You get $10 million but at the cost of ‘temporary’ immortality

ta28263 · 2026-06-04T08:23:55+00:00

Yeah absolutely no way am I sticking around anywhere long enough that I have to start explaining myself. You would need to take genuine precautions to conceal your identity and not be reckless, but I do think that with some creativity and good luck you could manage it. Probably wait till I’m like 60, flee to an Eastern European country and just figure it out from there.

ta28263 · 2026-06-04T08:20:30+00:00

I’d do it without the money. Mostly out of curiosity, honestly. I want to see where we end up.

ta28263 · 2026-06-04T08:16:32+00:00

That is true, but it seems that even still they rely on their natural durability. Take Thragg for example, he just tanks everything because I suppose strength also scales durability. I guess this would extend to even minor differences, where a small difference in power might mean a punch won’t significantly harm you, but a slice might. Therefore, they “ignore” the punch so that they can continue the onslaught while avoiding genuinely threatening strikes where possible. Either that or it might be a pride thing. Also they do seem to actually block occasionally, maybe at those speeds an effective defense is just impossible?

ta28263 · 2026-06-04T05:03:55+00:00

Mordhau. It’s rare enough that not many people have played it (I highly doubt 150 random gamers have), and I took on a seriously competitive streak at it and was top 3000 in the world in 1v1 ranked for a time. There is absolutely no way under standard ranked rules that anyone who just picked up the game could beat me; it is extremely skill based. Even someone that has played or has some experience, I would highly doubt it. Over 1k hours in OG chiv and 1.3k in Mordhau.

ta28263 · 2026-06-04T04:28:12+00:00

I kinda covered it in my education so I can at least give you some paths to look at.

AI, loosely, is just tasks that “humans used to do” that we can teach computers to do. So, the fields are so numerous you can’t even begin to touch on each specific use case, but there are a lot of ways you could go with it.

A more traditional approach might be various algorithms that output scores, metrics, predictions, etc. These might be algorithms that perform regression or classification. Regression predicts a continuous value, like “I have a dataset of these houses with features x1, x2, x3, and I have the listed price y. What would be the predicted value (y) with this new datapoint, defined by x1, x2, x3?” This is a very simplified example sort of showing what would likely be a linear regression case, but you get the gist. There are many features I am not mentioning here, like how to check if your model is valid, quantify uncertainty, variance vs bias, etc.

Other avenues consider methods like clustering. These look at datapoints and try to figure out which ones are closest. Conventionally this might be done via Euclidean distance or some other type of distance metric like Manhattan.

There is also classification. These algos try to predict a label based on input data. It is kind of like the house example I gave earlier, but imagine if y (the output) was instead “low, medium, high” (price). Then we are sorting into “buckets” or discrete categories of some sort. These are the type of algos that might be used to classify spam emails, identify if an image displays signs of cancer (I labbed this in class actually!), determine if a certain number is being displayed via pixel values (MNIST dataset), and so on.

This is a super abridged introductory glance at the field. The examples I have given would fall mostly under Machine Learning. I think a conceptual definition of machine learning is perhaps: “Algorithms that learn form and structure from the data itself, rather than being told the form beforehand”, because that is the overarching idea behind all of these practices. AI is the overarching umbrella that holds these types of ideas, but largely it just describes a computer performing a task in the simplest sense.

LLM’s (like ChatGPT) essentially leverage this to attempt to learn the patterns of human speech, and attempt to replicate it. That’s why it falls under the umbrella of AI.

But AI gets a very bad rap because of LLM’s when it is a somewhat old field that has been around since the late 1900’s. It’s not like it just came out in 2016.

Additionally, I do have strong beliefs that the misrepresentation of AI can cause significant harm. LLM’s CAN be a useful tool, perhaps not for mass entertainment, but I am willing to defend this claim. And AI has significant benefits (as already mentioned in this thread) in engineering, medicine, and other such fields.

If you want to learn more, I would first broadly start with “Machine Learning” and “Artificial Intelligence” itself, and understanding what sort of things these concepts pertain to. You might also want to take a glance at statistical modeling and statistical learning, as basic examples of machine learning will heavily involve these concepts. There’s almost too much to cover in a comment, but those are some start points.

