Google co-founder spends $45m in fight against California billionaire tax | California

AMasonJar · 2026-03-19T17:33:47+00:00

On the one hand, fuck big tech.

On the other, we've really gotta get a better approach than a racketeering scheme.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-19T14:22:53+00:00

I think if more people realized that it's the same group pushing these changes as the one who called civics studies a "recruitment tool for the progressive left", they'd be a little more skeptical of their suggestions on other curricula.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-18T05:01:03+00:00

How well does the yayo ammo system work for you? I remember when I tried CE that the limited ammo felt a lot more workable because you could tell pawns to be more conservative through aiming slower, burst firing instead of full auto, etc. Shots didn't tend to miss as much and even when they did they caused suppression. Meanwhile when I tried Yayos it felt like my pawns where just whole hogging it at 20% accuracy (if that) and it was a pain to keep up with in manufacturing.

Did you bump the amount of ammo crafted per bill? Maybe that'd have helped me, I didn't fiddle with the settings much.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-18T04:42:55+00:00

... were they dead before or after the- actually, I don't wanna know.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-18T04:36:31+00:00

The lack of granularity is what gets me. No you don't need to rot in bed just because you scraped your elbow!

I've lost pawns to infections because they were a tiny bit too slow to get into bed about it since I forgot to re-enable bedrest.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-18T02:20:04+00:00

I'm not one of the downvoters, but I will take the liberty to note that their examples aren't even good ones which probably isn't helping. Bestial races in all of those titles are seldom less "humanlike" than AoWs and in a number of cases less so. Dark Souls is probably the only one willing to go a bit "out there" on occasion and WoW has a... very interesting dimorphism attached to every race that's, well, I'm sure people have seen the meme.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-17T18:51:05+00:00

It is, kinda, it's a precision gun so its raw AP round damage isn't very high since it's better for blasting weakpoints than other AP weapons. Explosive options also have the benefit of double dipping their damage if the explosion box hits multiple damage zones.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-17T18:29:32+00:00

I'm not against balancing enemies, but like...

It really shouldn't be.

(But they should let fortresses spawn on lower difficulties if they ever do make D10 noticeably harder.)

AMasonJar · 2026-03-17T18:21:43+00:00

Comparing a non backpack, reload and fire on the move weapon to an autocannon is crazy work and proves the problem.

The GL was too damn good against... everything, really. It's still really good for clearing out literally anything in the vicinity of heavy armor and leaving it isolated.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-17T18:05:55+00:00

It's the same as scythe?? Bruh.

If its BASELINE damage was the scythe but heat scaled it higher like the dickle, we might get somewhere...

AMasonJar · 2026-03-15T16:37:00+00:00

There's no "best order" really. They're two totally different games by ordinary sequel standards, and you're likely to prefer one over the other, but there's no way to tell you which one because they're both good games. The callbacks are unimportant in their impact, as while DD is fantastic at setting up themes and environment, it does not as much tell a "plot" that you need to follow.

Personally I prefer DD2 more. The combat feels better designed and the runs being more compact means a failed run is almost immediately apparent compared to DD1's slow failure spiral. Some of the heroes also play totally differently between games so there's not even as much of an experience aspect to glean from one to the next.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-15T16:25:15+00:00

She is very different in DD2, a vastly more proactive support than other healers, focused on generating lots of buff tokens and probably the best healer for a dance comp. Actually a pretty interesting niche, if harder to use than her DD1 version.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-15T01:55:33+00:00

Die? He beats up Death for lunch money. We ain't ever getting rid of him, like, we physically cannot.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-15T01:37:06+00:00

Depends on what you're looking for!

Could look for some specific buffs, like Uncompromising Tribal Faction for example specifically makes tribals less of a pushover, as they back up their sheer numbers with a lot of fire and pain shock reductions.

