That was a real file browser on IRIX

Is this supposed to mean that I secretly liked it or else I wouldn’t have played it as long as I did? Would you rather I stopped after 10 minutes so you can say I didn’t give it a fair chance?

What’s good about it then? I don’t mean that as an insult to you or your taste, I am genuinely asking because I’m the sort of person that likes to think about games. I’ve spent hours listening to GDC talks on game design, hours looking at map viewers for some of my favorite games. When I play a new game I take screenshots and make notes about my thoughts while playing it.

From what I saw playing Skyrim there’s basically nothing there in terms of NPC dialogue, very little in terms of environmental storytelling, world design, and worldbuilding, and usually not very much atmosphere or sound design. And that’s on top of the completely vacuous gameplay. If the game did even a single one of these things well I would have considered it to be good, but for me there’s just nothing there.

I am aware that the Elder Scrolls series in general has interesting lore and metaphysics based on Hindu mythology. But it’s my understanding that the person who came up with most of that no longer works at Bethesda. And while I was playing Skyrim even googling some of the things I encountered (such as “why do the draugr attack you”) failed to elicit feelings of intrigue.

I did like the amount of verticality you experience ascending the main mountain though. That was cool map design IMO.

EDIT:

Skyrim isn’t good because it’s not your idea of a specific kind of rpg game

Most of the games that I listed are pretty vastly different from each other, but they all do at least one thing that’s interesting. Skyrim not being “a specific kind” of RPG has nothing to do with it.

Skyrim released in 2011.

New Vegas released in 2010.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines released in 2004

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura released in 2000

Plainscape: Torment released in 1999

Fallout 1 and 2 released in 97 and 98 respectively.

The concept of a good RPG wasn’t invented in the last few years.

The concept of good gameplay and encounter design wasn’t invented in the last few years either.

I played Skyrim a few months ago and felt like my soul was getting sucked out. I just kept asking myself “what am I doing? Why am I playing this?”, and stopped after a few hours.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I encountered a group of bandits that tried to attack me. I went into the cave they seemed to be operating out of and was greeted by a named NPC called “ulfric the blind” or something. He said something like “[name] is that you?”, and I thought “oh I wonder if I’ll be able to fool this guy into thinking I’m someone he knows. I wonder what could have driven this old man to banditry, or if he and his family have been in the game so long he’s now elderly. Or maybe instead of information about his life he’ll inadvertently reveal some secret that can help me. Regardless I’ll probably have to carefully choose what I say if I want to get the most out of this”.

Then the only dialogue choices were “yeah I’m him [end conversation]” and “he’s dead, you’re next [end conversation]”.

That was a different technique, using simulated evolution in an FPGA.

An algorithm would create a series of random circuit designs, program the FPGA with them, then evaluate how well each one accomplished a task. It would then take the best design, create a series of random variations on it, and select the best one. Rinse and repeat until the circuit is really good at performing the task.

A dark pattern would be some sort of underhanded but legal tactic to trick or coerce a user into agreeing to something they wouldn’t otherwise.

But most websites aren’t using dark patterns for this, instead they just blatantly and plainly violate the law.

Doesn’t really count if you have to google it first to know what it is

Maybe you have to Google it

I know that date handling isn’t necessarily indicative of the quality of the whole operating system but…

Unfortunately these bulbs didn’t have any components that could steer or modulate the electron beam, which is how CRT televisions form an image. Instead it just sprays a cone of electrons at the phosphor face to form a big blob of light, so the most you could do is make it brighter or darker (or make it flash) by turning the power up and down.

The closest thing to what you’re imaging would be “pixel LED” headlights. That’s a car headlight technology that continually adjusts the shape of the light output to avoid shining onto cars in the opposite lane, allowing you to retain high beam brightness without blinding other drivers. It works by using essentially the same technology as a projector: an LED light shines onto a MEMS mirror array which can dynamically change the direction that each pixel is pointing to shape the light that is reflected off of it. Sensors detect the position of oncoming cars and direct that light shaping process so the light avoids them.

You absolutely could form an image with one of those (projected onto a surface its shining on), though in the present day they’re only used in car headlights. I could see them eventually being used in room lighting though, if the price of MEMS chips comes down enough. They could be used to improve efficiency using anidolic lighting principles, and marketed as as a way light a room perfectly evenly, or direct pools of light to certain spots as the owner desired (a bit like how color changing smart bulbs are marketed today). Such a light source would have to scan the shape of the room, then decide how to aim its light into that space.

See also Li-Fi if you’re interested in weird stuff piggy backing off of lighting technology. Hackers have actually used something like that (subtly modulating the brightness of a light source) to exfiltrate data:

https://www.securityweek.com/ethernet-leds-can-be-used-exfiltrate-data-air-gapped-systems/

https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/hacking-air-gapped-computers.html?m=1

it’s actually designed to slow down typing speed

This is a myth

Please relay the information about the 60s ghost anime.

Or at least give us it’s name.

I’m more excited about those Frore MEMS airjet chips.

That’s actually in at least one consumer product right now.

I honestly feel like if this wasn’t regulated ketchup would slowly be watered down until it was just weak tomato juice.

The right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble hasn’t been respected at any point during US history.

Not immediately after the country was formed when they signed the sedition act into law.

Not while people were protesting for abolitionism.

Not while people were protesting for women’s suffrage.

Not while people held demonstrations while on strike.

Not during the cold war and red scare.

Not during the civil rights movement.

Not during the George Floyd protests.

They’re not going to start now.

That’s what Google was trying to do, yeah, but IMO they weren’t doing a very good job of it (really old Google search was good if you knew how to structure your queries, but then they tried to make it so you could ask plain English questions instead of having to think about what keywords you were using and that ruined it IMO). And you also weren’t able to run it against your own documents.

LLMs on the other hand are so good at statistical correlation that they’re able to pass the Turing test. They know what words mean in context (in as much they “know” anything) instead of just matching keywords and a short list of synonyms. So there’s reason to believe that if you were able to see which parts of the source text the LLM considered to be the most similar to a query that could be pretty good.

There is also the possibility of running one locally to search your own notes and documents. But like I said I’m not sure I want to max out my GPU to do a document search.

I think smart bulbs mi

Being able to summarize and answer questions about a specific corpus of text was a use case I was excited for even knowing that LLMs can’t really answer general questions or logically reason.

But if Google search summaries are any indication they can’t even do that. And I’m not just talking about the screenshots people post, this is my own experience with it.

Maybe if you could run the LLM in an entirely different way such that you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that’s irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.

Even then I’m not sure the huge computational requirements make it worth it over ctrl-f or a slightly more sophisticated search algorithm.

If you can’t sell it you might be able to donate it to a thrift store.