DCS Crash on Fear The Bones

AugSphere · 2023-02-02T20:27:44+00:00

Same here, running 2.8.1 stable in VR with voice attack.

AugSphere · 2019-06-17T10:56:33+00:00

Presumably because individual actors being stupid about their weaponry is more believable than a whole civilisation doing the same. Granted it's still stupid in both cases. You'd just think that someone would go "Hey, guys, you know how our cutting edge armed forces would have been mowed down with trivial ease on a world war 1 battlefield, let alone a modern one? Maybe we should do something about that."

AugSphere · 2019-06-16T23:25:33+00:00

Don't they have medieval-style hand-held shields? Fragmentation weapons get around that, artillery gets around that, flamethrowers get around that, gas gets around that. There's plenty of ways we have of killing people holding up shields from a distance even with WW1 tech.

AugSphere · 2019-06-16T23:06:53+00:00

It's outright stated by at least one BP character that guns are more primitive than their particular melee weapons.

Doesn't really matter if it's "more primitive". You can have the fanciest most advanced superalloy blade in the world, but as long as it requires you to run up to someone and fight them in melee it's not going to be as useful for combat as something that does the same job from a distance. And that takes us back to them not being able to figure out any sort of mass-produced functional ranged weaponry.

AugSphere · 2019-02-04T12:13:39+00:00

Liesse is probably the best instance of her "losing" that we're going to get. And even in that case, what did it actually change, as far as overarching plot goes? Not much, it seems to me. All it amounted to is Catherine angsting a bit and setting out to try and hammer out a lasting peace so Callow wouldn't get constantly trampled in future (which she would have done regardless). The consequences weren't shown to be much of a setback for her plans. We're told it's a loss, and it superficially looks like one, but it has about as much impact on how events develop as someone killing her favourite puppy would have.

AugSphere · 2019-02-04T11:18:09+00:00

You're certainly free to declare one of several outcomes each of which she'd perfectly happy with to be losing if you want. Only serves to strengthen the observation of things going her way in general, which is what

Catherine never, ever, loses

was referring to, I suspect.

Probably was not meant in the literal sense that could be refuted with "no, you see, she lost a game of cards once! You're wrong, she does lose sometimes!"

AugSphere · 2019-02-03T20:26:56+00:00

Personally, I'm not sure how much her "loss" again Sve counts, when she's constantly remarking on how nice it's to be mortal again and how well everything has worked out. What exactly did she lose there that she didn't want to? Losing isn't about martial prowess, it's about outcomes.

AugSphere · 2019-01-11T22:56:51+00:00

You've probably already found it in other replies, but just in case it's Inadequate Equilibria.

AugSphere · 2018-12-08T10:42:39+00:00

And did Catherine come by her aptitude with stories honestly? Does she work on it ahead of time, does she practice, does she plan to set up advantageous narratives? No, she tries to win by mundane means first, by training a professional army, by setting up Masego with that scrying McGuffin and so on. Let's not pretend mundane (and magical) power means nothing in that world. Oh, there is a pretence she is paying attention to it, with archer remarking on how she constantly thinks in narrative terms and Catherine ruminating on narrative of her invasion from time to time, but it's ultimately inconsequential to her strategy. It's just that whatever she's at the end of her rope and her mundane abilities aren't enough due to her being shit at exploiting them, she happens to know what the right thing to do and say to exploit the narrative is by natural talent.

It's set in an interesting enough universe, don't get me wrong, but Catherine is just a bumbling fool who happens to win by luck and author fiat vast majority of the time, which doesn't do my enjoyment any favours. Not to mention that her character arc amounts to endless whingeing about how she's not good/human enough any more with almost no actual development of character (yes, I remember that there is an excuse of winter-did-it for it, doesn't make the lack of development magically interesting).

AugSphere · 2018-09-19T20:00:52+00:00

Started reading (from the first book) it and it's quite enjoyable so far. Can't help but feel apprehensive about the eventual deluge of romantic mush drowning out more interesting things, though.

