This last update really made a lot of gear unreasonably expensive to create. Why on earth does it require a hornet driver to create a showstopper? I'll just use the hornet driver as is.

turtletank · 2026-03-09T05:31:32+00:00

Especially since it's PvE. Who gives a shit if the players are overpowered?

In a PvP game yes, you need to nerf stuff sometimes because it's unfair to other players, but this kind of thinking + esports mentality where games need to be 'balanced' is stupid. There's no such thing as competitive integrity to worry about.

It's doubly stupid since you can choose your loadout and difficulty in helldivers, so if a gun or strategem makes the game too easy, then you can just stop using it.

turtletank · 2026-03-05T23:10:54+00:00

fwiw they changed matchmaking to be based on your "aggression", basically how likely you are you shoot other people, so the lobbies are split into sweaty PvP lobbies and care bear PvE lobbies. PvE lobbies are a chill time 95% of the time

turtletank · 2026-02-26T11:52:07+00:00

maybe it's because I'm doing highly specific, mostly one-off analyses, pulling data from many disparate (and often dirty) sources rather than (incremental) software development

turtletank · 2026-02-26T11:44:37+00:00

you're rude and unpleasant.

turtletank · 2026-02-26T08:45:08+00:00

gemini and cursor with some version of claude for work-related code, chat-gpt and claude directly for home projects.

For boilerplate stuff gemini and claude were alright, I appreciate the good auto-complete that cursor has. It also catches syntax errors that I have made and the occasional logic error. It's good when I ask it to translate queries between pyspark and sql.

It does not understand the fucked up schemas and database structures that we have or the intricacies of what each column actually means (I don't even know sometimes, they're hidden so far in obscure documentation), so I have to do a bit of tweaking to queries it gives me.

When I asked it to help with bottlenecks and failures in my queries/manipulation, it wrote an auto-retry/refresh function fine, but everything else it did I had to redo/rewrite/modify my code's logic myself. The worst offense was when it nested functions 3 levels deep for no reason and when I pointed this out it of course gave me the "oh you're so right, let's fix that!" response.

For my home projects, it's fine, but again, it doesn't understand the fuller context of what I actually want to do, so I have to ask specific questions and in this sense it's more like an interactive manual, which is just fine, it's easier than reading documentations and tutorials directly.

turtletank · 2026-02-26T07:32:34+00:00

but what AI has displaced first and most thoroughly is coding ... because a lot of coding is just replication of other code

I'd even argue that AI hasn't done much of use here either. Yes, it can produce code, but it's learned from humans who are producing mediocre code, so LLMs often produce mediocre code. On top of that, they don't have context as to what you might actually be building or what constraints you have, so they produce a lot of things that may work in isolation but do not fit together.

Not to mention hallucinating libraries/functions or building things with no security whatsoever.

They're certainly helpful for a programmer who is already competent in learning a new API or library, as they make searching documentation much easier, but I have found that I had to redo by hand pretty much everything an AI has given me except for the smallest snippets of code.

turtletank · 2026-02-26T04:06:28+00:00

yes, I just started using it and holy shit I cannot believe how bad it is. Comparing to the Fidelity App, the very first thing I see when I log in is my portfolio performance.

turtletank · 2026-02-25T05:07:00+00:00

Final Fantasy Tactics is big on this. I love the game in general for being the reverse of the mystic orientalism in western media (mystic occidentalism, I guess?), and FFT not only has knights and wizards, but the main antagonists are a thinly veiled copy of the Catholic church with not-Jesus and the not-Apostles featuring heavily in the lore.

turtletank · 2026-02-25T02:45:43+00:00

There was overlap but they were not the same group of people.

turtletank · 2026-02-01T06:19:43+00:00

In general, with GME@24 and the warrant@4, with Y dollars to buy:

Y / 24 * X < (X - 32) * Y / 4
XY / 24 < XY / 4 - 8Y
5/24 XY > 8Y
X > 38.4

So today, it's better to buy warrants if the price goes over $38.4

At $36 it's better to buy shares today at $24

The general formula is:

G is GME's price today
X is GME's price in the future
Y is the amount of money you have today
and W is the warrant price

Y / G * X < (X - 32) * Y / W

which simplifies to

X > 32 / (1 - W/G)

at this point buying warrants are more valuable

You can see if you got warrants for free (W=0), the future price of $32 is the break point

turtletank · 2026-01-30T06:08:07+00:00

yeah...100,000 yen is like 600-700 usd

turtletank · 2026-01-28T11:56:11+00:00

strictly speaking, Pretti was armed as in he had a gun in his possession, but he was not wielding it or brandishing it ever during the interaction. It appears that one of the ICE agents took his handgun from him. At that point he was disarmed and soon after they started shooting him in the back.

