Am I the only one who can still have fun while dialing it back a bit? Just “fumble” a few times, fall behind intentionally, and then use your skill to catch back up. If you can’t catch up, your friends win and have fun. If you do catch back up, your friends think it was a close game. Either way you get to flex and nobody thinks you’re a sweaty tryhard and we all get to have fun.
On behalf of the dads: We used to let you win all kinds of shit and you never knew! Then one day we couldn’t beat your anymore… and we had two choices while you gloated: convince ourselves we let you win or let the mid life crisis begin.
I’m not big on fighting games, don’t they usually have a handicap setting? How do they work? I’m guessing good ones do stuff like break guard easier and do more damage, right?
Generally it’ll do something like make one person do more damage and take less, but if the skill gap is too big it really won’t make a difference if they can never land a hit. Personally I’m a fan of “I can’t use X” or “I will only use Y.” It allows everyone to still have a challenging and fair feeling time, instead of pounding away at a punching bag that one hits you which just doesn’t feel great for anyone.
I used to school the locals at SF2 and MK back like 20 years ago. This was in the quarters on the ridge, winner sticks, GenX days. I still get recognized in the surrounding towns.
This was all fine and dandy in the rural town I grew up in, but then I did a trip to a major city, out to Vancouver, and I got demolished by the big city kids. It was a disaster. I was getting laid out left and right. Just dummied. Sickened. Was humbled.
Whatever. I still clean up locally on the rare occasion it comes up. One of those guys from the town over ended up working at the same place I did for a while and he was going on about his SF2 prowess, so one day I brought in a Switch with some decent controllers and we went at it. We went 9 games to 1 in my favour in a 10 game series.
Back in the day me and my friends played SSB64 and I was by far the best out of them. They banned me from using pikachu because I was unstoppable with him. I just used the characters I was bad with when I played with them so it would be challenging for everyone.
I would do this when I was still playing Elden Ring. Signal a fair fight, trade blows a bit, make a few “mistakes” that made it seem like I was playing bad. Then score a “lucky hit” that’d finish them off. That way, they hopefully come out of it feeling like it was a fair fight. If I actually mess up and die, that’s fine too. It’s all in good fun. My goal was just to draw the fight out into something amusing and satisfying for both of us, compared to the 10 second hack and slash, Rivers of Blood/magic spam tryhards you’d get all the time. Those I didn’t hesitate to flex on.
This is part of why super smash bros is so good. Playing against friends who are decent but not as good as you? Play one of your secondaries. Friends are bad but learning? Play a low tier/a character you don’t ever play. Friends are casual gamers/don’t know how to play smash? Spam b moves as a low tier. No matter how good you are you can sandbag pretty hard without your opponent feeling like you aren’t trying/not having fun.
Right you just have to find a sweet spot handicap to use. You can absolutely both be challenged at the same time, just find the right equivalent of tying one arm behind your back.
One of us is constantly beating the crap out of everyone else with a particular character? Switch it up.
Or learn to counter whatever they’re doing to win.
Dhalsim’s endless string of “Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!TigerUppercut! You! Win!” was eventually conquerable with the right combination of moves and that wasn’t even player skill, it was a shortcoming in the game’s internal timing (that was bad enough that it overwrote the existing playing sound effect while you were doing it).
Yeah, oops, I was thinking Sagat and somehow typed Dhalsim.
Dhalsim was YOGA fire, which is I think what happens when they schedule the chili cook off at work on the same day as beginner’s downward-facing-dog practice.
This is exactly what I’ve had to end up doing in a few games. Some games I don’t mind. Like Battlefront 2. I used to play, and win, tournaments in it so when friends call me in to help them with a game or something it’s great because you get a ton of praise and hype. Your friends going “FUCK THEM UP DUDE! YEAH! GO FOR IT!” Or the thanks for helping a friend. But that same prowess meant that (even if there was easily accessible invite pvp) I can’t fight any of my friends. There are ways you kind of can and everytime I’ve suggested it it’s always a resounding and hard no. I’ve had similar levels of skill in other games that I actively tone down around my friends because I want to be able to play against them and not just play with them. I don’t give a shit if I win or lose. I give a shit that I’m hanging out with people who I like and playing games I enjoy.
It has a perfect handicap system, and the game sucks if you don’t use the correct handicap, but I simply can’t get people to play me with a handicap because they think it’s shameful. They want to play me without a handicap, then I mop the floor with them.
But we can have a really good game that’s really engaging if we use a handicap.
