I think it’s fair to expect students to use computers in a programming class. I don’t know if there’s a need for students to be using computers for the entire school day

Yep - I’ve already been bugging my grandma to get a passport so that she will be able to vote if SAVE act passes (she changed her name when she married, but doesn’t have a passport since she’s never left the country). Gotta avoid doomerism and make the fascists fight for every inch we can.

I’m torn on this - Christianity (particularly evangelical christianity) has had an extremely negative effect on democracy in our country and has caused physical harm to others.

However, I think most people with a conscience subscribe to some form of philosophy or religion (even if atheists aren’t “loyal” to any particular perspective and may not even use titles/categories to describe their value system) and I think it’s fine for your morals/conscience to influence decision making. Even a purely scientific decision making process could be considered a form of philosophy.

That being said, most organized religion is about obedience to the tenets of said religion, not a method of asking questions about the world to try to find the most just way to proceed.

Strangely, I find old Star Trek more comforting in times like these. Though perhaps that’s the nostalgia talking

Exactly. I can understand being glad the mafia boss is dead, but it’s a “change in management” not liberation

I think that’s a fair perspective - though I am certainly concerned about Trump starting wars without going through congress, as well as the precedent this sets for invading other countries without cause. (Granted, historically, the US has done both, but that doesn’t make it right). Additionally, this could just mean Venezuela swaps out this dictator for a US-friendly dictator.

It’s a bad position to be in. If they crash it will be bad, but if they keep growing and then crash it could be worse.

Worse, it’s a few megabytes of selfhosted storage. Data on a server you own that you are not allowed to access.

That’s true of many rules/razors… I wonder if there’s a rule/razor about not putting too much faith in things like murphys law and occams razor.

I’m not going to fault you for that - but do you think you should receive an award for the work you didn’t do? Even if you only use the car on the “easy” parts of the race that nobody cares about?

In the case of this particular game, perhaps the bulk of the creative work was done by humans. But if the GOTY committee isn’t confident with drawing a line between what work is OK to offload onto an AI and what work isn’t, then I think it’s fair for then to say this year that any generative AI use is a disqualifier.

You and I can say with ease that an implementation of a basic swap function (c=a, a=b, b=c) doesn’t require any creative work and has been done to death, so there’s no shame in copypasteing something from stackoverflow or chatgpt into your own code to save time.

But it’s harder to gauge that for more complex things. Especially with art - where would you draw the line? Reference material? Concept art? Background textures or 3d models of basic props (random objects in the scene like chairs, trees, etc)?

I don’t think there’s a clear answer for that. You might have an answer you think is correct, and I might have one as well, but I think it will be difficult and time consuming to achieve consensus in the game development community.

So, the most efficient answer for now is to have any generative AI be a disqualifier.

I’m not going to fault someone for driving to work in a car, but I certainly wouldn’t call them the winner of a marathon even if they only drove for a few minutes of that marathon.

There’s a difference between something that runs the race for you (LLM AI) and something that simply helps you do what you are already doing (I suppose photoshop is the equivalent of drinking gatorade).

The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they’re already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it’s a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.

I’d quibble that the average medieval peasant faced a lot less surveillance than the average citizen of any country today (Though perhaps that’s just a change in methods).

But you are right - and, in fact, I think it’s the case that countries/people in worse circumstances tend to have more kids (probably some weird evolutionary thing but I don’t want to speculate). As tough as times may seem in “developed” countries, most people don’t need to worry about where their next meal is coming from.

(This isn’t to say that circumstances are “fine” or that we shouldn’t improve things - simply pointing out some biological factors). It’s also worth noting that folks in worse economic circumstances tend to having a higher number of people in their “support network” (friends and family - ie, 3 generations living under one roof). Though perhaps this is not the case in the US since it’s culturally looked down upon to rely on family like that.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that can’t be boiled down to 1 or 2 simple factors like government type. Maybe this was too much text and I should’ve just said “I agree with you DeathByBigSad”

Gameplay - quick time events weren’t super annoying (I wasn’t a fan of telltale batman quick time events), I personally liked the hacking minigame (though not everyone did), and the actual “dispatch” segments were tons of fun.

The story was excellent - I kept expecting a “twist” like we’ve seen in a lot of superhero media recently, and there weren’t any big twists. I think this was a good thing, it’s nice to see more of a “reconstruction” of good guy vs bad guy.

Spoilers -

Steam’s business model does prevent it from pricing its consoles like Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, etc. since they need the console itself to be profitable, not just a means of bringing in games sales.

It’s plausible that they’re taking into account an uptick in overall game sales from this console - at least for me, I’ve been purchasing new games mostly off of steam rather than playstation/nintendo ever since I got a steamdeck - but you’re right that they aren’t going to sell at a loss.

Regardless of the price (and whether or not I even buy one), I think it’s healthy to have another “big” player in the console market.

YouTubers really are the way to go. For me, there’s no better way to see if I want to play a game than watching someone play it.

And for story games best played blind, I go by word of mouth.

Yep. There are people who can vote who were born after Portal came out XD

Oh yeah, that’s definitely around the time when games started getting “big”, especially with Halo.

We are living in great times for small studio and indie games!

It has a little more gameplay than past telltale games with its dispatch sections (a bit of strategy, deciding which heroes go on what calls), but otherwise you are right, it’s a fancy choose your own adventure game. They have done some interesting things with superhero tropes so far (e.g., superheroes working out of a corporate call center), but it’s a bit early to tell if they’ll subvert some of my expectations for the “final boss”.