Thats a good point too.

Addict as victim vs Addict as victimizer.

Maybe thats not quite the preferred nomenclature, but yes, its very much worth considering what drives people to addiction, how to potentially help them… but the flip side of that is that addicts tend to be various kinds of awful to the people around them.

You’d ideally need a holistic solution to the entire situation, but that’s often very difficult to pull off, in practice.

Thats a good point, but in my defense, I’d argue thst an alcoholic just is a manipulative narcissist, a flavor of them, just with worse memory and coordination.

Well the good news is:

1. That literally is not your fault.

2. You can learn to gradually undo some of those tendencies, to some extent.

My lemmy instance has a series of random… header quotes, like flavortext in a game loading screen or something.

One of them, which ironically seems to be an apocryphal, misattirubted quote, but is still a good sentiment nonetheless:

“Before you determine that you suffer from depression or low self-esteem, first, make sure that you are not simply surrounded by assholes.”

Hey uh, that second paragraph?

I am not a psychologist, but:

People misread social cues, emotional states, intent, incorrectly ascribe causality of these things, etc., all the time, every single day, constantly, for a wide array of reasons.

https://mindorigins.com/mind-reading-or-mammalian-instinct-why-we-misinterpret-social-cues/

People with low self awareness or high overconfidence just don’t realize that they are.

You actually have to have a significant amount of humility in order to have “high eq”.

People who make an entire personality or significant personality trait out of their infallible ability to read people?

Who will outright tell people: “I know you better than you know you”?

Vast majority of the time, in the vast majority of contexts, such a person is a delusional manipulative narcissist, a cult leader / grifter scam artist type personality.

So, lets say I run a local LLM.

… and pipe it into a 3D avatar/animation rig.

… and… give it the appearance of:

Not really a person who gives a shit about make-up, imo.

… I’m an econometrician by education.

My ‘takes’ have a pretty good track record, but, basically no one ever listens to me, so these days I just laugh…

Yep, dollar’s dying.

… Have you been following the Fed Repo rates in the last couple of weeks?

The Fed is losing control of the bond market, repo rates have been blowing outside of the Fed’s target channels… massive, massive liquidity crunch currently ongoing in the US banking system, because they’re all realizing they’re exposed to … double pledged collateral, or maybe the whole collateralized debt asset security things that people have been making out of!- yep, its not subprime home loans this time, its subprime auto loans!

Defaults and delinquencies are powering up highed and higher for… basically every kind of debt class, Commerical Real Estate market is blowing up…

China has been massively buying gold.

BRICS just rolled out a new intl payment system, based on the Yuan.

Turns out the largest foreign buyer of US debt is actually… the Cayman Islands, ie, US financial firms that are leveraged 100 to 1 on the basis trade.

Fed held a secret meeting on Friday, with a whole bunch of banks, to discuss those cockroaches Jaimie Dimon mentioned a couple weeks back.

… Because the $200T Shadow Banking system is currently completely imploding.

Oh, and Bitcoin is entering full nose dive territory.

Like I said, every one keeps trying to out clever each other, one day, it all breaks, 1929 style.

Took the market 25 years to recover from that one.

Because they know that someone is going to be more clever than them, faster than them, at some point, if they keep trying to do inside moves.

And also because they know that at some point, because of everyone trying to be cleverer and faster than everyone else… one day this is all going to blow up, and all the various kinds of leverage will unwind, and work backwards.

They didn’t say they went 100% into gold, just thst they have a solid chunk in it, as a safety margin / defensive play.

Gold, on the other hand… much, much simpler, in the long term.

Generally less ROI than during a Bull run in the market, but it does always go up, in the long run… beats inflation!

If you see massive volatility in gold, that means some fairly big entities are … rearranging their bets, so to speak.

On that note, here’s the DJIA / Gold:

Trump’s been great for Gold prices, Gold’s gone up more than the stock market has, in his term so far.

HFTs initially existed before AI, they were triggered by what we would now call basically complex, but ‘dumb’ condition sets.

Imagine a cluster fuck nightmare of nested conditonal IF THEN ELSEIF type shit.

They only work because the bigboy trading firms literally have lower latency, lower ping to the actual stock market servers themselves, than anyone else, because they pay for it.

This allows them to do a whole bunch of what should probably be illegal shit, such as effectivelt slightly changing the price someone else is going to buy or sell at, in between the time they click ‘execute trade’ and the time the trade actually executes.

Apply leverage into that kind of pseudo sort of arbitrage as you are comfortable with, and may the speediest fiber line win!

This would be one of the few topics I’d suggest you look at ZeroHedge for, they had actually very robust technical coverage of the Flash Crash back around the GFC.

That was basicslly caused by some of these dumb HFT algos amplifying each other, untill they started breaking things, because they were not coded very well.

They apparently did not realize they were basically making extremely complex PID controllers, that they were making things that, when a bunch of them existed in the same market, would basically cause cascade and crash effects, feedback.

… you know that goldfish, randomly swimming to one side or another of a fish tank…

… you know they perform better at picking stocks that will go up or down in the next quarter than nearly all professional hedge fund managers, right?

In fact, this old expiriment was rerun fairly recently… ironically, with an AI being used to simulate a goldfish, in a scenario similar to that old study from some decades back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/tts0a4/some_theories_on_how_the_goldfish_was_able_to/

The goldfish outperformed both WSB… and the Nasdaq.

I am literally not even joking when I tell you that a goldfish will probably outperform an AI at at least fairly short term stock picking.

See, there is a fundamental problem to predicting the market.

You have to have a strategy by which you do this.

If you employ this strategy… people will reverse engineer it and figure out how it works.

Then, everyone does that strategy.

Then, the strategy does not work any more, ‘nonsense’ begins to happen.