You are not alone. I’m the strongest regular at my go club, and when I ask if people want to pay even or with handicap, they 90% of the time choose even. I love the handicap system because it makes both sides have a close game, which is inherently more fun for everyone. And skill progress can be seen when their handicap decreases. The most common complaint I’ve heard against handicaps is that it changes the game too much. It does in terms of joseki and openings, but the important stuff which actually decides games—direction of play, fighting, evaluation of the board—still very much applies.
I travelled to Japan recently and played three games at a go parlour. There was no asking for an even game. The stronger players said the handicap the game would be played with and that was that.
In my country, that probably would be seen as rude because we don’t have that honour system. But maybe the solution is to just be more assertive and declare the handicap anyway. As a stronger player, people respect what I have to say, but I have never felt superior to anyone so I’ve always still asked. But if I say a handicap straight away, that respect means that people would probably just agree and play. And if they say that they’d rather play an even game instead, then we can! Maybe the solution is to make it opt-out instead of opt-in.
Based on my experience working with PR teams and executives - you probably had a bored PR team that wanted to do something that feels important or relavent, and they pitched it to the exec team in a way that made them feel all important and excited (they probably threw in the phrase “lifestyle brand” a few times), so they went with it against all reason
Agree. HBO is some high class, quality shit. Max is meaningless. I guess it corresponds with the CEO of Discovery channel coming in to wreck HBO in the same way he did Discovery.
It’s like Twitter rebranding to X. It’s extremely detrimental to the brand, but it makes some executive feel really good about themselves and that’s all that really matters apparently.
It can be easier to open up to UltimateTrollWarrior95 than to someone you know irl who has expsctations for how you should act and show your emotions. I once had a deep conversation about life with some rando on Town of Salem.
First you must locate one. Watch an entire season of Ultimate Troll Warrior (an American show imported from Japan). You will likely locate one. You may have to watch more than one season. Afterward, rely on technically-savvy stalkers to dox said Warrior. Contact them using that info, but be very careful not to come off as awkward. I recommend rehearsing in front of a mirror a few times.
Yes it is. Your therapist can absolutely put you in an emergency medical hold if you talk to them about thoughts of suicide. It’s happened to thousands, if not millions of people.
I once played 3 hours of modern warfare 2 with the same group back in the day, just because some guy was pouring out his life story and how much life sucked for him around the time. He sent me a quick “thanks for letting me rant” message and I didn’t hear from him again for years.
Then out of the blue I get a message that’s basically a letter, and it’s all about how life was difficult but some random person taking the time to listen without judgment made all the difference for his plans that night.
So I will never cut someone off to tell them I don’t have time to listen to their problems, or pull out my phone to play a game, get annoyed with someone who won’t stop talking, whatever… Sometimes all a person needs is someone to listen.
Yup I remember going through a phase where it was like “I don’t have time for this person’s jabber” and it would annoy me that they wouldn’t get to the point.
Meanwhile I could find all the time in the day to do meaningless things to take up my time like playing a game. Which is totally self serving.
Then I realized this was a me problem. Not a them problem.
I really hate who I was back then. Now some of my relatives do jabber on but it’s totally ok. I make space for that now cuz jabbering is part of relationships and that’s how some people communicate and listening is a part of healthy interaction.
No it was a project back in the 1950 I think and it was this big mobile lab but because there was this belief that rounded tires preformed better in the snow the builders sanded the tread off the off-road tires they got also the engines while they had plenty of torque the fastest the artic explorer could go was 2 mph and when it finally arrived at the artic it got stuck immediately and moved faster in reverse the scientists got soo fed up with constantly digging the 70ton paper weight free that they just gave up and started using it was a small stationary base until the ice under it broke then 20 years later vw sent a bone stock Beatle that managed be the first car to drive across the artic with 0 issues
Yeah, I was conflating two different Top Gear specials; one where they drove to the North Pole in pick-up trucks and another where they drove across Botswana and were out-performed by a stock Beetle.
I already know what you’re getting at but arguments in favor of breaking gender stereotypes aren’t made invalid if the person who originally made them ends up identifying as trans. I know that lots of people like to use situations like that as “evidence that people who break gender stereotypes are just trans-in-denial” and/or a justification for harassing GNC folks (r/egg_irl and r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns were especially awful about that back in their heyday) but it’s very important to recognize that GNC people are valid in their own right, and trying to generalize them as transgender is hurtful and enforces the toxic gender stereotypes that hurt people.
Oh and before someone tries to twist my words around. No a trans woman wearing a dress doesn’t enforce gender stereotypes, what enforces gender stereotypes is to say a person (i.e. a femboy) is trans because they wear a dress without their input on the matter.
Oh I’m definitely not trying to make a statement about gender identity or any sociological ramifications thereof - at least, I don’t mean to. In not thinking about my comment that way when writing it, I hope there isn’t a mean-spirited reading of it!
