I've slept on an Amtrak train before. It wasn't great, you're in a seat the whole way and a lot depends on who you're seated next to, unless you spring for a bed, which substantially increases the cost.
Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called "blobbers," have mostly died out: The classic Bard's Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.
The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.
Along with @maciejwolczyk we've been training a neural network that learns how to play NetHack, an old roguelike game, that looks like in the screenshot. Recently, something unexpected happened.
So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.
Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren't playing on Friday the 13th....
In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...
Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he's seething) entitled "The Man Who Killed Google Search." Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.
It's still easily possible that it's just a coincidence.
B-U-T
The fact that people are going to be very suspicious if whistleblowers die, even if it is purely accidental, is yet another reason not to do terrible corporate things. People will always wonder, and Boeing's management deserves the dark cloud that will now hang over their heads.
Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up.
Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it's made me twitchy.
Frequently image icons stop displaying.
For a long while, every time I've installed Windows on a computer, I've had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar.
I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn't redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area.
Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I'll have to disable it too.
This isn't the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Amtrak Borealis launches, connecting Chicago and Twin Cities – NBC Chicago ( www.nbcchicago.com )
The RPG that inspired Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Demon’s Souls is now more playable than ever - Wizardry! ( www.polygon.com )
So here's a story of, by far, the weirdest bug I've encountered in my CS career. ( threadreaderapp.com )
Along with @maciejwolczyk we've been training a neural network that learns how to play NetHack, an old roguelike game, that looks like in the screenshot. Recently, something unexpected happened.
Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change ( aftermath.site )
Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites ( www.theverge.com )
In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...
With two Boeing whistleblowers dead in one month, either Boeing is actively killing them, or there are enough whistleblowers that this rate of death is not statistically significant
...and I don't know which possibility is the least worrying
Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling ( www.pcgamer.com )
Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining ( www.neowin.net )
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.