Fascism is more of an approach than a specific ideology. Its only core value is Strength Through Unity - but to achieve that it needs some populist values to unite the people over - which is how you get different flavors of fascism. The original Fascist Party was using nationalism. Racism is also a popular choice (fascism + racism = Nazism), and it seems like rightist values are more prune to it - but leftist values are not safe either, like we have seen in the USSR which based its fascism around socialism.
Conservatism can be a base for fascism, but like all these other values - it doesn't have to be fascist. The rule is simple:
- If you want The Gays(tm) to just stop - that's regular conservatism.
- If you want a strong leader to "stop" The Gays(tm) - that's fascist conservatism.
Dragons live even longer than elves. They can't be bother to properly learn the spelling of all the words every time a human civilization destroys itself and a new one rises with a new language.
The advice is directed toward imaginary people that the company conjured out of memes and stereotypes. Yes, there are people struggling, but how many of them fit the "takes a cab every day to eat out and drink coffee" template?
I too drink 3-4 cups a days, which I make at home (or, much more often, at the office. Which means I save more money because I don't pay for the ingredients. At least not directly), but every now and then - say, once or twice a week - I buy a cup of coffee. Now, it's mostly a matter of convenience (I don't go out specifically to drink coffee, I buy it because I'm already out for other matters) but if I was financially struggling I could make that coffee at home (or at the office) and take it with me. But if wouldn't be that significant. If we use your numbers, that's about $2-$4/week - or about $156/year (I don't calculate the price of the jar because I already need it for the 3-4 cups I make myself, and yes I will use them up more often but at this point it's small change). Not much.
You drink 3-4 cups a day, and because you make them at home you imagine that these people who buy their coffee buy 3-4 cups a day. But is this really the pattern? I mean, I can say that I drink 3-4 cups a day and that I can say that I buy coffee, and both of these statements will be true. So maybe my pattern is the more common one? It would be enough to fill the cafes with people that only drink out once a week...
What "person in question"? There is no "person in question" here. We are not talking about the financial problems of anyone specific. We are talking about the problem in general.
When a person comes to the hospital with a knife popping out, you want the medical crew to focus on taking the knife out while preventing the patient from bleeding to death. When there is a public debate about how so many people are getting stabbed, the debate should be about preventing them from getting stabbed, not about the specifics of how to safely pull a knife out of a living person's flesh.
If you choose RC Cola, you get RC Cola. If picking a soft drink was like the elections, you wouldn't want to choose RC because you'd still get Pepsi or Coke and you'll just be throwing away your ability to influence it to be the one with the lower concentration of cyanide.
Yea, sorry, no. You Americans cannot be trusted with something so important.
Last time Europe sent people to "help" America it didn't end well...
Don't boast about "defeating pride" in your engagement photo unless you had to wrestle lions to get her to say yes.
Windows uses AI to determine what's best for you. GNOME just decides it generally in advance.
What would be the right tool for the job of keeping 7k tabs open?
Now… Could they pass a lie detector for “do you promise you would never pay for your mistress to fly out of state for an abortion?“
They probably will, but when the time come they'll manage to come up with the perfect excuse why their case is special and deserves an exemption.
Come on! This is 2024! At least pipe it through an LLM to get a different phrasing for each post...
I just got clickbaited by the new Twitter logo
Encountering one of these embedded tweets in a blog post, my hand instinctively moved to click the X and close it. That took me to the website.
Could this be a clever ruse to generate more visits? Is Elon Musk actually more cunning than we give him credit?
Looking for a value fine-tuning tool
I have this idea for a certain game development tool, but before I start another side project I want to check if something similar already exists.
An important part of game development is fine-tuning numeric values. You have some numbers that govern things like character motion, weapon impact, enemy AI, or any other game mechanic. For most of these there is no "correct" value that can be calculated (or even verified!) with some algorithm - you have to manually try different values and converge to something that "feels right".
The most naive way to fine-tune these numbers is to have them as hard-coded values, tweak them in code, and re-run the game every time you change them. This, of course, is a tedious process - especially if you have to go through long build times, game loading, and/or gameplay to reach a state where you can test these values (that last hurdle can often be skipped by programming in a special entry point, but that too can get tedious)
A better way would be to write these numbers in configuration file(s) which the game can hot-reload - at least while in development mode. That way you can just edit the file and save it, and the game will reload the new values. This is a huge improvement because it skips the building/loading/preparing which can drastically shorten the cycles - but it's still not perfect because you have to constantly switch between the game and the configuration file.
Sometimes you can use the game engine editor to tweak these while the game is running, or create your own UI. This makes the context switches hurt less, and also lets you use sliders instead of editing textual numbers, but it's still not perfect - you still have to switch back and forth between the game controls and the tweaking interface.
Which brings us to my idea.
What I envision is a local fine-tuning server. The server will either update configuration files which the game will hot-reload, or the game could connect to it via WebSocket (or some other IPC. But I like WebSocket) so that the server could push the new values to it as they get updated.
After the server deduces the structure of the configuration (or read it from a schema - but providing a schema may usually be a overkill) you could use its webapp UI to configure how the values would be tweaked. We usually want sliders, so you'll need to provide a range - even if the exact value is hard to determine, it's usually fairly easy to come up with a rough range that the value must be in (how high can a human jump? More than 5cm, less than 5m). You will also decide for each slider if it's linear or logarithmic.
The server, of course, will save all that configuration so that you won't have t reconfigure it the next time you want to tweak values (unless there are new values, in which case you'll only have to configure the sliders for them)
Since this would be a server, the tweaking of the values could be done from another device - preferably something with a touchscreen, like a smartphone or a tablet, because tweaking many sliders is easier with a touchscreen. So you have the game running on your PC/console, gamepad in hand (or keyboard+mouse, if that's your thing), and as you play you tweak the sliders on the touchscreen until you get them just right.
Does anyone know if a similar tool already exists?
Does it make sense to use a narrative scripting language for scripting the silent parts of world progression?
Narrative scripting languages like Yarn Spinner or Inkle were originally meant for writing dialogue, but I think they can also be used for scripting the world progression even when no dialogue or even narration is involved.
Example for something silent that can be scripted with a narrative scripting language:
- When the player pulls a lever...
- Move the camera to show a certain gate
- Open the gate
- Move the camera to show something interesting behind the gate
- Return the camera to the player
Even though no text nor voice are involved here, I think a narrative language will still fit better than a traditional scripting language because:
- Narrative languages describe everything in steps. Scripting languages will need to work a bit harder to generate steps the actual game engine can use.
- Narrative languages have visual editor that can help showing the flow of the level as nodes.
- The interface between a narrative language and the game engine tends to be seems to tend to be higher level (and less powerful) than the one with a traditional scripting language.
On the other hand, flow control seems a bit more crude and ugly with narrative scripting languages than with traditional scripting languages. It should probably still be fine for simple things (e.g. - player activates a keyhole. Do they have the key?), but I wonder if a game can reach a point where it becomes too complex for a narrative language (I'm still talking about simple world progression, not full blown modding)