Deconceptualist

Windows 7 Ultimate for me. I still kept it as a boot option on my main PC until about a year ago because I thought I still needed it for a couple windows apps and games.

I tried Win8 at one point and hated the changes. I also tried Win10 and one of those “forced bloody updates” bricked my machine so I said ‘fuck that’ for good.

I’ve dabbled in Linux for 20 years, and run Ubuntu on my living room HTPC for at least a dozen. My main PC runs EndeavourOS now and even gaming has been pretty great.

I mean if you’re down to NetBSD as your pick you’ve probably already made some big concessions so plugging into Ethernet isn’t a huge leap at that point.

Most likely yes, as many others have said. Of course you’ll likely have to pick a very lightweight DE.

As a fallback there is always NetBSD.

Ew, lol

You’re the wurst

I almost forgot about SimEarth. For some reason I was allowed to play it in grade school computer lab. I wish they would remake it so I can recreate my sentient cephalopod uprising, except with graphics that aren’t complete ass.

I never played SimLife. But no, Spore is really not like SimEarth at all. As the other person said, Spore is disappointingly shallow on all levels.

Someone should get this chart as a full body tattoo. Please report back; I’ll be waiting.

Does it have to be set in America? I’d think the genre could work almost anywhere with technological cities.

That’s somewhat hyperbolic, though it’s a worthy concern. I live in the US and none of my encounters with police have been like that whatsoever, but then again I’m white and midwestern and not financially underprivileged. I’ve seen cops thoughtfully de-escalate or give genuine selfless help firsthand.

I would still say ACAB, but that’s moreso due to the very abusable powers and excessive undue protections that political states give them. It’s a systemic problem, but not proscriptive of individual encounters.

I guess I can only speak from my experience. Most of the instructors and blackbelts who taught me were working on advanced academic degrees as well and actually cared about their students learning all aspects of the art. No meatheaded dudebros whatsoever. They would never even consider promoting that type of buffoon.

Sorry to hear your experience wasn’t the same.

I’m sure that would have happened if it was necessary. But what’s amazing about highly skilled martial arts practitioners is that they have incredible self control and extensive training on how to de-escalate a situation with the minimal force. They understand anatomy and reaction speed and pain and even the legal consequences of using their abilities for harm.

It still boggles my mind that it’s not a requisite for western police.

That’s not the whole story. “The dog swam across the ocean.” is a grammatically valid sentence with correct word order. But you probably wouldn’t write it because you have a concept of what a dog actually is and know its physiological limitations make the sentence ridiculous.

The LLMs don’t have those kind of smarts. They just blindly mirror what we do. Since humans generally don’t put those specific words together, the LLMs avoid it too, based solely on probability. If lots of people started making bold claims about oceanfaring canids (e.g. as a joke), then the LLMs would absolutely jump onboard with no critical thinking of their own.

Ok, maybe there’s a possibility someday with that approach. But that doesn’t reflect my understanding or (limited) experience with the major LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini) out in the wild today. Right now they confidently advise ingesting poison because it’s grammatically sound and they found it on some BS Facebook post.

If ML engineers can design an internal concept of what constitutes valid information (a hard problem for humans, let alone machines) maybe there’s hope.

Yeah I’m sure folks are working on it, but I’m not knowledgeable or qualified on the details.

As others are saying it’s 100% not possible because LLMs are (as Google optimistically describes) “creative writing aids”, or more accurately, predictive word engines. They run on mathematical probability models. They have zero concept of what the words actually mean, what humans are, or even what they themselves are. There’s no “intelligence” present except for filters that have been hand-coded in (which of course is human intelligence, not AI).

“Hallucinations” is a total misnomer because the text generation isn’t tied to reality in the first place, it’s just mathematically “what next word is most likely”.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/

I do find it’s a barrier for some fairly modern games I want to play like Divinity Original Sin 1+2 and Disco Elysium. I wish that wasn’t the case…

For me, the problem is “isometric”. There have been very few games like that I’ve finished compared to others. It feels artificially constrained, especially in a 3D environment, when visibility is limited to like <10 meters away from your character. It’s worse if the camera rotates because then I find it quite hard to make a mental map.

I don’t have this issue with a top-down perspective generally. Maybe those tend to be more 2D (even if rendered they can’t really include environmental verticality) so it’s easier to navigate.