smoothbrain coldtakes

why would you take anything you see on the internet seriously?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I tried Citadelum, which is a Roma-era city builder.

    It’s a bit janky given that it’s an early demo, but it’s a neat premise given that the last Roman city builder I was aware of was Caesar 3 from '98.

    I give it points for concept and setting, but I think Anno 117 is going to be my preferred Roman-era city builder when that drops, because I already know and love the Anno mechanics.



  • I agree.

    Even using my examples of KOTOR and ME, comparing them to (relatively) modern counterparts, Jedi Survivor and Andromeda, you can see that the storytelling has taken a back seat to the open world. ME 1-3 were all very tight corridor cover shooters, going from fully constructed combat environment to another, while Andromeda tried to shoehorn in survival crafting and exploration. KOTOR has more deep RPG mechanics and overall a better story than Jedi Survivor, and I would agree it’s because the focus changed on providing sprawling open worlds over more bespoke environments. I would also say that the combat in Andromeda and Jedi Survivor are superior to their older counterparts, but at the loss of other things.


  • Most of them, honestly.

    When you look back, it was cool what they were doing at the time, but progress is such that all newer games have iterated on those groundbreaking formulas and improved upon them, making the older games seem less spectacular than they were at launch. I have fond memories of playing PS2, N64 and Dreamcast, but when I go back to play some of those games I enjoyed as a kid, I find that there’s always something super sub-optimal like the controls or some arcane mechanic that doesn’t make much sense. I find this to be the consistent issue going back to PS2 era and earlier.

    I think the PS3/360 era is the one I have the most nostalgia for all things considered. There were a lot of stellar RPGs like KOTOR and Mass Effect that generation. Stuff like Red Dead Redemption was coming out. Control schemes finally became generally standardized and understandable. Tutorials, saves and decent graphics were really finally all combined properly for the first time.

    I find the same sort of issue with movies. When you go back passed the 80s, you start hitting pacing issues. Same with video games. When you go back passed the mid-2000s, you’re going to run into early installment weirdness.





  • If somebody can’t moderate their instance in any kind of way that’s impacting other parts of the federation, it makes sense to defederate until they fix their problems.

    I don’t think anybody should have open signups. It’s literally just an invitation to mess with the rest of us who are federated with the instance.






  • It’s also only valuable if people keep contributing to it. It’s highly likely the majority of current existing reddit data has been largely incorporated into many LLMs prior to the API access limiting. Google paying them 60 million dollars is a hilarious pittance to keep training their LLMs, given how much money AI services will likely generate off of the training data.

    I don’t actively use reddit anymore, but when I need an answer to something that isn’t programming-related, it’s usually the top source on any given web search. That kind of content is basically the only stuff I would give a shit about. I can’t imagine how much absolute garbage you have to sift through on the platform to get reliable training data. Maybe the ratio is terrible and that’s why Google paid so little.


  • Actually part of their IPO paperwork lists WSB as a potential positive benefit to the stock, in terms of having a clear userbase that will theoretically help sustain the value through shenanigans. That, to me, however, sounds like a securities violation waiting to happen.

    I don’t check reddit anymore. Does WSB actually consider this stock to be, uh, actually valuable? Every corner of the internet I’ve seen discuss this topic have all noted how worthless they think the shares are going to be. My money is on them shorting it.


  • I think it has to do with karma count.

    I had two accounts, one had been scrubbed and was mostly used for commenting, and the other was a porn alt.

    The porn alt has hundreds of thousands of karma and it got multiple IPO messages while the original, older account got nothing due to being sub 5k on posts.

    Edit: Suspicions confirmed!

    Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each “participant’s contributions to Reddit,” the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user’s “karma” score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.

    The first tier of users will be those “who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs,” though what that means isn’t explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier’s total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.