Ashtear

Absolutely love it. I frequently find myself dying on the “characters with generous proportions can be a good thing sometimes” hill, so it’s nice to find support when I can. And it’s for exactly all the reasons laid out in this article.

87 on OpenCritic. If I’m being honest, that’s quite a bit higher than I was expecting after playing the demo. The gameplay felt novel for about three fights before it quickly started to feel like extruded third-person shooter product.

Unless I start hearing really strong things about the story, I’ll probably be waiting for a sale.

I have never understood this. Heard it with Undertale, too. One can always just ignore the weirdos in the fanbase?

I got absolutely sucked into Mewgenics the past month, still playing that. It doesn’t help that no other recent releases have caught my eye, and there aren’t really any on the horizon other than Mina the Hollower, which still doesn’t even have a release date.

Cinematic style as in it’s heavy on cutscenes, or that you didn’t like the art direction? If it’s the former, that’s been the general orientation of the genre for a little while now.

You could try something more gameplay-oriented, like Octopath Traveler, Shin Megami Tensei V, or Rune Factory.

The wild thing is how this is a complete 180 for the marketing industry. They went through a paradigm shift into authenticity, or at least the appearance thereof, not all that long ago as millennials aged into their prime spending demographic.

That demand didn’t go away, but now as wide swaths of people continue settle more into a post-truth world, I have to imagine the most effective mass market communication is the kind that can successfully serve both sides of the divide at once, almost like quantum superposition. I think of the success of The Boys, which did well because it simultaneously carried a scathing critique of fascism and capitalism while presenting fascist “heroes” that some could see as validation of their beliefs.

Having to use something like Windows IME on a phone for Japanese is nightmare fuel

It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?

The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.

I run 11 LTSC on a local account with tweaks from privacy.sexy. Zero issues.

Ultimately not worth the hassle of an upgrade until it’s required for an important app, though. I only did it because I had a congested 10 install and wanted to wipe anyway.

This feels like cope a bit, honestly. The thing about the current push for system requirements these days is it’s less about visual fidelity and more about saving development time. This is especially the case with ray tracing, with setups that are far easier to get passable lighting on. Not that there’s ever a fortunate time for exploding hardware prices, but it’s especially unfortunate that they hit while the most popular GPUs right now are 3060 and 4060s. Not exactly RT powerhouses. It would have been better for everyone involved if RT hardware was a generation ahead, and the “we want to spend less time on optimization” part of the push isn’t going to stop.

I don’t know if the AAA devs will hit the brakes a bit on visual fidelity in response to the hardware situation slowing down, but that and the gradual rise of handheld PCs will certainly create an opportunity for lower-spec games to find a market.

Mind explaining what features and why?

Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.

This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.

This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).

There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.

And the problem with Reddit–especially with certain language communities–is you’ll get a hallucination rate higher than current LLMs because learners can either overestimate their knowledge or sound off just because they want to show off.

I don’t recommend LLM use for beginners at languages but once they get a semester or two (or the equivalent) under their belt, the instant access to an answer that’s right most of the time is invaluable. Just first get to the point where you can start to recognize “maybe that’s not quite right…” first, and check sources. And definitely check in with natives as much as possible.

This article didn’t even go into the service disruptions Perplexity has had the past couple of weeks. In short, the best thing Perplexity does is give you access to multiple models at once, but when you try to select one for a specific thread, it will throw an error and (quietly) kick the response to your prompt to a backup.

Perplexity’s calling it a technical issue but it looks more like throttling, especially considering API access to Claude is expensive and that’s the one that is having the most “technical issues.” I would have already gone elsewhere if my sub wasn’t free, and if it continues to be this bad, I might end up going elsewhere anyway.

This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.

Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄

I moved to a web browser but I can’t even get push notifications working.