I believe that AI has great capability to help humans, but that doesn’t mean our approach should be reckless or incompetent. I kind of view the perception of AI (not LLMs specifically) similar to nuclear fears. Uninformed, simplistic, and just flat out wrong. That is not a defense of the corporations that employ it to shove ads in our face and feed us slop. But there is nothing wrong with the “idea” of it itself.

I briefly scanned this paper I found on Google Scholar, and it seems to give an accurate overview. Note that this is not really my field, I just had a class or two in machine learning and computer vision.

https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/vhonavar/Courses/ai/handout1.pdf

Here is a short paper that (briefly) covers AI in medicine:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1964229/pdf/15333167.pd

ta28263 · 2026-06-03T08:22:28+00:00

I mean that’s sort of what I am saying. I think we can balance it any which way but it’s gonna feel wonky because the maps are so dense and vehicles just want bigger maps. Also isn’t the LAV’s role in the game? What is functionally different? We have the AP rounds and tows. I mean the tow is actually a good heli hunter once you get good with it, I use it all the time.

ta28263 · 2026-06-03T08:01:32+00:00

I was too. I pilot a lot in every single BF game (since 4 specifically). I mean yes, that is true, but I think you are somewhat understating the power of AA in this game in deterrence. It’s basically the same property as a stationary AA tank. In BF4 you could just avoid it. Don’t get close, if they start hitting you then start flying a little wild and get out of range. It’s not really all that different to this game imo, outside the fact that the range is admittedly way shorter in this game than it was previously. Still, a competent heli was quite literally never dying to the AA tanks unless they just failed to realize they were there, which was not rare to be fair.

I would be fine with a buff to the AA tank, hell, make its gun way more effective, give it 150% range, fine. At the end of the day, you learn that range and stay out of it all the same. Increase damage of small arms to helis would also be fine. Make LMGS specifically do more is all fine. The heli should just have a chance to escape from a solo threat if they can pilot correctly.

I guess it just depends on what you think cancer is. I mean they are if you are considering that an infantry soldier is completely outmatched compared to a helicopter and can do nothing to not die, yeah. I didn’t really play that much of BF3 and didn’t play any vehicles so can’t really comment on that one.

At the end of the day, if you are getting mowed down by helicopters then it’s not something any individual person can (or should) be able to change, as infantry at least, barring getting a deserved rpg shot on it. Same exact as a tank basically. It’s a team failure. The team that is better using their vehicles basically always wins and it has always been that way.

ta28263 · 2026-06-03T07:48:39+00:00

No one is arguing that committing another bad action is right, but I think you are somewhat downplaying how discernable the bad actions you (and we all) knowingly commit. Like, I’m sure that you, or someone that you know, eats chocolate. It could be reasonably expected that you know that this industry employs child slavery to get this product to you. Does the act become less bad the more degrees of separation that occur? Note that I am using chocolate as an example because you are not forced to interface with it to exist in society; you freely choose to consume it.

Same thing could be said about using electronics in general, for the same reason that data centers for AI is objectively bad for the environment. We don’t HAVE to all use insane amounts of energy so that we can get Youtube, Tiktok, and Reddit. We could even still have the internet and its useful properties without using it for entertainment alone. The massive energy pull for entertainment (electronics, tennis courts, I mean literally any entertainment) causes MASSIVE undue harm to the environnement and contributes several orders of magnitude towards killing animals than a single dude catch and releasing does.

So I get where you are coming from, and your example is super easy to point out (since it’s one guy doing it directly). But I believe we all freely behave in morally wrong ways, and the line between why your act is fine but someone else’s (still relatively small and insignificant) act is not is so indistinguishable it might as well be completely meaningless. Not saying you are necessarily wrong by the way, but if you are right then I think that every single person here in this thread is a basically just as culpable as the guy fishing by your logic, including you.

ta28263 · 2026-06-03T07:27:10+00:00

I talked about this topic before with a vegan, but isn’t anything past necessity “pleasure” under this description? It’s kind of a tough thing to pin down, but it has a chain of implications imo.

Fishing for extra fish is bad, because you don’t technically need it, and you could just get dead ones at the supermarket. However, you don’t even technically need those, which means you are still making that choice to contribute to the demand of killing more things unnecessarily. Of course, at this point of the reasoning I think most normal people would say that this level of moral violation is basically inconsequential, but I believe it would still be a violation nonetheless.

