Right, but Steam still let’s people who own delisted games download and play them forever. (Well, assuming they’re not live service games with no servers, but that’s not a Valve problem.)
Right, but Steam still let’s people who own delisted games download and play them forever. (Well, assuming they’re not live service games with no servers, but that’s not a Valve problem.)
I have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.
Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing… And despite the massive info dumping, they don’t even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there’s no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the “how to trap” explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.
And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn’t find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it’s playable.
Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it’s not fun. I’m only 3 tutorials + 1 “real” mission into the game, so I’m going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I’m not impressed.
If I’d bought this through Steam, I’d have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.
TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.
Grow: Song of the Evertree has lots of crafting materials, but no money. I haven’t played it much, but it mostly seems to be about gathering daily to grow the Evertree, then using the resources to expand the town.
You can get a cheap mp3 player for literally $5. Digital textbooks can be viewed just fine on a laptop, and schools have hundreds of those.
Smart phones are addiction machines. I’m very glad to see schools banning them. Hopefully, parents take note and realize how harmful they are for child development and start buying them dumb phones instead until they’re older (16+).
I haven’t been following PoE2 very closely, but I hope it plays well on Steam Deck. If it plays well, then I’m going to play the hell out of this…
I just looked it up and I already own it from the Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine. I should play it sometime! Also on sale on GOG rn at a historical low price DRM-free.
I think that’s fine, tbh. Not as many customers will pay $80+ for a subscription. Then companies that sell games with more ethical business models will be more competitive, too.
It seems like the Archive.org .zip dump’s “size” is just 12580366816. I assume that’s bytes, which is only 12½ GB. That seems way too small to include all the romhacks, doesn’t it? I thought a lot created assets and HD textures and such. But that also seems like way too much to just be website data, and most hacks are tiny files.
Does anyone know what’s in that data dump? I’m tempted to download everything, even though I’d only ever use a miniscule percentage of it.
I had completely forgotten about the quest mode and tetronimo ball mode.
I’ve long-ago lost (or sold, maybe?) all my original DS stuff, but it’s nice how cheap and easy it is to buy a used DSi/DS Lite and then get a flash cart or soft mod. I should pull it out and play it again. Highly recommended as a console; the DS has lots of timeless games.
I can’t speak to the US, but that’s not what’s happening in Canada, generally. I hear the UK public system is having difficulties, too, but idk the details.
There are some places in Canada that are struggling, particularly in remote rural areas, Indigenous or not (but even moreso for Indigenous schools for historical inequity issues that we’re working on meaningfully addressing with national Truth and Reconciliation work.)
Teacher:
Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you’ve done a course once, you can coast forever.
Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it’s not done very often.
Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.
Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are “old school” are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.
I recall hearing a story about law enforcement identifying an otherwise-anonymous phone by other phones that pinged the same cell towers at the same times. Essentially, the person had two phones on them, so they were able to uniquely identify the individual based on the shared location history of the two devices.
So there’s that, too, assuming my memory isn’t just some CSI bullshit. (It seems reasonable that this attack vector is technologically possible, though, and it may not matter if it’s legal if the identification technique isn’t used as evidence in court.)
The actual analysis itself makes it clear that the research specifically on cell phone bans is lacking. In particular, of the 1317 studies, only 22 were relevant, more than half of which were Master Degree research projects, not peer-reviewed studies. It’s fair that the evidence for cell phone bans in schools is inconclusive, but that’s because there isn’t enough quality reach yet to draw conclusions.
I was actually referring above to studies on cell phones in general for task success, non-specific to schools.
You’re missing the point entirely, I think.
If you want to learn about the research, Jonathan Haidt’s book includes links to studies on the effects of cell phones. I don’t have time to find the sources for you right now, but you can look there if you want to learn more.
It’s a shame your child’s teacher used the tool incorrectly. That was unprofessional of them.
If it helps, there are people like me running training sessions for educators to let them know what LLMs are (and are not) capable of. The main point I was pushing this year was that LLMs don’t know or understand anything. “The I in LLM stands for Intelligence.”
By age 16, there’s reason to think that youth can handle the addictive nature of phones, with support. Same for adults.
That said, yes, we probably should make dark patterns illegal, in general.
Smart phones in pockets being a problem is supported by robust psychology research. People do the worst at tasks when phones are on the desk in front of them, worse when phones are in their pockets, and best when phones are left in another room even if the devices are turned off, in all cases. It’s even worse if phones are on even without any sort of notification, like vibration. (And, obviously, notifications make things increasingly terrible.)
The research is not at all unclear or anecdotal; it is very strong. Phones are damaging to attention, task completion, and learning. This is established; the only disagreement is to the degree of the effect.
Re: phones in “class”, I think we’re misunderstanding each other due to terminology. Here, “a class” means a single instruction period. I thought you were for banning use during instruction time, but against phones being fully banned at school, but if you mean “class” to be the entire time from first bell to last bell, then we’re in agreement. No smart phones at all during school hours would be a good step.
Hopefully, that might also make parents more aware of the damage smart phones are causing and support a societal move away from giving youth addiction machines.
You’re only considering one narrow use of LLMs (which they’re bad at). They’re great for things like idea generation, formatting, restructuring text, and other uses.
For example, I tend to write at too high a writing level. I know this about myself, but it’s still hard (with my ADHD) to remain mindful of that while also focusing on everything else that crowds my working memory when doing difficult work. I also know that I tend to focus more on what students can improve instead of what they did well.
So ChatGPT is a great tool for me to get a first pass of feedback for students. I can then copy/paste the parts I agree with for praise, then “turd sandwich” my suggestions for improvement in the middle. Or I can use ChatGPT to lower the writing level for me.
For tests, it’s great to get it to generate a list of essay questions. You can feed GPT 4 up to 50 pages of text, too, so the content is usually really accurate if you actually know how to write good prompts.
I could go on. LLMs are a great tool, and teachers are professionals who (I hope) are using it appropriately. (Not just blindly copying/pasting like our students are… But that’s a whole other topic.)
To add to your last point, academics aren’t even the biggest problem: it’s youth mental health that’s in a crisis right now. Focusing on academic “success” itself is a problem. Academics will come if students have mental health and resilience.
They also sold 5 million copies in 3 days, and who knows how many copies since then. They can afford to pay good IP lawyers for a long time, if needed.