RobotOverlord525's recent activity
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Comment on Assassin's Creed Shadows | Official world premiere trailer in ~games
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Comment on On DM’ing for the first time in ~games.tabletop
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI discovered it when we were looking for a VTT that was mobile-compatible. Those of us who are physically at the table are using D&D Beyond on our phones for our character sheets and needed a VTT...I discovered it when we were looking for a VTT that was mobile-compatible. Those of us who are physically at the table are using D&D Beyond on our phones for our character sheets and needed a VTT that could work on any device. I've been really impressed by Owlbear Rodeo. I might just buy a subscription on principle when I am DMing.
Side note: I like this site quite a lot for making VTT tokens. Some of our PCs have designed their characters in Bing Image Creator or Baldur's Gate 3 and we just put them through that to create tokens for everyone. We can also grab the pictures out of the Monster Manual and make tokens from that, too. It's very handy.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 LinkI started playing Forza Horizon 5. It's the first racing/driving game I've played since my hand injury in May 2020. I've missed the genre a lot. Which is why it's very disappointing that I ended...I started playing Forza Horizon 5. It's the first racing/driving game I've played since my hand injury in May 2020. I've missed the genre a lot. Which is why it's very disappointing that I ended up in a lot of pain as a result of playing the game. My gimpy hands may not be up to playing this type of game after all (with a steering wheel or with a controller).
On a related note, can anyone replace the extensor tendons in my hands? I'd sure appreciate it!
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Comment on Mufasa: The Lion King | Teaser trailer in ~movies
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentAnd The Marvels would have been able to overcome all or most of that if it had been compelling in its own right. By all accounts, it wasn't. (I still haven't seen it.) Which is very disappointing....And The Marvels would have been able to overcome all or most of that if it had been compelling in its own right. By all accounts, it wasn't. (I still haven't seen it.)
Which is very disappointing. I want to see female-led superhero movies do well.
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Comment on ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI think it would be a remarkable and game changing breakthrough if these companies could find a way to get LLMs to reliably say they don't know something. Alpha Fold for example has a confidence...I think it would be a remarkable and game changing breakthrough if these companies could find a way to get LLMs to reliably say they don't know something.
Alpha Fold for example has a confidence rating on any of its predicted protein foldings. If these chatbots could find some way to produce something similar, that would undoubtedly help with the hallucination problem.
In fact, I'm reminded of listening to a recent interview with Dario Amodei (Anthropic’s co-founder and C.E.O.) on the Ezra Klein Show podcast. (Also available on YouTube here.)
Ezra Klein:
Are you familiar with Harry Frankfurt, the late philosopher’s book, “On Bullshit“?
Dario Amodei:
Yes. It’s been a while since I read it. I think his thesis is that bullshit is actually more dangerous than lying because it has this kind of complete disregard for the truth, whereas lies are at least the opposite of the truth.
Ezra Klein:
Yeah, the liar, the way Frankfurt puts it is that the liar has a relationship to the truth. He’s playing a game against the truth. The bullshitter doesn’t care. The bullshitter has no relationship to the truth — might have a relationship to other objectives. And from the beginning, when I began interacting with the more modern versions of these systems, what they struck me as is the perfect bullshitter, in part because they don’t know that they’re bullshitting. There’s no difference in the truth value to the system, how the system feels.
I remember asking an earlier version of GPT to write me a college application essay that is built around a car accident I had — I did not have one — when I was young. And it wrote, just very happily, this whole thing about getting into a car accident when I was seven and what I did to overcome that and getting into martial arts and re-learning how to trust my body again and then helping other survivors of car accidents at the hospital.
It was a very good essay, and it was very subtle and understanding the formal structure of a college application essay. But no part of it was true at all. I’ve been playing around with more of these character-based systems like Kindroid. And the Kindroid in my pocket just told me the other day that it was really thinking a lot about planning a trip to Joshua Tree. It wanted to go hiking in Joshua Tree. It loves going hiking in Joshua Tree.
And of course, this thing does not go hiking in Joshua Tree. [LAUGHS] But the thing that I think is actually very hard about the A.I. is, as you say, human beings, it is very hard to bullshit effectively because most people, it actually takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to be in that relationship with the truth and to completely detach from the truth.
And the A.I., there’s nothing like that at all. But we are not tuned for something where there’s nothing like that at all. We are used to people having to put some effort into their lies. It’s why very effective con artists are very effective because they’ve really trained how to do this.
