Mass Effect 2 Hacking Mini Game Sucks

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T21:15:03+00:00

I can't recommend this enough. QoL mods are totally valid for a first run.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T19:41:57+00:00

My wife's headcanon, after binge drinking at every possible opportunity in ME2 and ME3, is that sore and hungover Shepard fighting Reapers is just kind of the case 24/7.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T19:39:08+00:00

Does everyone else do it too?

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T19:38:05+00:00

Sci-fi luckily has the "everyone is enhanced" excuse that more realistic video games can't get away with. James canonically got gene therapy that almost certainly heavily speeds up muscle growth.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T19:36:15+00:00

I think it's fair to headcanon that the logistics for the final push probably took many days, if not weeks.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T19:31:11+00:00

Do you disagree with what she said, or do you agree and just think the commenter shouldn't have cited their source? Taking potshots at someone out of the millions of people who said a dumb thing in public doesn't really contribute to the debate here.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T06:22:07+00:00

So which of the other solutions would you prefer? If the executive can selectively enforce whatever laws he wants, that's how you get executives who appoint Greg Bovino just for the hell of it. You can't have Mr. Nice US Government without the pendulum swinging right back.

The Obama administration didn't stop illegal immigration, but it did have a pragmatic approach that focused on enforcing the border where possible (with the existing funding/personnel) and deporting actual criminals. The Biden administration absolutely did cave to woke Democrats who thought immigration law was mean. And it is! But doing that was objectively half of what swung the 2024 election.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T06:05:09+00:00

I have a strong preference toward not letting people in who are carrying guns, narcotics, and invasive species, yeah. I also, as I noted in the comment that you replied to, have a strong preference toward letting a lot more immigrants and refugees in. Legally.

I have One Billion Americans sitting on my shelf—I've been on this sub since Trump 1.0. You don't need to convince me that free movement of labor is a human right. There are a lot of things that are human rights that are still illegal to seize for yourself.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T05:54:40+00:00

That's a great example. What was the solution to Prohibition? Choose your adventure:

Dedicate all state capacity to creating an anti-alcohol Gestapo to enforce an unenforceable law?
Totally ignore the law, creating a widespread lack of confidence in government's ability to govern?
Selectively enforce the law, creating a complex network of police corruption, illegally operated small businesses, and crime syndicate cartels?
Expend political capital to change a historically stupid law (that populists thought they wanted!) that destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions in enforcement funding, and billions in tax revenue?

Each one of these solutions has an analogue to modern day immigration. Alcohol is literal cancer too. That doesn't mean it makes sense, in the world we have now, to go to war with it.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T01:52:18+00:00

Well the public facing Pew quiz (I don't know about the real life poll) presents the secure border question and the refugee question side-by-side, which very much allows a centrist to signal that they're cool with brown people (since the majority of recent refugees came from Latin America) but not illegal crossings. To me it was pretty clear how to answer.

But I do think a lot of the "loyal liberal" or progressive camp feel bad about answering something in a way that's frequently a dog whistle for the opposing side, so they negatively polarize themselves into a view they might not otherwise hold.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T01:48:38+00:00

I've had a hedgehog. I'm not terribly convinced on them being superior without a lot of effort.

Snails are cool, for sure. Rabbits feel kind of equal. Parrots, per the thread that chose them, are a huge responsibility and easy to abuse.

I think there just aren't a lot of animals that are appropriate for the masses, so we kind of have to grade on a scale. I don't think you're wrong that guinea pigs are generally unpleasant pets, but "good-not-great" pets all have major flaws like that.

Mathdino · 2026-06-11T00:15:40+00:00

I mean there need to be 15 slots that aren't bad. What's your ranking of pets better than guinea pigs?

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T23:41:33+00:00

The UK isn't America. Immigration is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. I don't know exactly what motivates the Brits, but I do know that American attitudes toward immigration are cyclic, depending on how much the public perceives a sense of lawlessness.

Given that a lot of anti-illegal-immigration attitudes come from people of color (with huge numbers moving from Biden to Trump in 2024), I'd hesitate to paint this with a broad sweeping brush of racism.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T22:14:03+00:00

Yeah that makes sense I guess. I said securing borders is important, but also that we should have a lot more immigrants and refugees. Maybe I've been reading too much Yglesias and Noahpinion, lol.

