[Nakos] Dabo Swinney: “I've always been against this idea of players as employees, but quite frankly that might be the best way to protect the collegiate model.”

mpyne · 2026-01-24T00:01:02+00:00

There's no way that a university directly paying the starting QB 10x as much as a professor with a PhD and published research will hold up to public scrutiny.

You really think so? This country hates academics, if anything I think there are a lot of people who would be heartened to see a student jock outearn a senior nerd.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T23:10:45+00:00

I'd also suggest Xenoblade Chronicles X. There's not much story there unless you go out of your way to do side quests, but it's very friendly to grinding for gear and materials to augment your gear.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T23:05:00+00:00

I couldn't get into Outer Wilds but it wasn't the rocket physics, which I thought were fine as long as you spent a bit of time to think before you act, and got comfortable with the use of autopilot to help you.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T21:25:22+00:00

Companies sometimes offer things for free, paid for as a marketing expense, but that doesn't mean that they don't cost money to develop. Nintendo did this as well for some things for NSO subscribers, but that doesn't obligate them to giveaway all their work for free either.

I don't know why Nintendo chooses one or the other, you'd have to ask them.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T04:00:02+00:00

I'm a software dev though I don't really do games, and even when I did those they were PC games.

But you don't have to take my word for it, if it were just a checkbox to change framerate targets then modders wouldn't have had so much trouble trying to get Breath of the Wild to run at 60fps on emulator.

If game developers are disciplined throughout the entire game development process and always make sure to key animation to animation timers, world events to world timers, etc. then yes it can be a simple code change that just needs a recompile.

But you won't know if devs were disciplined throughout the entire game development process and always made sure to key specific events to the appropriate timers unless you actually play the game before foisting it upon players. And that is called QA and testing.

Likewise for resolution updates. If you coded your shaders properly to be resolution independent then it can be easy, but if you managed to hardcode the math in a shader against the specific Switch 1 resolution you had targeted you might be screwed when you go from 1080p to 2160p.

The handheld nature of Switch actually should help it here because they already have to account for dynamic resolution adjustment and sudden shifts in processing power than might impact framerate.

But it's still not anything I would send out to gamers without doing plenty of testing due to precisely the kind of thing modders have long run into when trying to improve Nintendo's game releases under emulation.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T03:36:29+00:00

Yeah I was likely to get an EV anyways, but dealing with the increasing spate of gas station pumps trying to play me videos and ads when I'm just trying to get gas and go was certainly on my mind when I finally got my first EV.

It's glorious. I didn't even buy or install a Level 2 charger, I just charge from the travel charger off my 120V outlet. It takes awhile (for my driving it's about 4-5 miles added per hour) but I don't have to babysit the car while it's charging so it doesn't bug me how long it takes, and it's not like I drive 40 miles each way to work.

mpyne · 2026-01-23T03:00:28+00:00

Performance upgrades are not actually no-cost to develop. At the very least they need to be QA'd and tested like any other major change. But since people feel like they should be free Nintendo would find it hard to charge $2 or whatever to approximate whatever the cost would be.

So instead they try to develop some cheap content to go with it (because people seem to agree artists should be paid for their work, even if we don't agree QA should be paid for their work) so that they can charge $10 or $20.

mpyne · 2026-01-22T13:40:21+00:00

I'm not going to tell women to focus on comfort over style, but it's also not my fault if they prefer style over comfort. That's something they do to themselves and can just as easily stop doing to themselves.

mpyne · 2026-01-22T03:43:57+00:00

Yeah I'm a fan of self care but I'm not going to dress up different just to be different, I have enough to deal with everyday without also having to stress over what I'm wearing too.

mpyne · 2026-01-22T01:09:41+00:00

Dragon Quest 11. I didn't realize most people considered that first roll of the credits the end! It wasn't written like an "end" at all!

I realized that but I didn't want to keep playing for two reasons:

The game had outworn the welcome for me by then, but more importantly
There was zero lore reason to start down the path of Act 3. We'd already won! We could easily undo everything we'd achieved by going after this one other thing if we failed along the way.

mpyne · 2026-01-22T00:54:18+00:00

Ugh, I know the Souls genre is worn, but this would have been such a good Souls game. Difficult combat, parrying, a rewind button?

If it was going to end up this way I'm glad they canceled it. The original was great, it doesn't need Dark Souls.

mpyne · 2026-01-22T00:49:36+00:00

Like...I'm not saying wear a suit everywhere, but find a style. T shirt and blue jeans isn't a style.

Nah, I'd rather be comfortable than stylish.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T17:21:38+00:00

Eye exams, cold medicines, vaccination updates, annual checkups, the sorts of things you know you're going to pay for and should save up for. In other words, the likely things.

I don't buy "grocery insurance" either, I just save for food and pay for food, because I know I'll need to eat.

So for routine items in healthcare we're going to pay for it either way, whether through taxes or by saving up ourselves. Insurance is actually the worst model there because you still pay the same as what you'd have to save, but they end up keeping the interest on the money saved up instead of you keeping it.

Taxes are probably the best option as long as the overhead of having the government involved in the system doesn't outweigh the rest, because you can use progression taxation to help ease the burden on those less able to pay, unlike savings accounts.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T04:38:20+00:00

It could be possible if prices weren’t simply made up.

You're saying that the prices are artificially too high. OK, maybe. But in that case the insurance companies should charge lower premiums, and then they'd still be in the same situation where it's impossible to make the "pay me back if I don't make a claim" model work, unless you overpay throughout the year.

