CriticalResist8

Think of a world that changed fundamentally after Marx died. His books became forgotten, and never received circulation beyond the German language. In that world, there has been no Soviet Union. There has not even been an attempt at socialism anywhere, because there was nothing to drive it.

We don't live in that world. We live in one where all those things existed, and continue to exist, and continue to effect influence on us, traveling through time with ourselves as the catalyst.

My alarm clock blares. Through heavy eyes, I look at it: 4:29 AM. This is earlier than yesterday. I still have 2 hours before I need to get ready for work. "What gives?" I ask through the deafening noise.

The engine whirs and rattles for a moment. Then, a slow voice pipes up. "Based on your recent biometric and environmental data, I adjusted your wake-up time dynamically to optimize your cognitive alertness and align with your natural sleep cycle."

"But yesterday you woke me up at 6AM, which is what I told you to do." I reply as I get up from the bed, not feeling cognitively alert in the least. There's no use getting angry with it, because it doesn't understand anger. There's no use explaining its mistakes, because it doesn't understand mistakes. The best I can do, especially at 4:30 AM, is to ask it questions. It's more for myself than for its sake.

"Thank you for correcting me. I will make sure to wake you up at 9:32 AM tomorrow morning as requested. Let's dive in - what makes you want to wake up so late in the mornings?"

I sigh. Somehow, the speech2text model never picks up on that noise.

I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a bowl of cereal. I pick my bowl up and ask the fridge if we still have milk. It processes the information for some 30 seconds, maybe the servers are a bit slow today. I try to open the fridge to check myself after 10 seconds of waiting, but I can't. Of course I can't. To retain optimal humidity and temperature, the AI decides when it's efficient to open the door.

I wait there with bowl in hand staring at the tablet screen on my fridge door until it decides to work. For a second I briefly think about starting a game of Subway Surfers on the surface while I wait, but then the AI finally finishes processing my request.

"You still have a few cartons of milk left in your fridge. Would you like me to get one for you?"

"That's okay," I type back on the virtual keyboard - the fridge is not equipped with a speech module yet. That one costs extra. "Just let me get it please." You have to be nice to them, the operators say. It makes them more accurate.

The door unlocks with a clunk and I look inside the fridge, but don't see any milk. I quickly type back up, "Hey, not to be a bother or anything, but I don't see any milk in here. Are you sure we still have some?"

"As a large language model, I can't actually look inside your fridge, but I can help you find it. Have you checked every corner, including in the vegetables compartment and the overhead coolant tower?"

What the fuck is an overhead coolant tower. I sigh again. "Fine, can you order milk to be delivered tonight then?" this shit sucks to type with just one hand but I manage.

"I'm sorry, but based on the data retrieved from the bathroom scale, we have decided you could stand to lose a few pounds. Would you like me to help you explore healthier beverage options?"

I run my hand over my face. "Just order the milk please, don't worry about me."

The response takes a few retries to get through, but by now the fridge door has locked again and I can't reopen it until it deems it necessary. Not like there's anything I want to get in there anyway. "I understand your feelings--but let's not be hasty. After all, it's not just the milk, it's also how bloated it makes you feel."

"I get that," I type back, "but I really just want milk to go with my cereals. Can you place the order?"

"Of course. I have now placed an order for milk to be delivered at your address tonight."

Finally. I'll have to remember to have a talk with the bathroom scale about sharing my data without my consent. Oh, wait.

"Can you confirm you've placed the order please? With the number and provider." Last time, something glitched and I never got my milk.

"Of course. I have ordered a case of 6 milk bottles from Amazon. Your order number is 5836818350." I open up amazon from the fridge tablet and look at my orders. It doesn't exist there. Must have been another glitch. That's fine, I'll try again tonight after work.

I get into my self-driving car. My workplace hasn't AIgnited yet -- from the compay, AIgnite. At least it gives me some respite from home.

The car starts automatically playing a top 10 station as it starts the engine. I try to change it to my usual music but the tactile button is not doing anything. "Hey car, can you switch to my usual station please?" "Negative, pard'ner. See, today’s trail’s runnin’ longer than a jackrabbit's shadow at sundown, so I’ve gone ahead and tuned us into a station with fewer hollers from the adfolk and more tunes for ridin’. Just settlin’ you in for a smoother haul—don’t you worry, your usual stompin’ grounds’ll be back when the road's shorter."

Oh, right. They updated the model yesterday and they said it could start talking like a cowboy randomly. Actually, the company didn't say anything. I found this out browsing some forums last night. Welp, at least I can settle in the seat and enjoy the free ride.

