u/IndividualistAW

For obvious reasons.

In competitive sweeping, speed is the name of the game. Recognition of very easy and basic patterns like 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 is useful, as is being able to translate patterns into them. Beyond that, you’re wasting your time.

Almost all of the posts on this sub are situations where I would have just guessed and either died and started a new game or gotten lucky and kept going. Spending time analyzing complex patterns to solve the board is a completely different game than the game I used to play and requires a different metric. The posts I see show situations that can usually be solved with intricate analysis, and they also show numbers on the timer that make a guy like me cringe.

Are you guys competing on percentage of boards successfully completed? Do you ignore speed? What’s success in r/Minesweeper?

That is all.

Copied and edited from a thread asking about if old games truly are fundamentally better than those of today.

There was one aspect in which they were better than anything new will ever be: the wow factor that will never again be accomplished.

Born in 1983 here. My earliest childhood memories are of my family’s Commodore 64. I Got an NES for my 6th birthday in 1989. Got a sega genesis for Christmas 1991. Played on friends’ SNESes but never had one. N64 in early 1997. Dreamcast Christmas 2001 (I think).

When those new systems came out, each one of them blew us away with their improved graphics and computational performance…while the games also remained good with a strong focus on quality gameplay. Every single one of these transitions, separated by a low single digit number of years, was a leap far bigger than the 15 year leap between PS3 and PS5.

Every call of duty game that has come out for the past 15 years has been 95% the same game just with new levels/missions.

FIFA? Madden? Don’t even get me started. Literally The same game every year for the past 20 years. In the 90s There were major, appreciable differences in the new release of the sports game every single year; quantum leaps in graphics and gameplay complexity that made for a *meaningfully* improved gameplay experience. As an 80s/90s kid, listening to the Gen Z neckbeards screech about how different FIFA 202X is from FIFA 202Y (because reasons, probably having to do with slightly different specific sequences of button smashing, idk and I literally don’t care, I just know that I watch you play and I see that it’s the same damn game as last year) is both entertaining and infuriating at the same time.

Kids born from the mid 70s to the early 90s are incredibly lucky. We went through a phase shift, barring a global catastrophe that sends humanity back to the Stone Age, that will happen exactly once in human history; growing up alongside the games themselves. We got bigger/older, and so did the games. It became internalized as part of the experience of growing up.

That will never happen again. My 20 year old daughter is playing more or less the same level of games she was playing when she was 5, whereas when I was 20 the games I was playing were light years beyond anything I played at 5.

This will come to be appreciated more and more as video games continue to stagnate and it dawns on the world that they maxed out 10 years ago.

The only remaining leaps on that scale even possible are VR and, after that, you’ll literally need a Star Trek style holodeck. After that, the window to a childhood experience even remotely resembling mine is closed forever.

I am lucky.

I don’t mean to sell in stores for people to take home. I’m talking about at a Con type event where they have a booth, limit one per customer, and it’s served in a glass for consumption on the spot, under law enforcement supervision etc etc.

$100 per drink, and proceeds go to drug rehab programs.

There’s enough curiosity amongst the public there that I think this would be a success, and there’s enough legitimate historical interest that I think the DEA could be convinced to allow it under the right, strict conditions.

Customers sign a waiver, drink is consumed on the premises, they can’t leave for an hour, etc etc.

The amount of cocaine in one serving of the original Coca Cola is not going to kill anyone or even seriously mess them up.

The rules:

The match is extreme blitz chess. From the very first move both players get 3 seconds per move or the game is an auto forfeit.

The opponent is a casual chess.com player with an ELO of about 900. He has the magical superpower to freeze time on demand an unlimited number of times, for as long as he wants each time. During time freeze, his body is frozen like everybody else and he cannot move (with one caveat, see below), but unlike everyone else, for whom it is 100% as if the time freezes were not happening, he is fully conscious and can analyze the board state and plan for his next move and think about his strategy for as long as he wants before unfreezing time. He can move only his eyes as needed to conduct this analysis, but in no case does this caveat betray his superpower (“that guy’s eyes instantly shifted”!).

Magnus Carlsen is at his absolute prime and has been told only that he will be facing a tough challenge in speed chess and has had 6 weeks to train for this challenge however he sees fit.

This is not a political/ideological post at all. I take no stance in this post on any matter of public controversy and I discourage such in the comments.. This is simply a question of the mechanics of the German electoral system and how seats in the Landesrat are allocated.

That said, lots of chatter lately about AfD polling north of 40% in Thuringia and Sachsen-Anhalt.

Because Parties that receive less than 5% of the vote get no representation, the parties that do reach that threshold get a higher percentage of seats than their share of the popular vote.

So With AfD polling at 42-43%, is that already enough for them to win an outright majority? At what point is it a certainty? Is there a likelihood of smaller parties unlikely to reach 5% dropping out entirely to lower AfD’s overall share?

Edit to add, I don’t think any party in German history has ever won an outright majority. Has there ever been a non-coalition government before?

My 13 yo daughter is fascinated by space and science and astrophysics and I think she would love Isaac Arthur and is intellectually ready for these videos, but I’d like to start her off on one that’s softer on hard math/ewuations/etc and more broadly conceptual.

Any recommendations?

I cannot be the only person who is close to giving up on the platform entirely due to the sheer inundation of AI-generated slop. The search and recommendation algorithms are completely broken.

And look. It’s not your fault. When 99+% of content that drops on YouTube is AI, it’s hard to trust AI to sift through it.

So I ask you, the corporate leadership of YouTube, in combination with asking your content creators, to implement a tag that can be affixed to channels featuring strict limitations on the use of AI in generating the content.

For a channel to qualify for this tag, I suggest a few proposed rules but this is by no means exhaustive and I invite other participants to chime in with suggestions.

1: NO AI NARRATION. Period. Full stop. This alone largely addresses the issue. The voice in the video must be a *human* voice. There should be a brief disclaimer in the opening seconds of the video: “my name is ______ and I am a real human producing real content, if that matters to you then like and subscribe!”

2: AI-generated visual aids are allowed, but must be watermarked as AI-generated in a way that is prominent and clearly legible but not necessarily invasive to the content being visually aided. AI is a tool that should be available for content creators to use, but it should not replace human effort in the fabrication of content.

3: AI-generated music allowed but a caption “music produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence” must appear for the duration of the music.

4: there should be a nominal fee for the tag, paid by the content creator. Nothing crippling for one person running one channel, something like $5/month to run the channel and 25 cents per video. This would be crippling to a bot trying to spam 10,000 channels dropping thousands of videos a day with this tag.

5: users must be able to configure their accounts and/or their search results to show only channels that have this tag, or at least prioritize them to the top of recommendations. The tag should feature prominently wherever the channel name is listed.

I think this is a viable pathway towards cleaning up your community and I hope that, if not this, something be done about the invasion of low effort AI-generated content ruining the platform.

Sincerely, a frustrated human.