Thanks, I’ll check it out!

I tried it and didn’t like it. Maybe I was expecting it to be more like Elder Scrolls games and it’s not; I haven’t played other games in the genre either. The combat felt clunky to me, though I’ve heard that it’s better to think of it as a rhythm game. I like dark fantasy, but didn’t quite connect with the worldbuilding either, maybe because it felt like a zombie game dressed up as fantasy. It’s also a minor thing, but was also obviously made for console and ported to PC so felt a little weird.

There’s !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world, which seems active

Reminds me of this short from a while back. It didn’t quite predict the focus on smaller, cheaper drones, but still pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyMNIFZTQkg

This is also some good context about drones being the future of warfare, including in space. Star Wars having fighters duke it out with human pilots will almost certainly not be a thing:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php

The Godfather basically invented the modern idea of gangsters as sophisticated:

Gangsters reportedly responded enthusiastically to the film. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss in the Gambino crime family, said: “I left the movie stunned … I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt the same way.” According to Anthony Fiato, after seeing the film, Patriarca crime family members Paulie Intiso and Nicky Giso altered their speech patterns to imitate that of Vito Corleone. Intiso was known to swear frequently and use poor grammar, but after seeing the movie, he began to improve his speech and philosophize more. In 2025, The Times reported that recruits to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy are now urged by mafia bosses to watch The Godfather so they can learn the trade and because mafia bosses fear that new recruits “lack a code of honour”.

There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

You might be interested in browsing through this site:

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

It talks about a lot of sci fi tropes from a hard science perspective, and goes over FTL specifically:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

It’s kind of a downer site in some respects because it does a lot of “here’s why your favorite sci fi series is unrealistic”, but in that discussion there’s a lot of looking at interesting tropes and concepts. There’s also a good explainer for FTL specifically here:

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel

Sorry, not a good fit for the community. Politics is generally off-topic here

Here’s a comparison between French and Swedish on a random news story of the day:

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/06/22/le-premier-ministre-britannique-keir-starmer-annonce-sa-demission_6706580_3210.html

Keir Starmer annonce sa démission de son poste de premier ministre du Royaume-Uni

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/keir-starmer-avgar-som-storbritanniens-premiarminister

Keir Starmer avgår som Storbritanniens premiärminister

I can tell it’s about Keir Starmer and being a prime minister, but nothing beyond that (annonce = announce, but that doesn’t help). The French one is a bit worse IMO because of false cognates. He decommissions his son from the post of prime minister of the royal university? I translated it and I was way off. Looked at a few others, and I can see cognates after I translate them to English, but it’s not something I would be able to figure out just by reading it.

I tried translating the sentence to French with a machine translator and it came up with this:

L’hiver rigoureux approche, une tempête de neige va s’abattre. Viens te réfugier dans ma maison bien chauffée, mon ami. Bienvenue ! Viens ici, chante et danse, mange et bois. Voilà ce que j’ai prévu. Nous avons de l’eau, de la bière et du lait tout frais de la vache. Oh, et de la soupe bien chaude !

I would understand “bière” and “soupe” out of all that, I think. There’s cognates in there like mansion/maison, but they’re spelled/pronounced differently enough that I don’t think they’d help.

Generally not, but it’d be interesting to explore how long of an intentionally-constructed text could be considered mutually intelligible. Here’s an example for Germanic languages:

https://linguifex.com/wiki/Literature%3AThe_cold_winter_is_near

The cold winter is near is an example text for Germanic languages written by YouTuber King Ming Lam. It aims to use as much partially or completely mutually intelligible vocabulary between North and West Germanic languages to construct a text that can be understood, if vaguely, by any speaker of a mainstream Germanic language, such as English or German.

Here’s the English text:

The cold winter is near, a snowstorm will come. Come in my warm house, my friend. Welcome! Come here, sing and dance, eat and drink. That is my plan. We have water, beer, and milk fresh from the cow. Oh, and warm soup!

