saturdaysaint

In voice conversations I tell it not to reply at all or only say “Understood” until I use some kind of code word. Not perfect, but less intrusive.

Fascinating, then, how the head of DOGE has deep financial interests in China. It’s really not out of bounds to suggest that his benefactors could’ve pulled some strings to kneecap the US.

I found this to be an informative and well-laid out argument in favor of motion interpolation: https://www.wired.com/story/motion-smoothing-defense-hdtv/

I have come to prefer it. I think this comes as a combination of recent algorithms getting better (there are relatively few artifacts and they are far subtler than they once were) and because newer consoles have conditioned me to abhor any content running at less than 60 fps. The jaggedness of 24 fps grates my eyes. I’ve had my iPhone recording 60 fps video for years.

If you use ChatGPT or find it to be a compelling technology, there’s good reason to root for a reversion to the status quo. This could set back the state of the art consumer AI product quite a few months as teams reinvent the wheel in a way that doesn’t get them sued when they relaunch.

This attitude of acceptance is probably the most helpful attitude the vast majority of the time, but I was lucky enough to have parents that radically minimized their possessions in their early 60's and moved into a retirement community, and it has first and foremost been a favor to them. As they've aged a few years, they're just enjoying a wildly unencumbered existence with the bare minimum of regular maintenance chores. They're focused on spending time with the people they want to, not puttering around the house. You're right that this kind of mindset can't be forced on senior citizens and it bespeaks a certain level of affluence, but it is a wonderful way for the elderly to live. I'd encourage children to lay the seeds with their parents before they're elderly and more resistant to change.

I see the relationship coaches of this stripe all over all sorts of social media, and I just rarely if ever see insights that couldn't have been imparted by your average friendly stranger at a bar. What I mostly see are slightly-to-moderately damaged people who are articulate and engaging enough to find an audience of similarly damaged people who their experiences resonate with. This guy seems fairly innocuous (although this kind of rumination can also be unproductive!) but you see a lot of people fomenting bitterness. I would advise anyone I cared about to seek a credentialed therapist before turning to one of these self-appointed coaches.

Yeah, there's room to quibble when it comes to Warzone, but it really doesn't add up to much in my view. The most gamebreaking advantages - The Roze skin and the broken Mac-10 blueprint - were basically accidents when it was a fairly young game (< a year old), and almost all of them were freebies included in the basic battle pass (so essentially free for anyone that plays regularly). Statistical anomolies still come around and "break" the game every once in a while, but it's really reached a point where most of the main weapons are well balanced to the point that I often think I would have been best off sticking with some of the first guns I levelled up.

Most blueprints effectively just make levelling up new weapons a more pleasant experience, maybe saving you 1 - 2 hours for $20.

I play Fall Guys and Warzone, both of which offer cosmetic modifications that are unlockable both through gameplay and by purchasing them. IMO, the cosmetics are little more than flair that add a little bit of fun and personal expression to the experience. Along with the "Battle Pass" model, where users are rewarded for regular play during content "Seasons", these mini-economies incentivize people to play regularly (which improves multiplayer games on a lot of levels) and incentivize the developers to continually add content. People that get these cosmetics enjoy having a distinctive profile in a social experience they spend a lot of time in and subsidize gamers that enjoy robust free experiences (e.g. kids/teens who provide a lot of excellent competition). It's all a win-win-win-win in my book.

I'm 41 years old and have fond memories of the old days of packaged buy-once games, but the modern battle pass/cosmetic standard seems like a much more realistic way of having a consistently updated experience with strong engagement year-round.

This line of argument doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. First of all, it's quite pedantic and naive to assume that governments and medical bodies in the richest and most advanced countries haven't worked through similar issues of causality with innumerable other diseases. More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior years that have yet to be explained by anything else.

I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.

To me the best explanation for this is as mutually-assured-destruction insurance if Microsoft takes the biggest title in the Activision portfolio, Call of Duty, away from Playstation.

As a Sony fan, I'm cautiously optimistic that the relationship could be more fruitful than that. I don't know what Sony's creative secrets are, but they seem good at ushering high quality, interesting games with broad appeal into existence, sort of akin to what you see at HBO or Pixar. I would love to see them exert that influence on a big multiplatform game.

