Honestly just pile up containers in a cave and store the waste there. It’s highly unlikely you’ll run out of storage before winning the game.

Sure, it’s just important to recognize when abuse happens in the absence of law, and when abuse is law, as it would be for a law targeting Democrats and unmarried explicitly.

While I’m very against the executive order they describe, the headline is misleading:

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

So they can also refuse to treat e.g. republicans and married veterans.

Is RNG always bullshit?

Do you feel like that’s the case in Blue Prince?

To me, the RNG feels fundamental to the puzzling in Blue Prince, not something that could be removed to make a better game. And Blue Prince is undeniably an interesting game.

No, that sounds like a terrible game. How exactly is this relevant?

Well… A puzzle is a challenge. In Blue Prince, part of the challenge is that you need to engage with the clues you have available, not necessarily the clues you hoped for. Removing that challenge is to remove part of the puzzle.

You’re fully within your right to say that’s not your cup of tea, but I think it does contribute something meaningful to the puzzling.

While there is one main goal in front of you, all the shit they pile in front of you is more mystery, the solution of which will carry you closer to your goal.

It’s more like if Obra Dinn randomly had you play an Outer Wilds loop or Chants of Sennaar segment, with all the mysteries tying together.

Thanks for the long reply! To me, there is another element that RNG can add: the challenge of adapting. Think of x-com: you’re immediately told the odds that a shot will succeed, and have to decide whether to take that shot based on that chance and the consequences of it failing.

You know that on average things will work out fairly, but you have to be ready to push the successes without letting failure trip you up.

During most of the game, Blue Prince poses many different puzzles and riddles to you in parallel. If you focus on one thing you’ve had a eureka moment about, you’ll be frustrated with the lack of control, but if you approach the situation holistically, and pursue all puzzles at the same time based on what is available, it’s a very different experience. Your thought processes and realizations are shaped by the randomness of the day.

Furthermore there’s always an interesting strategy element of mitigating the chance by ensuring lots of redraws in different ways, upgrading rooms to serve several purposes, piling up resources between runs etc.

I do think it’s novel and interesting, though not necessarily the best idea in the world. To properly do the holistic approach I mention you need a massive infrastructure of photos and notes to keep track of all the clues you’re pursuing. I wish it had some kind of overview of found documents and clues, though I can see how that’s not so simple to implement for this game in particular.

Do you feel the same about other games that involve random chance, such as roguelikes and RPGs?

What value does such an agreement have? Why is it a problem that there’s a plurality of equivalent understandings? Does that plurality add to or subtract from our understanding of reality?

You say the different interpretations give drastically different pictures of physical reality, but not in an empirical sense. But can we really talk of an empirically unavailable physical reality? If pilot waves, multiverses and wave function collapses all lead to the same empirical reality, does it make any difference to physical reality which one you think about?

It’s not so much that there’s no agreement, it’s that the different understandings all give the same empirical results, so there’s no way to decide on which understanding is “better”.

Settling the argument is a matter of taste, not science. At least for now.

That is a somewhat narrow definition of “why”, I’d say. But indeed, the transition from quantum mechanics to classical mechanics is unclear.

There are several interpretations of quantum mechanics, but they are empirically equivalent, so you can just pick your favourite and move on. That’s not necessarily a big mystery. The math works, as you say, and that’s the whole point of a physical theory.

There are also several interpretations of statistics. Does that mean we don’t understand “why” a dice rolls results with a certain frequency?

Note that superconductivity and the quantum Hall effect are both macroscopic quantum effects, so we do know what a macroscopic quantum system looks like.

Quantum mechanics is extremely logical - we understand the math extremely well, and the math describes reality better than any other theory.

It is, however, not intuitive.

Do you mean “why” as in “why did X cause Y” or as in “why are things the way they are”?

In the former case, quantum mechanics is our most precise theory for coupling causes and effects, predicting the outcome of experiments to an incredible degree.

In the latter case, do we really have a grasp of that for anything? Why is the gravitational constant the value that it is? Why is pi the ratio of a circle’s circumference and it’s diameter? Mostly we ultimately have to say that it is so because we can observe that it is so. For quantum mechanics it is the same.

Or do you mean “why” in some other way?

I’d say we understand quantum mechanics better than most things.

We know more about the behaviour of an electron than we know about the oceans, the Earth, the sun, the weather, the stock market, the human body, prime numbers, and so on.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

Well, nothing increases it, but aren’t there contexts where it is unchanged? Vacuum and single isolated particles don’t increase entropy I suppose.

Local entropy, that is. At a global scale, life increases entropy.

Thank god for fridges

I actually like the lack of aim dot. A lot of the archery feels like it would be sort of trivial with an aim dot?

While it doesn’t make archery feel like real life, it does add to the feeling of starting out as a useless peasant.