u/dashingThroughSnow12

I like Metroidvanias in general but I don’t play many.

The atmosphere is good. The movement is solid. The game isn’t long (20ish hours depending on your skill.)

It is nice to get a new ability or get to a new spot and be able to push a lever or jump to a cliff to get to a new area that before tempted you from a far. (Like in Order of The Sinking Star.)

The bosses and mini bosses are plentiful and varied. Maybe you die for 30 minutes straight then final grok it. Some battles I literally went from barely surviving the half way point to fully grasping the flow, doing the fight hitless. Then leaving the fight, no power up, and flawlessly beating the fodder enemies that used to take small chips out of my health.

The story is interesting. In both how it presents it and what happens in it. I like the characters. They go from hilarious to “I want to protect & nurture this kid” to “I pity you” to “I hate you” to “I understand but disagree” and so forth. There are characters the fanbase are in agreement on that are hated and feel remorse for.

There is gore in the game. Fair warning. Guts galore. A few beheadings and amputations.

One thing I like is that the game respects my investment in the story. Too many games pose mysteries or create worlds and just never give answers. Or they avoid telling you much of anything; even when it doesn’t make sense.

Nine Sols doesn’t tell you everything upfront because you, as the protagonist, wouldn’t be given exposition for things you know. So it does have “mysteries” that are intriguing to watch unfold. It does disclose you the backplot and world naturally as it comes up. It doesn’t needlessly keep coy either.

This is not a spoiler but does involve the story. A lot of games have the veneer of grim. Oh this character is responsible for this bad thing or your character has some dark history. But the game doesn’t want to commit to the bit. They don’t want to live with the “reality” they set up. Actions have consequences. How many games have you played where someone slaughters a village and then two chapters later they are forgiven because they feel bad? Nine Sols respects the story it chose to write. Bad people have bad things happen to them as a consequence of their actions.

Including your character.

A few times a decade I boot up a game and the game feels like the developer had fun making the game. It is hard for me not to like a game when it exudes such passion.

Tangent. I was a single teenage parent in university 16 years ago. I played a lot of puzzle games. Free or cheap and plentiful.

I don’t think this is the best puzzle game I’ve played. It is good. I’ve definitely blown past any play time I’ve had with any puzzle game. It stays at a good, constant level of fun yet does mix up the challenge and ways of thinking. Part of this is that it has a tremendous amount of mechanics (every type of beam block, stone, mirror, character, block, enemies, etc). By the time something might wear down it’s welcome, you are in a different combination.

It has that “one more puzzle” aspect that makes Civilization a dangerous game to play.

I don’t know how to rate this game.

I’m a dad to four kids with a lovely wife. I now tend to appreciate games on the shorter (<=20 hours) side and I like story-heavy games.

This will be my most played game this year. By far. And I don’t regret the time. But it won’t be my GOTY played. (Nine Sols gets that.)

But at the same time, so many levels feel like how it feels when my wife and I go to a fancy restaurant where the head chef chooses the courses. I load up a level, the developers say “here is a nice little palate cleanser”. Next “here’s something a bit more forward in the taste.” Then “here’s one to sit and stew over.” “Now that you figured out that, figure out how that applies here.” In some aspects it feels intimate. Master game makers showing you their craft.

I can appreciate art from an artist even in a genre I don’t particularly fancy.

At my first corporate job, everyone except one person was 10+ years my senior.

I asked one once “what would you give your younger self as advice as a developer?” “Save more money and manage your finances better.”

I hope your recovery is going well.

😯

I have a complicated career but explaining parts of it is simple. I’ve managed environments frequently. As an example, I was managing hundreds of customers environments where each customer environment is mainly deployments on dedicated k8s clusters and each cluster is say a dozen to a few dozen nodes.

So we’ll say I was managing around 10+K nodes at one point with many hundreds of thousands of pod. Based on some environments customers of one of my former employer’s ran? I’d call 10K small.

Two things:

- Much bigger entities than probably you and I work for have gotten by just fine without AI agents fudging around with their clusters. The normal way one would do this in K8s is having a traditional operator (using the operator sdk) and/or an HPA, and a bunch of observability configured (ex hpas scaling based on metrics, operators that recover from certain failure cases). Playbooks and other solutions galore. There is actually a lot in this area. You should explore those options first.

- This is one of the things I am very hopeful for since I first heard of LLMs. There is a whole bunch of busywork in managing clusters. If you have 100s or 1000s of different workloads, devs just guess things like req/limit, see if it runs well, and may never return regardless on how traffic changes over time. A couple of weeks ago I had an agent rip to resize some requests/limits. Fixed a bunch of OOMKilleds. Reduced a bunch of excess requests. Saved thousands a month.

At this point, I think it is best if you have the agent observe and propose but not change. You are running a Flux or Argo or something similar, right? You can have it create PRs (ex change the max replicas, the scaling thresholds, etc) that your CD solution will pick up. You can even go a step further.