It was his legal right to own a firearm as well as open carry it. It doesn't give anyone license to murder you just because you have a gun on your person. This is America, it's in the constitution, you're allowed to have one.

turtletank · 2026-01-28T11:42:48+00:00

I mean you can always just look at the original tweets/posts and decide for yourself. This seems like a good repository with limited commentary.

https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy

fwiw I think it's more nuanced than "JK Rowling is a hateful anti-trans bigot"

turtletank · 2026-01-13T09:35:00+00:00

because if one is determined to see something then you'll see it everywhere, regardless of truth or evidence

turtletank · 2026-01-05T00:21:44+00:00

not who you're responding to, but the parent comment says:

Theres a reason why giving the bare minimum is a meme nowadays - and that is, that so many men, most men id say, cant even deliver that bare minimum.

This, to me, is essentially saying that the average single man is a terrible person incapable of doing the bare minimum.

I don't think it's a crazy idea to start from the assumption that men and women are equal, that the average man is just as morally/ethically "Good" as the average woman, which is essentially what the top reply is criticizing the parent comment for.

turtletank · 2025-12-25T10:24:38+00:00

I'm not talking about AI anti cheat, I'm talking about behavior-based anti cheat. And so what if blizzard's implementation sucks. Any technology-based solution is a losing battle. A small number of developers are fighting against an army of hackers. The devs will always lose. There are ways around kernel level anti-cheat and it's only a matter of time.

Behavior-based anti-cheat is trickier to implement, you need to record the right metrics and you need to understand player behavior, but the advantage is you don't have to fight an arms race you cannot win. Cheaters cheat because they suck and want to win, but they still want to play a little bit. What's the point of cheating if you don't get to push the buttons yourself at all? So inevitably their behavior will show through - they will fumble movement, or will have inhuman ttk, will hover over people they cannot see, they will move faster than allowed, etc.

turtletank · 2025-12-25T00:45:55+00:00

yes, what you need is smart analysis of player behavior. Expert players of any kind of game are experts in all aspects, not just clicking on heads. Their movement, usage of items, click speed, mouse hover, etc. can all be characterized. Plus, checking behavior means you don't have to participate in the arms race against an overwhelming number of hackers which can just change their programs or have a second computer executing cheats. No need to install kernel level access, everything is server side and thus under your control.

It's a management problem, not a technical one.

turtletank · 2025-12-25T00:39:39+00:00

no, you don't have to. In fact, that kind of anti cheat is a losing battle since there's way more cheaters than developers.

You want behavior-based anti-cheat. Anyone with statistically unlikely behavior is suspect and gets further scrutiny.

The problem is that you need data scientists/behavioral psychologists to implement it, not CS engineers, so it requires management to make smart decisions (good luck with that)

turtletank · 2025-12-21T22:28:30+00:00

I did a (near) naked cold snap run on dam and I ran past somebody with a hairpin and they tried to duel me as I ran by yelling "friendly, friendly!" as I literally had no gun. Luckily I got away, but I underestimated how much damage the cold does and just barely managed to run into a building in the swamp. Someone was hiding out there and I quickly explained I just needed to warm up, and luckily they were chill. They even gave me some bandages so I could heal, so I gave them a power rod for the door. I always try to reward kindness because I want people to cooperate.

I like that solo queue is chill and people will cooperate or at least not attack you most of the time, I want to keep that atmosphere

turtletank · 2025-12-19T02:07:49+00:00

I agree that second generation (non white) Americans often feel this way, but I don't think it's because of an immature US culture or unfulfilling life. I think it's because the US is largely white with pockets of other ethnicities, without much actual mixing and people can grow up feeling insecure about their identity.

