• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

    The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.


  • Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.

    Economists don’t know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

    Oh shit, it’s religion again.






  • I’m not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is

    If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn’t have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.



  • I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

    Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

    I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.



  • Hitman wasn’t really a sandbox until Freelancer mode was added. The story mode has always been pretty linear. Same level order, same objectives every time. I’m not expecting my choices to matter to the narrative, but I am expecting to be able to choose between quiet and loud, lethal and non-lethal etc. to finish the given mission which should be a pretty low bar.








  • I really don’t have any problem with any of these types of achievements in general. Even the super basic ones that you get by starting a game are useful to determine what percentage of people who own the game have actually played it beyond the menu screen.

    The best achievements are ones you get for being clever, skilled, or dedicated. Or when it’s an unhidden achievement for something you didn’t even know was possible. Like the BG3 achievement for saving the goblin Sazza - just seeing it was possible made my next play through more interesting.

    I do appreciate long ending achievements, but only if they indicate a significantly different playthrough. Good ending vs. bad ending works when that’s the result of many decisions and not just an option you chose ten minutes from the end.