That's hours of "testimony" from conspiracy theorists who all have long records of making flagrantly incorrect statements on COVID. Johnson's big leadoff panelist was a Texas cardiologist who is far from a respected authority in epidemiology and seems to be courting attention by disputing every best practice that ER doctors and the scientific community have agreed works best with acute COVID patients and hyping up silver bullet drugs that have shown limited effectiveness in the best studies. I recommend everyone look up "Dr. Peter Mcullough" and getting a whiff of his reputation before investing any of their time in that panel.

Kids. We have 2 toddlers and are expecting again. Both of us had parents who were teachers, which meant their working hours lined up perfectly with our school hours and holidays. Raising multiple kids is pretty tough if you don't have that luxury! Tracking doctors, dentists, caretakers, after school activities, etc was exhausting, and for virtually all of these you need some kind of backup plan. Especially with a third child, there would be virtually no way for us to handle,say, a COVID wave. My wife is high earning and our tastes are pretty humble.

At one point, this might have been a hard decision, but COVID and a child on the way feel like we've had an extra nudge in this direction. The labor market is so tight and my specialty is in enough demand that I feel like I could jump back into my field in another few years if it makes sense for us.

I feel like almost any new kit I look at is composed of big specially-molded bricks that would seem really odd and difficult to find a use for if they were deconstructed in a big box of bricks. Maybe I'm misremembering or am being too harsh on the newer kits, but I feel like the Lego sets I grew up with in the 80's and 90's were more reusable. I had the sense that every Lego kit I bought was also giving me cool new tools to build bigger/wilder spaceships and trucks, whereas these just look like a nice weekend project with no application thereafter.

https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Legendary-Mountain-Awesome-Build...

https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Creator-Adventure-Building-Creat...

https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Champions-McLaren-Building-Piece...

I'm sorry this isn't much use to the parent poster, but I think these conversations really need to happen years if not decades before it's time for the change. 70-somethings can be lively and wonderful, but as a generalization they are going to be very set in their ways and extremely loathe to changing their valued routines. At their age, even something simple like getting acquainted with new neighbors (and losing decades-long connections with old neighbors) can be really intimidating. They can have emotional attachments to rooms of their house that they probably can't even verbalize.

I agree. It feels like most Lego sets on the market have several major/foundational pieces which are essentially useless outside of the model they're built for - some huge chunk of molded plastic. A big part of the joy of Lego sets in the past was that they showed you what was possible with these unassuming bricks. Sure, any big/intricate set would have some funny pieces, but they would mostly lend themselves to many forms of re-use that even a 10-year old could easily figure out. My 4 year-old has had a great time with Duplos, but I'm sort of leary about transitioning to Legos because to me, they've become more emblematic of consumerist collecting than creativity.

Not sure when it's coming, but they announced an Android app when the AirTags were announced.

I wouldn't bet against Mike Judge - he went on from B&B to create Office Space, King of the Hill, Idiocracy (painfully underrated), and most recently Silicon Valley.

I hope that nobody reading this has an unsupervised psilocybin experience in 2021. We are so close to being able to pay for a professionally supervised experience (and you can almost surely find one today if you look in the right circles and come with the right intentions) - these will enhance the moments of clarity and alleviate a lot of the confusion and darkness that are part of the territory with psychedelic experience.

I've benefitted greatly from a handful of psilocybin experiences in my life. The experiences were marked by long periods of profound terror and deep sadness, but I consider these to be powerful literalizations of anxieties, fears and attachments that helped me grapple with them in new ways. That said, I've glanced at scary thoughts that don't occur to me in daily life and came close to getting in trouble when I ran outside. Get a good babysitter - even better, track down a professional.

In the most frequent circumstance - my 3 year old hitting his 1 year old sister - my first step is to pick her up, give her sympathetic attention, and whisk her out of the room. So safety is no longer an issue, and the hitter has a moment to cool off, which they typically need. More importantly, he's feeling attention drain out of the room - while undramatic, this is enormously impactful. In the psychological conditioning literature, this is called "extinction" - you're taking away the stimulus that he's been looking for.

