I think that putting in the hours to be very good at PoE2 is more embarrassing than being an amateur who only played a little bit. I say that as someone who looks forward to playing a lot.

Nihilism is tautologically true and the concept of an external source of absolute meaning is ill-defined. Even if God was real, the choice of pleasing him as opposed to displeasing him would ultimately be arbitrary. I can think of no hypothetical universe in which external, absolute meaning exists.

The story about selling to Musk is coming from Bloomberg. Meanwhile the “pure fiction” quote comes from TikTok’s reply to Variety’s request for comments. Variety is unlikely to have access to anyone at TikTok senior enough to know the truth and willing to talk about it.

IMO the main pro of cloud storage is that the provider’s engineers are much better at doing backups than you are. You won’t lose your data if, like most people, you only have one copy of everything and your hard drive is destroyed.

The main con is that the provider can deny you access without warning. You probably won’t get an explanation or a real chance to appeal the decision.

So far that second thing hasn’t been a common problem for normal users but I would still keep local copies of the data which I can’t easily replace.

It would be very nice if being conventionally unattractive also made a person attracted to other conventionally unattractive people.

I wonder what hurts more: the unfulfilled asymmetric entitlement shown in the comic or intellectual honesty of the “I wouldn’t be attracted to me, so I shouldn’t expect most other people to be attracted to me either” sort. Probably the honesty, since many people pick experiencing the entitlement.

I didn’t pay a couple of private tickets, over ten years passed, and so far I have been fine, but I’m not a lawyer…

Don’t actually do this. You can get your license suspended (or worse) even if you never go back to the town that gave you the ticket.

I would be surprised if hostile countries thought that Lemmy was popular enough to bother infiltrating. They probably haven’t heard of Lemmy at all.

I think the explanation is simply that Lemmy’s users are all contrarians, or else they would be using Reddit. Frequently they are of the international leftist sort due to the founder effect.

The commission added that British charities with “appropriate purposes can, in law, raise funds to promote the efficiency of the UK armed forces. However, providing aid or military supplies to any foreign armed force is not a charitable purpose, and no charity can legally undertake such activity.”

The decision is not specific to Israel, although I suppose this sort of thing was more likely to be overlooked before.

This is a true triumph of the human spirit.

I wish they would enable that in battle.net games so I don’t have to choose between trading and it.

I played Diablo II so much as a kid and then when the remake came out over twenty years later, it was just as great as I remembered and I play it regularly. I haven’t bought Diablo III or IV.

(It was much harder when I was a kid so I do wish there was more challenge now.)

Being able to actually do anything you understand well enough, the way that magic works in many settings. A brilliant engineer can design an airplane, but he still needs lots of workers and machines and materials to actually build one. A wizard who knows how to cast “fly” can just go ahead and cast it and fly around. If he has the right books, he doesn’t need other people for anything at all.

The sort of mystery only possible in a story where the author himself doesn’t have to know what the secret is. I love science but I was very disappointed when I was a kid and I realized that science meant that everything ultimately had a mundane explanation. A mysterious structure? Built by some Bronze Age dudes. Dinosaurs? Unusually large animals. Legendary heroes? Made-up stories. Even if elves or unicorns turned out to be real, they would have a mundane explanation too because the whole universe follows rules.

I can appreciate a sunset or a flower without needing these things to have “a human behind it all”.

With that said, art is far from the most important potential application of AI. I am merely amused that right now I can ask a computer to draw a cow in the style of Monet and get a pretty good result. The amazing thing is not present-day capability (which is remarkable but not world-changing) but rather what the rate of progress implies about the near future. I think that a computer better than any human at everything (or at least at every intellectual task) is likely within my lifetime.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

I was worried that this would be like those cookies pop-ups, but the functionality is still present here in the land of the free…

I live in NYC to support (and have the support of) my relatives, not because I want to. I also never said that I was rich. Even without the toll, driving in Manhattan is at the edge of what I can reasonably spend. Just the parking costs several times more than all my other discretionary spending put together.

I grew up in a Texas suburb and it was pretty nice (except for the humidity) but I don’t have first-hand experience with driving in a place like Houston or LA. I know that there’s a lot of traffic, but I’m genuinely curious about whether it’s really slower than mass transit in NYC is.

I want to clarify that I thought that Cambridge and Somerville were pretty nice - nicer than where I lived at the time. I had friends in Cambridge and I enjoyed visiting them, but I didn’t know anyone in Boston so I never felt like I had any reason to go there. I actually saw more of Boston earlier this year when a friend invited me to go there with her as a tourist than I ever did during the six years that I lived in Massachusetts. The waterfront was pretty, there was an Italian bakery with really good cannoli, and overall the city was cleaner and less crowded than NYC. I don’t have any particular desire to visit again, but that’s not because of anything wrong with Boston in particular.

I do see the irony in the fact that I spend a lot of money to live in a place that tens of millions of tourists visit every year but I really don’t like it. I’m here because this is where my relatives are and they’re not going to leave. (I tried to persuade them to, but it really would be very difficult for them.) I admit that while I know that many people like being in big cities, I don’t really understand why. The tourist attractions presumably get boring quickly even if they were interesting at first, and after that what’s left?

I just want to leave and go somewhere more pleasant and they’re going to charge me $9 every time I do that.

(Full disclosure: right now I want to save some money so I park my car in a Brooklyn neighborhood that doesn’t have street cleaning and then when I want to go somewhere, I take the subway to my car first. I won’t have to pay this toll if I keep doing that, but it isn’t fun and I really want to go back to having my car near me. I’m actually blowing off a dinner invitation as I write this post, because seeing those people would be nice but not nice enough that I actually want to get on the subway.)

Edit: Also I don’t really mind the downvoting. I know most people around here either like urban areas, dislike cars, or both so I wasn’t expecting sympathy from everyone. I do wonder whether the people talking about how wonderful taking mass transit is have ever actually taken mass transit.

I used to live in the Boston area, but out by I95. That’s actually where I learned how to drive. The Boston subway is a lot less gross than the New York subway, but I still only went to Boston about once a year. There wasn’t anything in Boston that was worth getting on the subway for me. However, Cambridge and Somerville weren’t too bad to drive to, as long as I had a plan for where to park.

I’m not saying Boston is a bad place. I just don’t like most of the things that people go into a city to do. The funny thing is that I live in Manhattan because I work around here, driving to work is entirely unrealistic, and I’d rather walk than take the subway.

He was saying “psychopaths”.

Even in NYC (where driving is particularly slow and mass transit is particularly well developed) it’s still usually significantly faster to drive than it is to take mass transit unless you’re traveling within Manhattan or between two stops of the same express train. The trips I frequently take are about twice as fast by car as by mass transit, so from my point of view I am forced to take mass transit (when I have nowhere to park at my destination) while people outside the city have the luxury of quickly driving directly from where they are to where they want to be.

I’m not going to get into my opinion of how pleasant (or not) taking mass transit is compared to driving, because that’s subjective. However, I will note that according to the MTA’s own survey, a little over half of the people who do take mass transit are dissatisfied by it.

Mass transit is necessary here because the city has an old layout not designed for cars and so it wouldn’t be able to function if everyone had to drive. That doesn’t imply that mass transit is pleasant or convenient. It’s just often the only option.