A huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge.
Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.
>Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.
Have you seen kids these days? Video games are an addictive substance like cigarettes or alcohol.
(Yes, I know you played Mario Brothers as a child and turned out fine. So did I. But the stuff we had back in the day is extremely tame and weak compared to the hard stuff they peddle today.)
That's still in the area of D&D - social rewards encouraging large amounts of time. Modern psychological tricks used to encourage addiction and over-spending, especially in kids and neuro-atypical people are newer, and were a "great" contribution from the likes of Zynga or King.
The "addictive" factor comes from micro-transactions with randomized returns on investment ("loot boxes"). Kids get sucked into chasing the most valuable skins for characters, weapons, etc. This either results in them spending an inordinate amount of time playing the game (increasing odds of paying money) or just paying money directly to purchase in-game loot boxes that have fractional chances of dropping the rarest gear.
It's not "all games" that are problematic in this way; it is games which are monetized through micro-transactions with loot boxes. It's essentially legal gambling for kids, and it's absolutely a problem that we should be taking more seriously.
There's still something to be said about the addictive nature of microtransactions, but loot boxes haven't been relevant to the discussion as far as fortnite goes for a few years.
They had to do that legally. But that was only in the unpopular save the world stuff, I think the break out battle royale mode or later creative modes never had them.
Didn't say I agreed. But there's an argument to be made that by making the game addictive, keeping players in the game encourages them to spend money on skins and whatever else they sell.
I'm personally pro-entertainment, pro-culture, etc... Tons of things we spend money on in life is entertainment and frankly, useless. But it's fun.
That depends on how you define "win". As a gacha player myself (Genshin Impact), a lot of people roll because of FOMO and because they want to own a thing, not necessarily because they're going to "win".
Heck, I main Yoimiya, and she's not exactly part of the meta. Maybe I'm a sucker (no, I definitely am), but I'm not paying to "win" in the usual sense. There's plenty of exploitation to be had without attaching a competitive advantage.
Advertising and game design technicques to encourage vulnerable people to spend inordinate amounts of time and money on a game are the real problem. This leads to the current situation of most hugely successful games today, where the vast majority of players spend nothing or next to it, while a small minority of "whales" literally spend thousands of dollars monthly.
I have hEDS which can cause POTS and had the exact same experience. The Golden Girls covered it over 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E and it is still the default response.
I enjoyed the realpolitik of Expanse but hated the trite interpersonal conflicts which seems to be a mainstay of modern drama. I find the main characters to be rather childish.
They are written in a childish manner: the white knight, the highly assertive love interest, the sociopath who wishes he could be a good guy, and the cowboy. Their personalities are unrealistic in ways that I would attribute to a young teenager. That said, the quirks of these trope-like characters is sometimes amusing. I enjoy the series mainly for the protomolecule plot, despite the characters.
If you follow r/antiwork on Reddit, the general trend seems to be people realising they have been put into a hamster wheel with crappy pay and no real future. Maybe some of that is due covid making people revaluate their lives, who knows.
I belive long covid is a thing, I know people who were unable to work for a long time after much less serious health issues. But I'm not sure if long covid is a major factor here.
My primary concern would be the noise. I can deal with small rooms, no windows etc. but I assume students crammed that close together would be crazy noisy. I have ADHD so I’m much more noise sensitive than most, but even for normal people I would expect better sleep and study outcomes from a quiet environment.
Q seemed to be an 'Operation Trust' / операция Трест campaign. The idea is to undermine resistance by pretending there is already one in place and that the secret resistance with a plan that will be eminently successful. It undermines actual resistance. The parallel being Trump supporters being the resistance that didn't do anything (other than make fools of themselves) with the belief that there was a secret plan to keep Trump in power. In this scenario Q would have been created to undermine Trump and his supporters. A large part of propaganda is to make your enemies look foolish. I'm reminded of a Voltaire quote: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous. ' And God granted it."
They are explaining how quadcopters don't scale very well. You may be misunderstanding the explanation. The surface area covered by the rotor is much less for quadcopters and it is difficult to make up for that. Plus small rotors are less efficient. One upside for quadcopters is simplicity but that advantage diminishes with scale.
For completeness I should add; Quadrotor configurations rely on varying prop speeds to control pitch, yaw, and roll. The larger the props the more difficult it is to vary the prop speed in a timely manner. Electric motors are more weight efficient at high speeds but larger props need to be slower. You could add a gearbox but either way you are gaining weight and complexity. Plus parts start to get really expensive as you scale up and get out of hobbyists range.
And to put an even finer point on it, it isn’t just control authority but keeping the damn thing even stable. The only reason those things stay aloft is the controller senses minute changes to the orientation (called attitude) of the craft and adjusts the motor speeds in tiny amounts to fight those changes. Without that quick feedback loop the craft would flop all around and crash.
It’s one of the reasons you don’t see gas powered quads. Gas engines just cannot react fast enough and precise enough to correct subtle changes in attitude.
I live in a forest between a river and a winding road... I see people do craaazy shit all the time, from death races in expensive sports cars on the road to wave running way too close to the dock to loading paintball guns with ball bearings and shooting them in the woods; and I'm telling you it's not if someone does an Endor race with this thing, it's when.
I've flown FPV drones through forests, it's insane. The reaction speeds needed are crazy. It is almost impossible to last a day without crashing. I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with it, but Endor style races is not one of them. The people willing to do things that crazy don't last very long.
I am aware crazy people do exist. It's a matter of degree and I would suggest that flying this thought a forest Endor style would be far more dangerous than free solo climbing.
It's more or less like wingsuit flying, just faster and with obstacles much closer. So yeah, I would say orders of magnitude more dangerous than free solo climbing...
Wingsuit flying is pretty well known as a hobby that eventually kills almost everyone who does it. It seems once you start flying as close to rocks as you can for fun there's some sort of skill-risk feedback loop that eventually kills you.
Most wing suit flying is generally far away from obstacles. When they do get close its not many obstacles and it’s carefully planned. Flying FPV through forests is a lot of fun because of how random it is, and how dangerous it feels, but you quickly become aware that the human brain is not set up to do that kind of high speed navigation. There is no traction and flight lines have to be planned a few moves ahead. There is very little margin in the best of times, and sometimes no margin at all. It’s like that ball tracking / hidden monkey experiment. While you are watching one tree another jumps out at you from nowhere. It would be like playing Russian roulette non stop. You’re looking for the intersection of people who are actively suicidal and with a spare $100K.
Some gyros can jump-start, as in pre-spin their rotor fast enough for vertical take off. It would add a bit of complexity but it'll still be relatively simple.
No, because the pre-spinning (torque applied to rotor) part happens on the ground with the rotor blades set to low/no pitch. The rotor then starts freewheeling (no torque applied or transferred from the rotor) and the blades' pitch angle is increased, which slows the rotor down, but momentarily creates enough lift to lift the autogyro into the air, where it immediately transitions to forward flight.
It’s still simpler and cheaper. The swashplate is much simpler. Much less power is fed to the main rotor as inertia is built up slowly and only for take off. The lower standard of reliability as worst that happens is you don’t take off. Engines are pushing a more forgiving higher speed prop, so engines and fuel are cheaper.
I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.
They also have some extremely dangerous flight characteristics.[0] To be fair, helicopters are even worse, but they require extensive training and are known to be dangerous.
Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.