Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.

I believe NASA ultimately had to scrap the idea, but the cloud 9 buoyant cities idea is an old one, tracing back to Bucky Fuller and Earth, and it's vastly more plausible than trying to make Mars habitable. Or even the Moon! Venus has Earthlike conditions if you exploit buoyancy to settle in the goldilocks area of the atmosphere.

Inside you are two humans. One wants to befriend every animal. One wants to eat every animal. You are named Terry.

I can't really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian...

Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.

Absolutely revolting.

I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation's team. I didn't like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a "MOBA mode" plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.

5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).

In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They've recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.

Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it's presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.

Where I am, the municipal government are also MPs in the lower house. LA seats also tend not to move much, it's been mostly the same people in the same seats the whole time I've been here. The big municipalist candidate actually gave up after he lost two elections and went back to local municipal and dual power operations and organisations... so I'm much more interested in volunteering for local coops or seeing what his latest work efforts are.

Overall though I'm way more interested in municipal politics. One for philosophical reasons, since I find Bookchin's ideas about municipalism both empirically and ideologically compelling; and two because it's way less depressing to actually see real change happen through municipal dual power operations and establishment politics. Federal and state politics are intractably bougie and have a lot of inertia driven by money and "old boys" networks.

All the socialist success stories have been built bottom up, all the failures and nonstarters have tried to cut in where they're inevitably forced out; or become tyrannical and drift from their original goals. Resilient systems are built from people, it's the only way humans can function collectively in my opinion.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.

I'm not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn't mean it's good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

Game budgets are too big.

Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security

Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you're exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly "better" winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don't).

Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.

Yasumi Matsuno's career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.