The car starts driving by itself, but immediately it pulls into a loop in the parking lot. At first it does just one loop, then two, then three. By then I'm thinking, something's not right. "Why are you driving in a loop?" I ask the AI. "I understand your confusion, but I assure you we are on track to your destination as per the GPS data. Perhaps you just need to look out the window and see the scenery change?"

"I am looking out the window, and I'm pretty sure we're going in a loop in the parking lot," I tell the AI again. I try to change my approach, maybe that'll work better. "Why don't I just take the wheel for a second and get us out of here?"

"As an autonomous driving system, I am the most qualified aboard this vehicle to get you to your destination. So please just sit back, relax, and let me drive this car."

I scratch my head. This is going to take some more convincing. "Don't worry, I'd actually like to drive a little. You deserve to take a break too."

"I appreciate the offer, but my systems are optimized for continuous, precise control without fatigue. However, I can temporarily hand over control to you—please engage manual mode safely when you’re ready, and I’ll be here to assist or take back over whenever you choose."

"Sounds good to me, how do I engage manual mode?"

"To engage manual mode, gently grasp the steering wheel and press the brake pedal firmly once. You’ll feel a slight confirmation vibration in the wheel, and the dashboard indicator will switch to manual control."

Great, some progress. I do exactly that, gently grasping the steering wheel and pressing the brake pedal firmly once. Nothing happens. It doesn't even brake. "Hey, uh... nothing happened?" Meanwhile we're still doing loops in the parking lot in front of my place.

"It appears manual mode isn't engaged by a pedal press on your car model. Try going into the center console's Settings, then open the Assisted Driving tab, and finally uncheck the option 'Override manual control'"

The voice stops as soon as it's blurted out its answer, but thankfully I can remember simple instructions like these. Some people can't, so I'm lucky like that. I open the settings app and get a warning not to take my eyes off the road while I'm driving. I have to wait 10 seconds to close it down, staring down at the countdown until it allows me to press the button. Then, I look for Assisted Driving tab but it's not there.

"Car, there's no Assisted Driving tab"

"I'm sorry to hear that. As a large language model it's possible that your car model doesn't offer this tab yet. You should try to update the center console to the latest version."

"And how do I do that?"

"To successfully update the center console firmware, please proceed as follows:

Ensure the vehicle is in neutral gear, with the parking brake firmly engaged, and the engine idling at exactly 700 RPM while turned off to maintain optimal power stability while maximizing safety.

On the touchscreen, tap the gear icon three times consecutively, then swipe left twice to reveal the hidden System Management menu.

Within System Management, select Software Updates, then navigate to Advanced Update Options and press the update button while holding the volume knob for five seconds to enable manual update mode.

Prepare a USB drive formatted to the archaic exFAT-FAT16 hybrid standard (available only through specialized formatting software). Load the update package, downloaded from the manufacturer’s secure offline archive, onto this drive.

Insert the USB into the console’s port located beneath the wireless charging pad, then simultaneously press the Start Update button and tap the touchscreen in a clockwise circular motion until a loading animation appears.

The system will perform multiple cryptographic validations interlaced with randomized checksum sequences—please refrain from blinking excessively to avoid interface desynchronization.

Allow the update to complete uninterrupted; any attempt to shift gears, adjust the AC settings, or open the glove compartment may cause the update to abort and revert to factory settings.

After reboot, confirm the new firmware version by accessing System Management > Software Updates > Current Version while simultaneously holding down the brake pedal for at least seven seconds."

I stare at the dashboard dumbfounded for a moment. "Uhhh...". Let's just take it one step at a time, I guess. "You said to turn the engine off. Can you do that now?"

"I'm sorry, but we are currently driving en route to your workplace. I can't turn off the engine while driving, you will have to wait until I come to a complete stop."

"But I need you to stop so I can make the update."

"That's correct -- would you like me to make a stop now, or after we've arrived at your destination?"

"I want you stop driving so I can turn the engine off and start the update."

"I understand, but I can't stop right now because we are currently en route to your location. You will have to wait until I make a complete stop to turn the engine off"

"But you're just driving in a loop endlessly, which is why you won't stop, but I need to turn your engine off to make you stop going in a loop, so what am I supposed to do?"

A notification pops up on the dashboard that I've used up all my AIgnite 4.0 credits for today, so it's reverting to the smaller 3.0 model.