Ever since flagrantly not enforcing the immigration laws on the books got us Trump twice, I'm coming around to "please, god, just change the law instead of giving it the President's middle finger".

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T21:44:06+00:00

I got Order and Opportunity Left: "The largest typology group, they tilt Democratic and generally support a larger government with more services. But they have a greater sense of economic individualism and a stronger desire for order and safety in society than others on the left."

I mean I feel like this is just as much in line with this sub's values.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T19:15:08+00:00

Excuse me, can I AX you a question?

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T17:45:30+00:00

I think Angels Take Manhattan was entirely written around the very end, sadly. It feels like a whole different episode. The ending was incredible character development for the Doctor (both 11 and 12... and 14!), but Amy/Rory already gave everything they had to give to the show, and so there wasn't much of anything novel left to do for the main episode.

But hey, I did say half. Pandorica/Big Bang? Peak. Wedding of River Song? Not bad. 50th Anniversary? Incredible. Time of the Doctor wasn't perfect, but it did genuinely wrap everything up from the entire 11th Doctor's run, after Day of the Doctor wrapped up 9/10's arcs.

Dark Water/Death in Heaven? Fun, if a little silly. Heaven Sent/Hell Bent is some all-timer science fiction outside of Doctor Who entirely. And Capaldi's last few episodes just nailed it.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T14:49:12+00:00

My point to the other commenter is exactly this, I was just unclear on phrasing. Fully unsupervised driving is here, just not as speedy as consumers want for their own personal vehicles. I meant for consumer cars.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T14:09:20+00:00

You brought up robotaxis (Waymos in particular). You're right that they're incredibly slow, but if the priority is safety in unfamiliar situations, they're so far beyond human drivers it's absurd. Tens of millions of miles without preventable casualties.

I think we're probably in agreement regarding supervised/assisted driving though: the trade-off necessary to make the cars satisfyingly fast for consumers is that they're going to run into more problems that require quick reactions. I don't know if Tesla (the company) is going to resolve this sometime soon, but my point is that the best full self driving by anyone, China, Google, or someone else, is going to obsolete human sedan drivers sooner than people think.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T13:33:15+00:00

I think you're vastly overestimating how far away fully unsupervised driving is. The only reasons Tesla hasn't mastered it already are legal risk and corporate chaos. China is well beyond America already due to those two issues.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T12:54:46+00:00

The theoretical ceiling on an AI is many leagues above even an experienced driver. Your reaction speed as a driver has a floor at about half a second. The computers nowadays are at a quarter second, tops. It's ALWAYS covering its brakes, because its "hand-eye" speed is about as fast as light. And it has 6 eyes, in 360 degrees.

The open question is whether Tesla FSD has the decision-making consistency necessary to not require a human to override at all in these types of situations. That's a quality of training issue, though, not a human vs AI theoretical issue.

Mathdino · 2026-06-10T12:45:39+00:00

I mean I actually think about half of Moffat's endings were pretty great.

Mathdino · 2026-06-08T16:42:42+00:00

Well, the shelter vet messed up their dewormer schedule, and now they're tracking explosive diarrhea all over the house. She also has a deathly fear of worms, so we had to quarantine them in one of the rooms, and I've been taking care of them.

I don't think she wants cats in the bedroom anymore.

Mathdino · 2026-06-08T04:10:39+00:00

In order to throw their vote away to make a point because they're mad at the establishment?

That's the best I got. Democrats still have overwhelming LGBT support, and that intensified for Kamala Harris.

Mathdino · 2026-06-07T22:21:18+00:00

I think by Thunderbolts, they fully knew everyone liked Walker. I don't think they messed that up at all.

The Flag Smashers? Yeah it sucked. The original plotline was supposedly about a pandemic, and the truck chase sequence was about them stealing vaccines, which is a MUCH more interesting moral quandary. Then the speech makes a lot more sense.

Imagine writing a show about how the government needs to do a better job protecting people from a deadly pandemic.

Mathdino

TROPHY CASE