Putting aside the tankies, I think a lot of people are just rooting for Iran because they want to see Trump’s stupidity blow up in his face. It’s not really about wanting Iran to win so much as it is about wanting the US to lose, because that kind of arrogance and belligerence deserves a downfall.

And, of course, there are plenty of people who are rooting for Iran because the Iranian people are already struggling under an oppressive government and don’t deserve to then get bombed into the stone age by an angry, insecure man who just wants to make his dick feel big. Rooting for Iran and rooting for the Iranian government are not actually the same thing after all.

Now that people are shunting easier requests to local models and sending the harder problems out, the hyper scalers have less income, so they have to charge more.

While you’re 100% correct about the fact that this is happening, and it is a serious problem for the hyper-scalers, it’s really, really important to note that even before this started happening, LLMs were already hilariously unprofitable, both on the software and the hardware side. For the AI companies, there is simply no way to charge people what the models actually cost to run and still turn a profit. On the data-centre side, the turnover on burned out GPUs is going to annihilate any hope of profitability. They’re treating as capex what is essentially a consumable and their business models simply do not account for this reality.

The behaviour you’re identifying here is basically just a swift kick in the guts to someone who was already bleeding to death from several bullet wounds. Seriously unhelpful, but not remotely the impending cause of death.

Basically, yes.

This comes back to the basic problem with LLMs as a business proposition; any digital service can either be cheap and frivolous, or expensive and necessary. You can even, if you do things right, be cheap and necessary. But you cannot ever be expensive and frivolous.

LLMs were supposed to be expensive and necessary, but it turns out they’re just so unreliable that they simply cannot perform an essential role. They must always be disposable; fun, or useful, but never essential.

Which leaves only cheap and frivolous as an option. And they’re just not cheap, nor does it seem likely that they ever will be.

So you get Character.ai filling chapter 11, because people simply will not ever pay what it actually costs to run these models just so that they can have a computer program pretend to be Lois Griffin for them.

Even as someone who is legitimately excited for this game to come out, this reaction is so completely justified. CIG have only themselves to blame for all the skepticism at this point.

Of course, they’re also continuing to make money hand over fist, so I guess they don’t really care…

You’re saying SQ42 will be like Heart of Darkness?

No, I’m not. Let me absolutely clear about that. I’m not saying anything about what SQ42 will be like, because I haven’t played it, and I haven’t had this confirmed by anyone who has.

What I am saying is that those comparisons were brought up by the writers early on in the development. Whether that has any bearing on the finished product remains to be seen.

Take a look at the discussions of Wing Commander 4 elsewhere in this thread if you want a better idea of the kind of stuff Chris Roberts likes to do when he’s not beholden to a publisher. If your only yardstick here is the Wing Commander movie, you’re really not looking at a very helpful data point.

But, again, I’m only talking about hints and intimations. I don’t have hard facts about the game and I’m not claiming to.

I feel like you’re misreading what I wrote if that’s your takeaway.

There are so many things to actually criticize CIG for that it seems weird to come up with something like this out of nowhere. When they were last selling SQ42 as a standalone it was $40. Despite all of the entirely justified memes about expensive ships you can still buy the complete Star Citizen game for $45 and unlock all those ships in game. While CIG have zero problem shilling $5000 ship packages to overly eager whales, they’ve always kept their base asking price impressively low.

The adverts are very vanilla, but the conversations with the creators have definitely hinted at a lot more going on. I don’t want to say too much because it’s a) potential spoilers, and b) stuff that has only been hinted at, never confirmed, but their plans for the game definitely seem to be more in a Heart of Darkness kind of direction.

Obviously, wait for reviews, see what they actually end up making as opposed to what they might or might not have planned at any point, but from everything I’ve heard the writers say I don’t think the story is worth writing off just yet.

The actual setting is much more nuanced than what you’re getting from the trailers.

The UEE (the guys you’re signing up with) was, until quite recently, fully the villains of the setting. A fascist dictatorship under the rule of generations of mad emperors. We straight up invaded and genocided other species.

The present day of Star Citizen is exploring what that world looks like after the revolution that restores democracy but ultimately fails to truly address the rot that created that dictatorship in the first place. The “democratic” UEE still has serious problems with alien rights, kowtows to corporate power, and is in a constant internal push-pull over security vs freedom.

Literally one of the main reasons to join the military is to earn full citizenship, a la Starship Troopers.

Chris was forced to make the first three Wing Commander games that way. His original pitch was much darker, explored the idea that the Kilrathi had legitimate reasons to be fighting, and basically ended with you doing war crimes.

Wing Commander 4 was much closer to his original vision, and involves you going rogue against the Earth Navy after learning that the conflict you’re in was started by a false flag operation.

Debt gets more valuable when the person owing looks more likely to pay.

So Trump buys the debt, then announces a policy that will funnel a bunch of money to the company that owes it. The debt all increases in value and he gets to resell it at a profit.