I was thinking more in the realm of comedy, how jokes are constructed, and what makes them funny or interesting. This classic line from a legendary comedian has recently had a new wrinkle added to it, and I find that interesting. I am curious to hear Izzard’s take on it, if indeed she’s even given it a second thought. (I imagine she has, but I wouldn’t dare assume to know her mind)
Hope that makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts
I agree with your point. But a guy who wears a dress isn’t inherently a femboy. Which I know isn’t what you’re saying but it can be interpreted as having that implication.
That is a good point, a person who wears a dress isn’t necessarily a femboy. Some certainly are but plenty also aren’t. It wasn’t my intention to imply that wearing a dress makes someone a femboy and I can see how it enforces gender stereotypes to a deree. In the end a skirt or a dress is a piece of clothing, which inherently do not have gender and saying someone is a femboy for wearing those clothes isn’t great if the end goal is to break away and be free from these stereotypes.
obviously what you vaguely describe has been around since 1945.
That home assistant devices are constantly listening and feeding back marketing data on every conversation is patent and disproven nonsense.
they have done packet sniffing investigations, they have disassembled the devices, they have run meters on the electrical charges… everything in every way you can imagine.
But even if you just think about it for a second - processing a live audio feed at a rate of 1 second per second indefinitely and correlating that data via voice recognition to your Google profile all to… make your ad personalizations… worse? more inaccurate?
like what the hell is the perceived benefit? That my wife says, “oh my dad found my old barbie house!” while at my neighbors house and my neighbor gets served barbie ads? Why would Google want that?
At some point ever you’re going to realize is that the real things you need to be afraid of are largely caused by the stuff made up by Facebook boomers.
what specifically? vaccines cause autism/monkeypox, the democrats drink baby blood, trump won the last/next election, Putin is good because he’s only killing Nazis in Ukraine, forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers, LGBTQ+ folks are grooming children and Bill Gates wants to put microchips in your brain?
Like — what are you saying, some misinformation is good?
I’m saying people believe those things. Roughly half of all voters. And those beliefs cause damage, and it will affect you, whether you think it’s stupid or not. You can ignore it and insult it all you want, but it’s not going away. Perhaps you’ve noticed?
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
They don’t spy on you without your permission. Comments like these devalue actual instances where companies genuinely steal and manipulate data. Take the tin foil hat off…
If you had any remote idea about the tech industry, you’d know what kind of reputation Amazon has. If Amazon were stealing data, you can bet your ass that one of its employees (probably one of the ~6% that gets fired every year) would happily rat them out.
Comments like these amaze me. Even cesspools like Reddit and Twitter wouldn’t be so out of touch and stupid.
They’re not completely wrong, though. If the devices are phoning home when the mic is disabled, then someone would have discovered it by now. There are people who do that shit for fun, and Amazon is a big target.
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
If you’re high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you’re also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.
So your theory as to why you haven’t seen evidence is that there’s a conspiracy of people withholding the evidence. I gotta ask, do you have evidence of that conspiracy?
That doesn’t make any sense. If I were “higher up”, do you think I would be actually doing any IC work? I’d be in management, and probably won’t even know where to look at any of the fucking source code.
Feel free not to take my word for it, but also feel free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.
Is Lemmy just full of conspiracy nuts or something?
That’s not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device “listening”.
I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it’s corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.
IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I’ve never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn’t phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don’t leave the device, they’re an offline trigger to get the “actual” content.
I’ll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven’t experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don’t do basic research before making statements?
lol they are such stereotypical conspiracy theorists too, “of course you’d say it’s not true, that’s exactly what someone who was hiding the truth would say!”
Tell me you’re not a software developer without telling me you’re not a software developer.
If you’re working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn’t be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings
(italicized is edited in for clarity)
Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I’m pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)
You should probably edit your comment to clarify that they don’t listen to you.
“Spying” doesn’t really have a clear definition in this context. Amazon employees have been caught spying on customers through their cameras, and giving away clips to authorities without “owners’” consent, consult or notification.
True, that is more accurate. IMO, in those instances, Amazon get all the shit that they deserve…although for many instances these are in their terms of service. There has been no shortage of scandals where Amazon have used utterance data for training ML models, or where they’ve retained voice data for the same reasons, when these have been in the TOS from the beginning.
I see so many attempts to argue with people before the bootlicker insult comes out. At least I know it’s being used correctly and not as some kind of defense against thinking or engaging.
At first, I thought you meant planetars (from D&D), and I didn’t know about that piece of trivia and felt inferior as a nerd.
But no, you really meant planarians (from reality), which is a science word and I now feel inferior because I am a moron.