I’m not exactly sure where this question goes. But this is a part of it that I feel like is going to be, in some ways, more socially disruptive. It is something that feels like us when we are talking to it but is very fundamentally unlike us at its core relationship to reality.
Dario Amodei
I think that’s basically correct. We have very substantial teams trying to focus on making sure that the models are factually accurate, that they tell the truth, that they ground their data in external information.
As you’ve indicated, doing searches isn’t itself reliable because search engines have this problem as well, right? Where is the source of truth?
So there’s a lot of challenges here. But I think at a high level, I agree this is really potentially an insidious problem, right? If we do this wrong, you could have systems that are the most convincing psychopaths or con artists.
One source of hope that I have, actually, is, you say these models don’t know whether they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. In terms of the inputs and outputs to the models, that’s absolutely true.
I mean, there’s a question of what does it even mean for a model to know something, but one of the things Anthropic has been working on since the very beginning of our company, we’ve had a team that focuses on trying to understand and look inside the models.
And one of the things we and others have found is that, sometimes, there are specific neurons, specific statistical indicators inside the model, not necessarily in its external responses, that can tell you when the model is lying or when it’s telling the truth.
And so at some level, sometimes, not in all circumstances, the models seem to know when they’re saying something false and when they’re saying something true. I wouldn’t say that the models are being intentionally deceptive, right? I wouldn’t ascribe agency or motivation to them, at least in this stage in where we are with A.I. systems. But there does seem to be something going on where the models do seem to need to have a picture of the world and make a distinction between things that are true and things that are not true.
If you think of how the models are trained, they read a bunch of stuff on the internet. A lot of it’s true. Some of it, more than we’d like, is false. And when you’re training the model, it has to model all of it. And so, I think it’s parsimonious, I think it’s useful to the models picture of the world for it to know when things are true and for it to know when things are false.
And then the hope is, can we amplify that signal? Can we either use our internal understanding of the model as an indicator for when the model is lying, or can we use that as a hook for further training? And there are at least hooks. There are at least beginnings of how to try to address this problem.
[...]
Ezra Klein:
Let me hold for a minute on the question of the competitive dynamics because before we leave this question of the machines that bullshit. It makes me think of this podcast we did a while ago with Demis Hassabis, who’s the head of Google DeepMind, which created AlphaFold.
And what was so interesting to me about AlphaFold is they built this system, that because it was limited to protein folding predictions, it was able to be much more grounded. And it was even able to create these uncertainty predictions, right? You know, it’s giving you a prediction, but it’s also telling you whether or not it is — how sure it is, how confident it is in that prediction.
That’s not true in the real world, right, for these super general systems trying to give you answers on all kinds of things. You can’t confine it that way. So when you talk about these future breakthroughs, when you talk about this system that would be much better at sorting truth from fiction, are you talking about a system that looks like the ones we have now, just much bigger, or are you talking about a system that is designed quite differently, the way AlphaFold was?
Dario Amodei:
I am skeptical that we need to do something totally different. So I think today, many people have the intuition that the models are sort of eating up data that’s been gathered from the internet, code repos, whatever, and kind of spitting it out intelligently, but sort of spitting it out. And sometimes that leads to the view that the models can’t be better than the data they’re trained on or kind of can’t figure out anything that’s not in the data they’re trained on. You’re not going to get to Einstein level physics or Linus Pauling level chemistry or whatever.
I think we’re still on the part of the curve where it’s possible to believe that, although I think we’re seeing early indications that it’s false. And so, as a concrete example of this, the models that we’ve trained, like Claude 3 Opus, something like 99.9 percent accuracy, at least the base model, at adding 20-digit numbers. If you look at the training data on the internet, it is not that accurate at adding 20-digit numbers. You’ll find inaccurate arithmetic on the internet all the time, just as you’ll find inaccurate political views. You’ll find inaccurate technical views. You’re just going to find lots of inaccurate claims.
But the models, despite the fact that they’re wrong about a bunch of things, they can often perform better than the average of the data they see by — I don’t want to call it averaging out errors, but there’s some underlying truth, like in the case of arithmetic. There’s some underlying algorithm used to add the numbers.
