“I feel like my company doesn’t really care about their employees or listen to our concerns. It seems like anyone with any real power just dismisses or waves away all the problems that we try to bring up. Is there anything we can do about that?”

“Sure is! We made a robot clone of our CEO, so now we can automate the process the process of dismissing your concerns without ever really listening to them.”

If you like self-directed fun, yeah, you’ll probably jam with it pretty hard. Just be prepared to lose a lot of fights; collecting scar tissue is basically how you level up.

I actually know basically nothing about SCP, and I think I enjoyed it more because of that. My wife instantly recognised most of the stuff in the game (they added a few of their own apparently) whereas I got the full “What the fuck is that?!!” experience.

The thing is that a lot of the SCPs are puzzles. You’re supposed to try and fail until you figure out their mechanics. So if you’re confused, that’s the point.

Locally? You’d need a VERY powerful GPU to really be able to match the capabilities of Opus 4.6 online. I’ve played around with this stuff for the same reasons and while you can absolutely run a model with all of Claude’s capabilities offline, very few people will have the hardware to let it actually run at an acceptable speed and with a sufficient context window. That last part is the most important thing for coding because it’s what allows the model to operate across an entire project and not just a few functions at a time.

At least the medical drama is really fucking good.

It’s not exactly what you’re asking for but SCP 5K is a hardcore tactical shooter set in a very well realized version of the SCP lore. Genuinely one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. 173 will have you shitting bricks.

Prepare to either bounce off a game harder than anything before, or lose the next three years of your life. Or, possibly, somehow, both.

Yeah, there have been a bunch of extraction shooter style games that I would play the shit out of if they just weren’t extraction shooters.

Jesus fucking Christ, why did Marathon have to suffer that fate?

For the record you can auto complete the battles and just play them as turned based strategy games with no tactical component. That may or may not be what you’re looking for, but just figured I’d let you know.

How… How do you think it works in other democracies when they cut military funding? Because that’s a thing that happens. A lot.

Did I miss the part where Canada had a civil war every time our government cut funding to the CAF? I’m pretty sure that’s something I would have noticed.

I wonder if this will finally be the point where Americans decide that their military has enough money?

Probably not.

And I have no idea which specific joke you’re referring to because so many of them would qualify.

https://boltflight.com/f-35-shootdown-controversy-iran-claims-historic-kill-of-israeli-stealth-jets-amid-rising-regional-tensions/

Iranian state media, quoting military sources, reported that two F-35I Adirs were intercepted and downed by Iranian air defense units during or immediately after their bombing run on targets near Natanz and other strategic installations. One of the pilots, described as a female aviator, was allegedly captured after ejecting over Iranian territory. Iranian Press TV wasted no time in proclaiming this as a global first: “Iran has earned the distinction of being the first country in the world to successfully shoot down fifth-generation fighter jets belonging to the Zionist regime.”

Hmm, looks like you’re right. That specific image wasn’t actually circulated by an official Iranian source.

I’ll admit I missed that, because it was so consistent with all of the other messaging coming out of Iran. The image circulated at a time where - with zero evidence to the effect, and a lot of evidence to the contrary - Iran was claiming to have shot down something like four or five Isreal F-35’s. As far as any independent observers can tell the actual number was zero. Then there’s the current conflict where Iran took videos of a wrecked F-15 and claimed it was an F-35, among other obvious lies.

I’ll freely grant you that specific case; we all get caught out sometimes. But you’re the one trying to argue that Iran, a nation with a long history of proven blatant falsehoods in their official messaging, are some kind of paragons of truth. That doesn’t mean that the US doesn’t also lie like crazy. A lot of nations do. It just means you’re in idiot if you go buying into this teenage morality idea that “US bad = Iran good.” They’re an autocratic regime that lies reflexively… Just like the Trump administration. Anything they say has to be treated with a baseline level of suspicion, and it’s absurd to argue otherwise.

If you’re enjoying The Stanley Parable, you’ll probably like Do Not Press The Button To Destroy The Multiverse.

Some of the best comedy writing in any video game series, ever.

They once posted a photo of a “crashed F-35” that was so obviously AI generated that there were people the size of garden gnomes walking around the cockpit area.

I get what you’re trying to go for here, yes, a lot of what we know about Iran is filtered through Western propaganda, but it’s also true that they lie, and badly, all the time. America being bad didn’t make the Iranian regime good.

Yeah, that’s it exactly. It doesn’t really feel genuine or meaningful, even though I’m sure a lot of people do mean it earnestly. It just sort of feels like a checklist.

That’s honestly worse than I thought.

If you’re confused then this is a great object lesson in how to read statistics. Consider how many people actually own a home still in New Zealand. It’s not going to be a lot. Realistically, I think 1 in 10,000 would be a high estimate. That is to say, about 0.01% of the population. I’ve not had any luck finding actual numbers on that despite my best efforts, but I think it’s a fair assumption given the amount of specialised equipment involved in home distilling (much more so than home brewing), as well as the space needed to set it up and the time required for the for process. It’s not exactly set it and and forget it. In comparison, the percentage of people who live in a home who have a stove is going to be fairly close to 100%.

Already you can see the issue right? If 0.01% of a population are causing 0.14% of all home fires… That’s insanely bad.

But it gets worse. That study covers a 20 year period, but home distilling was only legal for the last 10 years of that period. Which means a couple of things. Firstly the number of home distillers would likely have been even lower for most of the period covered by the study. Home distilling would only really have taken off as a hobby over those last ten years, and for much of that time equipment would likely have been hard to come by; that’s not the sort of thing where import / manufacturing and distribution are going to be easy to just set up overnight. Secondly, home distilling as a cause of fire was likely under-reported for those first ten years as people would have a strong incentive to hide the cause of the incident. By far the single biggest category of equipment listed in the study is “Not recorded” accounting for more than all the other categories combined. Obviously, there’s going to be a distribution of all the other equipment types throughout that “Not recorded” block, but it’s not all unlikely that the “Not recorded” stats for illegal home stills would be at least slightly higher than for most other equipment.

Then there’s a second factor to consider; frequency of use. People often cook on a stove at least once a day. In comparison I very much doubt the average home distiller is running their still every single day. It’s a time consuming process that requires a fair amount of attention. Generally you’re going to make a batch and then consume that batch until you eventually need to make another. If we were to normalize not only for frequency of ownership but also frequency of use, it’s not hard to arrive at a fair estimate that home stills are causing fires at a rate of several hundred times that of, say, the average gas stove, based on the numbers in that study. Obviously I’m being pretty loose here, but I’m just trying to illustrate the general point. I’m not claiming to be presenting hard data here, I’d have to really sit down with the raw numbers and run a proper normalization, as well as get some stats not accounted for in that study, but yeah, overall, I’m feeling very good about my “orders of magnitude” estimate if the numbers you’re presenting are accurate.

(Also, it probably goes without saying that getting your statistics on how dangerous making moonshine is from a webpage entitled “Making Moonshine is Safer Than You Think” maybe isn’t the best idea. I’m fairly sure pedophiles also have strong opinions about the relative safety of taking candy from people in unmarked vans.)