The obvious answer is the other two casual classics: Space Cadet Pinball and Minesweeper. Possibly also some of the classic board games like Chess, or Go.

A “profit all the things” CEO would be running the casino themselves. IE: Many of the big mobile games. Hell, I don’t play many modern triple-A titles, but it sounds like they’ve largely gone that route too.

AI content is low-quality slop. That said, sometimes low-quality slop is the best option for what you want, and in that case, it can make sense to use. That slop can also make a useful ingredient for other, better works, so long as its just a small peice used appropriately.

No, it wasn’t, and that’s exactly the problem. Car dependent infrastructure is so bad for society and he was proposing a concept that would entrench it to a degree that would make today’s anglosphere look like a utopian Nordic paradise by comparison.

Ignoring the fact that its already entrenched and not going to change without dedicated infrastructure that happens seperate to the development of individual vehciles, at that point, you’re asking him to make a video on urban planning rather than AI. Its an entirely different field. Might as well ask for him to make a video on vaccine development or something at that point. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the importance of pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but it’s importance doesn’t mean that cars can’t or won’t develop further. Frankly, given the fact that Grey has lived in both American and Europe, I doubt he’d disagree, given the first-hand experience.

Ending it and then saying nothing for months, before having your cohost release a lie stating that it hadn’t ended is unreasonable by any metric. It would have taken so little effort to put a post up on the subreddit saying “thanks for all the good times, but we’ve decided we’ve exhausted what we can talk about, you can keep up with me on my YouTube or my productivity podcast at these links.”

Given the unscheduled, (relatively) umplanned nature of it, its likely they just didn’t fully know what the plan was. Again, not suprising for what it was. Its entirely possible, for example, that they do hope to come back to it someday. Declaring the indefinite hiatus a lie just because it hasn’t ended is an overreaction. They could very easily decide that in the last five years, they’ve amassed enough new topics to come back for another 100 episodes.

You don’t get to give your fans cutesy nicknames and invite them to send you postcards en mass to vote on a community flag and then pretend to maintain the sort of faceless transactional relationship you described there. You just don’t, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

I mean, companies and organizations do that sort of thing all the time. Providing a banner for fans to rally to doesn’t make them any less of a buisness. I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of the head of the Nationa Research Counsel just because I was a big supporter of Boaty McBoatface, nor was that their goal.

I should add one more point to the list though that I just … … … interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.

I was not aware of the Kerzgizart or Nebula drama. If true, that would be a much bigger concern to me, and yeah, would paint him as much more of a scumbag.

I do agree with the criticism against him in terms of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I think the criticism of his automation and self-driving cars videos is a bit of an overreaction. These are videos trying to predict the future based on current trends. At the time, many were very optimistic about the progression of AI (and not just Tesla). At the same time, whille his predicted timeframe was off, its also not seeming unlikely that his predictions will come true. We’re already starting to see AI automate a bunch of jobs. If I remeber correctly, he also talked about the original video on Hello Internet about five years ago and basiclly said what I am now: his timeframe was optimistic but much of what he predicted still seems feasible if not likely. As for the traffic video specificly, it might be overly simplistic, but the idea is to give an idea of how traffic management might change in the future. It’s focus isn’t on bikes and pedestrian, and while not covered in the video, its not like they don’t fit in to that model. You literally just need a signaled crossing like is used now, or if you insist on ensuring near-maximum efficiently, a bridge, underpass, or otherwise separated infrastructure (which is usually better for pedestrians and bikes where possible anyway).

I also don’t really think the end of Hello Internet was esspecially out of the blue, or unreasonable. It was very much an improvised, talk-about-a-random-topic type of podcast, so after about 200 hours of talking, its not suprising that they would find it difficult to come up with new topics that they can both engage with and make entertaining. IMO it was very clearly fizzling out well before they stopped, and post covid, it would have only been more difficult. The lack of announcement is annoying, but I would hardly consider it a betrayal.