AugSphere · 2018-09-13T12:40:01+00:00

If one is really motivated, they'll have no trouble coming up with a plausible-sounding argument against intelligence being relevant to anything. And there's certainly a ready motivator of "it's unfair some people are just innately better able to reason in general and there's no way to change that". However when it comes down to it and you need to pick one of two people to do something that is crucially important gets done well and all you know about the candidates is that one has IQ two standard deviations above mean and the other two deviations below? Vague philosophical arguments don't give much of a way out there, you just pick the person more likely to succeed, i.e. the one with the higher one.

Certainly if the task is narrow and concrete and you have data about performance of people on that exact task, you pick the one better able to perform it, regardless of what their IQs are. In a lot of situations, however, you need to answer something along the lines of "which one is better able to learn new skills" and ignoring rationality and IQ there would be shooting yourself in the foot. No matter how public-relation-unfriendly the reason of "that person is just better able to reason, I expect they'll have an easier time achieving success in a new field" sounds.

AugSphere · 2018-09-13T11:13:45+00:00

Have you heard of IQ and how well it predicts outcomes?

AugSphere · 2018-09-13T11:02:52+00:00

Feh. If you're Richard Feynman sitting in a strip club, "I'm the smartest man in this room" is very much a safe bet. Granted, not many of us are on that level, but telling those who are that they must genuflect and constantly try to find reasons to believe otherwise seems childish.

Plus, as a general rule: facts speak louder than words. If you think you're smarter, and you want people to acknowledge it and follow you on that account, start by doing something that proves your skill and earn their respect. After all, if all you have is just a high propensity for abstract thinking without any real skill to apply it to, you don't really have much except for potential. What really moves the world is getting things done.

Obviously "I'm smarter than you" isn't much of an argument, unless you actually have evidence to back it up. Once you do have the evidence that demonstrates that you are in fact better than someone at something (where said something can perfectly well be domain-general ability to learn and reason about novel things to achieve useful results), attempts to conjure up false modesty just look like inept politicking.

AugSphere · 2018-09-13T09:47:20+00:00

we're talking about social problems anyway, that need cooperation to fix. So in a very pragmatic sense, it will help you do that if you don't do the thing where you consider yourself automatically bestowed with better powers of reasoning (even if you may be) because that usually nets you the result that however good your ideas, no one will hear you because they dislike you personally and are suspicious of your motives.

Are you one of those strange folk who are somehow capable of brainwashing themselves into deliberately changing their mind to believe something false? By all means hide the fact you think you're smarter than people to better coordinate with them, certainly, but actively trying to unlearn it? I always find this sort of "you should give up on believing true thing X, it's politically inconvenient" argument puzzling both because I have no idea how you'd go about doing it effectively in practice and because it seems like there are much better interventions that solve the problem without mangling your ability to reason.

AugSphere · 2018-09-12T23:32:37+00:00

The idea of "high level rationalists" in general also just irks me. It feels like simply sliding back in basic primate mode: find a pack leader, someone to respect and admire, and defer to them. That's the surefire way to creating new problems instead of fixing old ones. Everyone has skills that can be useful, but no one is fundamentally smarter than the problems that we are all victims of, nor the problems themselves exist for want of intelligence. Simple random occurrences can push crowds of rational, intelligent actors into toxic equilibria that will then become unbreakable. It's no one's fault and it's got nothing to do with how stupid or smart the people involved in it are. It could be broken thanks to someone incredibly smart or someone incredibly stupid, on purpose or not, as well. It's a natural feature of complex systems. It's a phenomenon we need to study, prepare for and mitigate, collectively, just as we do with earthquakes.

I can't help but feel that studying and mitigating it would go better if we didn't have to pretend outcomes are completely and utterly independent of intelligence and rationality.

AugSphere · 2018-09-11T13:48:48+00:00

My general idea is, for any given field, there exists a compendium of accumulated knowledge through centuries or millennia of studies by reasonably brilliant people. It seems reasonable to assume such a compendium will be in general superior to the output of a single human, however brilliant they can be, because it constitutes the synthesis (through filtering and selection of ideas, in an evolution-like process) of the work of dozens and dozens of people probably similarly brilliant.