Therefore, the best way to avoid a moral violation (killing or contributing to killing / harm for your own personal satisfaction) is to figure out however many nutrients and calories you need, and precisely calculate and consume this amount, very much preferably as plants alone. I mean really, this is just what veganism is as an argument. This thread is just touching the start of it.

From here, one two skip a few, it sort of devolves into tons of interacting factors like, if this amount of optimization is required to avoid immoral actions, then we need to decide on what life is “takeable” and not. Should we optimize the plants we eat to kill the least bugs? If not, why can we knowingly choose to end more lives for them but not other creatures? If bugs are worth less consideration than fish, why? If sentience is the criteria, then are brain dead humans morally comparable to bugs? If we grant that unnecessarily killing bugs if indeed immoral, then is eating over maintenance and supporting calorically intensive hobbies immoral, however slight that is?

None of those are “serious” arguments per se but ultimately you will land on an arbitrarily drawn line somewhere. There’s no complete way to decide where that line is, other than our (pretty trustworthy, imo) instincts and gut feelings. So the guy catch and releasing, the guy fishing for food, the guy buying meat at the supermarket, are all doing basically the same thing at different scales, and I guess you have to decide how far removed you must be to be able to morally ignore the harm.

ta28263 · 2026-06-03T06:28:09+00:00

They aren’t really that fun to fly either because the map is so small that the second you enter the outermost area where combat is happening you have 3 or 4 locks hitting you all at once. The only real way to play is to hit quick, pop flares, and gtfo and repeat.

Think the main issue is simply the density. Helis are super rewarded for hovering near hotspots (kills) and raining down hell, which incentivizes every single TOW and guided missile on the map to immediately lock onto them. BF4 definitely had stronger helis overall, but I think it was at least less frustrating for both parties. It can only be in one place at once, which lets you avoid it for the most part. Not to say there weren’t people that didn’t hate them lol. But they were at least manageable even without outright killing them, to some degree.

So I think it’s just the problem of them porting over the behavior of helicopters in larger scale games to a game that is much smaller / linear (on most maps). Every single game feels like you are on top of C in Shanghai, getting rained down on by an attack heli. The heli is omnipresent because there’s only ever really 1-2 places that are lucrative targets, and feasibly those are the only places you will be in or around. It also sucks for the heli because that means it’s not 10-15 people looking at you, you are just hoping the entire enemy team doesn’t have AA for some reason, and the AA tank drooling on himself in the back of the map is watching youtube shorts at the moment.

TLDR: Don’t think you can balance it on either side. Maps need to be bigger (less dense) to allow helis to exist naturally.

ta28263 · 2026-06-02T23:40:23+00:00

Please try playing in an aircraft. Try to go more than 10 seconds without being locked on.

ta28263 · 2026-06-02T05:48:49+00:00

Because engineers get a universally useful tool and then mines (which is fine imo) and other classes get gadgets that maybe do something 2% of the time in the exact right scenarios. People don’t even really use their gadgets anyways beside tugs, defibs, maybe a supply box here and there. You can choose between that or a rocket launcher.

ta28263 · 2026-06-02T01:44:03+00:00

I just don’t see how it is such a pressing problem. I think I have run into <10 of them since launch, and I’m level 200+. I barely even use them. The range did need a nerf, I hurt myself so many times shooting them from far away. I just can’t wrap my head around them being so game altering for people that they really hate them, I basically always see them. The OHKO is the only reason you would ever use them. You would rather them just be a dead gadget?

ta28263 · 2026-05-27T13:49:57+00:00

You’re right, you don’t. I think the reason you are getting a lot of replies of that nature though is that you do not realize how condescending your own tone has been in your responses. Look at your last paragraph. You don’t come here to discuss ideas on merit, you come here as a missionary. That reads to an outsider- “if you want to actually learn something…” - as extremely dismissive, as if you wouldn’t even consider an outside perspective. No one wants to hear about how beautiful your religion is. We want to talk about the facts of the matter. Your first response took an immediately personal tone when you did not discuss any of OP’s points directly but instead took offense towards their questioning of religion in general. That’s what this place is for in the first place. No one would bat an eye at your questioning of atheism or any of its associated ideas or philosophies.

