I wonder if this suffers from the same issue as 3 Pro, that it frequently "thinks" for a long time about date incongruity, insisting that it is 2024, and that information it receives must be incorrect or hypothetical.
Just avoiding/fixing that would probably speed up a good chunk of my own queries.
Ignoring the actual proposal or user, just looking at karma is probably a pretty terrible metric.
High karma accounts tend to just interact more frequently, for long periods of time.
Often with less nuanced takes, that just play into what is likely to be popular within a thread.
Having a Userscript that just places the karma and comment count next to a username is pretty eye opening.
I have a userscript to actually hide my own karma because I always think it is useless but your point is good actually. But also I think that karma/comment ratio is better than absolute karma. It has its own problems but it is just better. And I would ask if you can share the userscript.
And to bring this back to the original arxiv topic. I think reputation system is going to face problems with some people outside CS lack of enough technical abilities. It also introduce biases in that you would endorse people who you like for other reasons. Actually some of the problems are solved and you would need careful proposal. But the change for publishing scheme needs push from institutions and funding agencies. Authors don't oppose changes but you have a lobby of the parasitic publishing cartel that will oppose these changes.
I think it is somewhat ironic that you try to make a point that Chemie is an exception, when it is exactly the sort of example the claim is made from.
Ich and Chemie are pretty similarly pronounced (some people say either with a harder k sound, ik, "kehmee").
Chemie also derives from the Greek χύμεία, so it contains the Chi to make the comparison.
A similar case can also be made for Jesus Christus,
I certainly think Christus' pronunciation starts like crust.
And hey, if you derive the Greek root for it, you get Χριστός, which starts with Chi again.
I think a better case can be made just arguing against mixing alphabets like this.
Seems overly protective, and possibly a bit ridiculous depending on your sensibilities, if thought through.
By similar logic supermarkets should not carry alcohol or tobacco, theaters cannot show 18+ movies (even non-explicit ones), and entire parts of some cities need to be redone because of their red-light districts, because there are some at central locations a kid could reasonably stumble into.
I think just restricting access to this stuff, being discreet about it, and maybe limiting advertisement, is enough.
I've lived somewhere with a pretty plainly visible red-light district close to the central train station, yet most people don't even realize it is there.
I'd hope something similar could be accomplished for Steam as well.
Finally, at the end of the day parents gotta parent.
You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours. The game is taxing and bashing your head against the wall for several hours will just mean you get sloppier and prolong the losing streak.
Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference. Dying over and over again from increasingly sloppy mistakes is not anyone's idea of fun.
This is generally true for any mechanically taxing skill. If you push yourself for too long you get tired, and when you get tired you get worse. Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
> You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours.
I agree, unfortunately I'm not even grinding the boss, I am grinding the path to the boss.
> Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
Which is why I stopped playing the game instead of letting it waste my time, like many others :)
> Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference.
It it is not like I, or every other person struggling with playing the game, have been continuously doing the same boss, for extensively long game sessions. I only have 8 hours evenly spread across the last 5 days.
I've also explored up to Graymoor at this point and picked up a few of the upgrades there, I don't think that is actually the issue here.
Unfortunately basically every encounter up to this point has the same runback tedium to it. So unless one one-tries a boss, which at least did happen twice to me, there seems to be no real way to avoid this tedium because of progression locks.
For comparison, I've played Elden Ring and the DLC, I've never had this much frustration there, because for the most part the struggle was with the bosses, not the perceived busy work of getting to them.
But it doesn't really matter, a good chunk of the players seem to enjoy it, the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone.
Something I think people don't realize is why there's a runback. Primarily, it's there to teach you how to counter enemy attacks, especially common ones, and it helps you stockpile money so you don't need to farm for it. Usually, on the runback, there's enemies that drop rosaries. If you kill them every time, you'll get really good at fighting them and you'll get money each time, so the more you die to the boss, the more money you build up, which means when you do finally beat the boss, you'll have lots of money saved up, and can buy some stuff.
And don't feel bad if you are at 1 health and you have tons of money and you save scum and quit to go back to the bench and try again so you don't lose the money - it's okay, having to grind that money again is silly.
In Act 1, there's usually a bench fairly close by. Runbacks are often also easy, don't even try to eliminate the enemies, just sprint and jump over them (timing matters of course).
Are there actually long runbacks in Silksong? I'm not that far in, but so far they've all been maybe 2 screens long at most which you can cross really quickly.
There are several runbacks that are quite painful. I'm on the last bit of the game now and while I've overall very much enjoyed it there's more than a few spots where I thought "this is just tedious".
I mean, what does long mean in the grand scheme of things? Is a minute or two long?
I think, no, in a vacuum they are fine, at least up to where I got. But even a short thing can get annoying if you need to do it often enough, which is at least my problem, and apparently also that of other players that don't mind the difficulty.
It's relative to the boss for me. If the runback is 2x the time of an early fight, it sucks. I know it incentivises learning, but some bosses really do wipe you in a couple of hits at the beginning - a number of times.