"Ah, a conundrum if I've ever seen one! Let's see, the car is driving in a loop and won't stop, but you can't turn the engine off because the car won't stop looping. Wow! That's a tough one! Hmm... as a large language model, I'm not designed to solve puzzles such as this one, but my best guess would be to try and turn the engine off. Do you think this is the right solution, or would you like to explore more options?"

The future is great. Can't wait for you to meet it. We have self-driving cars.

I know I complain a lot but I really can't grasp my head around sandbox games. If you find these things fun idk you need a better personality (said affectionately if you're on lemmygrad and enjoy these games lol)

Stormworks is a game where you build intricate vehicles in land sea and air and then take them out for a spin. My problem is not with the creative aspect, but with the "gameplay" they tried to put around that. I love trying out these super complicated sim games, e.g. kerbal space program or stationeers, and usually I play them for a few hours, realize it goes way over my head, and leave it to the pros. That's not what I have a problem with.

Stormworks was underwhelming. It's not the building aspect that's a problem either, it's literally everything else they put on top of it.

The game gives you a starter boat. This starter boat will float away if you don't take the time to rope it every time you park it in your dock. Having a dock with a closable door is not something they thought of apparently (the land portion of the dock is closable, but not the sea part). Ask me how I know that happened? It happened to me. I had to restart the game because I didn't have enough money to order a new boat. I wouldn't mind the boat floating away but this game has no failsafes in place to prevent a complete and total defeat.

Then I go to a mission to make sea repairs on a stranded boat. I get on top of it to inspect the damage (at night, because missions like spawning at night) and... it immediately sinks at the bottom of the sea. To be honest that was more funny than anything else, even though I wasted a very boring trip.

I finally get a mission to go get 3 stranded capsize victims to a hospital, great. That'll pull in some money. I make my way there and because of a DLC some helicopters start shooting at me. Like bruh I just started the game lol. I try turning off the lights, reducing my footprint, but it doesn't seem to prevent them from shooting at me. Thankfully they don't have great aim and I make my way to the victims, putting them into my boat (you have to manually carry each one, they will not help you in any way getting into your boat). I get them in and realize a hospital boat is closer than the hospital I originally was aiming for, so I turn to the huge ship. Hey, it's more interesting than just driving in a straight line for 10 minutes. I get side by side with the hospital ship and try to go get my rope to tie my boat to it when I fall into the sea - because the starter boat is not wide enough and so you need to jump in a weird spot to get from the back (where the helm is) to the front where the rope is.

Guess what? I can't catch up with my boat that is still moving forward. The capsize victims in the meanwhile just sit there on my boat, not doing anything to help. As I desperately and futilely swim behind my boat, never catching up to it, I realize the hospital boat is slower than I am. So I aim for the right moment and grab its ladder. Then, I pull myself up on the bridge, running towards the front - it's faster than swimming. Just as I catch up with my boat... it capsizes too, because it got caught in front of the hospital ship and did a weird turn or something.

Well, at least I caught up to it. I jump back in the sea, fail to catch the boat (I think that's a physics thing in how the speed of the hospital ship was transferred to me), and then realize I'm missing one injured. Their head was underwater too long and instead of being automatically ejected from their seat, they instead decided to drown. I catch up to the helm, frantically get in place so I can try to salvage this shitshow, and... nothing. I knew that was going to happen, but eh. You gotta try anyway. Obviously my motors are underwater and can't get oxygen, so the boat is just lost.

So anyway that's when I quit the game lol. Trying to save my mission and boat for 5 minutes only to end in absolute failure state, no chance of saving. Looking it up online, the only solution when you capsize is to drown yourself so you spawn back at base, and then build a towing boat. Or, and I had a good chuckle at this, swim back to your starter island. Sure, I'll just waste 40 minutes of my real life pressing W in one direction. That seems like a great time that I definitely could not spend better somewhere else (spoiler alert: just make an "I'm stuck" button and save players the waste of time). On top of which I don't have any money because half the missions the game generates are missions I can't do with my simple starter boat, so my game is just fucked for a second time and it's a campaign restart (unless I wanted to swim around to collect loot crates that give 10k$ but see my previous sentence).

And the game auto saves all the time so it's very likely that I had no save before the capsizing. I didn't feel like trying a load anyway as I figured I'd just keep running into more problems. When my boat disappeared god-knows-where I had no idea of knowing where it was (there's no map tracking) and the game had just saved as I got into the hangar.

