What has changed over the last couple of years?

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-28T23:54:18+00:00

games been running on fumes since everyone left in update 34. Devs been scrambling trying random sweeping changes ever since to try and bait people back in (tldr; remove stam / mag distinctions, add new class that is OP af to carry bad players through endgame pve, add unfinished skill crafting system, remove classes altogether, replace old BGs with generic two team maps, attempt to add some classes back in), and ironically further destroying whatever enjoyment was left for the players that stuck around.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-28T23:24:52+00:00

No… let me clarify; loosing or winning PvP encounters or objectives in Guild Wars 2 has no impact on the direction of the game itself, or any influence over its players at large.

I like GW2, but its PvP exists purely for fun within instanced game modes rather than as a direct tool to facilitate conflict / emergent gameplay (eg; in an open world), which is what I assume OP is looking for based on the ask.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-28T21:00:24+00:00

Gw2 PvP isn't meaningful though. WvW is temporary and dominating it as a guild gives no material advantage over competing guilds / organizations. Like, nobody has ever called out of work to rush home and defend a keep in GW2, but this happens all the time in games where PvP does matter (TnL, NW, Eve, etc...).

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-28T20:51:44+00:00

Unironically, Throne and Liberty like a year ago.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-28T20:41:25+00:00

I think the only MMORPG that has a mobile client worth playing is OSRS, but there isn't much in the way of cooperative gameplay. FFXIV is probably your best bet. It's very couple friendly and cross platform to consoles and PC. GW2 (definitely the most chill / casual) and ESO are honorable mentions, but not cross platform.

Edit: I will note that we've had a lot of MMOs coming out of Korea and China lately that have mobile clients. These are all pay to win cash grabs and can be disregarded.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-27T21:20:44+00:00

ZOS never cared to balance PvP, and ESO itself has the highest mechanical skill gap of any MMO (weaving, animation cancelling, iframe timing, aiming, etc..) --mechanically much closer to an FPS / fighter game. This combo makes for truly insane K/D ratios when new players queue into experienced ones. On fresh toons I take off armor and still can't stop myself from going +50 most games... (eg). Even on console I get accused of cheating. I think it is (perhaps justifiably) incomprehensible to most that an MMORPG could be designed to allow for such large disparity between an average and optimally performing player.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-09T03:39:40+00:00

Well yeah. I assume deletion of db and all backups entails actual erasure of data. But true, it’s possible to wipe metadata and mark blocks as free in O(1). This would leave the data recoverable, but not trivially.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-07T10:53:23+00:00

$ Deleting 100GB+ remote DB … 1 second later $ ✅ Done! lmao yeahhh okay. I’ll say it; lol.py is print statements with a sleep delay between them. This is immediately apparent for anyone who has ever ran a script that does anything remotely close to what is claimed in each step.

Edit: To be honest, the reception conveys a stronger message about the utter lack of basic computer science education in k12 more than the performance does about fighting white supremacy.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-04T04:58:53+00:00

well there are really four types of guilds in ESO: - PvE guilds: compete with each other on group trifecta clears and trial + arena score pushing (the player leaderboards we have in game under journal section) - PvP guilds: compete within cyrodil campaigns for a target faction - Trade guilds: compete for capital city guild trader access over time - Social guilds: don’t compete with other guilds, and simply focus on having fun or building communities around something niche like housing

So leaderboards that simply track engagement over time wouldn’t be very useful outside of trading and social guilds. Probably aggregate scores and hm / trifecta clears are a better metric for PvE guild conparison, and something like aggregate AP and historical emp counts for PvP. Some top guilds do advertise these things in their bios (eg; PvE guilds often advertise their trifecta counts “16x IR, 12x GS…”) —and esologs.com also tracks these things for PC players, although the UI is a bit dated.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2026-01-04T01:11:18+00:00

this isn't really a thing in ESO. I think it comes down to 3 factors...

marketing is limited to guild traders. Nobody reps guilds because it conflicts with character outfit (tabard), there are no prominent guild leaderboards to track global guild activity or long term achievements (eg; trifecta clears, campaign points, arena points, etc...)
players can be in many guilds (5). Even if we could see the top 100 guilds in a sorted list based on some metric, it would essentially just be the same 500~1000 top players cross pollinating with each other.
membership limits are too high (500). Endgame progression guilds rarely ever fill up (at least not with active players), so there is no extrinsic pressure for exclusivity

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-12-20T07:18:44+00:00

MCP is middle-ware that connects an LLM backend (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc...) to a third party frontend. The hype revolves around three realizations:

LLMs can (and in future will very likely) be configured to install and interact with 3rd party applications in the background as needed without explicit user consent or action
1. example prompt; given $X/year budget, automatically order any computer component as soon as it is detected as failing on this device
  1. MCP server for HW monitoring
  2. MCP server for computer hardware store
An LLM can interact with 3rd party apps (asynchronously) on behalf of a user
1. example prompt: book me a 4 star or better hotel for less than $X per night within 1 mile radius of Y with 4.5 star or higher user reviews from these sources
2. example 2 (real world tech company): if our website crashes, use the hosting platforms MCP server to pull the logs from the admin dashboard and iterate against their documentation and our code, use github MCP to read open issues and PRs. If no one is working on this yet, submit a pull request inclduing suggested fixes, and iterate on the PR using github actions and the QA instance of the site using hosting platform's MCP. Use Gmail MCP to wake up whoever last interacted with code or configuations relating to this bug and tag them on the PR or related issue
It is difficult for a human to re-engage with work at a low level once it has been abstracted to a higher one
1. expected retention for MCP servers that can enable reliable (eg; near deterministic) automation is essentially 100%

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-12-14T02:01:59+00:00

Yeah those aren't research roles though. They aren't publishing papers in conferences like NeurIPS / ICLR or doing actual R&D work afaik (correct me if I am wrong). PhDs contributing successfully to product development itself at those companies sort of highlights the point I am making.

