Okay, I did a bit of googling and I think they refer to this desk:
Which... I guess... is iconic if you watch InfoWars?
Just because you refuse to learn anything from this doesn't mean there is nothing to be learned. I, for one, have got one important actionable insight from these replies: they prioritize having a strong president more than having a president that aligns with their values.
Trump radiates strength. You may say it's fake strength, that it's just the aggressiveness of his narcissism, but it doesn't matter - he is perceived as strong, and that's his main weapon, his number one selling point. Look at his his announcements and listen to what his supporters say - the main focus is on depicting him as strong and his opponents as weak. Policies are an afterthought.
Republican voters wanting a strong Republican president is a no-brainer, but the thing that really surprised me is Democrat leaning voters (Democrat enough to vote for AOC, at least) preferring a strong Republican president because he's strong. I find it counterintuitive - if you're going to have to live under the opponent party's rule, shouldn't you prefer a weak president that would be less forceful when implementing these policies that you disagree with?
This insight does shine a new light on some well known points. For example - Biden and Harris received lots of fire for supporting Israel. This always seemed weird to me - wouldn't Trump, if elected, support Israel so much harder? But this new insight make it all make (twisted) sense. If - or, actually, now we can say "when" - Trump as a president will support Israel it will be an act of strength because it aligns with the Republican values he represents. When Biden did it, it was against Democratic values and therefore perceived as weakness - as surrendering to pressure.
Or, more importantly - I keep seeing (mainly here on Lemmy) claims that the Democratic party lost these elections because they did not go left enough. With this new insight, I think the problem is not that they didn't go left enough, but that they didn't go hard enough. It doesn't matter where on the political spectrum you are aiming to be - you should be as forceful and as assertive as possible when going there. This is something Obama had in spades. This is what the Democrats need if they want to win the next elections.
Okay, but since real menstrual cycles are typically highly regular - wouldn't it be fairly easy to filter out the fake ones?
Understanding why something is broken is a crucial prerequisite for fixing it. If you don't care why it didn't work, then you don't care about making it work - you only care about being angry.
I believe that moral sacrifices performed to protect others deserve respect just like physical ones. A necessary evil may still be evil - but it's also still necessary, which means that someone have to do it to prevent much greater evil. If you happen to benefit from the prevention of that greater evil, it is not right for you to condemn those who have dirtied their hands and soiled their souls to bring out that outcome.
I'm not saying it should be glorified, of course - that would just encourage the ones who actually enjoy that greater evil while making the ones who feel conflicted and guilty about having to do it feel even worse. But you should not criticize them either. Save that for the leaders who actually had more options, maybe even some non-evil ones.
Yes, but these immigrants did kind of ruined the entire continent, so not a great example...
Implying the British are less messed up about these things than the Americans?
Small comfort: they still can't physically force you like they can with biometrics.
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)