• 1 Post
  • 414 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • I would recommend it. It can take a minute your first time through to get to some of the intense optimization stuff, but a lot of it’s there really early.
    The dominant gameplay loop by far is “you have tools. There’s a new problem to solve with those tools that’s hard/tedious. Solving it means you can make tools that make the problem easier. Goto step one”.


  • I generally assume intent that’s more shallow if it’s just as explanatory. It’s the same reason home appliances occasionally get a burst of AI labeling. “Artificial intelligence” sounds better in advertising than “interpolated multi variable lookup table”.
    It’s a type of simple AI (measure water filth from an initial rinse, dry weight, soaked weight, and post spin weight, then find the average for the settings from preprogrammed values.), but it’s still AI.

    Biggest reason I think it’s advertising instead of something more deliberate is because this has happened before. There’s some advance in the field, people think AI has allure again and so everything gets labeled that way. Eventually people realize it’s not the be all end all and decide that it’s not AI, it “just” a pile of math that helps you do something. Then it becomes ubiquitous and people think the notion of calling autocorrect AI is laughable.


  • That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”

    I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.

    Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…

    Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.



  • City skylines would be the best place to live, and would have a natural friendship with factorio.

    It would be a bit weird making a bowl of cereal and having a freight train blast up to your house at 200mph, a robot flies out of the depot just past the dog park, skims above the pedestrian walkways at just under the speed of sound, unloads the single stack of of cereal boxes that the train is carrying and sticks it in your pantry before they both vanish just as fast. You only had a half a box of raisin bran left and you hit the resupply threshold.



  • I’d even go a step further and say your last point is about generative LLMs, since text classification and sentiment analysis are also pretty benign.

    It’s tricky because we’re having a social conversation about something that’s been mislabeled, and the label has been misused dozens of times as well.

    It’s like trying to talk about knife safety when you only have the word “pointy”.



  • I agree with you. It’s just that the “right to remain silent” is the name for the category of right that the fifth amendment provides, not the actual right.
    The reason the interpretation is bullshit is because what the actual amendment says is stronger than a simple right to not speak: it’s very clearly intended to be freedom from being coerced to provide information that could hurt you. They shouldn’t be able to interrogate you at all until you clearly waive the right against self incrimination.
    You don’t have the literal right to remain silent. You have the right to tell them to stop coercing you, after which they have to end the interrogation.

    It’s not generally uncommon to have to do something to exercise a right. No one is passively invoking the right to petition their representatives or own weapons. The supreme Court has just unfortunately held that you have to tell the cops to stop pressuring you, instead of them not being able to start.


  • And that’s exactly what I explained. There isn’t an answer that doesn’t involve the constitution and what judges had to say about things.
    considering the police are legally allowed to lie to you, the Miranda warning using the name for a legal concept instead of a more accurate description of the right is about the least abusive thing they can do.

    It’s not particularly weird for rights to need to be explicitly actioned in general, as an aside. You have to actively get the arms to bare them, write a letter to petition the government, ask for a lawyer and ask them to stop interrogation. Invoking a right isn’t weird, but in this case the actual right is freedom from being coerced into self incrimination. They shouldn’t be able to start interrogation until you unambiguously waive your rights.



  • Those are explicitly derived from the bit of the constitution I was referring to. That’s what defines what they have to tell you and what it means.

    I’m not sure what you’re looking for here. You asked why you would need to invoke a right, and why it would be this way. There’s simply isn’t an answer that doesn’t involve the constitution or judges. The authority figure is using words that judges outlined the basic gist of in 1965 and different judges have dialed back the protections of in the 2000s and earlier.



  • Fun fact: if you haven’t been mirandized your silence is admissable, but not your answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinas_v._Texas

    The correct answer is to plead the fifth if a cop says hello.
    It would be great if our system was set up such that there were people responsible for public safety the way firefighters are and, also like firefighters, don’t have the looming threat of crushing you with the weight of the law, but unlike firefighters don’t need to be ready next to a lot of bulky specialized equipment to be effective.
    But it’s not, so…


  • The (obviously flawed) reasoning the supreme Court used is that it’s the same as invoking the right to legal counsel: we tend to accept that you need to ask for a lawyer, they don’t just get you one. Likewise, if you want them to stop asking you questions you need to say so.

    Considering the right isn’t the “right to remain silent” we nickname it, but No person shall be … compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, it’s a bit preposterous. Like saying it was a legal warrantless search because you never said “stop”, you just locked the doors, tried to keep them out, and tried to keep them out of certain areas.


  • You’re not wrong.

    There is a rationale, it just fails to be consistent with the reason the right is explicitly enumerated.

    Some rights are more about restraining the governments actions towards you. The right to legal counsel prohibits the government from putting you on trial totally lost and oblivious. The right to remain silent is a nickname we give to the prohibition on someone being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”.
    Rights that prohibit government actions are usually automatic: free speech, no unreasonable search and seizure, and so on all prohibit the government from doing something.
    The right to counsel requires the government to provide you with a lawyer if you need one, and to stop asking you questions if you ask for one until they show up.

    The conservative supreme Court majority held that the “right to remain silent” was a right to make the government stop, just like asking for a lawyer, and that it didn’t follow that the two rights needed to be invoked in different manners: no one has argued that their behavior should have implied they wanted a lawyer even if they didn’t say so. Further, they said that if “not speaking” is what constitutes invoking the fifth, then it opens more questions about what manner of not speaking counts as an invocation. If someone doesn’t answer, can the cop repeat themselves?
    Invoking the right however is unambiguous, making it a better legal standard.

    This falls apart not because of the nickname we give the right, but because of what it says and the intent behind it: “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”. The key word is “compelled”. The phrasing and intent are clear that it’s about compulsion , not invoking an entitlement. Any statement you make you should be able to refuse to allow to be used against you, otherwise it’s compulsion even if given willingly at the time.



  • Yes, but the case being referenced involved what it means to invoke your fifth amendment rights.
    Is remaining silent invoking the right, or do you have to state “I am invoking the right to remain silent”, or some other statement?

    Per the supreme Court, you can’t passively invoke the right and can only do so actively. So simply not answering a question isn’t invoking the fifth amendment and could be used against you.


  • The US has done many horrible things, but that’s an awful list to go by. It mixes US involvement in the Philippines and the nightmare that was with “Israel killed someone and it’s likely the US was aware”, NATO involvement in Bosnia, and the US usage of radio and press releases to influence world opinion in its favor.
    Specific incidents in Bosnia? Certainly. But on the face of it, the US joining with other nations to intervene in an ethnically driven civil war isn’t an attrocity. The US being aware of an Israeli operation isn’t a US attrocity. Propaganda isn’t an attrocity.
    Hell, one entry literally seemed to be “American soldiers reported a South Korean war crime through appropriate channels, and this didn’t change US foreign policy”

    Mixing actual attrocities in with the benign or unrelated things just dilutes the actual attrocities, particularly when the preamble says to play up to emotional outrage.


  • Problem with that line of thinking is that it presumes they won’t do those things anyway. If they want just cause, they just declare it. If anyone to the left in any way does anything, it’s a seditious partisan act by the extreme left and very likely a justifiable use for the insurrection act.

    Concerning ourselves with how they’ll take things is putting our actions under their review. Preemptively bending to their will before they even express it out of fear of how they might react.

    If they’re going to call you radical and extreme, you may as well enjoy the benefits rather than try to appease them.