I don't see that working out as well as they imagine. The big thing is that folks use D&D as a form of structured play whether it's online or offline. It's that interaction and the freedom of both the players and the GMs to figure out how to structure it. Unless Hasbro accepts that they must limit their 'recurring payment' model to make that less painful for players then I suspect that D&D the brand will decline in relevance with competing TTRPGs replacing them.
I remember somewhere in one of my undergrad courses textbook that had a quote to something of the effect that C++ was a federation of languages. And honestly, it still feels like that all these years later. It's both a blessing and a curse depending on what you need to do. Most folks probably never venture fair outside their specific subset of C++ to use anything else and probably an unlucky few have to have an esoteric level of understanding the language to do their work. I don't envy the latter.
I'm surprised the article didn't cover "life" or simulation games since these are often seem to be relaxing games compared to more frantic games like MMOs. For me, Stardew Valley is my comfort game when I just wanna to turn off thinking for a little bit and go fishing or chat with Linus by the lake. Or go on a gift giving run. It just seems like you can kind of turn off your head and go with the flow in the game rather than trying to min-max. I'm sure there's tons of videos for Stardew Valley that focus on min-maxing but I'm glad I just ignore them otherwise, I'd be restarting my game to do that, no thanks.
It's funny you speak of flow state here since for me reading up on MMORPG meta or any meta changes to any game is where I mostly focus on such that even before I launch a game I've been reading up on its mechanics and trying to understand it in an abstract way (the opposite of this for me is when I just play Stardew Valley since I just wanna fish or chat with the NPCs rather than figure out how to min-max my farm). The act of figuring out how a game works mechanically is just as fun as trying to play the game itself for me.
The problem with Thiel's worldview is that it's not all that accurate. Yes, the Soviet Union was a horrible authoritarian state but the alternative to it isn't any better especially if you're not in the United States or of its preferred/default social classes. The damage done by the USSR and the Russian civil war pale in comparison to the yearly death toll of millions from medical deprivation and starvation even after the Green Revolution (we still have a distribution problem wrt food and medicine). His solutions are basically go back to some form of feudalism but without there being a singular sovereign to keep the nobles of our age in check (i.e. him and other billionaires). The reality is that capitalism has been limping along post Cold War and it's not getting any better, so without there being an outside threat to unify ourselves around, its flaws are seen more keenly and felt more closely than in the past. If Thiel wants to stop the second Bolshevik revolt then he should focus on making wealth distribution through market means viable and support ending monopolies and enclosures of various commons (weaken IP law, reform land rights, and so forth).
Interestingly social setups had 'billionaires' and 'everybody else' too, it was just way worse for everybody else. It's not like there was no unchecked ruling class there.
How many people die every year from medical deprivation? While that is a legitimate problem that we need to fix, I'm skeptical whether that could exceed the 100M who have been killed by Communism.
> How many people die every year from medical deprivation?
A quick search suggests figures ranging from 1 million to 40 million per year. So if you want to compare that to 100 million deaths by communism over the past 100 years, then preventable disease seems to kill at least roughly the same number of people, and possibly 40 times as many.
Victims of Communism and the authors of the Black Book of Communism's own figures are debated by experts of the history of Russia and the USSR, especially during Stalin's reign. Many of the deaths that the Black Book of Communism sites were mostly due to the invasion by Nazi Germany (somewhere around 10 or 20 million iirc). The rest are also mostly not direct deaths by the Bolsheviks or the USSR state apparatus (this is including the famines). And the biggest problem with the book is that it often makes up the figures whole cloth.
This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).
Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.
World population circa 1950 was like 2 billion. I don't know what the root study is that reaches that 100M figure, but the idea that communism killed one in twenty people on the whole planet seems a bit unlikely.
The really high end figures for the worst[0] man-made disaster of all time (the famine during the great leap forward) are 42 million, no idea where you'd get the rest of the numbers from.
[0]: edit: I thought it was the worst: apparently there were several previous famines in China in the 19th century that were more deadly.
I agree with the comments in the video since often I find myself dealing with opaque code. Having code that's opaque makes it hard to make sense of what it does, when it does what it does, and what happens when it fails. Having code that's obviously less than optimal but still understandable is far better as the OP mentions in the video. At least with bad code that's understandable you can improve it sometimes if the underlying requirements and dependencies aren't too deep (otherwise, you're gonna break something and it's better to just leave it be bad or ugly code).
When you usually have flags in your function then you really have two functions in one which can be a problem. In practice, I usually break these kinds of functions down if it's looking like it's handling radically different cases, it does add some duplication but most times it's just the boilerplate of the language/platform than the actual work itself.
I don't know why folks are so freaked out about it. Yes, some of these programs can act somewhat like a person in text but often their output is just garbage. Heck, even AI focused on image generation gets hands wrong much as human artists do (sometimes even worse). It's strange to see folks being freaked out or otherwise surprised by computers. Maybe I'm just too old to care or understand the response.
Just a funny / interesting example of something that happened with ChatGPT last night. I asked it to translate my resume to another language from English, and it interpreted my resume as, hey "let's write code now" and opened up a prompt and started doing things in the prompt in another language...it was wild.
Yeah, it's easy to make ChatGPT do wrong things which is why I'm not so concerned about it other than companies using it as an excuse to further strip down essential technicians for such platforms. I think ChatGPT can be a wonderful tool if corporations would stop pretending that capital can always replace labor which won't happen anytime soon since many C-suite folks are naive about most things in my experience.
I'm not freaked out, personally, but I am very concerned about the difficulty in detecting what is the work of humans and what is not. I think that's an incredibly serious problem, and I hope it's solved very soon.
I remember in the 80s that there were bees all over the grounds at my elementary school, they had dandelions, clover, and a few other weed/grass species in the mix but bees went whole hog on them. About a decade ago I went back to that school during summer and noticed not a single bee was around the grounds. It's wild how fast insects are dying off these days. Heck, I remember summers in my hometown where it was a bad idea for me to be out since mosquitos would bite me furiously but now I rarely see them.
The problem with making a VR layer on top of the Internet is that it's not something you can do alone. It has to be done in a manner that's organic/spontaneous with competitors being allowed to participate on their terms as much as yours (Meta/Facebook in this case). Zuckerberg didn't like this idea so he decided to strike out on his own to have the first mover advantage but such a move as we see can be a failure. Rather than just slowly building up a foundation on the Occulus and forming partnerships with indirect competitors like Sony, he chose to force the issue and just belly flop right into it. Now, it'll take a decade or two before anyone else even tries this effort in a concerted fashion again as too many shareholders with the memory of the last attempt will be there to put a stop to that (for good and ill imo). In the long term, the idea that VR or human-friendly interfaces will dominate the Internet isn't a bad prediction but as I've stated before, it must be done in a slow and careful fashion. You can't force tomorrow to come any sooner than it will and you can't do it alone.