Planarians are flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes) found in freshwater bodies and their regenerative abilities have been documented for centuries (Pallas, 1766; Dalyell, 1814). Planarians can regenerate new heads, tails, sides, or entire organisms from small body fragments in a process taking days to weeks.
Many of us did know from like Middle or High school or some part of our education, but who would have thought you need to think about school to understand Lemmy
It’s called the wolverine effect, I can’t remember where I learned that ironically.
We all know what a wolverine is, but can you tell me where you learned it from?
It probably has a fancy name like “memory source origin amnesia” or something, but it basically goes along the lines of your brain not remembering where you learned something, you just remember the thing.
It’s why propaganda is so effective even on people looking for it.
Are you the alt domain for the person I was talking to or someone random injecting themself in the conversation? Either way I’m happy you acquired knowledge at some point in the past
But the aliens wouldn’t share the resources with us, or maybe like just a pittance to keep us alive so we could be used as cheap lab… oh I see where this is going.
They are called “casement” windows, specifically turn/tilt operation, and they do exist in the USA. They are typically more expensive than vinyl double hung, and home builders tend to shy away from anything “different” that might scare away home buyers. That’s why you don’t see them very often.
But if you want them, you can buy them and have them installed. You can even get them in patio door sizes, but the larger the door, the heavier it is when it tilts.
It’s really common for people unfamiliar with the door function to lift the handle and think it’s locked, and then a strong breeze blows the door inward. Between the noise and seeing the door falling inward, it can be pretty scary.
Source: I worked in construction in the US with European builders who loved these things and couldn’t figure out why Americans didn’t.
My expensive vinyl double hung windows in my previous house actually had a casement-like feature and I could easily remove either part. I loved those windows; I wish I could have taken them with me.
On my surface go 2 I get a better experience in terms of battery life etc than with edge than the others (I’ve experimented with chrome and Firefox). So I just use edge on everything for the sync stuff. Sure has a ton of “helpful” stuff in it I have to hide it turn off though.
So, I don’t trust them to have actually done what I’m going to describe, (and honestly I’ve just accepted that even with everything off, they’re still giving me ads based on stuff I’ve only talked about and never clicked or written anything), but:
The programs that recognize specific phrases(Ok Google), are always separate from normal voice recognition (and muchmuch lighter in terms of processing). So, if they weren’t Google, they might have left the “Ok Google” recognition on, but not process anything else that the mic receives.
I will say that that’s exactly how the google voice api works. Of course it’s all in a black box, but that’s how the documentation describes it and how it functions when making a voice app
Didn’t they just pass a law to make all that illegal spying legal, like that changes anything? Seems obvious if your phone is listening in a device like this will be used no matter what setting you use. I remember Amazon being caught leaving their mics on and also Facebook sending conversations to 3rd parties for transcribing. And this is just a small fraction of the shit we know about.
Not necessarily you or your case, but I’m still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There’s also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it’s been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad
It’s not just that either. Google knows who your family is. They know who lives with you because of location data. So any time those people search for anything regardless of whether they’re on your home network, they likely serve ads to whole families at a time when one person searches for something.
This has been my theory as well, Google presumably knows when I meet up with a friend for lunch (I don’t know if they go to such lengths but they certainly have access to the data to figure it out), if my friend then starts searching for something related to our conversation afterwards, Google could serve me ads about it too, just inferring the topic of our conversation based on that
Doesn’t really explain why I was receiving cat litter ads after only speaking with my husband offhand about maybe getting a cat. We didn’t already have a cat, so hadn’t had any reason to look up any cat care goods ever, and I had never searched for anything even remotely cat-related up to that point. But wouldn’t you know it, about 45 minutes later, I was getting kitty litter ads. Very spooky.
Sorry but I want the true story to be that your husband immediately went off and started googling to find a cat to surprise you for Christmas thus you got cat ads (same network like someone else said).
Lmao, I wish but no, no hallmark movie plots here. This was a few years ago, and we now have said cat :) He definitely forgot immediately after I mentioned it until I showed up with a cat one day lol
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
That’s the gist of how it likely works; the wake word is detected by an “always on” audio DSP, but a software mode prevents the passing of microphone data back up to the SoC. I’m actually quite familiar with Amazon Echo engineering design, and they implement the “mute” feature in a manner that takes privacy seriously: the LED indicator on that button is hardwired to only turn on when the microphone is literally powered off. Thus, an Echo device can’t even manage such a cheeky response, nor can a software bug or hack enable listening while the mute button is lit.
He was interviewed/was the topic of a Darknet Dairies Podcast. It’s his side of the story as well as some of the facts around the case. Don’t know how accurate it is, but it is interesting all the same.
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