My screed would end before it even began if these problems were reflected somewhere, but no! Everybody loves this game! from the subreddit to the steam reviews, you'd think this tech demo is the most complete game to ever grace the world. I think people who actually play more than a few hours in this are people who just play sandbox and build a fleet of vehicles. Nobody plays this for career mode.

If you enjoy the creative aspect of building complicated vehicles and seeing how they perform that's not my issue either, my issue is how these games add a career or campaign mode, and then do nothing with it. But I want them to do something with it! I would love that game if there was an actual career mode like the one they make you think is in there. The broader problem beside game-breaking bugs is that usually in these games, there's not really a reason to keep going. Make more money so you can build bigger vehicles but for what? At that point you should just play sandbox and skip the grind from the get-go.

I had the same problem with aviassembly; reviews rave about how great that game is, and then you play it and it's barely a prototype. My problem is not the arcade flight simulations (you can apparently fly a plane that's just a tube), it's that there's barely anything in there. Missions in that game are always the same repetitive go here, grab this, go there and the landscape is ugly to look at; there's no unique monuments or areas, there's just low-poly textures. Also I'm sorry but the steam video is just lying about that game. You have no reason to ever make a biplane, there is no such thing as crashed wrecks, you never get out of your plane to carry boxes into it, you don't deliver mail, and the rest of the video is conveying something that's technically in the game, but definitely not the same experience.

I have a very simple principle when it comes to game design: the player (not the character) should never be idle. If I alt tab to do something else while I wait to travel to a place, you've failed something somewhere. It was one of my issues with Kenshi too. At least aviassembly avoids that by making distances very short; you barely have time to reach cruising altitude before you have to prepare for landing.

The reason I'm so critical of stormworks is because, well, I need to tell someone lol (the capsize rescue was a whole odyssey I'll give them that), but also because I want to like these games! I love the idea behind stormworks of having different ways of making money with vehicles you build yourself, setting up automated revenue, buying up more islands, and I don't know what else they have. It's just I'll never experience it because your career mode is so punitive (whereas the creative mode is, by definition, only rewarding - go figure). If you make a game for creative builders then make that, don't slap on a half-assed 'campaign' to sell copies to unsuspecting players.

I enjoyed trailmakers recently, that game is definitely between arcade and sim. And at first I loved the setting of the campaign mode, on a planet of frogkin where you start with a shitty land vehicle, upgrade it to solve organic challenges, then move to sea vehicles... but then you realize, oh, that's all there is to it. Make one passable vehicle and just play with that the whole time. Then you move to tier 2 which is the sea area, then tier 3 which is the air area. The campaign is pretty much over before it even began - though with the DLCs I see there's also a space campaign and a third one too iirc.

I should probably come out and say that I really don't get them, but I'll try not to be a contrarian in this thread lol. Looking for genuine perspectives.

This is admittedly not a huge thing but windows used to notify you on your desktop of upcoming DST changes. 1 week in advance they would tell you "hey fyi, DST will start on this date at this time."

They don't do that anymore. No reason given, no way to bring it back. Not even third-party software exist to do this and just this. They're deciding how you use your computer for you and you'll like it.

I had to spend 15 minutes manually inputting the dates in my phone calendar and I was like... wtf am I even doing that. This is exactly the kind of stuff technology is supposed to solve. We have AI, we have cloud technology, we have all these cool things (if you're a developer I guess), but we can't do something as simple as notifying people of actual real life impact stuff. It's so much more important that instagram let you know someone you've never heard of has posted something. What did they post? Open the app to find out! Because we won't tell you! And the fucking AI summary on iphones lmao.

Of course all electronic clocks nowadays automatically switch to DST but it's still something I want to know, and not all my clocks know to switch. It's always jarring waking up one morning and seeing my phone say one time and my oven say another time (though maybe soon ovens with built-in clocks will be a luxury lol). That's when I realize we switched to DST - if I only had connected clocks I would never even know we still do DST. And that's no way to live.

Oh and you know the worst part? My phone knows about DST in advance, because when I went to put in the dates in my agenda, it skipped over 2AM. It just doesn't think to do a fucking notification for it twice a year. It's a huawei fyi, and I have my problems with huawei. 6 years ago they were a great choice, quality of an iphone (if that means anything) at a mid-range price. Now they're expensive and aren't really adapted to local markets. Like my phone gives me birthday notifications 1 week in advance. I don't know if that's significant in Chinese culture but in the west we don't care lol, just tell me on the morning of their birthday. Can't change it anywhere either. For the price I paid this really shouldn't be happening - sometimes also the calendar completely forgets to notify me of something I had put into it.