• 4 Posts
  • 939 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Not wanting to run steam is fair, but they asked about proton, not steam.

    Anyway, from a quick Google, it sounds like it likely wasn’t proton complaining about a lack of SM6.6 support, but actually GoT itself. It’s up to the translation layer (in the case of proton, DXVK I believe) to report what DX features it supports, and it sounds like it was telling the game it didn’t support SM6.6 for whatever reason. Might just be a matter of playing with some of the launch params.





  • And see, I think that’s too broad, because literally everyone is guilty of holding onto a belief that they formed before they had enough information, however small.

    Have you ever driven one route from point A to B, but taken a completely different route from B to A, both directions believing you are taking the fastest route? Maybe it’s doublethink, maybe we just got in a habit and never reconciled the conflicting beliefs, or maybe we think the evidence we’ve been presented with is not a representative sample of reality. Maybe a map shows one route to be obviously faster both ways, but you think “well once you factor in the lights, and the number of turns, and the traffic at the times of day I take each route, it makes sense to take different routes each way. These are hard to account for on a map, and how I do it feels shorter, so I’m going to keep doing what I think is best regardless of what this data says.”

    To me, the “defining feature” of a flat earther is accepting a false belief after it’s been amply demonstrated to you to be false. It’s not something you didn’t have enough evidence about, but now you do, it’s something you had overwhelming evidence for, but reject it all. That is not something we all do every day, that is potentially delusional behavior.





  • I don’t disagree that people can be stubborn and refuse to accept reality. This whole thread is known as Planck’s Principle.

    OP asked what “what possible misunderstanding of nature could make current academics look like flat earthers”. I think it’s implied that they’re talking about a scientific consensus today which we later find to be flawed, in which case I don’t think that anything would make current academics look like flat earthers. The difference is, literally no flat earther lived in such a time where the scientific consensus said the world was flat; they all became convinced of a falsehood after it was known to be a falsehood, which is orthogonal to Planck’s Principle.

    So I guess the answer to OP’s question is: if an academic becomes convinced of a falsehood with full knowledge of an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that it is false, then they would look like a flat earther. But I don’t think that’s the situation they’ve laid out.





  • Why do they think population is proportional to ability to “pay back” debts? We have technology. If one example of a “debt” is taking care of the aging baby boomer generation, yeah there was a time when that would have been solely the responsibility of their descendents, but we have improved medical technology to keep old people healthier in life, we have conveniences that make getting groceries, doing activities, or socializing easier, and (in some countries) we have modern social safety nets to ensure that even someone without any living relatives can feel safe knowing that they are taken care of.

    Another way to phrase my original question: would it be adequate for us to, instead of increasing the population, to develop a series of sufficiently advanced and efficient robots to do whatever task your friend thinks we need more humans in order to do? Just trying to understand the rationale.


  • The original graphics, physics, and performance were incredible for the time, but to be fair, that’s not what you’re running when you download HL2 on steam today. The textures have been silently updated many times over the years. Your mind’s eye says “yeah, this is how I remember it”, and I’ve seen multiple streamers playing it for the first time thinking they’re seeing the original textures from 2004.




  • It’s often attributed to Orson Welles, but I don’t know if that’s accurate. It is paradoxical, yes, but I find it to be a commonly relatable sentiment though across many art forms. It almost seems like the art world’s version of “necessity is the mother of invention”.

    Without limitations, there’s little opportunity for art; or to frame it another way, if everything is expected, nothing can be surprising. It’s when an artist’s work “jumps off the page” that people are in awe, so it’s important there’s a “page” to “jump off of” as it were.




  • It depends: if you only listen to music (or view artwork) to feel “good” or enjoy “basking” in the emotions it evokes, then it makes sense to steer clear of artwork you disagree with or makes you uncomfortable.

    But if you find value in viewing artwork that illicits a multitude of emotions, evokes introspection, throws you off balance, and forces you to consider concepts you wouldn’t otherwise, then taking a moment to peak into the mind of someone you fundamentally disagree with is a great way to do that.

    As Werner Herzog put it, “the poet must not avert his eyes”.