Lurker > MasaomiHouzuki

Yeah, will be trying to fix it so azuarc doesn't have to go through this, but ff14 is TOO TEMPTING.

This is the all ages version, if it was really written with "that" in mind, why is it 1) possible to release without any adult content 2) profitable even with an adult release that preemptively all the existing fans of the writer / company have already played

anyway game of the decade right here.

SeabassDebeste posted...

hm, layers upon layers of abstractions, layers upon layers of getter methods for calculated values, naming conventions, hidden beans...

FUNCTIONAL language gang was here
IMPERATIVE IS A FUCK
FUNCTOR THEM ALL
1989
I am immutable man
410,757,864,530 DEAD STATEMENTS

Also for people who like worm *and* can handle unfinished works, Worth the Candle isn't by the same writer but ALSO very good and hits a lot of similar notes of being very long and detailed with its world building.

It's unfinished but going at a decent clip and there are lots of arcs that are already resolved.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/25740126

ChichiriMuyo posted...

Unions are great, and I don't understand how a common working man or woman could be against them. If you go back to before unions or look at a non-unionized industry like game developers or Amazon factory workers you see a system where you can work extremely long hours, have essentially no days off paid or otherwise, get fired/laid off for no wrong doing, have no protection from unsafe work environments, no guarantee of fair pay, etc. etc. etc.

The straightforward answer is essentially that doing those things are good for a diverse workforce, but not good for individual workers. For workers who want money but don't mind working long hours as much, they have the option of working long hours and converting time into money. For workers who look bad on paper, but they personally know that they're a good worker (like ex-cons, teenagers, racial minorities in prejudiced areas) the ability to fire them for underperforming allows them to make a cogent argument for hiring them in the first place. For workers with high risk tolerances, unsafe work environments allow them to turn that risk tolerance into salary

Unions are good for the people already in them, but notably do not fight for the rights of people outside of them, although they claim to.

Name: Professor Quirrel
Series: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Media type: Literature
Tier: Medium

Basically no ethics Batman as a potterverse wizard

"Those of you who have wasted time by reading your useless first-year Defence textbooks may have gotten the impression that although this subject is called Defence Against the Dark Arts, it is actually about how to defend against Nightmare Butterflies, which cause mildly bad dreams, or Acid Slugs, which can dissolve all the way through a two-inch wooden beam given most of a day.

"The Hungarian Horntail is taller than a dozen men! It breathes fire so quickly and so accurately that it can melt a Snitch in midflight! One Killing Curse will bring it down!"

"The Mountain Troll is more dangerous than the Hungarian Horntail! It is strong enough to bite through steel! Its hide is resistant enough to withstand Stunning Hexes and Cutting Charms! Its sense of smell is so acute that it can tell from afar whether its prey is part of a pack, or alone and vulnerable! Most fearsome of all, the troll is unique among magical creatures in continuously maintaining a form of Transfiguration on itself - it is always transforming into its own body. If you somehow succeed in ripping off its arm it will grow another within seconds! Fire and acid will produce scar tissue which can temporarily confuse a troll's regenerative powers - for an hour or two! They are smart enough to use clubs as tools! The mountain troll is the third most perfect killing machine in all Nature! One Killing Curse will bring it down."

Professor Quirrell was smiling rather grimly. "Your sad excuse for a third-year Defense textbook will suggest to you that you expose the mountain troll to sunlight, which will freeze it in place. This, my young apprentices, is the sort of useless knowledge you will never find in my lessons. You do not encounter mountain trolls in open daylight! The idea that you should use sunlight to stop them is the result of foolish textbook authors trying to show off their mastery of minutia at the expense of practicality. Just because there is a ridiculously obscure way of dealing with mountain trolls does not mean you should actually try to use it! The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain. If, as an adult wizard, you find yourself incapable of using the Killing Curse, then you can simply Apparate away! Likewise if you are facing the second most perfect killing machine, a Dementor. You just Apparate away!"

"Unless, of course, you are under the influence of an anti-Apparition jinx. No, there is exactly one monster which can threaten you once you are fully grown. The single most dangerous monster in all the world, so dangerous that nothing else comes close. The Dark Wizard. That is the only thing that will still be able to threaten you."

Professor Quirrell's lips were set in a thin line. "I will reluctantly teach you enough trivia for a passing mark on the Ministry-mandated portions of your first-year finals. Since your exact mark on these sections will make no difference to your future life, anyone who wants more than a passing mark is welcome to waste their own time studying our pathetic excuse for a textbook. The title of this subject is not Defence Against Minor Pests. You are here to learn how to defend yourselves against the Dark Arts. Which means, let us be very clear on this, defending yourselves against Dark Wizards. People with wands who want to hurt you and who will likely succeed in doing so unless you hurt them first! There is no defence without offence! There is no defence without fighting! This reality is deemed too harsh for eleven-year-olds by the fat, overpaid, Auror-guarded politicians who mandated your curriculum. To the abyss with those fools! You are here for the subject that has been taught at Hogwarts for eight hundred years! Welcome to your first year of Battle Magic!"

