Large language model AI is pretty bad at getting facts straight. But its weaknesses in matters of truth are strengths when the task is a friendly chat: AI models tend to be extremely sycophantic, doing their very best to say exactly what the person using the service wants to hear. That can be bad when the person using the chat service is pondering something harmful, and the AI encourages that person. But outside those edge cases, many people think highly of their AI "friends", because those are so supportive, unselfish, and unlikely to contradict you.

The origin story of this blog is as a MMORPG blog. After many years of covering MMORPGs, I stopped playing those. While some were quite good if you just considered them as games, the overall feeling was that MMORPGs never lived up to their promise as virtual worlds. NPCs in MMORPGs were static and boring. Other players were either actively harming you if they could, were more interested in their own goals than interacting with you, or were simply offline. I certainly had some great moments of interaction with other players, and even great roleplaying moments. But mostly I had the choice of either fighting other players in PvP, which I hate, or playing a PvE game in which the interaction with other players was just a minor part. The most common positive interaction with other players was trying to beat group content together with other players, but that was not always a nice experience, and rife with stuff like guild drama or group members shouting at each other. The most famous player interaction in the universe of MMORPGs is Leeroy Jenkins, and that is telling you something.

It isn't just MMORPGs. Other attempts of creating virtual worlds, from Second Life to the Metaverse, not only failed because of technical problems and design flaws. The fundamental problems, that other players were online only some part of the day, might be gone next month due to having lost interest, and rarely had a positive social interaction with you are their primary goal, made the whole idea of virtual worlds that feel lived in impossible. People ended up playing The Sims instead, because the interactions with the NPCs in that game were still better than the social interactions with real people in virtual worlds.

So I had a vision of a future in which somebody would create a virtual world which was predominantly or even exclusively populated by AI chat bots. Where you could live in a virtual village, and have virtual friends and neighbors that are all powered by AI. They'd be there 24/7, they'd always be interested in chatting with you, and they'd always be nice. They would have memory of previous interactions with you, and a consistent personality. The virtual world could optionally have game mechanics, like Stardew Valley or The Sims, but in a way that wouldn't punish you if you spent most of your time just having parasocial interactions with AI chat bots. I do think that such a virtual world would be highly attractive to a large number of people. Maybe humans just aren't good enough to populate a virtual world and make it feel alive.

Much of this is in fact psychology, not economics. Saving is hard. If you have unspent money, there are numerous temptations available, and countless people who are clearly out for your money. The huge advantage of a mortgage is that it forces people to save money. By borrowing money to invest in an asset, you turn optional savings into required debt repayments. People consider their mortgage repayments like the rent they paid before buying a house, as a fixed cost, not as something that ultimately generates wealth. One day the mortgage is paid back, and surprise, surprise, you are suddenly sitting on a valuable asset.

Since the end of World War II until the financial crisis of 2008, houses have been a great investment in most countries. Houses are an investment which result in two different sorts of yield simultaneously: One is the rent you are saving by living in your own house, which is a yield that you "get" (or rather "not have to spend") every month. The other yield is the increase in value of the house, which historically in the period mentioned above has been well above inflation. Combined, the two result in a historically great return on investment.

Now social media have fabricated an intergenerational conflict well above the natural conflict between generations that already the ancient Romans have been writing about. Part of that is just how the internet works, taking small conflicts and blowing the out of proportion, because conflict drives clicks, which can then be monetized. Another part might stem from an attempt to deliberately stoke intergenerational jealousy in order to turn public opinion against state-run pension systems, as turning these systems market-based would generate billions of profits for the finance industry. So there is a wide-spread story around that older generations somehow conspired against younger generations to make it impossible for the younger generations to buy houses and get wealthy too.

The more likely explanation is that there isn't a conspiracy, and the high housing prices are an accident of history, caused by a number of reasons. Some of those reasons actually can be blamed on current owners of houses, e.g. zoning laws. Other reasons are more political, where the neoliberalism that started in the 80's led to a global retreat of governments from providing social housing. Housing was thought to be best provided by the free market, and the market pretty much everywhere failed to provide affordable housing, as affordable housing simply isn't as profitable as unaffordable one.

However, there is a part of the story that is nearly never discussed: Would it actually be a good idea for younger generations to buy houses today in order to create wealth and provided for a comfortable retirement? Now the part about mortgages forcing people to save, and house ownership giving a yield of unspent rent remains valid. However, it isn't obvious that house prices will continue to rise above the rate of inflation. If you bought a house in 2008, the value of that house dropped after the financial crisis; and while in general house prices are back up to where they were in 2008 plus inflation, there has been stagnation in the housing market over the past years.

The future of house prices is uncertain for two reasons: One is the fact that the political consequences of people not having affordable housing, whether bought or rented, are high. There isn't a government in the world that is currently not working on policies to make housing more affordable. The second factor is demographics: Many countries have already reached peak population, and while the US is still growing, that growth is only driven by immigration; and immigration has an uncertain political future as well. The world's largest generation, the boomers, are soon going to leave the single-family homes they currently live in, and move into retirement homes and cemeteries. Both of these factors combined, and given that house prices are currently at historical highs, suggest that betting on houses continuing to increase value faster than inflation is not a safe bet anymore.

