I remember having recurring dreams in which I would fall into the gap in the elevator or between the subways/trains and the plattform, etc. and then jolt away with a whole-body flinch.

The dreams went away as I got older, but I still grip stuff (e.g. my phone) as tightly as I can if I have to carry it across those gaps ^^

Been a while since I read this paper, but:

The main criticism in this paper is, that the problems are asked and preprocessed in a way that makes them almost trivial. Basically, CPU manufacturers could boast about 10000% faster prime number factorization, if all they were doing was prime number factorization of 2ⁿ

They even suggest, that instead of solving known and borderline trivial problems, quantum computers should instead be evaluated using random problems.

^Also, they should thank their dog in the acknowledgement section^

Sounds great! Can I invest now, but pay in 4 easy rates?

Canada also doesn’t include VAT in their prices, which - as a tourist - was quite nice, because the total price in euro was roughly the displayed price in canadian dollar. (VAT roughly cancelled the gain in conversion)

In Germany at least, the trucks are cheaper to operate than standard diesel trucks.

Diesel is more expensive and electric trucks require less maintenance. And they have enough range to drive them at the allowed top speed for trucks on highways (80kph) between the mandatory breaks, where they can then be charged and carry on.

The big complaint, last time I read about electric trucks being used, was about the charging infrastructure for trucks.

With two white-green edge pieces, the cube is literally unsolvable

Well, the original comic did need all 4 panels:

The german translation did that to avoid confusion with ‘Elfen’ from german folklore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

One could even say it’s a PogChamp

My video game experience tells me: That is one of the highest level armor she can wear.

Obligatory:

People who died in the shower:

In case someone else wasn’t sure: Bashkortostan is part of Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkortostan

Oh, I do think that romance is logical. After all its purpose is to ensure the survival of the genes. It’s just that the romance algorithms and the hardware they’re running on have been hotfixed for millions of years so there are insane amounts of technical debt, that make the algorithm hard to figure out.

And in romance movies there is always a pursuer and a pursued party. And, as audience, we can clearly identify the correct behavior for the pursuer. But, if you identify with the pursued party, then these romance movies will feel like it’s all chance, because the pursued often has very little agency.

A scoring system just formalizes this behaviour. And in video games, you as a main character have all the in-game agency. A romance, that would move the agency to an NPC will feel like the “OMG it’s you, the grand champion” guy from Oblivion, or like a courier desperately trying to talk to you no matter where you are.

And I generally don’t have an issue with local LLMs in video games, but I really don’t think there is a way to make them work. Dialog trees are a really good way to give a player some control, while not overwhelming them with choice.

LLMs might work by allowing characters to acknowledge things you have done outside their own little storylines.

And, sure, I can type in my question. But this will be clunky and imo break the flow of the game. And I really don’t want to sit infront of a computer and be talking out loud to some NPCs.

The point about who is telling the story is interesting, especially in regards to ttrpgs.

Because today, video games are everywhere and are telling insanly emotional stories. And to gamers, the guardrails feel natural. After all, they have to be there and have always been there, so the suspension of disbelief includes ignoring that you’re (in ttrpgs terms) on railroads.

But, the old guard has played ttrpgs while video games were in their infancy, so they never expected the GM to give them a framework, in which they could do everything, and that still produces a story that would make J.R.R. Tolkien give standing ovations.

They, instead, assumed that with clever incentives, the players would themselves want to play and create the stories themselves. As you pointed out, the GM would simply offer tools for the players to tell their stories.

But, to tie this back into romance in video games: Sure, you can roleplay that yourself (if you write it down, you have created fanfic) but, like in ttrpgs, it’s not ‘your’ character and you’re not the GM.

Some groups might play that way, everyone being a quasi gm who can tell a part of the story freely and then handing the scene back to another player.

But in most groups, I think, players want to control only one character (themselves). To them it feels violating to either take away/control someone elses character or having your character be played by someone else.

And in video games, the only character you have is your main character. Thus roleplaying other characters is like taking away the GMs NPCs.

But, your point does work in games like The Sims, where, even though the dialog/romance options are limited, you can add back that level of meaning through roleplaying. Or in games like the elder scrolls, where the storylines aren’t intertwined. But Cyberpunk 2077 does pull your romantic interest into optional endings, so the characters behavior might then no longer align with your interpretation, because the game took back control of its characters.

This is a really weird way to argue a weird point. I think, the main issue is, most games are closer to boardgames than movies. And the author places them too close to movies.

And you can build boardgames for romance, sure. But, unless the romance is part of the core game loop, it’s something that breaks the flow of the game. So it gets abstracted away, or the romance is expressed in terms of the core game mechanics. Which, in video games are often reaching the next scene, dialog trees or gaining stat points.

And, even if you think they’re closer to movies, then most video games are closest to action movies. And here the word romance isn’t used. It’s just renamed love interest and is often just the price for saving the world, but the core ‘mechanics’ are the same.

And most romances will start as fun flings full of hope, not with the nitty-gritty logistics. The logistics will come later, sure. But most Video-Games are set romantically in a few weeks of summer camp, so there is no need to figure out logistics just yet.

Open-World games, that have a character that travels around and meets people as part of their daily lives, sure.

But this argument would apply to games like the Elder Scrolls series. Not Cyberpunk 2077 in which the main character is dying and has only weeks left to live.

But, I do concede that most romances do fall flat once you’ve reached the top. You had your sex-scene and you may have your kisses, your hugs, the new greetings in dialogue, and the characters return to being cardboard in the background. I know it’s hard to implement, but still, it would be nice, if they could then play a larger role in, for example, the main story.

So manny happy smileys in there

If you’re not asking about anything that we currently don’t have a word for, we can use words as the alphabet, sure.

We then need to transmit a list of words, they’re allowed to use, otherwise our count is off, because I’m sure that 974 years from now english won’t be the same, as it is today. They’ll have a lot more skibid rizz than we do now.

busted

Once you’re able to use time as an information, they can send a message with a character limit. For every letter they need to wait:

Remaining Message Length^Alphabet Size*Index of Letter*time interval

So, if future people want to sent the message hello and our time unit is 1s, and the max message length is 5, they need to send the bit to exactly 26^4*7+26^3*4+26^2*11+26^1*11+26^0*14 = 3276872 seconds or 54614,5333min or 910,242222h or ~38 days after the start time.

We can choose smaller time intervals, but with a long enough message, we’ll eventually reach the year 3000 again. Alternatively, we can move the start time into the past, at the expense of quite a few possible messages.

This is the same problem as trying to map an n-dimensional array to a one dimensional array