And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone’s stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that’s even more entry level than autocross, I’d argue!

We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so ~twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.

(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)

£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don’t tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

I’ve been separating Chris Brown’s music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.

I don’t disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You’re paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)

Unfortunately for her, too. She might be successful, but she seems fucking miserable all the time.

I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• “I want something more friendly than that”
• “less professional”
• “more wonky”
• “less rounded”
• “less uncomfortable”

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

I agree, I had the same thought. And not only is she very pretty, she’s also “believably pretty”; she doesn’t look like a movie star or an unrealistically attractive Instagram model, she looks like someone you could see walking down the street. She’d catch your eye, of course, and probably be the prettiest person you saw that day, but it’s not like some pictures/videos I’ve seen of people where I’ve thought “I’ve never seen someone look that attractive in real life” and there’s a bit of a disconnect because of it.

Using Olga’s likeness, I suspect a lot of people can be fooled into thinking she’s just a regular person who happens to be at the upper end of the attractiveness scale rather than a paid model, and I’m sure they very intentionally decided to steal her likeness for that reason.

I think a lot of people on lemmy use lemmy/kbin/the threadiverse interchangeably. But yeah, I use kbin, too.

I definitely find myself being much, much more active on Discord since the whole reddit thing went down. It has its issues, and it’s not exactly a 1:1 substitution for thread-based forums, but I enjoy the greater sense of community that comes with Discord.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don’t necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there’s less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That’s not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that’s coupled with people wanting simple “explanations” because they don’t understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter’s fault in any way - it’s the immigrants’ fault - but also, they don’t personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it’ll all be solved for them. It’s all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it’s going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

I’m definitely a little confused about Tango - I’m hoping we’ll at least get more details come out about why Microsoft shuttered them. I mean, Ghostwire Tokyo was… whatever, and I could understand Microsoft not wanting to have them working on that kind of scale again any time soon. It wasn’t bad by any means, but it was fairly expensive and perhaps didn’t do as well as they hoped. But I’m surprised they didn’t want to just downsize the studio and aim for another HI-FI Rush-esque game (or sequel).

But Arkane Austin being closed definitely makes sense. Not only was Redfall a disaster, but by the time Redfall released, 70% of the people who’d worked on Prey had left the studio. (Largely because the studio’s president had left the studio just after Prey, I believe, rather than because of the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda.) All that was really left was the name.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

Those and reducing the requirements for the early blinds definitely stand out to me, yeah. Reducing the early blinds is a very good change - I think most of my early losses aren’t necessarily because I’ve played badly, but rather because it’s too early in the run to have found something to build around or to put any combos together. This change makes you less beholden to RNG in the early game, and also allows you to think a little more about your endgame strategy rather than focusing on surviving right now.

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that TalkTV is Rupert Murdoch’s latest outing, and is owned by his News Corp, which also owns The S*n and The Times. It’s no surprise it’s awful.

I agree. As much as I agree with the idea of universal basic income - because I think supporting society while reducing the work necessary is something we should aim for, because it’s the best way to ensure everyone gets a fair lot in life and because I think it’s a necessity with the direction the labour market is heading - this isn’t really the kind of thing I want to see in this community, personally. Hell, UBI doesn’t really have much to do with the thought of “if X is Y% of Z then 1000X is Y% of 1000Z” - it’s just basic maths really (and OP seems to have got the maths wrong, too).

Doesn’t always work.

It doesn’t guarantee people are going to look at you and think you’re a 10/10 because some features are out your control, but the difference between being overweight, poorly-dressed with bad skin, bad hair, etc, and being athletic/toned and well-groomed is huge. And while they might seem like superficial things that you feel you shouldn’t have to do for someone to like you, they also boost your confidence which tends to make you more attractive as a personality, too.

Also this is likely me problem, but how do you get over people being judgemental in gym (about appearance/phyiscal capabilities)? It often scares me off from going to a gym.

This can definitely take a little while to change your mindset on, but the big thing is just realising that no-one actually cares.

• people are there to work out, not to judge others;
• how much do you judge other people in the gym? Very little, I’d assume;
• even if someone is judging you: so what? Does it actually matter what a stranger who you’ll likely never even see again thinks? You’re there to improve yourself, not to worry about their thoughts;
• if someone actually comments to you, you can turn it into a positive thing. Tall them you’re new to the gym and would welcome pointers. Most people who’ll talk to you in the gym are just going to be asking “how long are you going to be using that?” or something similar, though;
• there’s a pretty low chance someone will actually be rude to you, because most people are well aware that everyone starts somewhere, and that if you’re overweight/unfit then being in the gym is you already taking steps to fix that.

And most of those points apply to a lot of things in life - it’s very liberating when you realise that most people don’t really care about what you’re doing and that you should just do what makes you happy.

If it helps, you can also do some research before using the gym so you’re confident about how to use the machines and equipment. It removes that “what if I’m using it wrong and everything thinks I look like an idiot?” aspect for you to worry about.

And if you’re just worried about people judging your weight/fitness, you can exercise outside of the gym. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats, step-ups, etc, are all free and things you can do at home. You can probably find somewhere quiet to go for a run - especially early morning or late evening. Dumbbells are fairly cheap (relative to a gym membership for any extended period of time) and don’t take up much storage space at home; they be used for their own exercises and to enhance other exercises (just adding more weight to your squats, for instance). Resistance bands are another low-cost, low-space option.

So you can either start off exercising at home until you’re comfortable enough to step into a gym, or just keep working out at home and gradually expand your equipment as you see fit. Obviously some of the larger, more expensive machines you find in gyms have their uses - some of them ensure you’re doing the exercise in a healthy way, some of them allow you to work out multiple muscle groups at once that would otherwise be difficult (like the rowing machine), and some of them let you target specific muscles in specific ways - but the things I mentioned above can take you a long way.

The two most important things are just being consistent (so try to get into a routine) and making sure you’re doing it for yourself. Obviously we’re talking about it from a perspective of people finding you more attractive if you’re in good shape, but more important than that is doing it because you want to be happy and healthy - if you can become happy and healthy in yourself then other people finding you attractive will follow eventually.

Anyway, this turned into a bit of an essay but hopefully something I’ve said here has been helpful for you!

I don’t think the Steam Workshop is the issue here. I’m glad it exists, and direct downloads or snv links are still a reasonable alternative for mods that can’t be hosted on the Workshop for whatever reason.

Honestly, most “ugly” people can be reasonably attractive if they get in shape, eat healthily (especially in a way that clears up their skin) and style themselves (clothes, hair, etc) in a way that suits them. Plus finding good angles and lighting for photos/videos, and building up some confidence and charisma for in-person interactions. Those things aren’t necessarily easy and they take patience and commitment, but most people can easily go up a few points on an attractiveness/10 scale if they manage them.

Those are the best kinds of compliments in general, I think, whether it’s a parent complimenting their child, someone flirting, a platonic compliment, or whatever else! Compliment things that are within their control and that they can feel pride over and it feels a lot more meaningful.

It’s okay; I appreciate the apology! :)

I think it’s important to look for the nuance in situations and not treat everything as zero-sum. Both sides can have good points and be open to criticism at the same time (this isn’t an “enlightened centrist” take, I promise!). I think a lot of discussion online does tend to strip away nuance and take the position that if you show any empathy with one side then it means you must hate the other - I do my best to avoid that!