No. Don’t think I was even invited to any.

I’m not close to anyone from high school. I haven’t talked to anyone from that era in years. I wasn’t my best self back then, and I don’t really want to relive it.

Other answers are good.

I expect there’s a lot of racism, too. A lot of people don’t want those people to have nice things, even if it means personally suffering.

If you build a nice train system, you might have to see those people on your day to day. In a car, you’re isolated and feel safe.

But mostly I expect it’s because of the massive highway system that was built without corresponding passenger rail.

My leading hypothesis is “management is stupid”. It explains a lot of this sort of thing.

I recently reopened Witcher 3, and was kind of surprised by how the graphics aren’t as lifelike as my memory. I remember being a lot more impressed by the bodies when it was new.

I really disliked how leveling up made you weaker. Things scaled with your level faster than the stat gains empowered you. Completely stupid design.

The card game is also too rewarding and too obscure. Without a guide, you’d never catch on to stuff like “lose this card to this unnamed person, then win a better version back from this other unnamed person”. Also various “everything is on fire! You wanna play cards?” moments really hamper the pacing and tone. But you want to play it, because it gives a ton of power.

Discouraging you from actually using magic was an interesting experiment, but I don’t think it was fun. Maybe it could have been rebalanced, but as-is you just stocked up on magic for the stats.

I don’t remember the story very well. I remember getting locked out of a lot of content because I went past a point of no return without realizing it.

Good. Break them up. Criminally charge their leadership.

Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”

Microsoft will continue on inertia for years. but it’s basically a walking corpse full of parasites at this point.

My hypothesis is that the least competent people use AI the most, and it’s a big multiplier on their incompetence.

A lot of Linux works out of the box now. If folks started selling preconfigured Linux machines like you can buy for windows, that’s all most people need. Valve is following a good strategy

Hah, I had written something specifically about “they took on risk!” and a retort of “are we a slot machine and lotto driven society then?” but didn’t polish and post it.

For the latter, I might zero in on “they worked hard, maybe. Now they don’t. Should a freeloader get more than someone who works?” to see what happens.

I’ve found “You work all day and get a small salary. The business owner sits around, and gets a huge payout. Does that seem fair?” is moderately effective.

The other core is “I’d rather die of preventable diseases so long as black people suffer more”

I’m not (intentionally) being rude while knowing that it’s ineffective.

I’m saying the people that believe a flashy YouTube video instead of something uncomfortable are being stupid.

The solution will never be to get them to fall on their face and worship logic. Nor will it be to call them idiots to their face. (Even though some people are so fucking stupid and full of worm paste that I want to scream at them, that’s not appropriate so it stays inside). The solution, unfortunately, needs to be wrapping facts up in ways that make them feel good. We have to cater to this behavior.

Here’s a more concrete example. We do code reviews at work. I could leave a comment that says “Don’t sort this list in place. That’s going to cause a bug at XYZ”. Straight. To the point. I could also leave a comment that says like “hey great work here. And a good call to sort the list! I think you might want to make a copy and sort that so it won’t be weird at XYZ. Thanks so much.”

The latter is a lot fluffier and a little dishonest (it’s clearly not great work), but I have to write more like that. Otherwise people feel bad and whine about it.

I think this is a factor in why people love LLMs so much. They’re always getting fluffed.

Right. But that’s a stupid strategy that leads people to believing what the flashy YouTube video says about eating horse medicine to cure cancer instead of the grumpy scientist who makes you feel bad.

You’re not wrong in describing how people behave. I’m saying that behavior is foolish.

Right. I think winning moves might have to play into people’s emotions. Don’t tell conservatives that greenhouse gases cause more heat to be trapped. Tell them like ONLY AMERICA CAN DEFEAT PHYSICS AND MOVE INTO THE FUTURE or whatever.

That doesn’t change the square root of 9, and it’s stupid to discard facts because the speaker is rude.

Another facet of what I said above: facts don’t matter. Emotions matter. Which is a stupid way to live, but that’s humans.

The average person, if you told them like “the square root of 9 is 3, you fucking idiot” isn’t going to believe you. Which, amusingly, shows they are kind of a fucking idiot.

Facts don’t change people’s minds. The main thing that matters is “is the source in my in-group?”

This is kind of a stupid way to live, but that’s the human baseline. So that’s how all the conservatives live, and why they won’t come around on things like climate change. They’re not listening to facts. They’re listening to their in-group.

He shouldn’t be allowed to keep going.