🐧

He featured in a documentary recently. Neat watch.

Criminal branch offices have a closing cooldown, so you need to open up a bunch of them and you'll only lose one at a time. I'm pretty sure it's the office with the least crime, so one thing you can do is open up a "dummy" office that the AI will target first. I think there was a patch a while ago that made the AI more likely to accept crime lord deals, too.

One thing I saw suggested a while ago is to play pacifist, and still build up a huge navy. You can't declare war on empires that have your offices on them, but they'll hate you enough that they'll declare war on you anyway, so you can sit and wait while taking advantage of pacifist bonuses. Don't target too broadly, you don't want everyone ganging up on you at once.

You'll want to avoid leaving branch offices on your vassals, as it makes them produce less, which means you tax less. Unless you have a big vassal that you might want to split up through instability, maybe? I haven't tried that.

Viability is a moot point anyway in a game with variable difficulty. You'll have trouble on GA 25x crisis without some specific builds, but imo the fun part of the game is trying new things, getting crushed, and learning.

I was at Walmart the other day and there were four employees standing around the self checkout. They all said bye to me when I left. Weird shit.

At that point, why not just have them work the tills??

Personally, I'm a comp sci graduate who did several courses exploring AI, but I actually started out in fine arts and continue to paint, write, and play music to this day. I'm sure I'll be blending these studies in some way when I move on to my master's.

I agree that automation is scary. It's unregulated. But it's not the tech so much that's evil, but rather the employers who see it as a reason to get rid of employees. And before, it'd be manual labour that we replaced with machines. People doing mental labour thought they were immune, until now they're not. Our economic system's going to need to change in some way.

But generative AI can be very good even for artists. For example, sometimes I suffer from writer's block (who doesn't?). Now, I can feed what I'm working on into chatGPT and have it spit out an example of the next paragraph. Sometimes that's enough to spur me on so I can write the next page.

Artist movements in general are pretty conservative. When digital painting first became a thing, allowing people use layers and filters so easily, the kneejerk reaction by artists was to consider it cheating.

My hope is that in an ideal world, human-made art becomes valuable in the future precisely because it has the human touch. Live music played on real instruments, paintings on canvas, the sorts of things with quirks and imperfections and a human element that can't be mass produced. Let the corporations have their algorithmic, soulless advertisements, and let the people focus on true self expression.

But then for people without artistic talent, say those who want to make indie games but can't hire an artist or a musician because they're just some kid with a dream and little experience? Hell, why not let them generate some assets with AI?

But we need to make sure that people aren't afraid of becoming homeless, starving on the streets. I think, we're not getting rid of AI at this point, it's too powerful, and I don't have an answer to our societal problems. For better or worse, we'll adapt.

It's probably related to the fact that it seems a lot of Lemmy users are in tech, rather than art.

I think generative AI is a great tool, but a lot of people who don't understand how it works either overestimate (it can do everything and it's so smart!!) or underestimate it (all it does is steal my work!!)

Ugh you're right. I admit I've scrolled through AITA more often than I should, because something about it is really entertaining.

But it's like junk food, I don't really feel good when I'm done with it. More vindictive, like those revenge subs. Being off Reddit has reduced how much I see it, and I don't particularly want to go back to that.

I always thought i for index when iterating through an array. Then you can't use i again in a nested loop so j follows.

Tho sometimes x, y if the array represents coordinates.

Only a maniac would use a, b.

🤤

Now that's a satisfying couple of charts!

I think the benefit of having metric in base 10 rather than 12 is that it matches our numeric base system.

123mm is 12.3cm and 1.23dm and 0.123m.

Converting things in base 12 would be a bit more work, not sure it'd be worth it.

We're not really going around converting time very often.

12 and 60 divide nicely. A quarter of a 12-hour clock is 3 hours, but in decimal time it'd be 2.5 hours. A third is 4 hours in base 12, but some gross 3.33 repeating in decimal.

I just don't like it.