To me, Norwegian is the closest to intelligible as a native English speaker:

Den kalde vinteren er nær, en snøstorm vil komme. Kom inn i mitt varme hus, min venn. Velkommen! Kom her, syng og dans, et og drikk. Dette er min plan. Vi har vann, øl og melk fersk fra kua. Åh, og varm suppe!

I’ve also seen that Frisian is supposed to be most understandable to an English speaker, or at least most historically related. Here’s some samples of that:

• English: The boy stroked the girl about the chin and kissed her on the cheeks.
• Saterland Frisian: Die Wänt strookede dät Wucht uum ju Keeuwe un oapede hier ap do Sooken.
• North Frisian (Mooring dialect): Di dreng aide dåt foomen am dåt kan än mäket har aw da siike.
• North Frisian (Söl’ring dialect): Di Dreeng strekt dit faamen om’t Ken en taatjet höör üp di Sjaken
• West Frisian: De jonge streake it famke om it kin en tute har op 'e wangen.
• Gronings: t Jong fleerde t wicht om kinne tou en smokte heur op wange.
• East Frisian Low Saxon: De Fent straktde dat Wicht um’t Kinn to un tuutjede hör up de Wangen.
• German: Der Junge streichelte das Mädchen ums Kinn und küsste sie auf die Wangen.
• Dutch: De jongen streelde het meisje langs haar kin en kuste haar op de wangen.
• Afrikaans: Die seun streel die meisie oor haar ken en soen haar op die wange.
• Danish: Drengen strøg pigen på hagen og kyssede hende på kinderne.
• Icelandic: Drengurinn strauk stúlkunni um hökuna og kyssti hana á kinnarnar.
• Norwegian (Bokmål): Gutten strøk jenta på haken og kysset henne på kinnene.
• Norwegian (Nynorsk): Guten strauk jenta på haka og kyssa henne på kinna.
• Swedish: Pojken strök flickan över hakan och kysste henne på kinderna.

As an artist? If so, do you have a link?

https://windows93.net/ - Some mad lad implemented a custom parody version of Windows 95 that has a bunch of working applications and emulators. Also, check out !internetisawesome@sh.itjust.works for a lot of similar sites.

I think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn’t change the “experience” of free will. It doesn’t “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observed. It does “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observer, who can now say “This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me”. You and I both think we have free will, because we can’t predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.

Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. “Does something have free will?” requires the follow-up question, “According to whom?”. Just like “I’m far from that rock” requires the followup question, “According to whom?”. The ant might think you’re far from the rock, something else might think you’re near the rock.

To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase “free will” in speech with “unpredictable behavior” without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.

We’re not “relieved” of free will. It’s not an intrinsic property that one “has”. It would be like having “big” or “near”. You don’t “have” big, it’s a relative term.

It’s simply a description of observed behavior. That’s all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.

Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don’t “choose” to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to “pierce the veil” and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.

That’s also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren’t ruled out (though a number of variants have been).

Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn’t.

Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for “I can’t predict the behavior of this thing”. For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.

Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that’s what trips people up so much.

To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can’t hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?

The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn’t, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!

Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. “Of course the first three don’t have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics”

This boils down to the best of all possible worlds argument, already well-skewered in Candide centuries ago.

Why create the world exactly the way it was? Is it impossible to create it, so that of their own free will, one more person makes the “right” choice? That’s some sorry omnipotence if so. If not one person, why not two? And so on, until you face the question of, “Why not create the world so that everyone, of their own free will, makes the ‘right’ decision”.

Calvinists are intellectually brave enough to accept the metaphysical consequences of their beliefs. Others, not so much.

What jurisdiction? In the US, factual information that you simply compile likely isn’t copyrightable, there’s been some court cases about e.g. telephone books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

Won’t stop big companies from harassing you if they feel like it, though. Nintendo is petty enough that they might