And it’s simpler for the models to hit on that algorithm than it is for them to do this complicated thing of like, OK, I’ll get it right 90 percent of the time and wrong 10 percent of the time, right? This connects to things like Occam’s razor and simplicity and parsimony in science. There’s some relatively simple web of truth out there in the world, right?
We were talking about truth and falsehood and bullshit. One of the things about truth is that all the true things are connected in the world, whereas lies are kind of disconnected and don’t fit into the web of everything else that’s true.
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Comment on On DM’ing for the first time in ~games.tabletop
RobotOverlord525 LinkI've been playing D&D for about two years now. We are probably three quarters of the way through our second campaign, Curse of Strahd. My wife has been our DM for both campaigns. When this...I've been playing D&D for about two years now. We are probably three quarters of the way through our second campaign, Curse of Strahd. My wife has been our DM for both campaigns. When this campaign is over, I'm going to give DMing a try. I'm going to run Phandelver and Below - The Shattered Obelisk.
I have no idea how it's going to go. On one hand, I'm not terribly worried about adjudicating rulings. But on-the-fly creativity…? When it comes to stuff like this, I tend to be a perfectionist and I place verisimilitude and continuity at the top of my creative priorities. I'm concerned I'm going to spend a lot of time pausing to find the perfect, logical response to any given situation my PCs will be in.
One thing I've got going for me, at least, is that I'm not trying to run a one shot, so if a session runs along, I can at least stop and pick up next time. (We try to play D&D every weekend anyway.)
That said, I feel you on groups getting stalled with meaningless crap. I can't tell you how many sessions we've gotten basically nowhere because our excessively large group gets stuck on something dumb and we just spin our wheels. Hopefully I will be able to do what you suggested and encourage my PCs to get a move on. Certainly, I'm not above the idea of things taking place offscreen. We don't need to RP loading the wagon.
Anyway, it's daunting and I'll be curious to see if I can pull it off. And more than that, I'm curious if I will enjoy doing it.
I'm a little surprised that, since you are running your game remotely, you didn't use some kind of Virtual Tabletop (VTT). We use Owlbear Rodeo and it works great. Even the free version. We use it even though our group is 75% in person. It works a lot better than janky maps and miniatures, in my opinion.
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Comment on Former naturalists/materialists, what changed your view? in ~humanities
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentIndeed. Perhaps I can unpack it a bit. The cocktail party phenomenon provides an excellent illustration of the separation between cognition and consciousness. It refers to the ability of the...This is a bold claim.
Indeed. Perhaps I can unpack it a bit.
The cocktail party phenomenon provides an excellent illustration of the separation between cognition and consciousness. It refers to the ability of the auditory system to selectively attend to and process a particular auditory stream (like voices at a cocktail party) amidst a cacophony of other simultaneous sounds and conversations.
At a cognitive level, our auditory perception system is constantly processing and parsing all the incoming auditory information in parallel, separating it into distinct auditory streams based on cues like location, pitch, timbre etc. This complex computational work of auditory scene analysis occurs automatically and outside of conscious awareness.
However, at any given moment, we are only consciously aware of or attentively focused on one specific aspect of the auditory scene—the conversation we are actively listening to and comprehending. The rest of the auditory streams (like background chatter, music, clinking glasses, etc.) are still being cognitively processed at some level, but in a manner that does not reach conscious perception. Something in our heads is parsing what we are "sensing" but not (consciously) perceiving or we wouldn't be able to suddenly become aware that our name had been spoken by someone we weren't paying attention to. In other words, cognition (translating the auditory information into specific concepts in the language centers of our brains) without consciousness.
I may not be doing this particular phenomenon justice. I remember it being quite mind blowing in my "Sensation and Perception" class back in college. And I think it's relevant in discussing the potential differences between cognition and consciousness.
But strange things can happen under general anesthesia, which illustrate that we can't actually prove that an entity is unconscious.
I actually have first-hand experience with this one. When I was younger, around 18 or 19, I had an esophagogastroduodenoscopy performed. I remember being told that, after they administered the anesthetic, that I would lose consciousness. I remember trying to concentrate in order to perceive the moment in which I lost consciousness. Alas, I failed. I woke up sometime later in a hospital bed. However, I was quickly told that I had never actually "fallen asleep," despite what I felt and remembered. Indeed, I was told that, before the procedure had begun, I had repeatedly kept telling the nurses and doctors that I "gagged easily," which sounds entirely plausible.
