KobaCumTribute

Uh oh, looks like someone needs to not let the barely acceptable absolute minimum standard possible be the enemy of the pure ontological evil that may or may not be part of a degree lesser than its frenemies in the official Bad Guy party whom it constantly makes common cause with!

Yeah, I think the biggest problem isn't that some foods are calorie dense, it's that "calorie dense to make shelf-stable, cheap slop palatable, and as not-filling as possible to drive more sales" is the norm and a serious systemic problem with large parts of the modern food supply. That and that people are actively taught and conditioned to eat pure sugar for breakfast and then snack on pure sugar in between meals and drink straight corn syrup for hydration and then cap dinner off with more tasty desert treats.

The problem goes so far beyond "some foods are fatty and sweet" that the notion that improving the situation would have to involve getting rid of the smallest and rarest of rich and sugary treats instead of just getting literal syrup out of the staple foods and not teaching people that they should start the day with sweet fried cakes drenched in syrup and cuts of meat that are 50% fat and not allowing "it's literally just syrup you're drinking syrup instead of water" to be the norm for hydration. Western consumption patterns have been driven by a century of companies trying to sell as much of the cheapest slop they possibly can, with catastrophic results.

None of the overly rich foods (except filling everything with syrup to try to make cheaper slop more palatable which is bad and should stop completely) are even really a problem on their own, they just shouldn't be the standard and should be occasional treats instead of regular parts of people's diet.

I remember one comic where he arrested a fellow Judge for torturing a false confession out of a suspect, and then arrests that suspect for admitting he had some table sugar in his kitchen. Still not as funny as when he arrested himself and all his friends for a petty noise violation on Christmas.

All of their models have consistently done pretty good on any sort of standard test, and then performed horribly in real use. Which makes sense, because if they can train it specifically to make something that looks like the answers to that test it will probably be good at making the answers to that, but it's still fundamentally just a language parser and predictor without knowledge or any sort of internal modeling.

Their entire approach is just so fundamentally lazy and grifty, burning massive amounts of energy on what is fundamentally a dumbshit approach to building AI. It's like trying to make a brain by just making the speech processing lobe bigger and bigger and expecting it'll eventually get so good at talking that the things it says will be intrinsically right instead of only looking like text.

It's probably at least partly because at least some high schools literally teach students that income tax brackets mean all income gets taxed at that rate as part of their "civics" curriculum. Education, especially related to economics, is fully captured by far right cranks pushing propaganda through control over textbooks and program funding.

I even remember some dumbshit "educational" video from high school "civics and economics" that had some poor farmer having to not grow his herd because progressive taxation meant he'd be making less money if he made more. That class and the American History class I took the next year both stand out as just constantly getting basic material facts wrong. Like the English classes did a better job of covering history than the actual history classes did.

It's funny, I can only remember the names of two teachers I've ever had and I can barely remember anything of highschool, but I can remember these clear flashes of how completely dogshit most of the classes were, even two decades later.

he made poor Bruce Wayne pay taxes

major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn't want to be denied review codes in the future

Wasn't it more/also they were worried about ongoing advertising deals? Like it wasn't even necessarily the review staff themselves being in on it so much as the execs leaning on them to not threaten the revenue stream.

IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I'm not gonna say it doesn't revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that's already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it's more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline "confirming your prejudices" or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that's that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.

You've got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It's kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.

Perhaps they're just airbrushed artwork on top of the armor. It seems like the sort of sardonic thing that character would do.

Matt Ward is such an awful writer that exposure to his prose is an actual psychic damage hazard.

I think it's something from an old Rogue Trader article? So it may be more a metacommentary from an old writer sort of thing, that Gothic would have been descended from Mandarin with a bunch of English vocabulary mixed in, albeit all unrecognizable after tens of thousands of years of sound changes.

Also the Emperor is from somewhere in what is now Turkey and canonically the most common language the humans speak ("Gothic") is descended from Mandarin and is just artistically portrayed as being Latin based because "High Gothic" is supposed to scan as archaic in the way that inserting incorrect Latin into English does.