zzalpha

I've found that if you're engaging in a behaviour that has a positive value judgement associated with it (dieting or eating healthier, exercise, etc), if people find out and do not share that behaviour, it often puts them on the defensive (they're not doing it, too, therefore they are somehow lacking).

This is exacerbated by the fact that a vocal subset of people engaging in those behaviours talk about it in order to either virtue signal or brag to others those who don't.

After that it's all about protecting the ego. The vegetarian is seen as an inconvenience. The dieter is teased for not eating desert with everyone else. The people who don't go to the gym start explaining all the reasons why they hate gyms and the people in them.

And I'm hardly immune. One of my friends is extremely fit and I caught myself teasing him about it as a consequence of my own envy and insecurities. I hope I've since stopped but it's a pretty basic human behaviour as far as I can tell.

Find an equivalently surprising example in... Let's use the other poster's choice, python.

I'll wait.

Edit: didn't have to wait long, way to go Python! Maybe I'll just claim it probably has fewer of these types of bizarre idiosyncrasies? I hope it has fewer...

I'm always baffled by JavaScript apologists... Look, your baby is ugly. We know it's ugly. You know it's ugly. But if we point out the problems, hey, maybe the ECMA will update the language to fix some of the issues.

Meanwhile, being aware of them is often important in order to build correct, secure code.

And they're just entertaining.

So chill. Let's all laugh at how ugly JS is on a Saturday morning and enjoy ourselves a bit. Because when it comes to the JS ecosystem, if we can't laugh, we'd probably be crying...

The difference is python is strict about its types and doesn't do automatic coercion. So at least you get type errors at runtime and not magic implicit behaviour.

That said, even Perl did this better (less magic and surprises)... JavaScript is like a language intentionally designed to surprise the developer. Half the time I feel like it's a practical joke that someone accidentally took seriously.

I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. The article does a good job of laying out their argument. In short: The claim is that Kim believes the US wouldn't "retaliate so savagely" because the US wouldn't be willing to risk losing a major populated area to a successful ICBM strike.

So preemptive nuclear strikes on local bases make sense to degrade the US's ability to stage a conventional invasion, while acting as a deterrent by threatening a strike on the domestic US.

You can choose to believe or not believe that argument (it depends on your measure of risk in that scenario), but the logic is clear and reasonable.

Actually it does:

This scenario to stave off an invasion with a limited nuclear attack on a U.S. military target is not irrational, although it is clearly risky and terrifyingly tragic. One wrinkle is that North Korea’s arsenal is currently small and vulnerable, and U.S. military strategy, reiterated by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, is to try to find and destroy all of Kim’s nuclear systems in the event of a war. That gives Kim an incentive to go first, go early and go massively if he is not confident about surviving a U.S. attempt at disarming him. If Kim thinks we are coming after him or his forces, he cannot afford to be wrong and he cannot afford to launch second.

That last sentence is key, so if you're skimming this comment, go back and read it.

To summarize: The basic thesis is that, if Kim believes an attack is coming (not that it has started, that it is simply coming), his rational choice is to use nuclear arms on bases in the region and thus force the US to the negotiating table.

Heck, if you're gonna argue this way, I'm surprised you didn't pick Super Mario Bros. After all, Mario Bros. is just wandering around and seeing cool stuff. You just to have to jump over things every now and then...

This is a false dichotomy.

Skyrim, for example, is absolutely both of these things, offering a strongly directed central narrative and lots of open world exploration opportunities.

But you still need gameplay mechanics to support the user's activities.

If the user is motivated by quests, you need good quests.

If the user is motivated by conflict, then you need good fighting mechanics, etc.

If the user is motivated by building/construction, you need strong mechanics to support that.

Unfortunately, I suspect you'll find very few user's who are motivated over the long term by just wandering around seeing cool stuff.

Of course, AFAIK, NMS only added "building stuff" (e.g. bases) to the list of things you could do after the initial release.

Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.

After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop: quests (Elder Scrolls), randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria), multiplayer PC threats (WoW, EVE), etc.

Sounds like this author feels NMS fails to justify itself in this way.

The post article would suggest NMS is being pulled in a lot of different directions... it has a single player quest, but it's not a great quest-based game. It has sandbox elements, but no obvious gameplay loop to make the sandbox compelling. It doesn't speak to the multiplayer elements, and I don't have personal experience with them, so I don't know how well they fit.

