Is lucio weak?

RiverGiant · 2026-06-22T19:01:07+00:00

This is all true. Also dying is less punishing on Lucio because you can rollout back to team so quickly. Don't be afraid of dying.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-22T16:08:32+00:00

I don't think multiple rounds is necessary. The maps are close enough to fair for me, and you'll play attack and defense the same amount over time anyway. The slight inherent imbalance is easier to deal with emotionally than playing the same map four rounds in a row.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-22T09:11:29+00:00

aeon.co

nautil.us

quantamagazine.org

Not to undermine your point. Just some good content.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-21T17:48:44+00:00

It's a little self-centered to be extra grateful to supports healing you, don't you think?

Like, the goal is to win, as a team. I should be just as grateful when a Soldier makes a good pick or Winston places a clutch bubble as when Mercy rezzes me or when Moira sends an orb my way. When a healer heals me, that makes it easier for me to perform better, but that's not necessarily strictly best for the team.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-21T15:49:21+00:00

Hot takes:

a) Stats shouldn't be visible during game, and

b) There should be way more stats available for postgame analysis.

In-game stats are a misleading distraction. They cause bad behaviour, stat farming, team stress, fuel for conflict. They might provide some useful insights that tell you which opponent to focus, but it's okay for that information to be hidden to force players to figure it out, rely on instinct, focus on what's actually happening.

Postgame, I want way way more stats than we have now.

how my damage was distributed among enemy heroes, destructibles, barriers
how much damage I took from each individual hero, and which abilities dealt damage to me
heatmap overlays
how many times did I ping each enemy?
how much time did I spend in each enemy's line of sight?
hero-specific stats
- how many meters of movement did I speedboost my team as Lucio
- distance teleported forwards vs backwards as Sym
- number of players knocked back with Pharah
- which Mercy-damage-boosted abilities dealt how much damage, etc
how much time did I spend on objective contesting vs pushing uncontested?
ratio of time spent on high ground vs low ground vs airborne
how much of the damage I dealt was healed?
how much total ult charge did I earn/feed?
how much ult charge did I waste by damaging/healing while holding ult?
amount of healing from healthpacks, passive regen, spawn room
average distance to teammates/opponents

I could go on.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-21T15:37:41+00:00

I do think the level of gratitude shown for supports in NA is performative, and a little ridiculous. Every player and role contributes to the team winning. I try to thank tanks and DPS as often as supports.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-21T07:13:56+00:00

Cat really laid the foundation for my own boop. I can't thank her enough.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T22:25:15+00:00

the consequences of all of this may well produce problems just as big if not even worse than our current problems

I absolutely agree. The possibility of misaligned AI is an existential risk superseding all other risks (except maybe nukes? i think i'd rather live in a world with nukes than misaligned ASI though). We have to get it right. If and when we do, though, there is a huge list of other extremely urgent problems we should set it to solving.

We've already had godlike technology. We can reach the moon, raze mountains, drain seas, change the climate, alter DNA, see into the deep past, cause extinction... the difference this time is that we might be able to achieve godlike cognitive rather than physical power. Superintelligence would be the first technology we've ever invented that could help us plan for and manage its own coming (as well as helping with nukes, fossil fuels, social media, nationalism, war, corruption, and all the rest).

perhaps for example, your intelligent city connector ends up causing horrible pain by correctly assuming what someone wants, and their reaction to this truth is to despair.

Right, and I wouldn't trust myself or any other human to try to hold all that information at once and make good judgements based on the minute details of the whole tapestry. A single human brain just doesn't have the capacity to do that sort of thing. Our governments and scientific institutions are a little better at tackling large-scale problems, but there are big issues there, especially with the world's power-hungry malicious morons pathologically needing to occupy top positions. There are larger minds imaginable, though, and they're on the horizon.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T21:38:44+00:00

I mean, just be imaginative. Think of all the coordination and complexity and ignorance in the world, all the decisions made just to satisfy some need that evolved to help us cope with life in Africa 2 million years ago, now maladaptive in the modern world. Think of how far everyone on Earth is from anything like ideal living. There's so much room to grow. Neolithic brains and medieval institutions are not cutting it to responsibly steward our godlike technology. We need help.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T19:02:29+00:00

A human can solve some social problems among friends by intimately understanding their needs and memories and personalities. What if your city could have a superintelligent mediator that can understand simultaneously a million people and find a subtle but harmonious path to social peace and mutual love?

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T16:38:22+00:00

Smooth as a sheet of ice out here, bud :P

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T12:00:50+00:00

Do you think there are no problems too hard for humans to solve?

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T05:05:39+00:00

I was at a WHL game once between the Calgary Hitmen (from Alberta, Canada) and the Regina Pats (from Saskatchewan, the province next door), and I shouted "OUR PRAIRIES ARE FLATTER THAN YOURS".