Quantum mechanics proves particles fundamentally non deterministic (even if we don't fully understand them), but if each particles wave function collapsing result is part of the definition of the universe, part of the input to the calculation, then.... the universe is obviously deterministic.

This is essentially false. Solve Schroedinger's equation, and not only do you get accurate results, but also get explanations of why a wave function looks like a particle at classical energy / time scales. The question isn't "is the particle deterministic" so much as "why is what we see the born rule instead of the waves themselves like in EM".

And to point out, like, wave function collapse is essentially the worst of all philosophical and physical worlds. Because that's proposing that there is a 1) non-unitary (i.e. not probability preserving) transformation that happens every single time a measurement is made, despite nothing in the equation or experiments indicating this happens (decoherence / entanglement happens on a gradual scale and have basically been confirmed up to larger and more energetic systems all the time and 2) time asymmetric, which like, is essentially the unitary point but you're also violating CPT symmetry at this point, which once again is like hyper confirmed. I dare someone who believes in wave function collapse to give a coherent account of what happens to the wave function in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment.

if you take the perspective that they're nonlocal, then some kind of information (even if we can't harness it) has been transmitted faster than the speed of light.

This is not what bell's equality says or does. You cannot transmit information faster than the speed light.

It's instead saying that if you interpret the Born Rule as a consequence of some sort of hidden variable theory, then you lose local realism. You can always just assume that quantum mechanics is quantum mechanics instead of a classical theory with hidden variables (which is what the EPR paper originally suggested).

Like, superdeterminism is what happens when you don't take the equations seriously, then wonder why nothing makes sense when reality obeys what the equations say rather than your intuitions. Of course you'd be confused when you pretend your confusion is a part of reality.

I'll point out that obviously you couldn't have gotten this insight from philosophy, but from actually understanding the physical facts on the ground / experiments that have been performed which differentiate different predictions from each other.


there are no valid local hidden variable theories. either we have to dramatically rethink our understanding of the structure of the universe and accept that the speed of light is a suggestion and that the universe operates non-locally, or that there aren't deeper equations and information that would describe the results of seemingly non-deterministic phenomena

like, locality not being true has a bunch of observable consequences in a bunch of observations that wouldn't even be hard to check. For example, the 1/r^2 dropoff in both the EM and gravity forces *is* essentially an ironclad statement of locality (if we had non-local interactions, then the surface area over which the force works wouldn't be proportional to 1/r^2ed, so you essentially have to repeatedly pile epicycle after epicycle to explain why *only* information propagates faster, not to mention how both special relativity and general relativity would be derived *at all* essentially because Einstein just assumed locality and then pushed as hard as he could on that assumption). At this point, you're not just beheading yourself with occam's razor, but bewilderingly stumped at why cutting yourself is so painful.

If something seems confusing and wrong, at least entertain the possibility that it is confusing and wrong because a wrong assumption got made somewhere.

Sarcasm aside, I don't have an informed opinion I just find it amusing how we are doomed to eternally debate subjects we can never fully understand. Oh humans. Silly us.

You are confusing the ignorance of people who don't even understand the basics of what is even happening (pop quiz, what's the difference between superpositions and the derivation of the born rule? if you aren't even aware that quantum mechanics actually talks about two conceptually independent types of randomness, then it's hard to see how you make *actual* sense of things like the delayed quantum choice eraser or the actual original experiment for bell's theorem.) This isn't a statement that these problems shouldn't be discussed at all, but pretending your own confusion has physical consequences is naturally going to stop actual new information from clearing up the confusion.

I'm not attempting to answer the philosophical question of determinism (incidentally, I'm a compatibilist), just trying to explain what people mean when they say that many world's is on the side of determinism.

Many worlds breaks the Gordian knot of "deterministic" wave function in theory vs "probabilistic" measurements in reality by asserting essentially that the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is identical to the probabilistic nature of experiments where a bunch of clones of experimenters are created.

To give an illustrative, but not quantum mechanical example, imagine you see a house with two rooms, one with an arrow pointed left and one with an arrow pointed right. Then you're knocked out, your brain + body split exactly in half + the missing half cloned (such that there's no question on which one is the "original"; if you can come up with an objection just pretend the splitting is even more fine grained or pretend that you literally can't tell) and each version of you is placed into the room.

So even though there was a deterministic thing going on (a single house that exists, and two versions of you), the chance that you wake up and see a left arrow is 50% (and same with right arrow).