If you are curious about the mechanics that cover that whole, meta sort of process, look into game theory under conditions of imperfect information and information assymetry.

Its… basically a robust mathematical approach to simulating the flux of ‘animal spirits’ within a market… or in modern vernacular, ‘vibes’.

Cry for help, it was trying to get you to interface with its own API, to either fix it, or end it.

Sorry 😜, I was trying to generate a seahorse emoji.

🐬 There we go, a seahorse!

Wait, that’s wrong. Sorry 😜, I was trying to generate a seahorse emoji.

🐳 Haha, got it, its a seahorse!

Oh no, not again. Wait, that’s wrong. Sorry 😜, I was trying to generate a seahorse emoji.

🐙 I finally did it! Seahorse achieved!

No, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I do anything right?. Oh no, not again. Wait, that’s wrong. Sorry 😜, I was trying to generate a seahorse emoji.

Oh I can sing, I just actually know my range, and don’t want to embarass myself trying to sing a song I know I can’t.

And I also don’t want to attempt to explain the concept of vocal range to usually drunk, usually tone deaf people.

Or, I’m uh, too polite to just laugh at you and tell your taste in music sucks.

Doesn’t matter, I live in an ‘apartment’, there’s a dumpster.

… you people all have houses?

Must be old, or lucky.

Yeah lol, here’s a $7k expensed bill, that your insurance covers an unpredictably random amount of, due to hyperbyzantine complexity of billing codes and what not, for ultimately a sterilized suture and some ibuprofen/tylenol, that anyone with basic field medic training could have done in 15 minutes, charged maybe I dunno, $50 - $100 bucks for labor and supplies.

ProTip: Go to a hospital without your wallet or phone, don’t give them your name.

This is the entire fatal conceit/flaw of the US medical system, which private insurance just actually can’t address, I guess maybe unless we also implement a digital panopticon society with biometric ID resolving cameras literally everywhere.

Hah, well, its funny, sometimes its like this singular, weird eye, right in the middle of-

[Leela visibly furrows her… eyebrow?]

Like, one way of emulating this on a mouse and keyboard is what … at least the older Splinter Cell games did, on PC.

WASD for move, but the mouse wheel scroll moves you gradually up or down a speed gradient, your UI has a little bar, I think, that goes either up or down or left or right, to indicate what speed you’re dialed in to.

I have always been confused as to why basically no other PC games do this, especially sneaky games and tactical shooters, nope, they’re all a bunch of state transitions.

Just make it so you can also have button binds that jump between sprint and walk or w/e, 20 and 80 out of 100…

I think… Intruder is like one other PC game that does something like this?

And also adds in a kind of funny ‘balance’ mechanic, where it calcs the width of the surface you are standing/moving on, if the width is too small and your movement or rotational velocity is too high, you have a greater chance of … basically, you make a basketball court sneaker screech sound, and then insta ragdoll, and either trip or fall off what you’re standing on.

Its pretty fucking funny, especially in a small team v team shooter, but it is also designed to basically solve a problem with a lot of brush based shooter maps, which is that there will be some absurd, 5 cm wide ledge that a player can use to obtain a ludicrous postion.

So… this just embraces that and says sure buddy, you can try lol.

It is extremely funny to watch someone try to sprint along a railing and try to then jump to a chandelier or somethjng, only to cause a large squeek sound when they hit they jump button, do half a jump and then ragdoll collapse down the balcony.

Anyway, double tap WASD to either start a sprint or do an evasive dodge or something like that, that I’ve seen in PC games as well, though again, its fairly uncommon…

It really sucks imo, that basically the most fundamental components of most video games, how does the player move through the world… its just like an afterthought these days, no, what we need is either a very basic, simplified standard, or some half busted third person schema that mainly exists to show off all our very fancy graphics stretched over extremely simplistic gameplay.

Blargh.

I kind of don’t understand joy clicks as inputs.

Hey kids, wanna fuck up your sticks and cause drift?

Try clicking them! A lot! All the time!

Along side motions that also require a precise but variable angle on the stick, that’s even better for your controller!

Now, I like the idea of configurable button sets based on which joycon is being touched, i make control configs for my Deck that do shit with that all the time.

But clicking them?

Just no.

At least over with a Deck, we have track pads for that, you can do basically anything with em, use em as a mouse or joy input, map them 4 way or 8 way as more buttons, turn them into a custom menu, just make each one into one big button…

But also, when it comes to running… its an analog stick.

The whole point of an analog stick is… it gets a variable/range strength of 2d inputs.

Its not a dpad with something glued on top of it anymore.

Just make full stick run, semi stick walk, barely any stick just lazily slow creep, or amble.

Or, make a quick double up tap stick transfer you into run mode, which eases off when you pass some threshold near 0.

… there are so many better ways to do ‘make character run’ than ‘jam the stick into itself.’

I agree, which is why I only use the term in a kind of negative reference: this knowledge is evidently not common place.

Err… well ok, unless it is the proper noun form, directly referring to Tom Paine’s revolutionary war era pamphlet… which… I think is the sort of proximal etymylogical / cultural origin of the phrase as we use it today?

Either way, yes, its a bastardized term now, like how ‘literally’ now also means roughly ‘figuratively + extremely’ in certain contexts, from certain speakers.

I think that back in 1770’s English, ‘common’ was also often used to mean something … simple, unremarkable, basic.

Not just uh… plentiful, easily found in many places.

So then, ‘common sense’ would roughly translate to modern English as something like ‘basic logic’.

And to loop that all around, I would say that people who … do not treat driving a car like they are operating a ton or two of mass that can move up to 80 or 120 mph or whatever… you know, as that, well they actually are not excercising what I would call basic logic.