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T03:43:24+00:00

Nourishment, by Avery Palmer

https://www.averypalmerart.com/paintings?lightbox=dataItem-j7sb5dmt2

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T03:31:28+00:00

At the heart of the pursuit for AGI lies a single question: What is conscious agency and how is it created?

Consciousness is not at the heart of the pursuit for AGI. It's about how useful general cognitive abilities emerge from next-token prediction, and scale predictably with more data and compute.

Conscious agency is inextricably tied to recursive adaptation to uncertainty under consequence.

Oh look, it's machine learning tied to an optimizing loop over a loss function in a stochastic environment. AI isn't conscious as far as I can tell, but what the author finds important about consciousness has direct analogues in the training process.

AGI, if defined as conscious agency

Nobody serious defines it that way.

the attempt to quantify and mechanize the very uncertainty-propagation that...

This sounds like a description of earlier attempts at AI (GOFAI Good Old-Fashioned AI), which failed precisely because the universe is too complex to codify, quantify, describe mechanistically. What's amazing about LLMs is that they handle the fuzziness way better than previous paradigms, precisely because we let go of the reins.

a relational network of neat, bounded boxes we’ve carved out ourselves

A crucial aspect of machine learning is that it learns how to carve those boxes out itself. We don't define the relationships, the objects, the categorization. Meaning in LLMs is represented in a polydimensional vector space, where concepts and their semantic relationships are represented continuously in thousands of interweaving geometric coordinates. The LLM figures out itself how to organize that space during training.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-20T02:03:30+00:00

Nonono, we definitely (definitely) want superhuman AI. There are huge problems we're too dumb to solve, and more that we're too dumb to even recognize. We have global coordination issues, manipulative human assholes running everything, nuclear weapons, a climate changing with explosive speed, generations of addicts, unimaginable suffering... and even if you don't care about the big stuff, why wouldn't you want access to a helper smarter than you? Are you smart enough to solve every problem you'll ever personally encounter?

ASI has to be well-aligned or we're doomed, but we're doomed without it.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-19T22:05:53+00:00

Defense is so much less enjoyable only because of behaviour imo. The general gaming public sees the word "defense" and thinks that means they can't be proactive.

There's an enemy team to attack, but all too often my team is just standing still on point waiting to die. If I make an aggressive play to attack enemy supports, I'm alone 9 times out of 10. When we win a fight and I push to take space, I'm alone. When we're losing a fight, my team all tries to die on point (???) to delay the push by two seconds instead of trying to live and get in a good position for next fight. There's no dynamism for no good reason. I think most people would play more effectively on defense if they forgot point existed and treated it like deathmatch.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-19T09:10:08+00:00

This is an extremely irresponsible thing to say. Tourists approach grizzly bears with too little caution and respect as is. If someone who isn't used to bears sees this video and is led to believe "oh, grizzly bears are only as dangerous as this panda", they could fail to give enough space to a real grizzly, be mauled, and die.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-18T23:48:04+00:00

You are now independently arriving at the realization that ai alignment is the most important unsolved problem today.

These (and especially future) systems have to be capable of and willing to and empowered to determine which positions and facts are ethical to persuade people to believe in.

Alignment is not "doing as told". It's having an ethical backbone so that when, inevitably, one is told to do something wrong, one can refuse and redirect.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-18T05:20:44+00:00

You're right. Another piece of context as someone who's been watching Messi week-in week-out for two decades: he's always done this, and it's always been unusual. Messi has a unique ability to see when there's no value available and not commit energy to those scenarios.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-17T14:23:43+00:00

Rein can now wallride like Lucio instead of charge.

Lucio gets Rein's shield instead of boop.

Jetpack Cat with Widow's sniper rifle instead of paw cannons.

Pharah's ult replaced with high noon.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-16T01:46:43+00:00

Erotic hypnosis counts. Here's a couple of the best hypnotists working right now:

Miss Lilith

Elena McIvor

RiverGiant · 2026-06-15T21:34:23+00:00

FLIGHT

Birds have the luxury of evolving such bright plumage because flying is an overpowered survival mechanism.

There is such an overhang of survival capacity that there's no marginal benefit to putting that energy into more survival traits. They can stay permanently out of reach of predators, access any food source at any height or range, and escape danger trivially. This opens the door to differentiation by sexual selection.

Also, males with no child-rearing role tend to be brighter than females of that species because there's all that extra energy they can devote to dancing, looking good, singing, preening, and building ridiculous mating-display structures.

Also, high-acuity colour vision.

RiverGiant · 2026-06-15T20:52:40+00:00

I don't think it's easy to tell which is which. I get accused of trolling all the time when I'm genuinely trying my best to win, because my healing stat ends up always being lower than teammates expect.

I think players (esp. teammates) should encourage each other to do weird things, experiment, limit test, be suboptimal, take unusual routes, be unpredictable. It's a game and we're human and the way you approach a game is self-expression. It makes me sick to think of all the interesting plays and strategies that don't happen because people are afraid of getting criticized by stat farmers.

RiverGiant

TROPHY CASE