Buttons840 (u/Buttons840)

Buttons840 commented on Rats Play DOOM ratsplaydoom.com/... · Posted by u/ano-ther

theultdev · a day ago

You missed the point. The chips are exchanged for money shortly after. The brain knows this.

Similar to the rat knowing the sugar comes very shortly after the task.

Buttons840 · 20 hours ago

Yep. And money is just another kind of chip. What's so great about money?

Buttons840 commented on Rats Play DOOM ratsplaydoom.com/... · Posted by u/ano-ther

As an evolutionary cousin of a rat, the half-second delay after firing my weapon and the response would make me want to eat my whiskers.

This would completely kill any potential reward (and replace it with the opposite, frustration) you're trying to train me with, please fix immediately.

Buttons840 · 2 days ago

One of the most important traits of intelligence is understanding and appreciating delayed reward.

I saw a gambler win the jackpot. He was really excited and started gathering up all the chips he'd won. Why he was so excited to win a bunch of plastic chips, I'll never know. What's so great about plastic chips? Why was his brain so excited when all he was doing was gathering plastic chips? ...

A half-second delay doesn't mean your brain can't learn to make the precursor feel good.

Buttons840 commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

jimmydddd · 6 days ago

"It does that sometimes." I guess for some reason the minimum wage cashier was not fully invested in maximizing the customer experience.

Buttons840 · 6 days ago

Somehow the entity exploiting both parties of the exchange is not actually present or accountable for anything that happens in the exchange.

Buttons840 commented on · Posted by u/wonderfuly

alexander2002 · 9 days ago

Am I tripping cuz I saw this a while ago

Buttons840 · 9 days ago

You remember correctly: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Buttons840 commented on AI may be scoring your college essay. Welcome to the new era of admissions apnews.com/article/ai-cha... · Posted by u/rawgabbit

Buttons840 · 11 days ago

Pay money to go to a university that's almost entirely run by AI--AI teachers, AI grading--and then use AI to do your assignments. In the end, it's just paying money for a degree, and then the degree is a signal that helps you get a well paid position where you can use AI to do your job.

Buttons840 commented on 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads flowtwo.io/post/on-10-yea... · Posted by u/thejoeflow

Cogito · 13 days ago

It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.

As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.

For example, in the article we have:

If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.

Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.

Buttons840 · 13 days ago

I would have used parenthesis for that example, since it departs and returns to the main line of thought so cleanly.

Buttons840 commented on 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads flowtwo.io/post/on-10-yea... · Posted by u/thejoeflow

namanyayg · 13 days ago

It's a terrible side effect of AI that regular people using em dashes in honest writing are labelled as AI.

I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt.

My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.

Buttons840 · 13 days ago

It's not that hard.

Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)

Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.

Buttons840 commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

LMYahooTFY · 13 days ago

I don't think they're saying cheating doesn't exist for the game, they're saying the popularity/incentive is too low to attract many cheaters compared to esports games.

Buttons840 · 13 days ago

I'm saying they have their fair share of cheating and they have managed to moderate it well without using any form of anti-cheat software.

Of course a small game is going to have fewer cheaters. They have fewer cheaters, but they also have fewer moderators; it's literally like 4 or 5 people doing it in their free time.

Buttons840 commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

ThrowawayR2 · 13 days ago

Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating.

[1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.

Buttons840 · 13 days ago

People have been banned for cheating, so cheats exist.