HexesofVexes

That’s a little more controversial, but towards my taste yes. Majora’s mask is one of those games you could never make today because it combined a children’s franchise with cosmic horror and themes of grief.

It took common ideas like npc routines, day/night, and a solid action core. With this it wove in puzzles that were not just about what you did, but when. This was groundbreaking in its scope and scale, and then they added in the soundtrack… Ye gods that soundtrack…

I could go on for pages but, quite simply, it was a work of genius.

No, I really enjoyed BotW for the same reason I enjoyed OoT! Both innovated and both were very different games exploring different concepts. BotW will forever be my go-to for “open world done right”, and OoT set up a solid action game with strong puzzle elements; that said, fuck the water temple.

Games that break genuinely new ground are rare, in the case of both the old and new Zelda’s there are good and bad (the nds era was a bit of a stagnation), the really groundbreaking titles push the hardware through skilled coding and amazing game loop design.

Also, no spoilers for tears please, it’s on my list once I get a few weeks vacation!

MM is hard to top; it’s peak early LoZ (in an old man’s opinion). It took a familiar engine, added two new major mechanics, and told the first really dark story.

Awakening is the one to play first, it’ll set you up for later games nicely, and it was originally a Gameboy (not GBC game). It took the Zelda formula from the earlier NES iterations, and made a content-rich world.

I’d say save ages and seasons for last (when you get your carts!). They’re amazing games that really show how far the GBC could be pushed, and are very much taking the awakening engine and doing wonderful things. The fact there is linked content between the two means you should also keep a pen and paper handy!

I only wanted to triforce.

Now I need to fix dad’s laptop before he gets home!

What is life but a lottery?

A lot of the drive towards AI is people thinking to save a quick buck, but longer term that places them in a very unsteady position themselves.

All products end up being for “shareholder value”, and AI will be no different. Someone will find an enshittification vector and run with it.

Suddenly, that “quick buck” becomes a monthly subscription that costs more than the people fired. Company data is harvested and sold, customers are advertised out, the shittiness of the system becomes a company problem.

So we’re either going to see a stark change away from the current shareholder value model (about as likely as world peace), or we’re going to see a lot of CEO seppuku. Win win really.

Hah, jokes on them, my university is too poor to afford copilot.

I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it’s derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.

To be honest, if a company produced cards as solid and stable as the 1080Ti I’d buy one as a spare today.

I live in fear of mine dying of old age; when it does nothing seems to compare on the market at the moment in terms of vram, size, and power usage.

My options are likely to be:

A) Live 5 years unable to remember my work, with added incontinence.

B) Go out trying an experimental age reversal treatment - because why not roll the dice one last time?

C) Not survive to old age due to overwork, burning out my body one semester at a time.

C is most likely, B is the plan, and A is to be avoided at all costs!

Operation archive the archive?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.

It gives normal distribution questions, but not actual use cases (I was looking for a normal model based on actual data rather than just made up values).

You’re looking for normal distributions in chemistry, biology and real estate.

On the contrary, that is their function, one they used to be good at.

I can give a fun example for both ddg and Google:

Earlier today I was writing an exam paper for my students, and one of the topics is “basic” normal distribution. So, I thought to myself, why not make it I testing, give them a real world normal model.

Try it yourselves - the number of bot reposts is frightening.

Ah, an artistic expression saying “you must learn our language, see how it feels for you to subvert your culture to do something needful”?

Hardly an avant-garde notion today, but in 2010 it may well have been.

I can appreciate the beauty of what was created, though I suspect it failed to move people in the way it was intended. To me, it seems an illogical step backwards, rather than a meaningful stride forwards, as I see it from a pedagogical perspective. Others may disagree, but such is art.

True, but I think the principle still holds.

When I talk about a “print”, “if”, “for” or “while” I am universally understood by the majority of coders. This means, someone with those concepts can use any logic flow making use of those terms with a minimum of learning.

However, if I speak of “gable”, “gyr” or “wabbajack”, then trouble begins, for now I have no tutorials nor guides. Let us say these are not merely localisations, but new concepts, then the question comes of completeness and how it is proved.

In essence, one either recreates Babel, where no two people can understand one another, and collaboration quickly slips away. Or, one builds a tower upon the sand, that has no logical foundation to anchor it, this rendering it worse than useless to those who learn it.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/formulas-breaking-in-different-languages/a821c5dc-b288-4986-96bd-5b1a3218a72b

Excel would like to know your location

Jokes aside, alternative command words for different languages make it harder, not easier, to teach programming. I run some excel labs at the start of my course, and trying to troubleshoot students using their own devices set to their mother tongue is pain.

“What just happened?”

“War were declared.”

Going to be following these threads closely as I’ll be damned if my students are going to put up with adverts from a file hosting service.

Warlocked for GBC - it was ambitious as hell, and has some quality scenario ideas.

The ramifications of this ruling are astoundingly dire.

The notion of controlled digital lending was a good counter to “ebook packages” that come with a yearly sub. At the moment, that yearly sub eats a large chunk of university budgets because academic texts are harder to get for free (we are a captive audience, though we do have scihub to help somewhat). In terms of books outside academia, I’m not looking at prices but I can tell you which direction they’ll now go.

I’m sure you can guess which direction library budgets are not going to go.

In essence, it’s forcing digital from a “purchase to lend” to a “subscribe to lend” model, which is going to really hurt libraries. This doesn’t even begin to explore the full horror of censorship - “I’m sorry, LGBTQ+ texts are not available to bundle for your library due to local laws prohibiting them”. That’s a topic that deserves its own book!