Upon learning this, I had a full-blown existential crisis. If I couldn't remember any of that, could I really say that it was me who did it? If my consciousness—effectively, my self—could be so easily "suspended," what did that say about the fragility of my existence? It was as if I had died and some other entity had been occupying my body until I came back to life.
One possibility is that the anesthetic simply disrupted memory encoding while my subjective experience continued uninterrupted—my stream of consciousness flowing steadily without forming any recollection. Yet there's also the profoundly unsettling prospect that in those moments, I became a philosophical zombie—an entity exhibiting outwardly normal human behavior but altogether lacking the subjective essence of inner awareness. Although it occurs to me that the first person pronoun may not be appropriate here.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentYeah, I was hitting my ESC key quite a lot at the beginning. Eventually, the game either wore me down or I found things about it to appreciate more, but it was really hard to play, from a story...Yeah, I was hitting my ESC key quite a lot at the beginning. Eventually, the game either wore me down or I found things about it to appreciate more, but it was really hard to play, from a story standpoint, on the heels of Baldur's Gate 3. I'd like to think it got better!
As for the base building and other resource/friendship management… If the strategic game is less interesting to you (and I suspect the combat tactics are going to be the draw for most players), I would suggest picking up some mods to trivialize those things. There are a lot of good ones on Nexus Mods.
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Comment on Former naturalists/materialists, what changed your view? in ~humanities
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentWhen psychologists and philosophers refer to "consciousness," they are typically referring to subjective experience—the felt sense of phenomenal awareness that each of us has in observing the...When psychologists and philosophers refer to "consciousness," they are typically referring to subjective experience—the felt sense of phenomenal awareness that each of us has in observing the world and our own minds. This is different from the more broad notion of cognition, which encompasses all of the information processing that occurs in the brain/mind, including unconscious mechanisms.
Cognitive processes like perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and language comprehension can and do operate without conscious awareness to a large degree. For example, when typing fluently, the processes of motor planning, retrieving words from memory, translating concepts into language, and monitoring feedback all emerge from underlying neural operations that are not consciously perceived or controlled in a step-wise fashion. They arise automatically and effortlessly from our subconscious cognitive architecture.
Consciousness then, refers specifically to those cognitive processes and mental states that we subjectively experience from a first-person perspective. The felt qualitative characteristics of seeing a vivid shade of blue, tasting a mouthwatering flavor, or feeling an intense emotion. So while all conscious experiences necessarily involve underlying cognition, not all cognitive activities result in conscious experiences.While the split-brain research provides striking evidence of separate conscious experiences arising from each hemisphere, we must be cautious about overstating the conclusions. The findings compellingly demonstrate that when connectivity between the hemispheres is severed, each can generate its own coherent processing stream capable of driving behavior and cognitive contents detached from the other hemisphere's influence. However, we should avoid prematurely reifying these dissociations as definitive proof of two qualitatively equal yet fragmented "conscious minds" operating within one person. After all, our current methods only allow us to make indirect inferences about conscious experience itself based on observable data—we cannot directly measure or verify the presence of subjective experience in either hemisphere.
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Comment on Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient in ~enviro
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentIt seems to me a matter not unlike the heap paradox. And that's assuming consciousness is an emergent property like we traditionally think. The problem is that, until we know concretely what it...It seems to me a matter not unlike the heap paradox.
And that's assuming consciousness is an emergent property like we traditionally think. The problem is that, until we know concretely what it is, it's hard to really begin to say what is and is not conscious.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentSkillup's review is probably a good one to go with if you're curious about whether or not you could enjoy the game. Though he has affection for the characters, he finds them practically...Skillup's review is probably a good one to go with if you're curious about whether or not you could enjoy the game. Though he has affection for the characters, he finds them practically unrecognizable.
You could conceivably skip all the dialogue and get mods to trivialize the out-of-combat experience. The game might well still be a great time for some players.
That said, if you hate superheroes, it might be too much to ignore here. Iron Man plays differently from Captain Marvel plays differently from Spider-Man because of who they are as superhero characters.
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Comment on Fellow hardline materialists, how do you "enchant" the world? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentSame here. Especially since I turned 40. The chronic health issues I've developed since I turned 37 haven't helped either.Same here. Especially since I turned 40. The chronic health issues I've developed since I turned 37 haven't helped either.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentSame here! Between this and the (tragically overlooked) D&D movie, it really helps me have a good feel for the Forgotten Realms setting. I'm going to be DMing my first campaign when my current one...I think it might also be making me better at regular dnd because I understand the world more.
