whole universe into a show form and considering the novels huge time jumps that requires changes. Like, Demerzel is the most influential character in the entire Foundation timeline by a mile, but doesn't feature in the original 3 Foundation novels.

Yeah, I also loathe mob rule and it's why that's the best argument I can make for "free speech." I just think we can and have to find a middle ground where we do punish the egregious but not "cancel" anything we reactively dislike. So far, I haven't had too much problem with what people have done. If it start tipping toward mob rule, I'll push back then.

Yeah, I don't agree with it either. I think the best argument I could make for their side is people are fucking dumb and it may be better to instill a simple policy of "don't boycott stuff for words" than it is to teach people to have more nuanced perspective when they decide whether something goes over the line. Otherwise the tables can too easily turn and you get puritanical mob rule. But there is just so much awful shit out there I think we simply have to ask for better judgement as a society, one where we can boycott and protest the obviously bad shit. If we can't ask society to do that, we're fucked anyway so we might as well try.

An advocate of philosophical free speech would probably tell you you shouldn't cancel your Netflix subscription over it and certainly not anything and everything the person in question touches in any form. They would tell you to keep your subscription if there is other content in which you find value, and just avoid watching the content you dislike.

Chappelle specifically hasn't had anything of note happen to him, but there very much is a cancel culture that exists. When someone is a giant shit bird, the public doesn't simply ignore their show and comment online about they dislike them, they make pleas to have them removed from the network hosting them so *no one* can watch them. In most cases of stuff like that, I believe that is an appropriate response, but the people who ascribe to philosophically pure free speech would advocate that you just not watch their show and comment on why you dislike them yourself, not move to have them removed. I suppose there might be risk of something like that happen to him now, since you can find people petitioning Netflix to remove the content and cease further relationship with him.

Yeah, because no one is going to become over-reliant on the autonomous targeting and just pull the trigger without thought. This is not how we navigate to the positive future with AI.

This comic is of course correct, but I think a lot of opponents readily admit this fact, but further hold the position that "freedom of speech" is a more philosophical stance that asks people to respond to words only with their own words, rather than seeking other punitive measures. I suspect Chappelle is one of those people, although I haven't watched the latest special. Now, I disagree with that philosophical position: I think we ought to respond in more significant ways to certain kinds of speech. I even think in the age of misinformation that the government needs to tighten free speech rights to some degree too. But I think it's important to be cognizant of the opposing position.

Holy shit that's rough.