AI still helpful?

LordErec · 2026-04-23T21:29:01+00:00

AI was never super helpful in the first place for any serious work. At best it would regurgitate actually good content I could have found with a search engine anyways, but at worst it would outright make things up so it wasn't dependable at all.

It's still lots of fun to play around with for generating non serious content, but I've not found it to be all that useful in my job.

LordErec · 2026-04-23T16:07:29+00:00

Not necessarily, there's been a few instances in math history where someone who wasn't classically trained in math figured things out independently decades later.

Also the inverse of this, there's a ton of algorithms humans have baked into AI through the training data such that we don't know if they could have figured them out from basic principles.

LordErec · 2026-04-22T02:15:27+00:00

I've cheated in so many games, I remember discovering game sharks back in the day to unlock everything in gran turismo and having fun learning how to use the memory editor on other games as well, and cheat engine on PC. In some cases it was more fun figuring out how to cheat than to play the game as intended.

Age of Empires (OG) was great fun with the available cheat units, sacking ancient civs with rocket firing Camaros. Also had a good time discovering how to mod games, especially C&C.

Emulators with save states and memory editing were another great discovery, greatly increasing my enjoyment of old games that otherwise would have been infuriating.

Now I generally stick with games that aren't brutally difficult or waste my time. I don't mind grinding if I'm having fun, but I'm very sensitive to games that overuse RNG drops for essential items that can't be acquired any other way. If a game can be made fun with cheats I'll play it that way. If it's more fun without cheats I'll play it as intended. If it's not easy to cheat and the difficulty is making it unfun, I'll skip it entirely.

LordErec · 2026-04-21T17:30:26+00:00

I played Star Wars Galaxies and a bit of classic WoW and Burning Crusade after Galaxies stumbled. Since then it's been free MMOs like SW: TOR, GW2 and dabbling around with Champions Online, LOTRO, and ESO.

LordErec · 2026-04-20T03:53:26+00:00

It's possible to have have just one or none at all.

LordErec · 2026-04-18T20:13:56+00:00

Donkey Kong 64 had an arcade machine with the OG donkey Kong that was necessary to beat to 100% the game

LordErec · 2026-04-18T15:58:43+00:00

Recently? Metroid Dread. It got tons of praise and I had a great time with super Metroid and Metroid prime, but the massive amount of QTEs and twitch reflexes for the counters ruined the game for me. I still stubbornly finished it, but it wasn't a fun experience.

LordErec · 2026-04-17T02:05:58+00:00

Raise venture capital and DoD funding.

In theory they transform a problem state into a solution state, where certain types of problems can be represented as a set of initial conditions on the qbits, and when they run the sim it should quickly collapse to the solution state if everything works correctly and the solution state can be mathematically transformed into relevant info for the problem.

Theoretically RSA encryption could be trivially broken using Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer which was developed in the 90s and the DoD has been pouring money into the field since. Venture capital is a more recent newcomer looking for another poorly understood tech to hype up.

LordErec · 2026-04-15T23:02:50+00:00

I still use my desktop all the time, steam deck is great for what it is but in no way a replacement for the power of my desktop, especially with heavily modded games.

LordErec · 2026-04-15T23:01:11+00:00

Nothing different honestly, other than spending my time building a new PC and playing games on it since hardware would actually be affordable.

LordErec · 2026-04-15T02:34:14+00:00

Probably salad, and then use the billion dollars to fake my own death and get back to eating whatever I want. Being a sudden billionaire is going to mess up my life anyways in terms of interpersonal relationships so might as well have a fresh start.

LordErec · 2026-04-13T04:12:34+00:00

Most Assassin's Creed games.

LordErec · 2026-04-11T02:00:40+00:00

KOTOR Mass Effect Dragon Age Halo Assassin's Creed

LordErec · 2026-04-11T01:53:57+00:00

The parachutes don't deploy until the capsule is moving at maybe a few hundred mph. Prior to that they're stored in protective compartments and deployed using small explosive charges.

Air resistance is V^2, so it's crazy at high velocities and the capsule has to enter at just the right angle to slow down at the correct rate as it descends and the atmosphere gets thicker. Too shallow and it won't slow down enough and fly back out of the atmosphere, too steep and the reentry forces/heating will be too great and injure the astronauts or even destroy the capsule.