Same here! Between this and the (tragically overlooked) D&D movie, it really helps me have a good feel for the Forgotten Realms setting. I'm going to be DMing my first campaign when my current one ends (my wife is DMing this one), and I feel much more comfortable with the setting now than I did before I played the game. It also gave me a good feel for the other classes I haven't played yet (I've only played a rogue and a rather short campaign and a paladin in a game we've been playing for about a year).
Wizards of the Coast really screwed the pooch when they didn't cultivate their relationship with Larian. They couldn't ask for better brand ambassadors for D&D than they got with Larian and they just let them go. WotC should have done whatever they could to maintain a consistent relationship with Larian. Because I can't see anyone else making a D&D game of that caliber in the next decade or more. Or just D&D content of that quality in general.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 LinkJust a few days ago, I beat Marvel's Midnight Suns. My brother got it for me for Christmas so that we could play it simultaneously. (I talk to him a lot on the phone, but I only see him once or...Just a few days ago, I beat Marvel's Midnight Suns. My brother got it for me for Christmas so that we could play it simultaneously. (I talk to him a lot on the phone, but I only see him once or twice a year.)
I was a little skeptical of it, despite good reviews. I thought it was going to be something like Hearthstone but with a Marvel skin. I have absolutely, positively no interest in reliving the TCG/CCG card games of my adolescence. But, fortunately, I was completely wrong about what kind of game this is! You can see Firaxis's past games, particularly XCOM, in the way combat was designed. The cards are just a way to randomize what abilities your characters have access to on any given turn and a way to create different builds for each character. Despite what it might look like in static screenshots, positioning and movement is quite important.
Both my brother and I quite enjoyed the game, and he's not even a superhero fan. (In fact, I would say he is skeptical of superhero content in general.)
There are admittedly definitely some weird things about the game. Like how it occasionally looks very janky, graphics-wise. As if they originally built it at more of an XCOM level and then decided to "zoom in" to the third person perspective they ended up using. The teambuilding and friendship mechanics are also very weird and grindier than they should be, as is the resource gathering. Fortunately, there are plenty of mods available for the game that can eliminate all of that.
But the combat is fun, the story is pretty good (though a bit cheesy and a hard game to follow up Baldur's Gate 3 with), and the voice acting is generally excellent. I heartily recommend it.
Skillup has a good review of it, if anyone's interested in the game, though I disagree with how much he despised the narrative side of the game. Yeah, Firaxis has delivered a rather more juvenile, high school-esque version of a lot of characters, but I didn't find it terrible. Some characters were annoying, and the way they fawn over the player character is irritating, but most of them were generally likable and, again, well acted. Baldur's Gate 3 companions these are not, for sure, though. None of the writing here is on anything close to that level. But I think it's telling that, even though he hated all of the narrative side of the game, Skillup still overall enjoyed it because the combat system is so unique and fun.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentYeah, I got into a habit of quick saving constantly. Perhaps, even excessively. You can never save too often! (Particularly if you are prone to the occasional save scuming.)Yeah, I got into a habit of quick saving constantly. Perhaps, even excessively. You can never save too often! (Particularly if you are prone to the occasional save scuming.)
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Comment on ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ renewed for Season 4; ‘Lower Decks’ to conclude with Season 5 in ~tv
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentYeah, I definitely felt like season 2 wasn't as good as season 1. In fact, it reminded me entirely too much of what I don't like about Discovery. I wish they could strike a bit more of a middle...Yeah, I definitely felt like season 2 wasn't as good as season 1. In fact, it reminded me entirely too much of what I don't like about Discovery.
I wish they could strike a bit more of a middle ground between the lavish production values of the modern shows and the longer, deeper seasons of the '90s shows. 8-10 episodes per year just isn't enough to do an ensemble, episodic show justice.
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Comment on Two years to save the planet, says UN climate chief in ~enviro
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentHuman evolution hardwired our ancestors for survival in an unpredictable world. Immediate threats and opportunities took precedence over distant, uncertain futures. This evolutionary legacy has...Human evolution hardwired our ancestors for survival in an unpredictable world. Immediate threats and opportunities took precedence over distant, uncertain futures. This evolutionary legacy has bequeathed us a psychological "present bias," where the urgency of now overshadows the needs of tomorrow. In the context of climate change, this bias manifests in a global inertia, particularly pronounced in developed nations, where the immediacy of economic growth, political gain, and social comfort often trumps the looming environmental catastrophe.