A good example of how the experience of something can be so different between people. I also feel the need to write an article about it, but I'm not done yet...
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game),
but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?"
And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.
The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.
A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
UFO50 is voluntarily retro and purposefully use poor design as a kind of homage to video game progress and as a way to foster nostalgia. Part of the pleasure is seeing the changes between the games pretending to be older and the newer ones. Plus, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t made with the idea that most players would finish all the games. Part of the pleasure is sampling the large collection, closing games you don’t like until you find one that sticks. UFO50 objectively contains games which are not that good next to real gems but it is particularly brillant as a collection. Plus independently of how it plays, it’s interesting in itself as a kind of experience. That’s indie at its best.
Silksong is supposed to be a modern game and excels at some parts but the issue is that some design decisions are just, well, bad. I agree with the person you are replying to that it’s not particularly respectful of its player’s time for exemple forcing you to grind and slog repeatedly through uninteresting parts to actually play the fun parts. This is notably something FromSoft entirely solved a long time ago. To me that’s entirely orthogonal to being difficult. It’s an enjoyable game but a flawed one which makes for a tarnished experience.
> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania
This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.
The shade also makes the places you died in actively harder. It’s a baffling design decision. Compare it to Dark Souls, where souls aren’t even that valuable (because you level up often enough, and single levels aren’t important). Plus, when you die twice, everything is gone, and you get total freedom. It hurt the first three times, then I realized souls are cheap and stopped worrying. I never finished Hollow Knight for such reasons. Loved the first half, then decided runbacks aren’t what I want to spend my limited time on.
The amount of people here just exposing their network to Tailscale, and recommending others to do the same, is surprising, to say the least.
I've set up Wireguard on a VPS once six years ago, and nothing needed adjustment since. It is as easy as you make it out to be, and depending on the use case the firewall rules can also be simple.
If I need to add a new device, which is probably a rarity for the average user, and once a year for me, it takes two minutes to edit two files and restart a service.
I can see reasons why one would want to use Tailscale, especially in an organization. But just uncritically recommending it for home-lab like setups seems as harmful as pushing people to Cloudflare for everything.
Inter-node mesh with raw Wireguard is an exercise in patience to say the least; I have a few different colo sites, my house, my phone, LTE/5G hotspots, raspberry pi projects in the field, etc that I want to fully connect together.
Raw Wireguard is fine for a road warrior or site-to-site VPN setup as is common, but when you want multipoint peer-to-peer connections without routing through what might be a geographically distant point, magic DNS, etc, Tailscale really shines through.
Although at that point I'm sure you, and any similar user, would not actually rely on ad-hoc advice like in this thread, and instead just evaluate what is needed.
As an aside, personally speaking, headscale solves basically none of my concerns associated with introducing more software, complexity and third parties (the maintainers) into my network setup.
Less so because of paranoia towards the software/product itself, and more so because of the increased surface area to attack.
But I also think that anyone actually bothering to set headscale up probably falls into the aforementioned group of people that actually thinks about their requirements.
I've been using Netbird on my home network and on my daughter's laptop to provide remote support while she has been at college. This year she moved into an apartment, which has its own cable modem and router/network that I set up. I haven't figured out how I will configure a "zero-trust" architecture that will allow me to act as remote support for her remote network. I'm not the best at networking and I'm afraid of connecting the networks in a manner that I don't expect. I'd be interested to hear if anyone can suggest how to configure this arrangement. I've always had her leave the Netbird client on her laptop turned off unless she is specifically asking for help. I plan to do something similar, where I would have her remote network normally disconnected from whatever VPN bridge network I set up.
I have a VPS and have thought about using Wireguard on it for accessing my home network, but I worry that I don't understand the security well enough to use it. Wouldn't less experienced people like myself be safer with Tailscale or Netbird or something that doesn't require extensive knowledge of a publicly-hosted server?
Your CV and cover letter probably does a lot of the work at least in DACH.
The stories I hear from friends in HR, at varying company sizes, is the stuff of fiction. Apparently most people apply with utter trash, its no surprise they get filtered out if they can't even be bothered to present themselves properly.
At least at smaller companies, if you have something that actually looks like you tried, you immediately stand out. (After HR waded through all the bad ones)
We are also not talking about typos or gaps in the CV here, but things like: including everything expected in a CV, writing something even vaguely resembling a formal letter, or even, addressing the right company in it (bonus points if they are a direct competitor).
Creating a copyright on one's likeness seems pretty messy in regards to that, but there is a somewhat similar idea in German law (and surely other places) that creates similar concerns for using an image or work.
We have a "right to one's image", you generally can't distribute/publish photos with recognizable people without consent. Unless they're truly just "part of the landscape" (background randos), crowds at public events, or of legitimate news/artistic interest.
I'd expect a similar threshold to apply to this Danish solution.
Just avoiding/fixing that would probably speed up a good chunk of my own queries.
reply