Depending on your needs, I could recommend a traditional operator with the operator SDK. You could have an agent observe behaviour in a cluster or from your logs (ex a common failure) and propose a change on your operator. Or maybe it proposes new Argo Workflows that get added to playbooks included in PagerDuty alerts. Or an alert fires and it does some triage for a human automatically. (I’ve liked that Datadog does this when it notices an anomaly.)

I am extremely optimistic for agents in this space. I barely trust humans. Again, observe and propose. (Prompt injection is a real risk here, btw. A couple of months back I had a Claude Fable agent looking at logs and…..the person wasn’t even trying to prompt inject. I would be cautious on the outbound network access any agent has. I don’t trust that the thing can’t be prompt injected from a URL path for goodness sake.)

One aspect is it doesn’t matter fully. Let’s say you have the full Google source code.

Every project. Rewrite anything hardcoded to say google.com and other things you don’t control.

Ok, you lack the gigantic hoards of data Google has that it runs all its operations on. You lack its trained models (I’m not just talking about Gemini.) Yeah, you have the search code but you lack the data it uses.

Let’s say you get those too. You probably need a few tens of millions of dollars in servers just to host them. Maybe add a few zeros.

Ok, you are blocked everywhere btw. Because Google is so large, websites like my employer’s have to let the Google bots scrape the site incessantly. We’ll block your traffic that you use to keep your search data or AI overviews up-to-date.

Ok, let’s ignore that. You get to be treated like how we’d treat any tier 1 search engine.

Ok, what’s the business? You have all the ad code and models running but you don’t have the ad network.

Let’s say you get that too. Coca Cola is as fine running ads with you as they are with Google. Gives you the same rates even.

My wife has an Android phone. It is connected to Google’s services, not yours. My tv has the YouTube app, not yours. Every major browser gets paid by Google to make Google search the default search engine. Not yours. Can you pay Apple 21B/yr to be their default search engine in Safari?

Can you handle the incredible amount of lawsuits Google will throw at you and how your offices are going to be raided by every acronym agency from the government your servers run in the country of?

Aaron Swartz was a millionaire.

> “In short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy,”

Since when has caring for accuracy been Trump’s concern?

I earnestly think the BQ would win seats outside of Quebec if they ran candidates. I don’t think many seats but they’d get my vote.

The whole being separatists doesn’t have to be a reason to divide over.

(Yeah, I know he is PQ not BQ.)

You are correct. I am sorry. Thanks for calling me out there.

What legal filings have they made to state their ongoing GAAP numbers would be a profit thus far (either thus far in H2 or YTD)?

Anthropic is prone to lying or “selectively omitting” things when it talks casually.

What legal filings have they made to state their ongoing GAAP numbers would be a profit thus far?

-80B means their expenses exceeded their revenue by 80B.

Ok, thanks for the double check.

Doesn’t Microsoft have a defacto city? With hundreds of acres. Over 100 buildings. Tens of thousands of employees?

Actual question: does that include that 99.9% of any two humans’ DNA is identical, let alone when a couple is from the same ethnic group?

I don’t know enough about this process on whether that makes a significant difference or not to the math.

I feel sorry for the women in whatever country you live in if consent is the minimum legal requirement.

I was thinking it was going to be that the twins were from the same mother & father but by pure coincidence they shared no overlapping DNA (except that which is common among the populace at large). ie baby 1 got 50% from mom, 50% from dad, and baby 2 got the other halves.

Iirc, he was white and black. By pure chance one got all the genes for a high melanin level and the other got all the genes for a low melanin level.

Consent is not even the floor of morality when it comes to sex.

Edit: to make my comment more substantive, consent isn’t even the bare minimum to be considered legal in my country of Canada. Worthwhile read on this topic is Rape Is Rape by Jody Raphael.

The same people who think you can ask a clankkka to program the banking system think you can take a picture and ask a clankkka how to do plumbing and electrical work.

To me, there is credible evidence that Pfizer & BioNTech extended the cycle so that they’d not submit their application/ trial results before the election.

The evidence being:

- GSK informed the British government that some of its employees were told by a former Pfizer exec that Pfizer intentionally did this
- Pfizer submitted earlier in some other jurisdictions
- Pfizer extended the length of their trials
- US government officials were getting preliminary updates on the trials as they were happening and were surprised Pfizer waited until nine days after the election to submit, as opposed to in early October or late September

Again, “to me”. I can understand if you or others don’t take this as credible.

100% agree.

When I read the praise some people give these LLMs tools, or read what some of them made with them, or read how long they say things used to take them, or read what they think were hard tasks before, or read them quote a clankkka and not notice the gigantic mistakes……

I’m starting to think all those “I’m such a bad programmer” jokes on r/programminghumor won’t jokes at all.

We had multiple effective vaccines for ten months by Oct 2021.

The only reason they won’t available for longer was that some companies didn’t want to sway the US election.

-80B in h1 is not profitable.

Was not expecting capital “F” Fascist propaganda there. That was quite a surprise.