Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.
I am increasingly convinced that the people who claim AIs are useful for any given subject of any import (coding, art, math, teaching, etc.) should immediately be regarded as having absolutely zero knowledge in that subject, even (and especially) if they claim otherwise.
From what I can see in my interactions with LLMs, the only thing they are actually decent at are summarizing blocks of text, and even then if it’s important you should parse the summary carefully to make sure they didn’t miss important details.
This article is excellent, and raises a point that’s been lingering in the back of my head–what happens if the promises don’t materialize? What happens when the market gets tired of stories about AI chatbots telling landlords to break the law, or suburban moms complaining about their face being plastered onto a topless model, or any of the other myriad stories of AI making glaring mistakes that would get any human immediately fired?
We’ve poured hundreds of billions of dollars into this, and what has it gotten us? What is the upside that makes up for all the lawsuits, lost jobs, disinformation, carbon footprint, and deluge of valueless slop flooding our search results? So far as I can tell, its primary use seems to be in creating things that someone is too lazy to do properly themself like cover letters or memes, and inserting Godzilla into increasingly ridiculous situations. There’s certainly something there, perhaps, but is it worth using enough energy to power a small country?
The entire point of the season 1 finale is that if Pike’s fate gets retconned it’ll turn out very, very poorly. If Pike doesn’t end up the way he did in TOS, it means he doesn’t vacate the captain’s chair on the Enterprise, and when the events of Balance of Terror happens, Pike’s inclination towards compromise and peaceful negotiations leads the Romulan empire to conclude that the Federation is weak and declare war, causing the death of millions. Future!Pike even says at the end “every timeline where you don’t end up in that accident ends up with something horrible happening, and someone else taking your place.”
Iirc There’s a remaster floating around that revamps the super dated CGI. It’s no SNW but if you can stand TNG & DS9 you’ll be OK.
Isn’t the entire concept behind Lower Decks is that the Cerritos isn’t a big, important ship? The California class only has 13 decks, which is the third smallest ship in the entire series–the only ships smaller than the Cerritos were the Defiant (which was an “escort ship” not intended for long missions) and the NX-01 Enterprise. It’s also slower than everything else in the 24th century–while most other ships can handle warp 9 without problems, the Cerritos flies itself apart if it goes above warp 8 for too long. It’s not all that strong either, practically every time it gets in a fight it gets its ass kicked.
🎶These horrible mooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally memed!🎶
For what it’s worth, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.
DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.