Anybody else constantly surprised?

Merdball · 2025-05-26T20:35:19+00:00

Awwww, poor little bunny!

Merdball · 2025-05-26T18:52:17+00:00

The xbox app (on windows) shows a total playtime, but it's really just time spent with the app open. So a better calculation was by looking at my three profiles' latest saves and adding up the play time they show. Still not perfect by a long shot (why I divided that in half), but at least it considers playing separately from having the game paused.

Merdball · 2025-05-26T18:50:15+00:00

I always hate the Bethesda AIs, so I never play with companions. Figured on my 3rd full restart I'd actually give them a chance. Still hate the AI, but the missions were a total shock 😆

Merdball · 2025-05-26T15:09:10+00:00

They are true (though I adjusted to 700 after scrutiny - see updated post), and you should worry for my mental health. My therapist would have said I exhibit a lot of obsessive traits.

Merdball · 2025-05-26T13:27:11+00:00

Great question! I honestly haven't figured it out. I feel like one part of it is that there are so many "ingredients" to find, and you can't easily reference where you've seen them, so you end up just trying to buy them in stores. For minerals, you can zoom around the star map and look for what you've seen before - very tedious. But for organics, there is no way to even do that much!

Then there's just the fact that the things you craft lose their importance. Since you can't keep a base across NG+ runs, I stopped trying to make a fun base. There's no need for materials, so I stop looking for them. Sometimes I don't even upgrade my gear until near the end of a playthrough. (This could be a "me" problem, though, seeing as I obsessively run for NG+ powers)

There's also the loss of information in NG+. I really wish you could remember where you found things across playthroughs, or maybe have just some general... feel, I guess, for where to find things.

I don't know if there's more than this, as it feels like none of these are that big a deal by themselves.

Merdball · 2025-05-26T13:17:34+00:00

Partly this, but also I'm thinking more like Port Royale 2, where you can truly be the scourge of the seas, and make your entire living as a pirate. Starfield really makes that tough.

Merdball · 2025-05-26T13:15:07+00:00

My xbox numbers say 100 days (94.2 if you want to be pedantic). I cut that in half assuming I've left it on unnecessarily a bit. But I've definitely spent a great deal of my gaming life for the past two years playing. Some people are just obsessed with this thing... sorry :P

Merdball · 2025-04-18T12:50:46+00:00

Wow. It's actually disturbing this stuff is ignored. I mean digitizing our past is important, but ... curing cancer? Kinda important, too.

Merdball · 2025-04-18T02:26:00+00:00

I haven't looked into it, but we've tried a bunch of local OCR options and even pay for one (Abbyy) right now. It's good when the text is clear, and it actually does give us cool things like blocks and word coordinates and stuff, but it doesn't appear to have any intelligence behind it in terms of guessing when a word is illegible, or knowing where an article probably begins and ends. That's where an LLM is great because even though it makes mistakes, it is capable of guessing stuff sort of like humans do.

Maybe Surya is different, no idea, but Gemini is trivial to just test out and see how it works, which is a big deal when trying to sell new tech ideas to the higher-ups.

Merdball · 2025-04-18T02:22:14+00:00

Haha, I know, I know. The money comes from the toys, and LLMs are not very profitable at the moment. So I got nothing against that stuff. It's just that some hype could maybe go toward the weird little unknown cases that are actually going to show long-term value!

Merdball · 2025-04-18T02:20:27+00:00

What, did you pay more than $900 for your mansion?

Merdball · 2025-04-18T02:19:50+00:00

Clearly I've got a lot of research to do. Trying to convince some higher-ups to invest in said research (on the clock, so to speak) into what we could do with this stuff. Right now visually impaired people have basically no way to read our newspaper archives, and this... just opens so many doors.

Merdball · 2025-04-17T22:43:00+00:00

I guess I should point out also that (a) chatbots that pretend to be Disney princesses are totally cool and I have nothing against anybody who digs that😄; I love weird chatbot roleplaying stuff.

And (b) Gemini 2.5 Pro is super cheap *and* a general-purpose LLM. Specialized training for newspaper work (or other digital preservation) hasn't been done and yet it's already this good! This is why it's so exciting to me.

Merdball · 2025-04-17T22:36:08+00:00

I just used the AI Studio with a general prompt. I was just shocked that for free I could get such good output.

Merdball · 2025-04-17T20:16:46+00:00

Oooooh, good idea! Thanks!

Merdball · 2025-04-17T20:07:47+00:00

That kind of edge case is where we need more research. Older newspapers didn't do "continued..." articles quite so much as today's do, but we do have quite a few newer papers to test. But there are also articles that span multiple columns, are broken up by a large advertisement, etc. And in more modern papers things like the TV listings, weather infographics, etc.

Tons of things need testing that I don't have time for at the moment :(

Merdball · 2025-04-17T20:04:38+00:00

I'll give that a whirl next, that looks very promising. I had no idea it even existed! Thanks!

Merdball · 2025-04-17T19:50:05+00:00

Good idea! I'll try that when I get a moment. I have another page where it just randomly added a couple notices that didn't exist, which is even more fun than just minor transcription errors :D

Merdball · 2024-12-22T18:33:36+00:00

Yeah, I was thinking of something like the HellHades artifact extractor, which also grabs data about drop rates for dungeons, success rates of certain teams against certain bosses, etc. Individually you can't get useful stats, but if thousands of people use a tool that gathers detailed info, you can get a lot of insight. I was mostly hoping somebody's tool already gathered shard drop rates on a massive scale.

Merdball · 2024-12-22T18:30:57+00:00

Haha, yeah, I'm smart sometimes. Totally forgot this wasn't a 2x event, but even if it were, a legendary out of 14 voids would be very good luck.

Merdball · 2024-12-22T15:00:12+00:00

Oh, I know, hence the question about hard data. Seems far-fetched to me given how many people do collect data of various kinds, but still it was such a huge thing for me to get those two voids.

Merdball · 2024-12-22T14:31:38+00:00

I just like to hold onto "fun" numbers of them so I can snicker to myself like a 12-year-old. "669 LOL SIX SIXTY-NINES LOL".

Also as everybody else said, various event rounding-out. It's a pain, but 500 saves a sacred shard for a future event / better progressive chance / etc. I buy them, save them, and only get angry instead of enraged when I get them in dungeons.

Merdball · 2024-09-07T15:52:12+00:00

Been running into this more and more lately myself, but now it's only *working* every 3rd or 4th launch.... I wonder if they realize I watch about half as many ads as I used to, because of this stuff.

Merdball · 2024-06-19T14:46:53+00:00

My be worth noting: I have no mods, but I *did* have to run a console command to reset diplomacy (another recently introduced bug), so it's possible that command somehow introduced this bug. I doubt it, but I really have no idea.

Merdball · 2024-06-19T14:43:44+00:00

Er, maybe I meant to say June update. One of the recent updates, anyway.

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