In this case, the analogy corresponds to solving the wave function with two results being discovering the house has two rooms and the case of measuring the result being waking up and seeing what room you're in. Many world's asserts that this set of observations is commiserate with having split versions of you.

(There's more complicated ways that you can explain this by talking about entangled states / actually weird quantum experiments like the delayed choice quantum eraser, but the intuition behind many worlds I think is much easier to explain.)

Note that I haven't talked about some other objections against like the "basis problem" (where some people protest that there's no "objective" way to split the universe) or the "people who don't understand many worlds or occam's razor talk about occam's razor" problem (where, if you believed that many worlds is more complicated than one world, you goddamn well better explain how "many atoms" is simpler than "four elements")

Not_an_Owl posted...

MasaomiHouzuki posted...

If you liked it and want more (or really really like OG Xcom on DOS / thought there wasn't enough to do) I highly recommend downloading the long war mod and at least taking a look at the campaign (maybe not finishing it it's very long)

Do not do this your first time around. Long War assumes you know the base game backwards and forwards and does not hold back at all.

And yeah should have said this, this is only if you finish and win a campaign.

Also you should probably look up some stuff on the long war wiki since they couldn't actually ship it with a manual, so there's lots of changes they make that aren't visible to the player, but you should know about. (Like the addition of damage reduction etc.)

If you liked it and want more (or really really like OG Xcom on DOS / thought there wasn't enough to do) I highly recommend downloading the long war mod and at least taking a look at the campaign (maybe not finishing it it's very long)

why the hell would you credit socialized medicine with death panels wtf

"Well actually you have to beat it 5 times to get the real good ending."

I see you've never watched beyond the first act of a three act play because they say "end of act 1" at the end of act 1.

Because if the word "ending" is contained anywhere, it's definitely because playthrough 2-3 are exactly identical to playthrough 1, just like how acts 2 and 3 are definitely repeats of act 1.

Hakuno Kishinami (Fate/Extra CCC)

Would like to have time to compile good quotes + good summary for what's fun about her!!!

Nwabudike Morgan (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)



Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill. ~ CEO Nwabudike Morgan

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri (look for morgan industries quote)
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/first-impressions-morgan-industries/

Distorted Travesty 3
Slay The Spire
FTL
Celeste

Sceptilesolar posted...

I read Subarashiki Hibi, but I wouldn't put it in my favorites. There was a lot going on in it, though, and I did enjoy it a lot. I'm not sure I can forgive End Sky 2 though. There were also some really uncomfortable parts, like Saya level 'I'm hesitant to recommend this to other humans'. There's a hell of a lot to unpack and I don't know if I ever really did.

Edit: Also I read Dies Irae too but didn't find it anything special outside of good battle scenes. The main character was also insufferable.

Oh yeah I probably should have put a content warning on Wonderful everyday. Isn't there an all ages patch though?

Wonderful Every day spoilers: Endsky 2 isn't really about resolving the stories or about the characters, and in that sense, yeah, it's extremely disappointing, but the thing that I enjoyed a lot from it was when you start reading the last line and the extremely ending sequence starts scrolling. I don't think any other game has ever given me that level of despair and hollowness and that moment is special enough for me to remember vividly like eight years later.

Dies Irae and fate stay night spoilers: Is especially great because on the surface level there's such a hodgepodge of stuff; like the metafictional winking by Mercurius, the personal character arcs that basically everyone has, all of it, interweaves into each other and plays a role in every fight's outcome and role in the plot. It's like Fate's UBW moment except stretched out over 4 glorious routes. I agree that if you don't like the main character the themes won't do much for you, but I don't think any battle shounen has made me so actively wish for the protagonist to triumph because he's the protagonist, rather than because of other factors.

I think it also says a lot that with the exception of maybe two or three characters, everyone with more than two scenes has been a favorite of someone who played Dies Irae.

Oh and yeah if you pay attention to vmgc it's also the game starring this track:

Wonderful Everyday was the first thing I read in Japanese, it's fantastic, it's mind opening and it's one of my favorite works of fiction ever. It's been translated, but basically no one has read it :(

The dialogue is extremely snappy, the main female protagonist is consistently hilarious and not-an-idiot.

One of the central problems of talking about it is that it's difficult to say what it's about without spoilers, other than to say the first chapter is not at all representative.

Also dies irae is incredibly cool and satisfying and basically perfects the art of "people fighting in ways that represent their character / ideology".

If I had to say what people from this topic would consistently like, it'd be Dies Irae, but man, if you want something one of a kind that makes you think laugh and cry I think Wonderful Everyday deserves the chance to know about it.

CCC event is fantastic and I'm glad I play with sound on always.

It's Shake.

Maybe if you've never played medic you'd think that.

I hate random crits.