I know its very blunt but, it sounds like you were far more attached to him than was warrented. I always read his talk of fans as very clearly viewing them as a seperate group - appreciated customers, not friends. For example, his talk about using the Grey alias to seperate himself from his work, trying to keep himself faceless and mostly anonymous, and the treating of all of his works as a buisness. IMO he never tried to sell it as anything more than a buisness.

Its a posting of his video from years ago.

While I’ve been disappointed by his lack of modern content, I don’t see a reason to call the productivity techniques he likes nonsense, nor to lose respect for him as a whole. Is there a particular reason?

In my case, its even just if packet loss gets too high - not rare on wifi.

Basically, Valve’s game, Counter Strike sells cosmetics for the game. They can be bought from through in-game lootboxes (a form of gambling itself, but not what’s being refrenced here) or, notably, from other players in an open market. Valve provides the infrastructure for managing this, but doesn’t charge players for its use or otherwise moderate it. For a comparison, when NFTs were popular and people were saying it was already a solved problem with fewer issues, markets like what Valve set up for Counter-Strike cosmetics were the existing, non-blockchain version.

Ultimately, as this is an open market, with free trading, this has significant benifits and significant downsides. On one hand, I can buy hundreds of $0.02 skins to use in the game without every touching the $3 lootboxes, or can trade items with friends or other players. On the other hand, this is an largely unregulated market. Valve controls the “wallets” but doesn’t have direct say over trade negotiations, and governments are either ignorant or intentionally looking away. This means scams, money launderers and illeagal or sketchy casinos can use Counter Strike Cosmetics as a currency or intermediary without having to fear oversight or law enforcement.

These casinos are the gambling being refered to here. Because they have have effectively no oversight, they can use every scheme in the book to abuse their players from rigging results, to ignoring normal casino legal payout rates, to advertising to children, to using bureaucracy to make receaving payouts as slow and difficult as possible. The casions advertise aggressively and are able to make millions and millions off this.

The reason Counter Strike, and to a lesser extent DotA benifit from this is because the items being used in this, are cosmetics in their games. As the only practical way to use these cosmetics (besides selling them) is in-game this encourages players to play the game. For example, if a player wins a jackpot in the casino, they might play a round of Counter Strike to show off their valuable new cosmetic item before the sell it. This adds to the games population and acts to advertising the costmetics in-game.

It absolutely still can, but its not quite as enticing. For example, you open a lootbox, get all the slot machine animations (usually with misleading visuals to play up your odds) and then a glowing red “legendary” item. You don’t know how much its worth without looking it up, but you do still get the risk and payoff regardless. Even if you can’t resell if, it can still be enough for people to get addicted to. If anything, its worse in a lot of new ways because its usually harder to avoid (Ie, mobile or sports games where lootboxes are needed to play the game) and can’t be cashed out. The sunk cost without any way to cash out is often an intentional decision to to help keep users (esspecially those gambling) from leaving. You can see this esspecially in games that go to great lengths to show you your “earnings” at every turn. They’re known as anchor purchases if I remeber right.

I know, I was more expanding on your comment mocking the prevelence and acceptance of gambling by the industry as whole. That said, quite a few other the others do have external markets for selling accounts, often with rare items (from lootbox gambling) being a major factor in the value. I know my War Thunder account is worth well over a grand at this point, for example, because of some of the rare drops I have on it.

And the dark non-secret is that them and basically all the other top-grossing multiplayer games on the list are there because gambling is also their primary source of income.

Basically, the same systems that allow Skin gambling also allow for trading and 3rd party marketplaces. You can’t just disable one without disabling the other. They could ban it on paper but enforcing those bans technically will likely just lead to users/victums lossing more as casinos would be unable to payout owed earnings.

