As a kid, I owned Kings Quest 3 and 5 (side note, KQ5 was available on NES). Both are in the cruel category, and I never met anyone who came close to beating them. They were fun to play occasionally, but the most fun was had by showing to friends and letting them play (everyone was blown away).
Sierra operated a 1-900 tipline (cost $0.75 per minute or similar). I can't imagine anyone beating these games without those tips or tips from a magazine.
I live in the NE and just picked up Lyme for the second time in 3 years. My child and several friends have had it in the past few years. The problem is that some tick species are unbelievably small and easy to miss. With winters not being as cold, they don't die off as much as they traditionally would. I'd hate to move, but if we keep getting infected, it's not out of the question.
This is insightful but entirely tangential to the heart of the quote you posted.
"... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]"
Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy.
This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world."
A warlord from those times would not be reluctant. War was central to life, considered a duty of a leader in those times, but not in the sense of piracy as you put it. To grow and increase wealth was to protect your kingdom and increase odds of surviving not only war but downturns of all types.
I did not read the odyssey yet, but I just finished the illiad and there the Warlords are measured in how much livestock they stole and Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share, which is measured in women.
Hectors wife is worried about her husband, and he tells her, that there is nothing to worry about, when he is dead, because if he dies, the city is sacked and she would become a slave and this would be that and since he would be dead, why should she worry then at all.
Oh and then there is the parley scene, where one of the main points is who gets whoms bronce armour after the duel is over.
What are you even talking about man. I don't know how you misinterpreted that so badly. He is saying yes I might die but if I don't risk my life you will be a slave, so I am going to fight for you:
"And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing: “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the spirit urge me on that way. I've learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory for myself. For in my heart and soul I also know this well: the day will come when sacred Troy must die, Priam must die and all his people with him, Priam who hurls the strong ash spear . . . Even so, it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers in all their numbers, all their gallant courage, may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies — That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears, wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live, laboring at a loom, at another woman's beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting it all the way — the rough yoke of necessity at your neck. And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears, 'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans, long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more, widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough to fight off your day of slavery. No, no, let the earth come piling over my dead body before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!”"
> Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share
He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.
I think you must have skimmed this book very rapidly because you seem to not understand what you read.
> What are you even talking about man. I don't know how you misinterpreted that so badly. He is saying yes I might die but if I don't risk my life you will be a slave, so I am going to fight for you:
In the passage you cited he does not say that he is fighting for her; he is fighting for his honor, the glory of his father. Everything else he states are consequences. He doesn't reassure her, he offers her fate rather than hope.
> He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.
Reasonable if your point in going to war is for riches; they are just a bunch of pirates and bandits, thats my point. Before the Illiad I had the idea of the noble greecs in their shining bronce armour. That was my misconception to be fair. So this was something that got me from the start. The only thing that seems to outweight riches is glory, it seems.
So my reading of the whole thing is, and please correct me if I misunderstood it , that the man fighting these wars are total manicas, they fight for glory, and women and tripods. They choose the best and wised of man (Nestor) on how good a cattle thief he is - ok not entirely he is also valued for his age and eloquence, but he got there beeing a pretty good cattle thief.
They plunder the land and destroy everything around it and themselves. And I think the Illiad backs this up...
yes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.
Actually, I have been wondering to which extend the AI craze has reached the DACH region. I don't work for any company and neither do my friends. HN is essentially my only peephole into the world of commercial software development and I'm aware that it's extremely biased towards Big Tech and SV startup culture.
I work at a hosting provider that has pretty conservative customers who don't want to host on AWS/Azure due to data privacy / safety concerns, among other things.
For us, sending customer data to the US is a big no-go.
We have been experimenting with LLM usage, first through a Gemini subscription, then also with the Claude API. Participation has been lightly encouraged by management. As for coding, we haven't let the LLMs loose on our core components, but tooling on the fringes (like deployment scripts, reporting) has seen some uptick in LLM usage.
We have also started building an on-premise inference cluster, which is in alpha testing, and where the "don't include customer data" restriction doesn't apply anymore.
do you mean this aesthetically or quantitatively? Are they actually outcompeting / making more money ? Or do you mean they are now looking more desirable because their competitors are racing to the bottom (though likely making money on the way down)
It is absolutely going to be a competitive advantage if it isn't already. When your competitors' products suck because they are using LLMs to write them, and yours work because you aren't, customers notice.
Every power user of LLMs thinks that they are the ones that know how to hold it correctly, in reality they usually have major Dunning Kruger and are convinced they're living in some hyper productivity mode when actually they're all just copying each other making low effort slop that all sounds the same, looks the same and does the same things.
For the record, the comment you deleted was something to the effect of:
checks notes
The company you work for is committing genocide. You should be locked up in a concrete cell for 10-15 years for working at <wrong robotics company because you're a dufus>
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Maybe get better notes? Or try going offline for 10-15 years?
No offense, but if you think your using AI in the development and design of your site, voxos.ai , gave you a competitive advantage it didn't. I can instantly tell when someone used an LLM to build their whole site and lets just say... Its not a good thing.
I'm not even trying to be mean, although it probably comes off that way. I'm just saying we live in a world with handmade watches from Switzerland and mass manufactured watches made in Vietnam. Nobody cares about the mass manufactured watch from Vietnam, whereas the handmade watch gets all the attention (and money). We now live in a world with the same dichotomy of software. Be creative with your pursuits, put effort into them it will pay off.
PSA: You don't need a Costco membership to buy from Costco.com. You pay a surcharge of 5%. A membership is $60, so if you spend less than $1200/yr on their website, it's better not to buy one.
Sierra operated a 1-900 tipline (cost $0.75 per minute or similar). I can't imagine anyone beating these games without those tips or tips from a magazine.