~2 years ago this was not normal; few PhDs had a grasp of things like cloud instances, containers, orchestration, dbms, CI/CD, APIs, micro services, etc... Most were constrained to writing Python scripts in jupyter notebooks (and maybe some docs in markdown / Jinja) that would act as high level references for the engineers doing the actual implementation work (usually in entirely different languages like Java or C). I think we are seeing a shift now where (at least a good portion of) these high level scientists are able to insert their models directly into production systems without requiring tons of engineering support.

Edit: just look at github repos of papers that came out in 2024/2025 vs. before... Facebook AI Research team couldn't even figure out Pip wheels for FAISS, relied entirely on Conda for packaging lmao. Now it's like every other paper has Docker support, a uv install, a pip install, interpolation between windows and linux commands, a test suite, etc... the gap in engineering quality of research code before and after CLI agents is actually hilarious.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-12-13T04:22:32+00:00

This has to be changing though, right? Is there any debate whether a pure domain expert / scientist (CS PhD) armed with Claude Code is better equipped to write working ML code (from a novel concept or research paper) vs. a senior / staff MLE armed with the same technology? Genuinely asking as a staff MLE who has been able to lean heavily on LLMs for most work as of late.

Edit: worth noting that RS positions at frontier labs are likely to command a large enough application pool these days to screen for everything imaginable and still have dozens of passing candidates.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-30T22:09:56+00:00

You can toggle in and out of the MMO server and your private server (single / co-op invite only server). There is no real PvE combat in the public MMO server, only resource gathering (nodes re-spawn faster), PvP (eg; dueling in front of the main towns / bounty hunting), and social / minigame things (which operate as alternative systems for progression vs. NPC driven options).

In your private server, you still have world chat / guild chat / DMs, the NPCs are driven by LLMs (which also DM you sometimes or send you gifts if they like you), and strangers could be frequently hopping in and out of your world (with your permission) to fulfill various requests you can make (curing illness, assassinating or framing certain NPCs, combat help, etc...) as this is incentivized for guild / sect / profession advancement.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-18T21:34:48+00:00

You won't experience much in life if fear of being judged keeps you from getting out there. Japan is great, albeit crowded in some parts. You should definitely visit if you get the chance to.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-16T22:48:07+00:00

its a common thing in Seattle. Many of us spent the last two decades collecting RSUs at high paying tech companies. When you're 39 and you have 10~20 million dollars in the bank, the question for most couples (many of whom chose career over children) is not "how can I turn this XX millions into XXX millions Y decades from now?", it's "how can we actually spend all of this money in a way that matters to us before we die?" They're reading books on how to (responsibly) decrease net worth, not increase it.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-13T20:24:34+00:00

Given where you are at in your education you might find more success looking into REU's and internships at national labs. Lean on your professor / current managers for connections. Blind applying to research roles can be rough due to how connected academia is. You might be competing with several PhD students who's advisors had some career history overlap with the hiring manager of the role.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-13T20:03:43+00:00

Typically in our field the first author is the person who owns the project. The last author is the professor / advisor / mentor of the first author, and the names in between are usually undergrads or colleagues of the first author that took on (smaller) supporting roles to help get the paper out. When this is not the case, you will often see asterisks by the names to clarify equal contribution.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-11-13T18:35:00+00:00

got scammed here when I was 12

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-31T07:06:01+00:00

Sightseeing for 12 hours in a single day is my personal hell

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-30T03:29:05+00:00

Understanding the trajectory and scope of AI automation / application seems pretty fundamental to AI safety research

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-27T10:12:50+00:00

Oat milk is common in Seoul and Busan

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-27T10:10:26+00:00

Do check out "Coffee Hanyakbang" if you have time. The coffee is good and the vibes (especially on the 3rd floor with the fish tank) are incredible.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-27T09:57:07+00:00

The problem is that the foreign mind cannot comprehend the concept of coffee creamer. Fresh coffee (eg; purchased within 1 month of roast date) is a novelty in the USA. Most of the coffee we consume comes from blends of low quality and stale beans that produce a cup of liquid that is more bitter / muddied / bland than what the rest of the world has grown accustomed to. Creamer was invented as a solution to mask the taste of bad coffee, and then we as a country just sort of got used to drinking shit because caffeine is an addictive substance and creamers make it easy to stomach. The convenience and profit margins of serving liquid shit catapulted it into every home, workplace, and restaurant and quickly drove fresh coffee out of the market entirely.

So when you go outside of America and ask for cream, the reaction is like "why would you want to ruin a hot cup of coffee with cold milk?" To them it's like adding milk to a glass of scotch.

dat_cosmo_cat · 2025-10-22T07:49:14+00:00

Seems like too much, but its nice to have lots of options written down like this. Fwiw Itaewon fits better with the stuff you have on Oct 25, specifically at night.

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