That leaves legal enforcement, but Valve isn’t a government body - they don’t have the authority to investigate these casinos, and have limitted ability to enforce the law. They’re effectively manufacturing poker chips and releasing them into an open market where they don’t have authority (nor should they). Instead, illegal casinos should be investigated and prosecuted by the government - its supposed to be their responsiblity to handle exactly this sort of thing. They have the ability to seize casino property to investigate them or collect information, and the ability to fine them and enforce fines, unlike Valve which can do neither. As even noted in the video, the have sent cease and desist letters in the past, but casinos can changed names, changed owners, ect. and nothing changed.

Edit: For clairity, free trading is what allows these sites to work. Valve will disable account’s ability to trade in some cases such as where their services are directly abused on-platform, but they don’t have access to trade negotiations and things obviously get messy when it comes to trying to mediate bad or unfair deals (such as the case with these casinos.) That means Valve has four options to tackle this:

1. Do nothing.

2. Send cease and desist notices to the casinos and/or persue legal action where possible. This leads to individual casinos closing and then a new one is immediately re-opened to take its place as there isn’t any cost to then.

3. Disable the accounts of these casinos. The problem is that this effectively freezes their cashflow both in and out. Anyone waiting on a cash-out effectively immediatly loses everything, and given the long transaction times and sizes of these casinos, this will likely hurt a lot of victims. At the same time, while they lose some of their assets, casinos can still walk away with a lot of their current profits. This just turns it into a game of whack a mole, where casios pop up, make a small fortune, then get banned and effectivly rugpull their userbase.

4. Disable trading and possibly marketplace, which sucks for regular users and means all sales much go through Valve storefront with no room for competition or price negotiation. No more giving friends spare skins, and no more bypassing Valve’s 5% royalty fee on sales. This also has the same issue as #3.

Or sort phrase. The sort of thing you might introduce a minor character in a book with. Something that would fit in a phrase like, “He was a tall, buff man.”

“Interactive experiences” as pretentious as it sounds, seems to be the the matching general term. Asside from that, simulation, educator, or something like, “interactive video” might apply.

Nah, those are all Indian run. Nigerian scams are more like American scams. I.E. open a church and steal all the money, or become a politician and steal all the money.

You can test the catch rate of illegal or dangerous materials, but this is a measure more of the chance of catching someone once an attack is already prepared and being put into action. Basically, it just measures if its security theatre or not. To know if its effective at preventing attacks, we’d also need to know the number who wanted to attack and decided against it because TSA existed.

Does this “Security Theater” actually scare away a would-be terrorist?

Basically, we can’t answer this because it’d require measuring how many events didn’t happen. I suspect it only really helps reduce improvised, spur-of-the-moment crimes, but then again, the sort of person who would highjack an airliner is usually pretty stupid.

I already do that for pastas and stews, but haven’t found any good keto recipies using it (yet).

Thanks for the advice.

For the time being, we’re trying to transition very gently into keto. It’ll probably be multiple months before we’re trying to maintain a “real” keto diet, so hopefully that will help the side effects or at last provide time to intervene before they become too serious. Worst case, we can stop at whatever point is healthy for us, but we’ll still need recipies to maintain even that compared to our current “rice or potatoes with every meal” diet.

I don’t want or need incentivizing to play a game I enjoy.

The whole point of what I said was that it shouldn’t be an incentive to play the game, it should be an incentive to try new things within the game that you already enjoy, should you chose to.

For example, me and my friend group put 1000+ hours into CS:GO. Almost all of this was in competitve because that is the mode the game is built around and the mode that is considered the “real” game. At the same time, playing the same game day after day, while enjoyable, is also repetitve. When operations (battlepasses with missions) began, we’d organize to complete those tasks as well as playing normal comp. Most only took 15-20 minutes and while the games were less refined, they were still fun and injected some variety into our otherwise repetitive gameplay. The game as a whole was made more fun because the tasks convinced people to leave the better gamemode in favour of adding variety. At the same time, not all of us completed all the tasks, and not all of them were needed for all the battlepass rewards. It was just a way to encourage exploring other parts of the game you might not have touched since you learned the meta, or found your favorite gamemode.