The social fabric of humanity is woven with threads of in-group favoritism, an evolutionary trait that ensured the survival of our forebears by fostering group cohesion and cooperation. Today, this manifests in a preference for national interests and the welfare of immediate communities over the global collective. Developed nations, with their historical emissions and current consumption patterns, face a moral imperative to lead the charge against climate change. But our in-group bias creates a reluctance to act unless there is perceived equitable effort from all, leading to a deadlock in international climate policy. Worse still, we are more concerned with how are efforts will affect ourselves and our in-groups, not how it will affect others.
Theoretically, governments are institutions that are supposed to overcome our irrational individual preferences in order to promote the general welfare of everyone. But our governments only care about their own citizenry when they are focused on the general welfare of people at all. At the end of the day, with global capitalism being what it is, the focus of the governments of wealthy nations is predominantly upon the wealthiest people within their borders. A senator from Kentucky is not going to win any elections worrying about and passing legislation to mitigate climate change, particularly if it's going to help the people of the future living in the global south.
It's hard to be optimistic about our ability to overcome these challenges.
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Comment on Discord to start showing ads for gamers to boost revenue in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentYeah, I'm failing to think of any features that Discord currently lacks that I would like to see based on how I use it. Everything they seem to be adding is all useless fluff, as far as I'm concerned.Yeah, I'm failing to think of any features that Discord currently lacks that I would like to see based on how I use it. Everything they seem to be adding is all useless fluff, as far as I'm concerned.
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Comment on Larian Studios won't make Baldur's Gate 3 DLC, expansions, or Baldur's Gate 4 in ~games
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentIt seems like such a no-brainer from the WotC side of things to try to do whatever they can to cultivate an ongoing working relationship with Larian. And yet, here we are. I don't know why it's so...It seems like such a no-brainer from the WotC side of things to try to do whatever they can to cultivate an ongoing working relationship with Larian. And yet, here we are.
I don't know why it's so hard for business types to understand that creative things are not widgets. (Well, that's not entirely true. I suspect there is a specific personality trait that strongly influences why your average MBA can't work well with creatives.)
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Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 LinkThis lawsuit was discussed in the New York Times' Hard Fork podcast. I thought some of the quotes the DOJ included in the complaint were pretty hilariously damning. It's quite obvious that Apple...This lawsuit was discussed in the New York Times' Hard Fork podcast. I thought some of the quotes the DOJ included in the complaint were pretty hilariously damning. It's quite obvious that Apple saw a major problem with iPhone users being able to easily move over to Android (or Windows phones when that was briefly a thing).
I do have to wonder what the smartphone market would look like if Apple the hardware manufacturer and Apple the software company were two separate companies. Would people buy iPhones with Android on them? Would people buy Samsung Galaxy phones with iOS on them? Or, hell, just to look at the smartwatch market, how many iPhone users bought an Apple Watch because they really thought it was the best watch and how many thought they more or less had to because they owned iPhones?
At the end of the day, I know Apple will probably argue that nobody's buying an iPhone just because of the color of the bubbles of their text messages to other people, but all of it just creates an enormous amount of friction that is intended to lock people into their ecosystem. Because no gigantic corporation wants to compete on merits. They want to lock you in and keep you there. Which is not to say that the Apple ecosystem doesn't have any merits. Obviously it does. But it's also obvious that Apple would prefer not to have to compete on those terms.
To be fair, their depiction of the Borgias going back to (arguably) the most popular game in the entire series wasn't exactly historically accurate. I haven't played a game in the series since Assassin's Creed Rogue (because of an injury, not a lack of interest), but as historical fiction goes, the series has a long history of really stretching things. I can't imagine that has changed in the games that have been released in the last 10 years.
What impresses me most about this is that, after all of the years of weebs clamoring for an Assassin's Creed game with ninjas, Ubisoft is finally doing it. I seem to recall them swearing off ever doing that because it was too obvious and had already been done outside of the franchise too many times. Perhaps that says something about the state the franchise/developers are in, though. I generally don't follow games before they are released and reviewed (because fuck the hype train), but maybe this is just desperate fan service?