The way The Sims does it is actually pretty interesting. The individual sims have very little behavioral coding involved. They’re basically just monitoring their individual needs. The vast majority of the objects contain “advertisements” that they broadcast, and the sims can simply look for nearby advertisements to decide on what to do.

Basically, you have a sim. They are simply listening to advertisements that are being broadcasted by the objects around them. Maybe the kitchen sink says “Clean +3” while the shower says “Clean +7”. If the sim’s cleanliness meter is low, they’ll check for local “clean” advertisements and choose one. As their needs get lower and lower, they’ll be more likely to pick stronger advertisements. So a slightly dirty sim will be likely to choose the sink, but a very dirty sim will choose the shower.

Then once they get to the chosen object, the object basically goes “okay, here’s how to interact with me”. The sim simply pulls from that pool of interactions for the specific object. There may be flags for specific interactions based on certain conditions, or certain traits that make a sim more likely to choose one object over another. For instance, if your sim is a witch, they may have specific magical interactions available. Or if a sim has the Active trait, they may be more likely to choose fitness-based advertisements.

This makes adding expansions very easy. You don’t need to do a ton of coding for individual sims, to “teach” them how to use new objects. You simply add new advertisements to the objects you’re adding to the game, and make sure your interactions are properly flagged for the various conditions that can exist. And now those objects can be dropped directly into existing save files without any fuss.

Worth noting that this advertisement system is what caused the infamous “my sim is using the bathroom sink to wash dishes” complaint that plagued the series for so long; the bathroom sink was nicer than the kitchen sink, so it had a better advertisement. The sim wasn’t looking at advertisements based on why they needed a sink. They just knew they needed a sink to wash dishes, and picked the one with the strongest advertisement.

Honestly, the most effective thing would be a general strike from everyone except the federal workers. Just grind everything to a halt until the oligarchs get Trump back in line.

Hell, the photographer would be dead too.

And yet you know damned well what they meant, otherwise you wouldn’t have responded with the “well akshually” type of comment.

It’s an extremely common misconception, and why I bothered pointing it out at all. People will get a scratch from rust, and immediately panic about tetanus. In reality, tetanus is basically everywhere. Rust is simply a good carrier because it has lots of rough surface area and is good at poking people.

But also, people will inevitably get affected by AI as well and people will drift towards sounding more like AI too.

The “AI checkers” that schools/unis use has found a strong correlation between neurodiversity and sounding like AI. Basically, AI sounds autistic, so autistic people get flagged as AI.

But also, tetanus is commonly misunderstood. Scapes and scratches are extremely unlikely to result in tetanus, regardless of what causes it. Rust isn’t any more likely to transmit tetanus.

Tetanus is an anaerobic microbe that can only really survive in deep cuts and punctures where air isn’t able to reach the wound. The spores are basically everywhere… But the spores only bloom and become dangerous when they come into contact with blood. Once they bloom, oxygen will kill them. So you don’t need to worry about it for surface-level scratches and scrapes, because the air will kill off any blooms. The only reason it is commonly associated with rust is because one of the more common puncture wounds is from stepping on rusty things.

Accelerationism hasn’t proven to be an effective method of dealing with him so far. There’s no reason to believe that pattern would change because of this.

Yeah, newer generations have been raised on tech that “just worked” consistently. They never had to do any deep troubleshooting, because they never encountered any major issues. They grew up in a world where the hard problems were already figured out, so they were insulated from a lot of the issues that allowed millennials to learn.

They never got a BSOD from a faulty USB driver. They never had to reinstall an OS after using Limewire to download “Linkin_Park-Numb.mp3.exe” on the family computer. Or hell, even if they did get tricked by a malicious download, the computer’s anti-virus automatically killed it before they were even able to open it. They never had to manually install OS updates. They never had to figure out how to get their sound card working with a new game. They never had to manually configure their network settings.

All of these things were chances for millennials to learn. But since the younger generations never encountered any issues, they never had to figure their own shit out.

Yeah, Biden’s term was simply quiet. For the most part, the government ran properly and things didn’t break. But he also refused to actually spur the DOJ into action, because he didn’t want it to be seen as a frivolous witch hunt. He was more focused on keeping the peace than he was on actually protecting the country from domestic threats.

.ml tends to moderate things before they get outrageous. The biggest issue is simply the censorship that happens quietly. It’s less “extremists screaming at each other/into the heavens” and more “Big Brother is ensuring you don’t accidentally post anything that goes against the officially approved narrative.” The heavy censorship ensures the echo chamber remains polite (because they leave very little room for disagreement) but very echo-y.

So as an outsider looking in, you tend to see a bunch of polite discussion. It isn’t until you dig deeper (and see a bunch of the removed comments, and users who got banned for totally mundane things) that you actually begin to see the whole picture.

New Mexico license plates specifically say “New Mexico USA” because so many New Mexican residents kept getting pulled over for having “foreign” plates when traveling throughout the US.

Yeah, exactly. First world was allied with the US. Second world was allied with the soviets. Third world was basically everyone else, and was largely considered irrelevant to the Cold War. That’s why “third world” became a signifier of undeveloped countries; If a country wasn’t part of the Cold War, it was likely because they didn’t have enough developed resources or manpower to be considered a war asset. If they were developed enough to contribute, one of the two sides would have already been working on recruiting them to the war.

Unfortunately, modern cars will track you even if you block the plate. They all have cell connections nowadays for things like firmware updates and manufacturer tracking. You should assume that every single thing you do in your car is recorded and sent straight back to the manufacturer. Car companies have shifted their priorities towards selling data, not just cars.

If you go to a rally, don’t drive, and don’t take public transit because they all have cameras in the cabins. Ride a bike, walk, use a motorcycle, or basically anything besides a car or public transport.

Yeah, the lack of local accountability was a large part of why Trump “threatening” to pull the military out of Japan was a monumentally stupid bluff. Japanese people already hate the US military, because the average Japanese person’s perception of the US military is “drunk dude causes damage/hurts someone and flees back to base where he will never see any punishment.” It also came at a time when hardline conservatism and patriotism (bordering on jingoism) is increasingly popular in Japan. Japan basically went “fucking do it then.”

If you do, I’d love to seed it. I’ve been looking for good copies of this for a while.

I have struggled to find good downloads for a lot of the older stuff. Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry both come to mind; I’d love to have them on my server, but haven’t had the time to drive all the way to my parents’ place to get my old DVDs to rip. And even if I did get the DVDs, there’s a non-zero chance that they’re rotted. So I tried downloading them, but finding properly seeded torrents for content that old has been a struggle.

Yeah, OoT feels dated by modern standards, but that’s largely because it set the standard for 3D games. Future games have built upon the mechanics, but OoT was what paved the way.

Basically, Trump’s war team accidentally added the lead editor for The Atlantic to a Signal group chat where they were discussing detailed war plans.

It immediately raised a lot of questions with uncomfortable answers. Why are they using Signal, which doesn’t comply with federal records keeping requirements? Why didn’t anyone notice the massive security breach immediately? What was discussed, and how would it impact national security? Did anyone besides the editor have access to the chat? Was Pete Hegseth (current Secretary of Defense, and a known alcoholic who has been caught drunk at work numerous times) drunk when he added the editor to the chat? Why does one of the chat members’ flight logs show them in Russia during the time that all of the sensitive messages were being sent? Along with a lot of other questions, that are honestly too numerous to list…

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit with extremist judges was a large part of the Southern Strategy.