Heh, I knew a cat that would go through a pan of unseasoned cauliflower if you weren’t careful. Maybe every cat is born knowing something they have no clear way of understanding, like how tasteless things are food or how to move in four dimensions or what electronics are.

More seriously, the article I linked to suggests cats can taste things we can’t, so that’s a possibility.

It’s worth noting that cats are unlikely to be able to perceive sweet tastes. So while sugar is not toxic to cats, there’s not really any benefit to letting them have it, even as a treat.

On a related note, there’s a hypothesis that the mutation that caused them to lose the ability to taste sweet things in cat ancestors is what led to them becoming obligate carnivores, which is kind of interesting.

Your guess is as good as mine, honestly. Waiting for an expansion to come out and then checking in makes sense, IMO.

A lot could be improved, either by modding by Bethesda. Fallout 76, whatever else one could say about it, is in a vastly better place than it was at launch, so there’s recent precedent.

Yes, it is, I’m sorry to say. At least for now.

I have a few dozen hours in Starfield, and while I wouldn’t call it extremely dull, it’s not not dull on a regular basis. The game has an uncanny talent for reducing space travel, planetary exploration, and crafting down to a series of nearly-identical nested menus. Crafting and world interaction feel like a step down from Fallout 4 in some ways, particularly how most of the junk is just useful for decoration.

It excels at giving you less when you’re expecting more, which makes it easy to overlook what it does well. There’s still a lot of fun to be had in it; it feels tighter and more polished than Bethesda games generally do, and it’s not a bad alternate take on NMS, which also isn’t exactly a 100% compelling experience even after the work it received. (I had fun in Starfield way faster than I did in NMS, for what that’s worth.)

I don’t regret my time in it at all, but it’s kind of perfect patientgamers material. Not playing right away keeps you from burning out on it before it figures out what it wants to be.

But be careful if it has the post-Wolf-359 remodulation hotfix, because it’s really easy to end up stuck in the nutation settings menu if you press either button 5 times within a few seconds.

You can disable this behavior with a long press of the firing button, which unsurprisingly got its own hotfix shortly after that.

There’s rarely a bright and unambiguous line between free verse poetry and prose, but I’d argue poetry is about layered use of language to a degree you generally can’t sustain for the length of most prose genres. Line breaks are one way to draw attention to the way a word or image is used, which is one reason you see them often in poetry, but it’s not distinct to poetry, nor is it something all poetry uses extensively.

Like many distinctions, this one breaks down at extremes. Microfiction can seem a lot like a poem and narrative epics can look a lot like prose, for example.

I’ll second that the fan patch for VtM:B is pretty much essential for enjoying it. FNV had its bugs, but it was at least polished into a solid experience before release. VtM:B…wasn’t, unfortunately, but the patch gets it there.

The AI stuff is entirely optional. I’ve been using Kagi for about four months and I forgot it exists. I haven’t been nudged to use it even once. I think they’re just buying AI service from someone else, not training their own.

So far they’ve been good about remembering they’re providing a search experience as their product and not chasing shiny tech press objects. I find it does a consistently good job of just finding what you tell it to and otherwise just getting out of your way, which is honestly all I want a search engine to do.

This is quite a grandiose plan for someone writing a LessWrong blog post. And there’s a decent chance it won’t work out for either technical reasons or because I can’t find the resources and talent to help me solve all the technical challenges.

The phrase “technical reasons” is doing an absolutely majestic amount of work in this sentence.

Now there’s a series that needs a reboot.