I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.

And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.

I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.

Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?

I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.

Now I must find this sequel.

Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:

This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.

Time travel!

So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.

Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.

Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:

Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.

even moooore possible endings

No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.

As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

Bleck.

True, but then you have that whole weird… few seconds of being able to move your eyes and possibly make facial expressions while your head rolls around thing haha.

And yes, a properly sharpened, weighted and … drop heighted… guillotine will lop off your head every time.

Takes a fair amount of strength and finesse to chop someones head off on a block. IIIRC, there are more than a couple recorded instances of bad executioners having to make a number of swings to totally off somebody’s head. Bleeeegh.

It isnt so much vaporware as basically massively bad funding model and development practices.

They have software. There is a ‘game’ you can ‘play’.

Its just that its still buggy as fuck and the gameplay doesnt really meaningfully work.

Its… more like an alpha that never stops adding features and content… and as a result, never does a feature lock and actually make what they have into a non buggy, actually compelling game.

A correctly done hanging snaps the neck instantly and is nearly certainly less painful and drawn out than lethal injection. You are basically totally brain dead within I think under 10 seconds.

Obviously an incorrectly done hanging is horrible as you asphyxiate in an extremely painful physical position.

Technically lethal injection methods vary, but the last thing I remember reading about them was… they do not actually render you unconscious and then inject the stuff that kills you.

They render you /paralyzed/, and then inject the stuff that kills you, which more or less make you feel as if your blood is on fire, and this can take up to 2 minutes before it flatlines your heart… brain probably takes longer to die, all in extreme agony.

Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.

Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.

Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).

Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.

The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.

Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.

These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.

Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.

Other than SWGEmu, which … literally emulates it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

No, it isn’t a traditional Chinese recipe, but many American Chinese restaurants have figured out a way to do an analog of it as I described, due to many Americans now expecting it as a basic staple of ‘Chinese food’.

Unless you go to basically a non franchise, non chain, actual asian/chinese restaurant/take out place… yeah basically if you dont do that, you are getting pretty much reconstituted chicken puree doused in… not really even real orange chicken sauce.

As with much modern food in America… its got waaaay more sugar and is missing other vital parts of the original way of making it.

Real orange chicken from a real chinese place tastes significantly different, and varies from place to place if they actually make the sauce on site. Usually a different medley of spices and oils… way more flavorful than extremely sweet orangeness.

Oh yeah, I watched the whole series at one point around 5 years ago. I could do with a refresh, love Adam Curtis!

Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.

Ok, now compare the populations of both places for the category of ‘mammals with chlamydia.’

Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

EDIT

https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.

Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.