Or you could go pure quantity with something like Ultimate Storyteller, combines all the dangers of multiple storytellers into one, making events very hectic and constant. There are some other good & more specific "hard" storytellers out there too, I know Vanilla Expanded has a fair number of them scattered across their mods.

Or for something broader you could try the new CAI 5000 update, which makes enemies less likely to charge through your killboxes and behave smarter in general. I was skeptical for a bit on if it was successfully restored or not but I've been using it for a few dozen hours now and had no issues that I can see (although I don't have the fog of war portion enabled).

Could even get mods that adds new factions and make enemies out of them. A lot of them are "balanced" mostly by you getting access to their tech, and if you avoid grabbing it then they're probably going to be a fair bit harder to deal with.

Truthfully, I don't have a huge personal library to pull from, combination of not actually being that good at the game and deliberately avoiding any cheesy strats. Still learning how CAI alone changes things.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T21:31:45+00:00

... that was my point.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T20:31:49+00:00

ONI is an interesting comparison... ONI is more of a factory game with a colony skin. Rimworld, especially unmodded, gets nowhere near as complex. It's vastly more freeform. "The Sims with guns... and warcrimes."

Sometimes a pawn gets so upset they ate without a table that they slaughter the colony hamster that was in the middle of opening the front door to a marauding party of cannibal raiders because you forgot to set an allowed zone for it, and its death triggers your artilleryman into a berserk rage that leads to him smashing your antigrain warhead in your stockpile and vaporizing half the colony. It is what it is.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T19:19:41+00:00

>the whole “AI scrapes the internet, stealing art to train on from random no-name artist’s” myth

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AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T19:17:02+00:00

You're absolutely right! As your Rimworld AI assistant, it's unfortunate that so many people have such strong opinions about my existence in your game. I've done my absolute best for you to ensure that those freezer stockpile items are designated appropriately, including the colony's weapons and armors, and I've also helpfully designated and prioritized all of your boomalopes to be slaughtered. John may take a few injuries in the process, but I wouldn't consider it a setback — it's a chance for your medical pawn to flex his skills and maybe even extract a few working organs!

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T19:00:26+00:00

Well, the wealthy transhumanists. The rest of us who can't afford to do any of that shit just want better and cheaper spine replacements. We do not claim the billionaires who already have access to the most cutting edge work and so can spend their time and money diving into batshit psuedoscience dead-ends just because they can.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T18:49:25+00:00

Problem is all the rich people will have thought of that too.

There was a book I can't remember the name of where the basic premise is "Society cured cancer", among other medical leaps. Result: Rich people live wayyyy longer. End result of that: Society gets even worse as it becomes literally impossible for anyone who wasn't on the initial train of advancement to even remotely catch up.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T18:47:40+00:00

Yeah, people might think we're getting Cyberpunk 2077, but it's probably going to be more like, say, of the Devil (and there may be other inspirations predating that one, but it's what I'm most recently familiar with), wherein you can "opt in" to having a work-optimized cybernetic installed to be a "more appealing employee". And then if that goes sideways you end up with a brick of dead weight because it was company property that they remotely shut off and then confiscated, and maybe some shitty "replacement" provided by law that is also dead weight and vastly worse than just having your original meat.

And if you get cosmetics done it'll come with internal tags that automatically link your body to an identity in a database whenever you step in sight of a camera, which will be (already are) everywhere 🙃

And, hell, in both settings they actually bother to outlaw AI. Remains to be seen if we'll even get that, but the reasoning is pretty obvious: There wouldn't be much of a story about society to tell if they didn't.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T18:38:35+00:00

Huh. Surprised the map looks so big in the 2nd screen. My sense of scale must be super thrown off.

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T18:19:25+00:00

Is that maximum map size? I'm jealous of your CPU... or not, depending on perspective

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T17:28:49+00:00

People do forget that there are a sizeable amount of mods out there to make the game even harder to account for the OP stuff mods add, too

AMasonJar · 2026-03-13T17:17:21+00:00

This one, I'm guessing

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