I'm sure there are circumstances where there's not much choice but to step in, but think hard and creatively about ways to mitigate the safety issue while removing attention. We're so driven to step in and make a scene that this is often painfully difficult.

I've done this too, and I have one of "those" hard-headed boys that loves to roughhouse, but I've come to believe there is no escape from "Where attention goes, behavior grows." You might be inflicting a punishment, but you are also granting him zealous attention, which is a drug worth some negative side-effects to their mind.

Withdrawing attention - say, to attend to the kid he's injured in another room - seems to change behavior much more effectively, exactly as the psychological literature predicts. Ignoring violent behavior is extremely difficult, but it can produce surprising results. It's taken a few months of this, but my hardheaded 3 year old has just started expressing sincere apologies.

A lot of this article (possibly the majority?) is actually spent explaining why Instant Games haven't taken over the world, despite some success stories. This is why he goes into some detail on Apple - if they can't go on iOS devices, there's a real ceiling on the trend.

I really enjoyed this article, but it's a bit of a discursive brain dump, which is why I think a lot of the criticisms have essentially been misrepresentations of the actual article contents.

I mean, you're not completely wrong, but if you say "not interested" to a handful of emotion-stirring or shocking things, it's amazing how savvily the algorithm will steer you away from that content and often into more interesting fare.

These are early adopter products that are, for some good reasons, expressly aimed at a fairly small subset of wealthy and technologically inclined people. Given the nascent state of the technology and the extremely high liability, they probably wouldn't want all of their customers to drive this even if it was magically cheap.

In the medium run, like GPS technology, competition will drive the cost of autonomy down to practically nothing and it will be enjoyed by working class people for free.

Now that tactical shooters have gone from a hardcore gamer niche to arguably the primary way many teenagers hang out with peers, good spatial sound is a huge opportunity. If someone could make $200 headphones where you could easily perceive if someone was above you or below you in Fortnite or Warzone, you would have a billion dollar company. As it is, most of us need visual indicators to tell where a nearby gunshot on the same level as us came from.

Exactly. I've been on Tik Tok for a few months and I feel like I've seen a hundred times as many interesting and relevant videos that have actually improved my life and inspired purchases as I've ever seen on YouTube, mostly just on my For You Page (aka its recommendation algorithm). As a user, it doesn't feel like magical AI, it just feels like Tik Tok quickly grokked my most basic demographic information and frequently tries feeding me things that anyone would guess might be relevant to a 40 year old American dad who likes videogames (aka stuff Google knows). It's perplexing that Google, masters of A/B testing, can't figure out that parenting advice or retrogaming content might be relevant to me.

Granted the interaction model is very different, and who knows if I'd ever commit to watching even a 5 minute YouTube video on something I'm not primed to watch, but after Tik Tok, Youtube feels like a stale product of yesteryear.

Gentrification is often discussed as a phenomenon fairly specific to poor urban areas. A lot of the frequently mentioned problems of gentrification (displacing people and altering neighborhood character) don't really apply if a well-to-do techie buys (or builds) a house in, say, an enormous new Dallas suburb. The US has tons of land for wealthy people to build nice homes on without displacing anybody.

Power really isn't an excuse these days. There's a huge library of great games on Steam that run beautifully on a $600 laptop. Look at how many great games are on the Switch, which is about as powerful as an iPhone 6S.

It's just ridiculous that a leading software company can't support such a wildly popular class of software, but Apple game support has such a long history of tragic incompetence that any handwringing is a waste of time.

I was riveted by Half-Life in 1998, but I recently picked up it's well regarded remake Black Mesa (which updates the graphics to approximately 2006 levels) and IMO, it doesn't hold up at all.

Nothing about it is epic - it feels like a cramped dungeon crawl. The gameplay and puzzles are extremely simplistic (lots of slow moving enemies crawling down a hallway). The story is a bad B-movie compared to some of the compelling modern games that are raising world-building to new levels. When you compare it to modern games, I don't see how anyone could justify spending more than an hour or two on nostalgia playing.

It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.

If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.