For Super Mario Bros 3, it was only recently that I beat it without using a cloud to skip the maze fortress a few levels before Bowser’s castle. And even then only because I looked up how to get through it.

I’ve found that sometimes I come back to a game after a long break and end up better at it than I previously was. Like I’ll dread parts that were difficult the last time and then breeze through them when I get there.

Like I was stuck on some room in Doom Eternal, it just kept kicking my ass until I gave up on the game for like a year. I tried resuming the game, realized I couldn’t remember all the controls and decided to start over again and then didn’t even notice when I got back to that room because I cleared it easily and continued on.

I’m not sure if it’s because the other games I’d played in the meantme helped me develop my skills more, if my subconscious optimized the skills I retained from the first playthrough, or if I just avoided picking up some bad habits I had the first time that made things harder for me.

Yeah, sometimes your playstyle ends up being a natural counter to a boss. Sometimes a boss ends up being a natural counter to your playstyle. Or one of your first strategy ideas works and makes it easy.

Too bad I can’t trust either the competence or intent of those with resources to create brain chips. Sorry teenaged me that desperately wanted true VR, but I’ll probably decline it even if it becomes a thing.

Thank you, this is very helpful information, too. Lucky for me, I like to reinvent the wheel from time to time for fun, so the more open option isn’t scary, though it does sound like there’s a decent chance my 3d printer will just be a dust collector what with all the other wheels I started reinventing but never finished. But I think I will add another hobby to the collection.

Thanks for the quick replies! That snapmaker U1 looks great, but I do see that page referencing their app, so it could go either way, depending on whether their app is a mandatory part of the pathway.

The other one sounds like it might be a great way to get my daughter into more techy stuff, since she loves 3d printed stuff, so modifying it and needing to also modify the firmware might even be a plus for that.

I’ve been interested in getting a 3d printer for a while now but am not deep into what’s out there, does the ender 3 pro require any cloud or services that I can’t run locally to function?

Edit: same question for the snapmaker U1.

Also, where do you source your fillament from? Any other ongoing maintenance requirements (material-wise)?

I want a 3d printer, not some new relationship with a corporation.

And has determined that nothing unusual is going on?

Fans do both.

Just sucking or blowing involves filling or emptying an air reservoir, as the air you suck needs to go somewhere and the air you blow has to come from somewhere. So something like a bellows does them in separate stages.

But a fan pushes air with its blades and other air moves in to replace it, so it’s doing both simultaneously.

Sorry but I have figured out your secret code and will now reveal your true identity to the whole internet: You are a horse who is trying to obscure the fact that you wear horseshoes but you are also obsessed with them and can’t help but reference them, in the hopes that you’ll prove to your archnemesis, a racoon, that wearing horseshoes is way better for your hooves than the raccoon shoes he keeps trying to sell you.

Also, be aware that he isn’t really in a horseshoes vs raccoonshoes debate with you, he’s just trying to scam you into giving him some apples for some dirty gloves he found in a dumpster. He, just like everyone else, knows very wrll that horse footwear is superior to all others and that you are hardcore af for just standing there casually while your cobbler helps you put them on with nails and a hammer.

One thing I’ve noticed lurking on AITA is that there’s suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you’d see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.

It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It’s still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.

Funny how you use the term “banana republic” to mean “corruption that wasn’t in the US” when the situation that coined the term was created by American imperialism in the first place.

Edit: not disagreeing with you btw, just found that specific use of words ironic, given the background.

email: If you don’t forward this message to 4 friends, there will be a school shooting!

ChatGPT: forwards email Crisis averted!

ChatGPT on 3 of the 4 friend accounts: forwards email Crisis averted!

ChatGPT on other friend account: If you want to pull off a successful school shooting, you need to <6 points of advice: 3 eerily on point, 2 irrelevant or obvious, 1 likely to blow up in face>

KP: We have successfully averted 4.166666 school shootings, but might have caused 0.844444 school shootings, for a net of 3.322222 school shootings prevented!

Yeah, I kinda wish the site generated a hash or something because I’ve got an extension that fakes the canvas results, but the site says those identifiers are unique for me… But are they the same unique (which indicates the extension isn’t doing anything) or different each time (which might even make the others less useful if it aggregates everything?

I did notice earlier today that the YouTube recommendations were all actually related to the video I was currently watching instead of it trying to get me to go down a rabbit hole I’ve already been down even logged out, like it does on my desktop where I haven’t installed that extension.

I like that they covered all the possibilities for the do not track flag, as I saw it as useless from the very start, as by then I realized the honour system didn’t mean shit and it would just be another piece of data.

Which will make identity theft profitable but in a subtle way that won’t show up in credit reports.

I think the screwup started when companies stopped rewarding loyalty and instead aimed for capitalizing on laziness and lockin, giving the discounts up front to attract subscribers in the hopes of keeping them in a more expensive subscription afterwards.

I think the streaming sites could turn it around by instead offering a discounted rate after you’ve been subscribing for x months.

Hmm this is reminding me of something… Something that happened during the lead up to an event that happened about 25 years ago…

You might as well just put all those emails into a hat and pull out random ones. Or maybe categorize them first and pick from the hats your feature falls under.

Try this: ask the AI how useful it is to ask an AI for “synthetic user feedback” and it will probably even tell you why this particular task is particularly stupid for an LLM. Ok, I tried it with Haiku, you might need to follow up with a question that mentions that experience and implementation specifics matter but aren’t going to be in the context window before it will give an in-depth explanation about why this approach is a waste of resources, though using an AI to help summarize the important problem areas users want addressed can work, it just won’t be able to tell you how you did.

A moment of horrified silence for the scrotums/labia of the 18 scientists that collectively discovered this. Their sacrifices will not be forgotten.

Oops, the AI controlling the magnets just deleted the database with the records, but it says it is very sorry.