There’s a lot to be said about how GURPS is clunky - and it is, even when you’re not digging into the insane optional rules - but I think its biggest flaw, by far, was that it had very little appreciation for genre. GURPS was built on the notion that a single system could tell any story, but what that meant in practice was that a single system could tell a story with different trappings. GURPS was set dressing applied to a core system that ultimately imposes certain genre constraints on anything you tried to run with it. This is true of all systems, but GURPS tries to act like it isn’t.

That’s not to say that it’s universally bad. A lot of the settings for it do fit well in the mold it offers. Alpha Centauri is fantastic in GURPS, and it’s a wonderful system for the huge line of historical settings it offers, if you’re looking for a more grounded, simulationist take. But there are also plenty that don’t. Illuminati University is brilliant but has no business being a GURPS setting. That game desperately wants to be PbtA. Ditto Discworld. Star Trek makes no sense; that game probably wants to be running on something like Cortex, the relationship engine would work beautifully with Trek’s tone and themes.

God help you if you actually think the WoD conversions are a good idea. And who in their right mind ever thought it was the right system for Hellboy?

No system can ever be universal, because roleplaying games are stories, not historical re-enactments. That matters.

I live around army people, and I cannot emphasize enough how much they all hate Trump.

Even the alt-right chuds. The guys who used to love him. The moment this 51st state shit started, he was dead to them. Doesn’t matter where they sit on the political spectrum (and, for the record, Canadian soldiers sit ALL across the political spectrum; I know straight up communists and anarchists in the CAF), the one thing that basically unites every soldier in Canada is that they serve Canada. They swore an oath to defend and protect our sovereignty, and when Trump threatens that sovereignty they take it seriously and personally.

Also, fun fact, the US regularly cheats in NATO joint exercises, and still routinely get their asses kicked countries despite their cheating. Learned that from a jack literally just this morning.

In this case the clean room is probably “We told Claude to write it and we don’t care if Claude has a bunch of leaked Adobe source code in it’s training data.”

I absolutely detest this take. The notion that understanding things makes them less enjoyable is just assinine bullshit peddled by people who feel insecure about their ignorance.

And I do want to be absolutely clear about what I’m saying here; the problem is the insecurity, not the ignorance.

Ignorance is, by and large, morally neutral. Everyone has things they are ignorant of. We can’t all be experts on everything, and expertise is not a requirement for enjoyment.

But once you start deluding yourself into believing that ignorance is some kind of morally or practically superior state - that you have achieved some kind of zen nirvana by not knowing things - you’re one step shy of putting on a MAGA hat.

The elitist cinema snob who can’t enjoy anything exists in the same place as the hipster barrista who refuses to acknowledge that filter coffee exists. You have never actually met this person. What you have, perhaps, met are people with different tastes than yours. People who don’t enjoy Bayformers but do enjoy Parasite. Why is your enjoyment of the former morally superior to their enjoyment of the latter? What leads you to believe that the joy you experience from the former is greater than the joy they experience from the latter? Do you have any evidence for that at all, or is just something that needs to be true in order for you to feel good about yourself?

Again, there is nothing morally wrong about enjoying Bayformers or whatever. If those movies bring you joy, that’s great. There is so much trash that I unironically love. You can enjoy things despite their flaws, and you can even enjoy things because of their flaws. No one is coming to arrest you for your love of Naruto.

But if you truly believe it’s OK to enjoy those things, grow the fuck up and act like it. Stop inventing miserable strawmen in a pathetic act of self-justification. And stop getting so fucking insecure every time someone says anything bad about a thing you enjoy. If your entire fucking philosophy is that it’s OK to enjoy things that are trash then why are you so god damn upset about people pointing out that they’re trash? Own it. Fucking commit. Show some fucking backbone and proudly enjoy the things you love instead of fantasizing about how everyone who disagrees with you is secretly miserable.

That’s not even close to being as weird as Eclipse Phase PCs can get.

This isn’t even as weird as Eclipse Phase PCs can get…

Posthuman never did. Eclipse Phase was created by a small team who really cared about it and put the work in.

It also came out before CGL really went downhill, circa Shadowrun 4th edition, which was great.

All of which sounds incredibly silly until you actually play the game.

Peak Eclipse Phase, well done.

Not OP, but I’ll take a moment to rant about how fucking great Eclipse Phase is.

You play as immortal posthuman (or uplifted animal) badasses working to secretly save the remaining ten percent of the human race from the hellish aftershocks of the cataclysm that wiped out the other ninety percent.

What’s great about it is that this is a game that actually trusts its players. That’s such a rare thing. What I mean by that is that Eclipse Phase has no notion of game balance, because it’s not about being a game, it’s about being an awesome story.

You want to create a literal clone army of yourself? Go for it. I wonder if that’ll have any unforeseen consequences. Want to perform mind surgery on someone to rewrite their personality? Sure thing, have fun living with the moral weight of that choice. Want to be a sentient whale that lives in the sun? Hell yeah buddy, of course you can be a sentient whale that lives in the sun.

It looks like an action game, it plays like a horror game. It’s Call of Cthulhu with the singularity and Fermi’s paradox as its elder gods.

CGL were only the publisher, and not any more. It’s published directly by the creators now. It’s also under a creative commons license, so you can freely share the rulebooks and create your own material for it.