definitemaybe

Dwarf Fortress, so much. But I agree; I don't think that type of play is unintended. It's a fantasy world simulator first and game second (if at all). There are absolutely no objectives in the game at all; it's entirely self generated.

Like, what's more fun than chopping down all the trees, getting the elves raging mad at you, then holing up in your giant underground+inverted pyramid "hourglass" base while completely ignoring the siege going on above/below you while digging deep to get magma pumps set up all the way to the inverted pyramid so you can flood the surface with magma and kiil all the elves with fire, without having a single military dwarf the entire time because you can't be bothered to figure out the military menus/training when it's not as much !!!FUN!!! as mechanical defense options (lava traps.)

Is that a game, or just a sandbox? idk, but I love it. I haven't played in a while b/c of life commitments (kids, mostly), but I look forward to playing again.

Apparently military is a lot simpler, now, but I can't be bothered. Traps are so much more !!!FUN!!! and I totally haven't drowned my complete base with a failed water trap design killing all my dwarves. Not recently. (Mostly because I haven't played recently.)

Took me a second...

The challenge, as always, is to never underestimate a bubble's capacity to outlast your solvency. I personally know people who have been heading against the housing "bubble" in Canada bursting since 1999. They've spent a lot of money with nothing to show for it, yet, and missed out on housing prices, like, quadrupling? Quintupling?

So, good luck. Buying out-of-market puts might be a safer bet, since you're most likely to "just" lose all your money, with a small chance of a massive payout of it "properly" crashes.

Exactly right. Parent poster is conflating the investment in "AI" since 2022 (almost exclusively meant to mean LLMs, like ChatGPT) and specialized "AI" systems (almost exclusively "machine learning" systems).

A LLM is just about useless for any sort of surveillance or data analysis tasks. The bigger fear with LLM proliferation is as a propaganda machine, astrotufing the whole Internet with mass LLM-generated bullshit.

Nothing on the OP is talking about honey bees. There are many species of bees. I'm a big fan of mason bees; they pollinate like 20 times more than a honeybee, iirc.

To be fair, what did Obama do to deserve the prize? Maybe I missed something, but I remember literally laughing out loud when I first heard that news. Like, he won for campaigning on hope?

I've been on the flip side of this. You're so panicked about getting your wallet back, and wondering if it was carelessness or thieves, that you don't even think of giving a reward if you get it back.

I think the worry about thieves also primes us to not want to give money, too, but that's just speculation.

I've also been the one delivering a lost wallet full of cash and got no reward, lol.

Not parent poster, and you're totally correct... But paper-format books don't work at all for me, or many others with accessibility needs. I read almost exclusively with TTS while driving/doing chores/walking or to fall asleep. It's... very hard to TTS a paper book.

So, an old (<= 5th gen) Kindle works great. They're incompatible with the newest Kindle DRM, so they still allow old methods to transfer books. For KU books, it also has built-in TTS, so you can leave the book "reading" for you after you've transferred the file to your "real" device. That way authors get paid for your page reads, but you can still read/store/transfer/preserve the book.

But Amazon still tracks your reading data, and you're still supporting Amazon's/Kindle's self publishing monopoly... But it's literally the only place where books from my genre of choice are available, so not really any good options until their unethical monopoly is regulated away from them.

In BC, Canada, auto insurance is managed by the government. We have low insurance rates to begin with, and then we get a cheque in the mail at the end of the year if they collect more premiums than they pay out. (It's not a straight annual thing, of course. I don't know the details, but over the longer term it's how it works.)

It's kinda weird not having any sales pressure, too. They aren't at all light about upselling extra features. I only just found out that for ~$30/yr, I can add replacement car coverage to my plan. Over a lifetime, that's like $2K to never need to worry about a collision leaving you unable to drive for more than like a day to get a rental.

The article addresses a lot of the speculation about these numbers:

• This is an internal estimate that was leaked to the gaming press, and so is likely designed to be an underestimate, if anything, since it makes the entire XBox division look bad for cannibalizing their own sales (although most likely this was a best estimate).
• A whopping 82% of full-price sales of BO6 was on PS5, the one platform that does not have GamePass
• Inflated piracy numbers are addressed directly by the writer, although no specifics are given in relation to this number since the modeling was not disclosed

So, I think a lot of other commenters are unreasonably dismissing this number as inflated when it's likely fairly accurate.

Wait, this has hunted? That map was 80%+ of my TFC playtime. I need to look into this.

DA:O is peak CRPG. I love that game so much. I should do another solo nightmare playthrough, with a different class this time...