The Verge seems a fair bit more charitable regarding the changes, while acknowledging that the game is still flawed. They seem to like the additional quest components, and feel the overall engine improvements have been well done. But it still doesn't seem to address the core issue this article is focused on, which is that they feel NMS is a jack of all trades but a master of none.

So what's your take?

His example of Dark Souls is a perfect one. He acknowledges that, while the game isn't his thing, he can at least intellectually grok why Dark Souls is a good game, and how it has been optimized and refined for the specific play style they aimed at.

The author claims the same can't be said for No Man's Sky.

So, no, it's not that it's a different set of priorities. It's that it appears to be an incomprehensible set of priorities. And that's a real problem, if you believe in the thesis (which, I assume, will be explored in subsequent installments).

And yet it was a decade before we knew Volkswagen was cheating on emissions tests.

It's amazing what a few unscrupulous engineers and some careful information sharing can do...

Some places do a 37.5 hour work week, 9-5 with a 30 minute lunch. Others do 9-6 with an hour. There's also no shortage of places (such as my workplace) that do 35 hour work week, 9-5 with 1 hour lunch.

Well, assuming you work for a company that puts much stock in ass-in-seat time (which, lucky for me, I don't).

If you ask me, R&D on a tight budget and timeline is the worst time to be overworked and exhausted, as it renders you less creative, and far more prone to make mistakes.

Obviously it's a cost-benefit curve, but the research shows the benefits don't outweigh the costs beyond about 60 hours per week.

That didn't stop one fellow, many years ago, from trying exactly this. He'd commit code that was simply reindentation/style changes, send emails, etc, late at night, in an attempt to paper over the fact that he was simply a weak contributor that produced low quality code.

Everyone saw straight through him and recognized the absurdity for what it was.

Maintain work-life balance. If the company you work for doesn't support that choice, work somewhere else. It is an absolute lie that "most jobs" need you to "seem like you work 24/7", and perpetuating that lie only makes it easier for the bad actors to justify their behaviour.

TBH, I've never really understood this argument. Unless the argument is that the artist is being forced to set a lower face value, if all the tickets are sold at face value and scalped, the artist is getting exactly what they would have budgeted for.

So, are you saying the artist is being forced to sell the tickets at a price that's below what the market will bear?

By raising the price of tickets to what the market will bear, they force some people out of the marketplace, increasing availability of tickets for those who can afford them.

And from the perspective of the artist and Ticketmaster, they eliminate some of the risk of tickets going unsold.

Of course, it's understandably seen as very unfair (goodness knows I've missed out on shows I wanted to go to because scalpers raised the price beyond the level I was willing to pay), but I wouldn't say it has no value.

Look, a scalper wouldn't command the prices they did if the demand wasn't there.

In reality, whether we like it or not, the scalper is actually facilitating price discovery. It's very clear that these tickets are worth more to people than their face value, as otherwise the scalpers would be unsuccessful.

All the scalper is doing is raising the price to what the market will bear.

Which is why this isn't about economics. It really is strictly about fairness, which is entirely orthogonal.

For me, I tend to talk faster, raise my voice a bit, frown more, and generally behave more combatively.

So basic things like slowing down, relaxing my expressions and smiling more (even and especially when you're on the phone!!!) go a long way to not only changing how I present myself, but also changing how I feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money

If so, then a fixed money supply is necessarily deflationary in an expanding economy.

Of course, by that same argument, the US should be experiencing massive inflation right now due to the actions of the government during the financial crisis which led to a tripling of the monetary base, and yet it never materialized...

Oh please. This is just like someone's mom telling their kid "they're bullying you because they're jealous".

The arguments against cryptocurrencies are legion. Some of those are arguments are very good. Some not so much.

But this argument of yours is nothing more than a baseless ad hominem attack leveled at people you disagree with.

If you view them as what they are, a commodity, you realize all you need is a buyer and a seller of that commodity. Whether or not you can trade that commodity for goods and services is entirely irrelevant.

I expect if you did a survey, a very small, very libertarian group of cryptocurrency "investors" may be concerned about governments managing their respective currencies.

The vast majority just wanna make money on the hottest new thing. A subset of those people might even believe in the fundamentals. The rest are just glorified gamblers.