is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

Nobody wants a burger that’s one 1/8th pound patty and 3 inches worth of solid lettuce.

Had regulars when I worked fast food that would order the kid size burger with a fuckton of lettuce and tomato. Just way too much.

Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

deleted by creator

Doesn’t really seem spoilery to me at all. Alan Wake - and Remedy in general - is very into surreal weirdness and world fuckery. He’s mostly talking about audiences being receptive to pushing creative boundaries.

This does not apply when you can move or make your own instance. It’s like complaining about tyranny inside your own house. Like, what?

I think a perfectly acceptable line to draw is “Is it reasonable to expect a large majority of the people on this instance would want this other instance blocked?” If the answer is yes, block them. If somebody has a problem with that, move to a different instance.

I don’t really understand what the problem is.

Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:

People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.

On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.

I don’t really know what this post is on about, but science is not truth. It’s a system of prediction. The closest you can get to “truth” would be observation and data. Science is the process of interpreting these facts to better understand what things will look like in the future. It is obvious that science is not ‘true’, because by its nature it requires change over time as our models of the world improve.

I’ve read similar things about the development of Morrowind, about creative decisions needing to get past Todd, in this excellent article about its development.

Here are some quotes from Michael Kirkbride:

The game was originally set in the Summerset Isles. And then we got bored and decided, “Man, this is really boring. How about we put it in a volcano with like giant bugs everywhere?” And people were like, “What?” So Todd Howard — the easiest way to get anything past Todd, at that time, was you basically just had to say “Star Wars.” Which was true for me and anybody then. So I was like, “The game should be like Dark Crystal meets Star Wars.” And he was immediately hooked. I got all the bug creatures I ever needed, we moved it from Summerset Isles to this weird dark-elf place on the map, and we just went from there.

I used to have this thing with Todd, because he was one of the ones that’s like, “Let’s not make it too weird.” So I’d bamboozle him. There was a period where I would actually draw two different versions of a monster — the one that was weird and that I wanted to be in the game, and then one that was fucking crazy. And so I’d go to Todd, and I’m like, “OK, I think I’ve got the mid-level creature set.” And I’d show him a picture. He’d be like, “Nah, dude, that’s crazy.” Then I’d go back to my office and I would act like I was drawing something new, and I’d just come back with the original drawing of what I really wanted to be in there. Like, “Hey, is this what you were thinking?” And he’d be all, “Oh, yeah, that’s much better. That’s great.”

I can definitely believe his influence has become immense following the studio’s success - though it definitely feels like he needs to hand the reins over to somebody else.

I suck at math, but if the mean is sufficiently over the “positive” threshold, and there’s a low standard deviation across reviews, wouldn’t this have the problem I describe? The more certain people are about the quality of good games, the less relevant the ratio becomes, which is perhaps the opposite of what you would want.

I played it - and if it was truly only made by two people is quite impressive - but it’s just alright. The world is very cool, and is structured around multiple levels of a tower each with their own language that you need to learn to progress. My main issue with the game is that the differences between these languages, and the puzzles built around them, aren’t particularly interesting or deep or varied. There are a few gems, but overall it’s much closer to a traditional adventure game than you might expect on first glance.

That said, the art and world design are very cool.

Edit: As an aside, it’s worth noting that the Steam Reviews metric is a tad misleading in a similar way to Rotten Tomatoes, in that it only gauges ratio of positive reviews, over what those reviews are actually saying. A universal consensus of a game being a 7/10 (if we assume 7/10 is positive) will appear “better” than a game where 99% of people believe it is a 10/10, but 1% think it sucks. It’s good at predicting whether you will like it, it is bad at predicting how much.

That’s one way of seeing things, and I respect that viewpoint, but I disagree. I primarily view myself as my consciousness; everything else is secondary. How do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat?

I believe consciousness is a result of processes of the brain, and the brain is a very complex machine. It’s hard to say anything too concretely beyond that because I don’t really understand how it works. I live as though the brain and my consciousness are in perfect sync, but I’m unsure how true that is.

There are, for example, experiments where it can be shown that decisions are made before we are consciously aware that we have made them. Others show that severing a nerve between the hemispheres of our brain can result in two independent consciousnesses. Who can say where I end and my brain begins?

Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?

My answer changes depending on your meaning but:

Of course. My brain is constantly updating and improving itself. I’m just not ultimately in control of how that process happens. Though that does not mean that I should stop living. I can still experience and enjoy my life, and ‘choose’ to improve it. It’s just that the I that made that choice is a consequence of my brain calculating optimal paths based on a myriad of factors: genetics, culture, circumstance, biological drives, personal history, drugs, etc.

I’m a fairly hardcore/radical determinist, and tend to agree that individuals shouldn’t be held morally responsible for actions, any more than a hammer is morally responsible for driving a nail. However, that does not mean people should be free from consequence. There are plenty of reasons - even as a hardcore determinist - to hold people to account for their actions, either as a social corrective mechanism, public safety, deterrent, or personal sanity.

As for getting their actions to align with your morals, that’s a more complicated question that depends on the type of person they are.

The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it’s not particularly close.

I don’t dispute they provide value, but why 30%? Why not 35? Or 25? or 80? or 3? or 29? I don’t know.

I’m curious, how much of that 30% do you think feeds back into making Steam better and keeping it running?

I think it’s better to reframe the question as “Are there downsides to Valve’s PC market dominance?” or “How is Steam’s 30% cut different from Xbox or Playstation?”

For the latter: it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Sony sell their hardware at a loss, and make up the difference through software, so there are obvious developer benefits to the 70-30 split. For Steam, the equivalent value-add for developers is only the platform itself, and I would wager for many of those developers the biggest reason for selling on Steam is not the feature set - though obviously useful - but because that’s where the users are.

So, users get a feature-rich distribution platform, and developers (and by extension users) pay a tax to access those users. So the question is, how fair is that tax, and what effect does that tax have on the games that get made? Your view on that is going to depend on what you want from Steam, but more relevant I think is how much Steam costs to operate. How much of that 30% cut feeds back into Steam? My guess is not much; though I could be wrong.

But anyway, let’s imagine you took away half the 30% cut. Where does that money go? Well, one of two places: either your pocket, or the developers (or publishers) pocket (depending on how the change affects pricing). The benefits to your pocket are obvious, but what if developers just charge the same price? Well, as far as I’m aware, a lot of games are just not profitable - I read somewhere that for every 10 games, 7 fail, 2 break even, and 1 is a huge success - so my personal view is that this is an industry where developers need all the help they can get. If that extra 15% helps them stay afloat long enough to put out the next thing without selling their soul to Microsoft or Sony or whoever is buying up companies these days, and Steam isn’t severely negatively impacted, I’d call that a win.

But of course, that won’t happen, because Steam has no reason to change. That’s where the users are, and they are fine with the status quo.

people who sold millions of shares

Is there a source for people selling millions of shares?