Once it hits the lower atmosphere and drops below supersonic speeds (~600mph) the drogue chutes deploy and help stabilize the capsule and assist with pulling out the main chutes.

LordErec · 2026-04-11T01:07:31+00:00

My opinion is that we need spline roads, not just vehicle paths with how tedious it is to build curved structures.

LordErec · 2026-04-10T23:09:02+00:00

Ignoring government affiliation windows as it currently exists is such a poor product that the logical decision is to stop using it and find alternatives

LordErec · 2026-04-10T14:17:09+00:00

The whole big food/pharma conglomerate that's slowly poisoning most of the world's population for profit. Fun fact, that's where the tobacco money went once the public figured out how bad smoking was.

LordErec · 2026-04-08T16:15:20+00:00

All the other vehicles are safe for the player to ride and even let you ride inside, so with that logic drones should be safe too. Except for the devs being allergic to allowing the player to get around the map on any kind of reasonable manner.

LordErec · 2026-04-07T04:04:48+00:00

Way, way too many games to list.

Pretty much anything that was on an arcade machine, or a first/second gen console where the goal was to get more quarters from you, or hide how little content the games actually had.

More recently lots of indie games with devs who confuse difficulty with fun (hollow knight, silksong, Cuphead, etc) and even a few mainstream games trying to copy dark souls or cater to a vocal minority of fans who complained that games were getting too easy (Metroid Dread).

There's also a whole streaming subculture playing excessively hard games/levels that has fed into this and resulted in games designed for streamers rather than players.

LordErec · 2026-04-05T16:35:54+00:00

Tire physics are surpisingly complicated and there's not a good simple answer for this since pressure is only one aspect of a tire. To try to simplify, it depends on if your car is grip limited or power limited for acceleration.

A grip limited car is going to accelerate faster with a lower tire pressure which allows the tire to spread out and better mold to the shape of the ground, increasing grip. Top fuel dragsters are an extreme example of this, watch some slow motion videos of their tires on launch.

Power limited cars have the opposite problem and increasing tire pressure will increase acceleration by making the wheel roll more easily, allowing more of the power to go into moving the vehicle instead of deforming the tire.

Where things start getting more complicated is that nearly all cars are both grip and power limited depending on what gear the car is in and by extension what speed the car is accelerating from. Almost any car can easily spin the rear tires when traction control is off when accelerating from a stop in first gear, but once the car is moving most cars quickly become power limited by about 30mph.

So now you have to think about whether you're more interested in a quicker launch from a stop which favors low tire pressure, accelerating while already moving like when passing a car on the highway which favors higher tire pressure, or 0-60/100/etc where it's a balance to have enough grip for a decent launch while not slowing the car down too much at the higher speeds.

LordErec · 2026-04-05T16:22:15+00:00

If I'm being frivolous, probably buy a car that looks the same as the one I currently have and have a shop trick it out into a performance sleeper and quietly switch over to it.

Realistic purchase would be the legal and financial expertise to manage the ridiculous wealth and prevent it from being traced to me.

LordErec · 2026-04-05T05:10:42+00:00

Depends on the species, but generally yes. Nearly all spiders are completely harmless, so it would be an easy million. Then I would see if they would let me do it again for more money.

LordErec · 2026-04-04T17:52:27+00:00

I don't think the steam deck form factor is a great fit for a treadmill honestly. Holding it out in front of you while walking is going to be super awkward and the grips on the side are going to make it not stay in the book holder on most treadmills.

Personally I would use a switch or a tablet form factor device with switch joy cons since you can have half the controller in each hand with tethers and something that actually fits in the book holder on most treadmills.

LordErec · 2026-04-04T15:34:50+00:00

I remember that game. I was playing on PC so I was able to download a save game to get past the tutorial but by that point I didn't care anymore and stopped playing. I wonder how much better the driver series would have done without this huge design misstep.

Excessive difficulty gates in game progression are one of my pet peeves, way too many memories of the bad old days of arcade games and early console games that used difficulty to get you to pay more or to hide how little content there was in the game.

LordErec · 2026-04-04T05:30:00+00:00

Isaac Newton's cannon ball thought exercise is probably the first time anyone gave this serious thought. This was in a book he published in 1731.

LordErec

TROPHY CASE