I feel like that’s pretty meaningfully different from the original claim that the US government allows cigarettes to be advertised to children.

Didn’t they close up the loopholes in advertising regulations that Juul exploited?

What? Tobacco is like, the one thing that actually has extremely stringent advertising regulations in the US. When vaping products like Juul came around, they were able to exploit loopholes in those laws, but I think those have pretty much been patched up by now.

As an aside, I always hated how Dems completely caved on the terminology of the ACA. They should’ve been saying the words “Affordable Care Act” at every turn, keeping the actual goal of the whole thing more in the popular consciousness. Going along with calling it “Obamacare” implicitly accepted the GOP’s framing of the bill and allowed them to more easily control the narrative.

The DLC car packs contain exclusive cars that cannot be obtained elsewhere. The weekly cars are often “hard-to-find” in that they are generally not available elsewhere until they re-run them, but apparently, now that the game is late in its content cycle, they’ve also added a “backstage pass” thing recently, which allows for easier acquisition of some previous “hard-to-find” vehicles.

There are a ton of base-game vehicles that are not exclusive to any particular time or event. Many can be obtained in the Autoshow, which you spend in-game credits to buy cars outright, or in wheelspins, which are basically lootboxes, but they hand out free spins like candy, to the point where I never felt any pressure to buy more. Most spin reward cars are pretty cheap on the auction house anyway (which also uses in-game currency, no IRL money or anything).

When did that happen? I thought the paid DLCs were the Hot Wheels and Rally expansions, plus the car packs. I don’t remember them locking out previously free content, unless that happened within the last year or two since I stopped playing…

I actually had a lot of fun at first with FH5 in the exact same position. The unlocks flow fast and there’s a ton of stuff to tinker around with and explore, and the racing itself is very beginner-friendly. The difficulty settings and assists are very granular and can be fine-tuned to suit your skill level.

I particularly appreciated that it avoided a linear progression system and didn’t make you start off on the slowest cars and slowly work your way up to the good ones, as it’ll give you some insane hypercars right off the bat. The upgrade system and vehicle tiering also ensures that the “slower” cars are never truly obsolete. You can drive what your like, and the game never punishes you for it (in singleplayer, at least).

However, once I got through most of the single player content available, I started to sour on it at a certain point. The constant drip feed of new content in the weekly challenges was fun at first, but felt like a chore after a while, and it definitely takes advantage of FOMO, as the new unlocks in a given week are exclusive to that week and can’t be obtained anywhere else, unless buying them from another player at often exorbitant rates. They do re-run previous exclusive vehicles in the secondary challenges sometimes, but there’s no telling how long you’ll have to wait for a particular car to come around again if you miss it the first time.

So yeah, your mileage may vary, so to speak, but I did put something like 300-400 hours into it before I dropped it for good, and I don’t regret most of that.

The Wii might’ve had higher sales at its peak, but PS2 had a lot of longevity.

Every MAGA accusation is a confession.

I was always disappointed that they bound the skillbar to weapon types and removed secondary professions in GW2. The possibilities for character builds were virtually endless in GW1’s system, and you could make your character really feel like your own. I did play GW2 for a while, and it was fun in its own ways, but the original still holds much more nostalgia for me.

AI’s tendency to hallucinate means that for it to be actually reliable, a human needs to double-check all of its output. If it is being used to acquire and convey information of any kind to the prompter, you might as well just skip the AI and find the information manually, as you’d have to do that anyway to validate what it told you.

And AI hallucinations are a side effect of the fundamental way in which generative AI works - they will never be 100% accounted for. When an AI generates text, it is simply predicting what word is likely to come next based on its prompt in relation to its training data. While this predictive ability has become remarkably sophisticated within the last few years (more than I thought it ever would, tbh), it is still only a predictive text generator. It’s not “translating,” “understanding,” or “comprehending” anything about whatever subject it has been asked about - it is merely predicting the likelihood of the next word in its response based on its training data.

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should only be used for art

No, churning out uncanny valley slop built on mass IP theft ain’t it, either. Personally I think AI is best used for simulations and statistical models of engineering problems, where it can iteratively find optimized solutions faster and sometimes more accurately than humans. The focus on “generative AI” and LLMs trying to get computers to act like humans is incredibly pointless, IMO. Let computers do what computers are good at, and humans do what humans are good at.

It’s AI

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1998 and 2004 have strong cases, as other comments have mentioned, but I think 2007 has got to be up there as well. The Orange Box alone was massively influential, even for just the new-to-'07 releases (TF2, Portal, HL2EP2), and was almost entirely unique - I don’t think we’ve really seen anything like it before or since. Beyond that, you have stuff like Halo 3, CoD 4, Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Uncharted, Pokémon Diamond/Pearl, and Guitar Hero 3.

Ohh, that’s probably what it actually is

It looks like “Cream Blindness” to me, not that it makes any more sense…

See the thing about the Epstein thing is that we actually have evidence for it. “Trump staged the shooting” is baseless speculation.