u/Far_wide

As someone who largely stopped playing modern videogames nearly 20 years ago now, I'm curious about how far enemy AI patterns can be taken now from those who know.

I still play Thief a lot now, but can't help but think how cool it would be if the enemies were just a bit smarter - like able to climb ladders, or even push you off them. Or swim. Also to vary their routes more and have less predictable behaviour.

As I say, my experience with modern games is limited, but I'm not assuming it would be massively better because I've seen various youtube videos of e.g. GTA police doing very idiotic things, and it seems like a lot of NPC behaviour is still often pretty rudimentary.

So what do you think - If it was made today, do you think the enemy AI behaviour could be significantly improved?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I know I'm not alone in being continually bothered with these scam 'Finance app' sign up studies which set off my alerts every 20 minutes.

What I find quite disturbing about them is that it shows there's no in person vetting whatsoever done on any of the studies even on brand new researchers before they're launched.

Surely there should be that step?

Otherwise, we can have researchers posing as esteemed organisations tricking people into handing over god knows what data.

As well as this repeated one, we've also seen other studies which just by the descriptions set off huge alarm bells - even just a 30 second review per study would take out the vast majority of these. Or ideally, better vetting of the 'researchers' on the platform.

I'm frankly quite disappointed this wasn't the case already.

EDIT: I've just now received an (I assume) unrelated study which literally links direct to someone's Whatsapp (study ironically titled "UK - Global Financial Trust & Security Survey" . This really needs to change.

I'm just wondering is the BA complaints system particularly poor?

I raised a case 3 weeks ago, then checked up on it yesterday to find they had summarily closed it saying they've communicated the result. I've had no refunds, no message in my inbox/junk, no comms whatsoever, so I'm not particularly happy with that.

So, I raised another one which their clever CRM said is a duplicate and that I should follow through with the existing complaint - the existing complaint which has been closed with no action.

Is this typical?

https://preview.redd.it/e81xvlpejych1.png?width=1149&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e213435c8e0afbc1bfa99e4e36584ce9675e931

I usually find I'm pretty good at understanding these sorts of studies first time around, but I was screened out here - The scenario seemed a bit peculiar to me. Like it didn't say how much of the £3 would be risked, and the reward structure seemed rather odd and not memorable.

I'm just wondering if anyone else found that or if I just need to sharpen up my brain again?

Might regret this take, but I honestly think Argentina look nowhere near good enough this year and will go out to England or Norway after Switzerland (can't really see Switzerland beating them as they can't score for toffee).

They've faced bang average opposition so far and are making it all look very difficult. If Egypt had the capacity/sanity to shut up shop, they'd already be out.

Greece has actually been very kind and only minimally neurotic to us this year, so I just want to reserve a small piece of classic Greece for Golden Star Ferries, who have sent me an E-Ticket with the following advice:

"In order to board on the vessel it is necessary to print out the e tickets."

I think otherwise everything really has gone smoothly, aside of course from each and every bakery's belief that they only need to produce four slices of spanakopita for the entire town and run out by 08:30am (what is it with that?).

I'm 43, moving to the Canary Islands Spain next year from the UK and am seeing rather mixed opinions about whether I'm going to need to pay the wealth tax immediately based upon my UK workplace pension taking me over the 700k euro overall threshold.

Does anyone have any experience of this?

It seems if you're moving from a non-EU country (Brexit strikes again), then Spain is now trying to count any pensions that are investment based (as opposed to paying out a fixed sum, which they're happy to disregard), even if you are nowhere near them being available to you to use.

It seems a very harsh stance to me, given that my pension is just as inaccessible (until i'm at least 58) as anyone else's pension.

Despite that, the best I can determine right now from my research is that one can certainly try their luck in still placing it on the Modelo 720 (as is required) but declaring the surrender value as zero and therefore not submitting a wealth tax modelo. But doing so looks like a big risk of generating an audit and conflict with the Hacienda, which I obviously really want to avoid.

So, yeah, has anyone actually been through this? I can certainly suck up the fairly small initial cost, it's obviously highly likely to increase and increase as the years go by and my pot increases, despite me being unable to actually use the funds to pay the tax.

Don't worry, I have not started vibe coding.

It's not brand new, but I've just discovered that the earlyretirementnow.com guy has made a web tool FIRE drawdown simulator which I find much more useful than his spreadsheet.

It's here and the only reason I mention it is that it's unique (AFAIK?) feature is that once you input your data, you can use simple sliders to limit the historical scenarios by what CAPE* value they started at and also to limit scenarios by how far into a drawdown you are.

I think this is especially relevant/useful now and actually strangely reassuring in a way, given we're at ridiculously elevated levels at present. Though it obviously shows that higher withdrawal rates fail far more often when you start off at elevated CAPE levels, it also provides reassurance there's huge potential to increase your SWR% rate if you happen to FIRE into a declining market.

I was using it last night (I know how to spend a damn good Friday night) to stress test scenarios where equities drop 40% or so and actually found it quite reassuring.

On the flipside, it is rather interesting that if you slide the CAPE slider all the way up to 40 (roughly where we are now in the US market anyway), then that limits the 1,737 available past scenarios to, um, 6. Which rather shows just how rarefied the air is up here. Though 4% does still work for some parameters!

*For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, CAPE is a valation metric one can use to try and say how over/under valued markets are. No metric is perfect, but it does have a reasonable correlation with long term outlook. I wouldn't personally say pin your hopes and dreams or worst fears on it, but use it alongside everything else, including your gut!

As a global tracker is up a frankly outrageous 27% year on year today, there surely must be some here who've suddenly been thrust unexpectedly from the long slow middle bit of FIRE to very nearly or indeed at their target.

I'm curious about your stories and what you'll do now? Jetting off? One more year? Or rather more tediously perhaps lowering your SWR target because it looks rather over bullish now?

Last week, I quite enjoyed chasing a bit of XP for promotion whilst learning. It was a bit of fun.

Today, I noticed that when I opened duo on mobile I was flung 200XP in about 5 minutes for doing match madness, which was way easier then actually slogging through written exercises on desktop to actually properly learn the content, whilst earning 10XP each time.

Even just the standard exercises, which again were easier than desktop, earned 3x XP.

I get why and everything (advertising on mobile), but I'm gonna just disregard XP for now and try to focus on actually learning for its own sake. The incentives seem rather perverse for actually learning.

To be constructive, the obvious suggestion is to equalise rewards, or even reward the more difficult desktop exercises more than mobile, but I perceive this as an active choice of theirs to be honest.