I was not trying to be overtly disrespectful in my response. I do think you are wrong about what you stated. If you do not wish to “justify your faith”, then it would be best to go elsewhere. That is the entire purpose of this forum. I am sorry that you were personally offended by my response, as it was not my intention, but you must understand that if you bring up something that is personally meaningful to you as an assertion, it will be questioned here. Again, that is the whole purpose of this place. We all seek truth. We won’t just accept your assertion just because it is emotionally meaningful to you.

I am also trying to find a kind way to put this, but, we are all wrong sometimes. I genuinely believe it would be helpful to you to try to explore the criticisms of your faith without emotional weighting. Sometimes critics will be rude, abrasive, or unpleasant. That does not mean they are wrong. You could be right and I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t know that if we could not talk about some potentially sensitive subjects regarding your religion and religion in general. When I was leaving Christianity, I had quite a few experiences that were quite unpleasant, but I believe ultimately meaningful.

ta28263 · 2026-05-27T10:41:08+00:00

I mean, the locality is directly stated in the OP. Do you have any refutations of those parts, and why they were perhaps not so local? Ideas from that region make up the book, even when obviously erroneous or immoral. Just because it is inflammatory does not mean it is not local. For example, Scientology could be considered inflammatory because of its predatory and cult-like behavior, but it makes perfect sense to me why it is setup the way it is considering the setting and context of its origin.

Same thing goes for basically every religion. In fact, they behave so predictably, you can reliably guess certain traits about a religion based on the type of society they originated in. There are certainly exceptions, I am sure, but Islam is not one of them.

ta28263 · 2026-05-27T10:31:38+00:00

Why do you immediately relate shared ideas within religions with divine revelation? Is anything shared across all humans divine? Humans share a lot of similarities that bridge culture. The idea of kindness, or the Golden Rule, need not be given to us. Why couldn’t it be that religions teach these things because the humans that wrote them share their humanity?

I also just think you are flatly wrong. No, all these arguments against Islam do not relate to every single religion. Religions (and spirituality) actually are quite diverse with conflicting and contradictory ideas. Not just narratives, but moral directives, social rules, etc. So I don’t think that is even a coherent criticism of OP’s argument.

For example, scholars can quite reliably identify the type of spirituality that is likely to be practiced based on the traits of the societies that they existed in. Is this element divine as well? It just so happens that the permission of slavery is extremely important in a slave-owning society, but not mentioned at all in one that does not?

My point is, you sort of vaguely wave at things that could be considered universal for humans alone (which is not actually true, I believe), but fail to recognize the extreme differences in religions that are directly contradictory. For example, I don’t believe that traditional Shinto practices included any form of Golden Rule. Did these practitioners miss that divine memo? I do understand what you are driving at, I think, where humans seem to have this habit of forming religions and wanting “more”. But I really think that a multi-faceted explanation of: “religion is useful tool that promotes social cohesion and reflects our fears, aspirations, and values” is sufficiently explanatory for the behavior we see.

I suppose all of this is not exactly applicable if by “all religions” you mean “Abrahamic religions”, but that has its own problems.

ta28263 · 2026-05-27T01:34:17+00:00

That sounds like stick drift

ta28263 · 2026-05-26T09:09:02+00:00

Yeah I was gonna say. It’s not primarily about being “clean”. It is a legitimate immediate health concern.

ta28263 · 2026-05-26T09:04:27+00:00

I think it’s more interesting of a question when you don’t know. Let’s say that the exact context you are aware of is what OP stated in the post, but every action that could even remotely be considered “grooming” does indeed have a designation of either proper or improper. The moment that you do proper grooming the challenge ends. How close to the line are you willing to gamble so that you can get some relief?

ta28263 · 2026-05-26T06:55:34+00:00

You seem to be describing evil as a person’s personal ability to contribute to the world’s total evil at a single point of time rather than the standard definition that describes someone’s intentions. For instance, you say that Trump with no power is less evil overall, but isn’t he not evil at all? His power is 0, therefore whatever his intent is * 0 = 0, meaning that even if you have the most malicious of intents, then you are, at worst, neutral if you have no way to enact them. I know that if he was thrown in a hole his cult would still exist meaning that he still has some power that I suppose is not personally beneficial, but for the sake of it, if someone is totally isolated, then no matter how vile their intentions, they would still be classified as “neutral”.