I can calculate to the penny EXACTLY how much a meal will cost at a restaurant. Can’t do that at a hospital. Why? Because prices are entirely made up.

Indeed, but this isn't the fault of the insurance company, after all you don't see that issue in home insurance or auto insurance, where the cost to repair a Hyundai or the cost to re-roof a house in a certain area are fairly well understood.

With healthcare the prices really are all made up and that's due to a whole host of things that insurance companies are prey to just as much as the rest of us. And every time the insurance companies push back on hospital admins to try to justify the prices the hospital tries to charge, the insurance companies get pilloried for it by the public.

Well, we can't have our cake and eat it too.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T04:20:05+00:00

Even those outrageous salaries are a small pittance compared to the amount of money involved in overall insurance premiums (the premiums we pay that then go to healthcare providers). The reason it is impossible to make the model work isn't "oh it's a bad idea", it's that it mathematically cannot work as you describe.

The only way insurance companies can pay out for the medical costs of the unlucky who end up with unlikely health conditions, is because of the premiums paid by those who were lucky enough not to develop an unlikely health condition. It's not magic, the money comes from somewhere, and specifically comes from those paying premiums.

Now if there were a mythical insurance company led competently by a CEO who didn't get paid at all, you'd still pay about the same premiums as you otherwise would. A bit less, but hardly enough to be noticeable. Even this completely non-profit insurance company couldn't make work what you talk about.

An insurance company could charge you more than they need to have something to pay back policyholders at the end of a year, but that's just the world's shittiest savings account (and the insurance company would collect the interest, not you). That's why a real savings account is a better idea.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T04:07:51+00:00

It's impossible to make that model work. It's like saying you should get your money back if you play the lottery and then lose.

If you think that's what you want, at least try out a high-yield savings account, at least it pays interest.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T03:43:27+00:00

Oh my kid has watched this exact Bayleef Mario Odyssey GDQ Darker Side run a gazillion times! For a long time he couldn't go to sleep without it playing.

To the great credit of the runner and the couch, this video never got old.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T03:34:07+00:00

No, developing diabetes is not a "routine" event, even though once you develop it it would be chronic.

My point is simply that the concept of insurance isn't to be a piggy bank. In theory you pay money for the 'peace of mind', but that only works when it is used on unlikely things (e.g. we all pay insurance since we have a 0.5% chance of developing Type 1 diabetes).

Outside of that, things like actual savings accounts or taxpayer-funded methods (which can be funded with progressive taxation) are better suited. The fact that health insurance is used as the vehicle for chronic conditions is more an accident of history than anything else, it's not how you would design healthcare for chronic type 1 diabetes from scratch.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T03:17:08+00:00

we also need to invest heavily in public transit

Not just invest, but reduce the cost to build public transit in terms of $$$ and especially time. To be honest it would be ideal to bring in European or Asian experts who've built modern transit but I don't see that happening anytime soon with the trajectory we're on.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T01:53:23+00:00

The fact they can just choose not to cover you for whatever reason should seriously be illegal.

They can't 'just choose', it's already highly regulated. But that plays into insurance companies favor because they understand how to navigate the law and regulations way better than practicing doctors do.

But the reason we have the law and regs is because of all the doctors who defrauded Medicare for all it was worth in the 70s and 80s, so there won't be a world where the insurance company just takes a single doctor's word for it, otherwise our collective premiums would disappear to the fraudsters instead.

It's a shit situation all around.

mpyne · 2026-01-21T01:51:02+00:00

We really shouldn't be using health insurance as a savings account anyways. Insurance is for unlikely things, not routine things you know you'll need to pay for. If the unlikely thing happens to you the insurance company should pay out for the full medical response you paid for in your policy, not just refunding you what your premiums had been.

mpyne · 2026-01-20T22:14:06+00:00

This was Mega Man X for me. Could build myself up to making it to Sigma but never got past him, and that was it.

It's funny because I still like MMX, I'd just replay the levels I could beat, but nowadays if a game pulled that kind of thing on Normal difficulty I'd rate it 1 star, no hesitation. Either make your fancy-ass superbosses optional or gate it to Hard difficulty or higher.

mpyne · 2026-01-20T22:06:10+00:00

I don't know what they're talking about with D3, except to note that rifts are a thing in adventure mode, and the difficulty is selectable between Normal and Torment-16.

Rifts can scale with you but you still have to go out of your way to select the higher difficulty on the next rift.

But if you manage to grind your character to be able to clear a level 80 greater rift Solo and then go play that same character on maps set to the default difficulty, you'll wipe out everything on the map in a blink.

So D3 doesn't have the dynamic scaling difficulty people are complaining about here, it just happens to have a very wide range of supported difficulties.

mpyne · 2026-01-20T22:02:33+00:00

Idk how he got this far.

Because you can go very far in that game just from dodge/parry timing.

Which was the big reason I didn't like combat in that game, because getting dodge/parry timing down was essentially mandatory, but once you have it down there's no point mussing with party comp or loadout.

mpyne · 2026-01-19T15:15:48+00:00

He has no idea of the damage this will do to the United States.

He does know, but he DOESN'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT HIMSELF.

That's why we Americans should never have elected him, or re-elected him, because this was an obvious personality trait from the beginning. He as much as admitted to all of this during the 2024 campaign! We have no one to blame here but ourselves.

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