xyzzy

I haven't watched the second season, but I remember more than one sigh during the first one. I really liked the costumes and decoration, but I just kept thinking, "Why did they need to tell this story?" I didn't hate it, but I thought the entire exercise was pointless and unnecessary: apathy is worse than hate.

The question is rhetorical, of course. They couldn't get ahold of the rights to the Silmarillion, and the machine hungers.

Now try importing a 4K from Japan

It's UHD, so you can always import it if you want.

Yes, but it's very unlike Nintendo to just do a hardware bump with similar form factor; the closest I can think of was DS to 3DS, and that added stereoscopic 3D. So I'd expect some kind of new feature to go with it.

CDs are particularly susceptible to this. DVDs far less so, and Blu-ray (modern games) will likely outlive all of us—if not stored in a shed.

Fortunately, ripping the games most at risk is usually quite easy.

I wonder if they include the conversation between Reagan and Nixon where Reagan called black people "monkeys."

Or the Lee Atwater quote where he talks about his strategic use of dog whistles and starts it off by saying the N-word three times.

Man, Reagan sucked.

The "learning" isn't the same kind of learning that humans do. There is no abstraction or meta layer, only whether or not a sequence of inputs achieved an output deemed successful by a human. Programs like these interact with the game, essentially, as one static screen shot at a time. For any given configuration, the input that is most likely to result in success (based on prior experience in the form of training) is reinforced so it becomes more likely, a bit like training a dog. Except a dog knows what a ball is.

This is similar to how Google's Go models worked. For any given configuration, a set of probabilities are generated based on the weights in the model, which are based on the training (initial values are arbitrary). The main difference is that Google could simulate zillions of AI vs. AI games at a high rate of speed. Anything with a live stream attached is mainly for entertainment value and subscriber count, otherwise you would have the game run at 1,000x speed so the computer could actually train faster.

But the side effect of this kind of training is that each level is a new experience. This is somewhat analogous to how infants learn to avoid holes while crawling, but then have to relearn that when they begin walking.

I bought a VM2. DreamMods makes high-quality products, but they're a small company based in Greece, and getting their product through customs is apparently extremely time-consuming (read: months).

expected to launch within Q4 2024

If you order at launch, expect to receive one in Q1 2026.

No evidence this is authentic and no way to authenticate it. But sure, I suppose some people have $35,000 to spare.

I was interested in this until it said something like 4-5 hours of gameplay. Just can't imagine spending like $75 with shipping on an RPG I'll finish in one sitting.

If you're like me and you've never heard of EGX before: it's in London and used to be called Eurogamer Expo.

And everything will have impossible to remove price decals directly on the covers that ruin whatever condition and collectibility there was.