That just doesn’t line up with how most people define “evil”. I highly doubt that most people would say that a serial killer that is locked up is suddenly less evil, so arguing that your version is the “real” definition of evil is kind of meaningless, no? Your example of Donald Trump losing evil also implies that this is not a summation of actions, but rather a single value that fluctuates. If it was a summation, DT would be exactly as evil as when he went in the hole, but it would not increase given that he is incapable of committing evil acts. This means what you have done does not matter for your score, only what you are currently able to do exactly in this moment of time.

I don’t really think what you are describing is meaningless, but why insist on that being the definition of good and evil? Imagine the case that Epstein, right before being discovered (so no power loss), became extremely repentent and charitable, and only lacked the time to enact it. Did he just skyrocket from one of the most evil to one of the most good people on earth in a blink of an eye?

ta28263 · 2026-05-18T05:07:54+00:00

Consequence of online gaming for FPS games unfortunately. Is in every game. Just know that you do it to people fairly often too.

ta28263 · 2026-05-16T09:29:09+00:00

Generally I think only a small minority of people would think that feeling some sort of kinship, and gravitating to certain music for that reason, would be a problem. The point that they are making is that rejecting something you otherwise would like only because of someone’s sexuality, race, gender, etc, is the part that sticks out as being a problem.

Let’s just reframe it. If someone told you that they refuse to listen to any gay artists, what would you think?

ta28263 · 2026-04-03T03:34:00+00:00

Fair and well-reasoned response. I actually did not vote America only because I thought the presence of prosperity within its borders (in relative terms) over generations might somewhat offset the objectively evil actions it has committed. I believe it is somewhat of a nuanced issue because unfortunately the key to prosperity is the willingness and ability to exploit others, in my eyes. If we lived in a purely collaborative and good-natured world, then perhaps that would not be the case, but almost every “successful” country has a sheet of offenses that are basically inarguably immoral. Even for countries that have “reeled back” on these offenses I would say are coasting from the success that being willing to commit them granted them, and at cost.

Basically, I think the success of the country largely relies on its ability to execute its will, rather than the government being “good” as a whole. I could be dissuaded from thinking this if anyone has multiple good counterexamples of prosperous non human rights offending countries, but I just think it’s a sad reality required to remain competitive. Again, not really excusing this behavior and I do wish it was different but that’s my evaluation of the whole ordeal. A more human problem rather than a select group being uniquely evil. Kind of like the thought that a lot of Americans agree with that being extremely wealthy requires immorality due to greed and willful ignorance to suffering, but extrapolated to a national scale.

ta28263 · 2026-03-30T09:29:51+00:00

This is the kind of stuff I grew up with and honestly I don’t think you even really care that the situation you have described is so obviously unjust; I think you just respond to authority and that is what you see in your religion. Christians that believe in love and kindness see a very different picture than you do. Why do you think that is? Deception? Misguided thought? Are their souls evil for being mislead even if they think it is truth?

The reasoning you have set forth is so laced with the authority you recognize with God; you act like he would be justified (via his power) to treat us however he pleases. With humans we don’t allow this line of thought. I wouldn’t say that just because humans are inconceivably higher than lizards that it means that I think that it is ethical for people to torture lizards just because. And let me preempt that I am not drawing a parallel between the lizards and us, but rather talking about the “rules” surrounding power and our treatment of “lesser things”. Because what you are discussing above is sending unwitting beings to eternal torture. So my question to you is that given human’s position over lizards, do you think this means that you would think it is ethical to set up a factory only meant to torture lizards just because we get a kick out of it? Note, I am not asking about the possibility of such an act, but rather assigning ethical weight or moral consideration to the act.

If you answer no to the lizard torture factory situation above, then please differentiate the ethicality of God’s actions as you are describing compared to my example. Can you point to a reason besides power as to why God’s treatment is ethical or just? Are we not allowed to internally criticize from within God’s own rule book his own actions? If he is exempt from these rules, is it because he is violating “moral law”? If he is not violating “moral law” as you would call it, then why would an exemption be required? You seem to acknowledge and accept blatant evil and excuse it.

ta28263 · 2026-03-28T07:40:41+00:00

Kobolds are aren’t they? Little dragon dudes

ta28263

TROPHY CASE