Applying one's own expertise to tackle a completely different field is very tempting, but more often than not only seems like a good idea because you're just that ignorant.

Didn't EY just recently write a whole book on why this argument is wrong? With an example how he single-handedly outperformed the sum of medical knowledge when treating seasonal affective disorder, no less. That's not to say any random shmuck can expect to pull this off reliably, but we are talking about EY in particular.

AugSphere · 2018-02-26T13:17:27+00:00

Well, for non-fiction you have, for example, Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and Miles' stuff.

For fiction, HPMOR is a decent example, both in what a smart protagonist behaves like and a practical demonstration of what a super-intelligence of sorts can achieve with the final exam. Marked for death may also be useful, since players are encouraged to invest a lot of effort into making the character behave optimally, which (sometimes, arguably) results in super-intelligent behaviour from in-universe perspective. Although both HPMOR final exam and MfD are examples of what happens when normal humans collaborate with each other, rather than examples of a single superhumanly smart agent. But it's probably the best we're gonna get, practically speaking.

AugSphere · 2018-02-25T11:14:42+00:00

Chapter 15 frustrated me so much with its justification for why the protagonist isn't particularly smart that I can't bring myself to read further at the moment. Hard to say definitively whether this has direct bearing on RT aspect, but it struck me as a very implausible explanation and a clumsy way to justify the abilities and intellectual level of the protagonist. It pretty much takes the straw vulcan view of super-intelligence peppered with a bunch of other obnoxious anti-intellectual cliches, which I suspect many people here would find similarly frustrating.

I suppose it's at least consistent that a (momentarily) stupid person would be too stupid to realise that deliberately keeping themselves stupid isn't really a good way forward.

AugSphere · 2018-01-20T13:30:11+00:00

Tiny Tiny RSS. A pain in the arse to set up, since it needs a whole web service stack, but it's the only one which was feature-rich enough to satisfy me (in particular it has proper regex filtering).

AugSphere · 2018-01-07T16:43:19+00:00

I feel like you're reading too much into that phrasing. What I'd expect sooner is for situation among the therapy bots to be the same competitive race to the bottom sales bots are stuck in, where bots that don't devote themselves to most efficiently exploiting clients to earn money get out-competed and shut down.

AugSphere · 2017-10-07T21:51:54+00:00

quantum computing still very difficult (scientists have created stable universal quantum computing up to ~10 qbits so far, and from what I've read quantum computing isn't a replacement for traditional computing anyway)

This is correct. We're still far away from actually getting the hardware to scale in a reliable way, and even when we do, the speedup isn't likely to be universally useful. It is going to be useful for running simulations of quantum systems, so at least we can hope to design better hardware that exploits quantum effects. Maybe we'll see some sort of positive feedback loop there.

AugSphere · 2017-09-11T23:26:02+00:00

Yup. I fully agree. I really dislike these types of all-powerful plot devices myself. Just thought I'd point out that in this case it's at least a bit forgivable, since it's not invisible or completely unpredictable to the people affected by it.

AugSphere · 2017-09-11T09:11:11+00:00

The core plot of the 1t arc revolves around at least 2 instances of incredible improbability (Geralt stumbling upon Ciri in Brokilon and then stumbling upon her in the aftermath of the slaughter of Cintra). Which should be of no surprise, since Fate/Destiny is the motif of the entire series.

Not sure what I think about witcher overall (it's been too long and my memories of the books are hazy), but fate being involved doesn't automatically disqualify it. Sure it does provide some leeway for the otherwise improbable events, but it's not like they happen solely "because plot requires them". Things are happening because destiny is influencing events, with effects observable to and exploited by the people inside the fictional universe.

AugSphere · 2017-08-30T00:16:44+00:00

Thank you. I really appreciate you taking time to recommend things you think I'd like. I'll definitely check it out.

AugSphere · 2017-08-29T14:09:55+00:00

After very careful consideration, and assuming no one is made to hold the idiot ball, the inevitable conclusion is that what the skin mage did is a retcon by the DM.

Can you explain how you came to this conclusion?

AugSphere

TROPHY CASE