I started playing (from a thread on HN) ~7 years ago. The changes are both broad and deep - devs are not afraid to rework something three times until happy with the outcome. I missed food/hunger entirely but very few players speak highly of it.

There is no difficulty playing previous versions, changing and compiling your own etc etc. Devs are changing the game to be better (in their own view), more fun, more engaging. They should do that! It is a living piece of art imo

Well, players who speak highly of it probably wouldn't play the modern crawl :)

Old Crawl had a lot of systems around food. You had races that were mostly or entirely vegetarian, which made them significantly harder to play in that respect. Then there were the kobolds, which could eat almost anything, the ghouls which didn't even mind rotten chunks - but they had other problems to balance it a bit. You could opt out of the entire hunger system by playing mummies - those went all the way back to Linley Henzell, and he had the philosophy that if you wanted a bit tedious play style, you could have it (mummies were really hard to play, though!). The Hive was a dungeon side branch with a lot of bees and honeycombs, a big breakpoint on the food clock if you weren't one of the carnivorous/saprovorous races, but nasty if you didn't have poison resistance. I think they removed it entirely in modern crawl? They might as well, without food its whole purpose is gone.

Of course the game works fine without food. ToME has no food, and it's fine. But it says something about how much of the original game they ditched.

Most people I've spoken to, even players who long since ditched the game, describe food and hunger as tedium. All sorts of tedious gameplay has been targeted for a variety of reasons - but i freely concede it cost something in terms of story/worldbuilding/etc.

Mummies are still miserable to play, only now they have no upsides at all... xD

Yeah. I'm not sure how a strict reading doesn't end up with obvious policies ending up making all of the policies below "vote buying":

    - Cancel student loans
    - Reduce federal tax rates
    - Increase unemployment/pension/etc payouts

There is always a state of "this policy upside is contingent on voting for me" - though in Trumps case he is making it contingent Not on his own electoral outcome in some sense. Just messy.

As is often the case with our commander in chief, things once expressed subtly are now expressed brazenly.

They basically only did it because the private servers had enough of a userbase that they felt obliged to get that money for themselves afaict

Product Market Fit rarely flatters the egos of visionary product managers.

^^ i think this is pretty fucking insightful, yeah

you can't be the next steve jobs without some acrimonious counterpoint that shows unique and true vision

angels eat that shit up. see also: theranos, et al

I wonder how ICCup was able to stay online for so long? Hosted out of Russia?

In my headcanon it was all born from an experimental show (Big Brother) in around 2000 - which was obviously and intentionally stage managed but otherwise largely genuine behaviours. It took them a couple of seasons to really optimise for the "right" contestants and how to maximise the drama etc etc.

The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo

yeah, I'd agree with that, but the number of shows just exploded after the strike taking them from MTV to mainstream channels.

I saw the same things when the OpenAI Dota bots could eviscerate humans 1v1 - even pros lost!

Until a more average player confuses the AI with an unseen behaviour (pulling creeps between the towers etc) to get an advantage.

We saw this with AlphaStar too, but ultimately it feels like simply an exploit. I expect even a relatively simple modern LLM/model working with the custom transformer would have been able to address these exploits after a game.

I don't think exploit is the right term?

Anyway. Yes if you throw examples into training it will be able to handle the situation - but handling unseen things for me is a key goal.

> The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold.

I will always remember literally stopping mid stride to just stare at a Francis Bacon I'd seen in the corner of my eye in the Tate modern. Slightly later same day I am just staring at Monet lillies bewildered.

I gotta be honest, any time I go back I am disappointed because the same surprise and wonder have simple not been present. Idk

I just request the desktop site, it's fine

> one of the biggest benefits of exercise is the mental growth of learning to accept being uncomfortable.

I claim the same about hunger (within bounds of moderation etc etc). It's simply uncomfortable, but it's a discomfort that you can adapt to and live with. My general view is that both hunger and exercise work as ways to moderate weight but they rely on the exact same capacity for discomfort (and enduring that requires either necessity or motivation/discipline etc)

> I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.

I'm not bothered by the desire to send an informational message to the populace, but the alert is absurd. Sirens going off from a million phones for text that needed to be disseminated within O(day) not O(minutes) - this was patently an inappropriate delivery mechanism.

I have, of course, turned the damned things off on my work phone now too so I shall be blissfully ignorant when the nukes fly.

> It really changes you, to the point that now, when I talk to childless people my age, I feel like we're fundamentally differently.

As a childless person, the inverse is equally true. I have wildly different levels of obligation and constraint - and that difference typically becomes obvious very very quickly. I don't say that as a better/worse, just different.