Dave the diver. Very much enjoying so far.

And as someone whose pandemic hobby involved a deep dive into the history of the sea peoples, I’ve been enjoying a secondary layer to the game as well.

In theory not infinite ones though

I was disappointed to see that this thread had an end…

In some ways I think players coming from BotW are at a disadvantage over coming to it fresh.

It took me hours (too many) to finally realize that it’s a different game and I needed to play it as its own thing, not BotW 2. And as soon as that clicked it became much easier.

If you mostly play it as BotW, key additions like using thrown items take a backseat to dodge/flurry attack or such. Similar to how you might early on be climbing things as opposed to bouncing on a spring or finding a ceiling to pass through.

When it finally clicked, even though most of the BotW toolset was available to me, I barely touched it anymore.

Honestly the best learning experiences were the naked combat shrines. Don’t skip those - they become incredibly easy after you finally get using the new mechanics available to you, but they are there to force you to adapt. Same as how some of the annoying puzzle shrines if you do them the ‘right’ way are there to force you to learn how to use reverse to solve nearly everything in seconds.

Many encounters can be solved as easily as an active Zonai flame emitter you just carry around with Ultrahand.

The bow in TotK is so much more OP than in BotW. Also, thrown stuff can straight up break fights - silver lynel in depths? Yawnfest with abusing puffshrooms and a near breaking royal armament.

The one area where there’s a legit serious step up in challenge is the phantom Ganon world encounters. Those are hard fights even with all the tools at your disposal.

But the combat is much more tuned around preparation with itemization than in BotW. If you are having difficulty with parts, try using more items and play around with the options available to you. Shoot a powerful enemy with the muddle bud. Fuse a gloom sword to a gerudo dagger.

Playing it more like BotW is going to be unnecessarily painful. Forget what you knew, and don’t be afraid to experiment with radically different approaches to combat from what worked in the last game.

Also, I recommend farming the spikes from the frost dragon when you see it in the overworld. Cheap and easy way to have a freeze weapon you switch between to set up your hard hitters (frozen enemies take 3x damage on the next attack).

This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.

There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.

Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.

You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.

Ok, here’s a fun one:

When people have their corpus callosum split, the part that connects the two brain hemispheres, there’s often different personality traits that will emerge for each hemisphere, such as one being religious and the other atheistic.

So the question is - where do the emergent personality traits come from?

When the brain is connected, do you effectively have psyches that are simply sitting there suppressed waiting to come out? Or is the you right now a mixture of personality aspects located in both sides?

What about extending this to the concept of the soul?

Is it still one soul in the body split into two, such that the one hemisphere could doom the other with its disbelief, or is there now two souls in one body - and if so where did the other one come from?

Are we actually individuals, or just a hodgepodge of different subconscious identities that’s fooled themselves into thinking they are a single mind, just an accident away from being thrust into their own isolated lobes to define themselves anew separate from the others?

And if that split were to happen, which side would the ‘you’ experiencing this moment right now end up on?

How so?

Do you think I’m taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?

No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.

That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.

I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.

It’s funny that when it’s transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the ‘them’ that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.

We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.

Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.

Hilarious.

Only five years ago no one in the computer science industry would have taken a bet that AI would be able to explain why a joke was funny or perform creative tasks.

Today that’s become so normalized that people are calling things thought to be literally impossible a speculative bubble because advancement that surprised everyone in the industry initially and then again with the next model a year later hasn’t moved fast enough?

The industry is still learning how to even use the tech.

This is like TV being invented in 1927 and then people in 1930 saying that it’s a bubble because it hasn’t grown as fast as they expected it to.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college’s VC groups in optoelectronic neural networks and how that’s going to impact decoupling AI training and operation from Moore’s Law? I’m guessing no.

Near-perfect analysis, eh? By someone who read and regurgitated analysis by a journalist who writes for a living and may just have an inherent bias towards evaluating information on the future prospects of a technology positioned to replace writers?

We haven’t even had a public release of multimodal models yet.

This is about as near perfect of an analysis as smearing paint on oneself and rolling down a canvas on a hill.

Fun fact…

A few years ago Microsoft was granted a patent on using social media data left behind to resurrect dead people as chatbots.

The more GitHub is considered to be a social network, the more extending the content there (such as the maintenance of a popular sole-contributor project) fits into a patent protected usecase.

And now you know 🌈