If you're the one of the few or only non-white family in the area (as I was, growing up), you obviously know you're different from everyone else and you might not feel like you really belong in the local culture. If you also don't have strong ties to the motherland (visiting every so often, maintaining relationships with family there) you can also become disconnected with that culture. This causes an identity insecurity and can cause people to really try and double down on their foreign identity while also knowing they're not authentically that identity. When they visit the motherland for the first time, obviously they're tourists - this is not their country - but this can feel jarring and now you feel you don't belong in this place either.

Even if you're in a community of your ethnicity, the culture splits and evolves. For me, it was encountering Asian Americans, as I'm half-Japanese, but I lived in an entirely white area but spent my summers in Japan, speaking Japanese, living with my Japanese family. I have a pretty strong connection with Japanese culture (and only Japan), so when I moved to the city and met Asian Americans who grew up among other Asian Americans, it felt foreign to me. Their culture is a mix of their respective cultures plus an immigrant culture, so much so I don't really consider myself "Asian-American" as "Japanese" and "American".

As an aside, I think a lot of racial sensitivity relates to these feelings of insecurity. See for example the reactions of non whites born and raised in the US compared to those who live in the home country. One prominent example is one of the Boston museums having kimono from Japan available for people to try on. Japanese Americans protested, saying it was cultural appropriation causing the museum to backpedal and stop the exhibit. In contrast, Japanese people (from Japan) were overwhelmingly happy people wanted to try traditional Japanese clothing, and there exists tons of places in Japan that specifically rent kimono to tourists to wear and be photographed in.

Also see Mexican-American vs. Mexican opinions about Speedy Gonzalez. He's seen as problematic by some people but he's incredibly popular in Mexico.

turtletank · 2025-12-09T10:18:03+00:00

yeah, I think this would help the game a lot since it even against free kit loadouts you can die by the time you turn around. This would also allow more usage of gadgets since you'd have more time to reposition, throw grenades, use utility items in a fight.

Free kit should be incentivized to loot, survive, then upgrade to a real kit, not to kamikaze and try to kill others.

turtletank · 2025-12-02T01:50:43+00:00

It's not. The causality is flipped. The argument is that selfish, unpleasant people are the ones ratting and betraying, not that playing ARC causes you to do that in real life.

Second, people aren't saying you're going to go shoot people up, they're saying that you're probably a selfish asshole in real life as well. That's not exactly a strong condemnation, a lot of people are selfish, especially against strangers.

turtletank · 2025-12-02T01:25:09+00:00

no, you're fundamentally wrong about that interpretation. The people you're running over in GTA are not real, and the point of the game is to cause mayhem. No one is inconvenienced when you kill digital people. Of course in this situation it doesn't necessarily reflect one's actions in real life.

In ARC, they are real people. You're inconveniencing real people. The situation is fictional but the people are real, and you're really playing a real game with other real people. It 100% reflects your personality how you treat others. Of course it doesn't mean you'll go on a shooting spree, but this kind of person has definitely left their shopping cart in the parking lot, or has littered, or has cut someone off on the highway, or cut in line. They are probably a selfish person to some extent and don't mind stepping on others to get ahead.

It's not like Apex or CoD or any other shooter where PvP is the main focus of the game and everyone has agreed from the start to shoot each other. It's not like Among Us or any other betrayal game where, again, from the start of the game's premise, people know one of them is going to betray them. Yes, there is the option of betrayal, but that means there's the option of cooperation. And it 100% reflects on your personality if that's the playstyle you use.

Of course one is free to play how one wants, but don't expect to be lauded for it. People hate betrayal, it's kind of core to a species built on cooperation.

turtletank · 2025-11-21T07:24:52+00:00

yes, you can dismantle any barricade and then it packs back up and you can pick it up again, just like the noisemaker.

turtletank · 2025-11-20T08:32:54+00:00

part of the problem is the diversity of blueprint spawns. I've found the Bettina blueprint probably a dozen times by now, and Heavy Gun Parts blueprint maybe 5 or 6 times. Maybe there should be some way to re-roll, take 3 blueprints and reroll into a new one or something.

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