The dream of a single-family home in the suburbs with a white picket fence providing financial stability might also be outdated for cultural reasons. The single-family home doesn't make much sense without a family. Marriage and having children are both strongly decreasing in popularity, especially with women. It is hard to imagine somebody following a 4B ideology (no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children) still believing they need to buy a house to fulfill their dreams. The prevalent housing of the future might be the one-bedroom apartment in the city, and the advantages of ownership vs. renting aren't quite as obvious for these.

That doesn't mean in any way that wealth generation will become impossible. It might not even be harder than for the boomer generation. The younger generations will just have to learn to save more of their income and spend less. How that clashes with their ideas of work-life balance is a different story.

The Byzantine Empire in reality fell in 1453 and didn't play any role anymore in European history. In EU5 the Byzantine Empire at the start date of 1337 is weakened by corruption and internal problems, and is often conquered either by one of the Turkish beys or by its northern neighbors Bulgaria and/or Serbia. That is of course only if the Byzantine Empire is played by the AI. A player-run Byzantine Empire naturally does a lot better.

Yesterday the first DLC for EU5 was released, Fate of the Phoenix, which adds a lot of content to the Byzantine Empire. While the free patch 1.2 changes a lot of things for other countries as well, the Fate of the Phoenix DLC is only affecting the Byzantine Empire, and indirectly the regional neighbors. That in itself is a problem: If you don't want to play the Byzantine Empire, there is zero reason to buy this $10 DLC. On the other side, if you buy the DLC, you are going to play the Byzantine Empire, and thereby take the history of Europe down a predictably ahistorical path: A player-run Byzantine Empire is going to crush the Ottomans early and probably all other Turkish beys as well. If anybody is besieging Vienna in later centuries, it will be Orthodox Greeks, not Muslim Turks. You can't play Fate of the Phoenix without seriously altering European history. The DLC is thus only interesting for people who prefer history simulations to strongly deviate from reality.

The interest of the DLC is obfuscated by the free patch. If you play the Byzantine Empire before and after, as I am doing, a part of the difference in experience is due to new content like bureaucracies. But that is free patch content, not DLC content. So my comparison games are inherently flawed. What I should have done to identify the interest of the DLC is to play the Byzantine Empire twice under patch 1.2, once with and once without the DLC.

Apart from the ahistorical direction, I also dislike Byzantium for a different reason: It appears even more scripted and railroaded than other countries. The Byzantine Empire in EU5 in 1337 has some big strengths, "balanced" by some big weaknesses. For example your estates all have unique corruption privileges that make them not pay taxes. The problem is that every player of the Byzantine Empire will play this in exactly the same way: Use the strengths of the Byzantine Empire to expand into Turkey in order to preempt their rise; while one by one removing the bad privileges, bureaucracies and laws that keep you down. The economy is in a terrible state, and that the player will have to fix as well. But if you look at the various content creators that are currently flooding YouTube and Twitch with Fate of the Phoenix EU5 videos, after several decades they all look very similar. Yes, there are two options of whether to style your empire as "roman" or "greek", but everybody a few decades into the game has fought some successful wars in Anatolia, has much improved their economy, and has removed the same bad privileges.

Due to me having bought the Premium Edition of Europa Universalis V, I will get the first three DLC automatically. But if I play EU5 for many years, I can totally see myself not buying many DLCs, except for those that provide content for a country I am already interested in. That is in stark contrast to previous games, like Victoria 3. While the base game of Victoria 3 is currently available for just $15, the "ultimate" bundle with older DLCs adds another $60, and that doesn't include the latest $30 expansion The Great Wave. Even if I just wanted to buy all the major gameplay-changing DLCs for Victoria 3, I would have to pay $65 to get access to all game mechanics, without the country-specific content, and all those prices are lower than usual due to a big Paradox sale. And with the latest DLC having apparently "broken" the game and being rated "mostly negative" by Steam users, I don't think I will buy all this.

So I am not yet totally convinced of either the EU5 nor the Victoria 3 DLC business strategy. In fact, the only Paradox game where I like the DLC business strategy is EU4, where you can cut through the jungle of game changing DLC by simply subscribing to all of them for as low as $5 per month.

The country I now live in, Belgium, I jokingly sometimes call a socialist paradise. Belgium is a democratic and capitalist country, but has a number of progressive social policies that don't exist elsewhere in Europe. For example Belgian salaries and pensions are automatically inflation adjusted, and Belgians enjoy extremely strong workers protection rights. And while all that certainly has its problems, it also has huge advantages: Belgium has a low Gini index of 26.8, compared to over 30 for France or Germany, or over 40 for the USA, meaning Belgium has less inequality. Although GDP per person is lower than in Germany, median household wealth in Belgium is over 4 times the German number.

By comparing different countries, it can easily be shown that for example health care systems have much better outcomes if they are organized around "socialist" principles, while mostly "capitalist" health care systems cost more and achieve less good outcomes in public health and life expectancy. So to answer my initial question, me personally I am much in favor of for example "socialist medicine", but much against the "real existing socialism" of the GDR. The most successful country calling itself socialist is China, and that only since it injected a good amount of capitalism into their system, to form a so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics". History to me suggests that the countries that have the best outcome for the common people have all adopted a mix of capitalism and socialism, while countries with extreme capitalism or extreme socialism have done a lot less well on various measures.

Now the idea of socialism is nearly two centuries old by now, and a lot of people (mostly outside the USA) are able to make the distinction between socialism as an idea, and possible partial solution to problems, and socialism as a failed system to run countries. But with newer progressive ideas, we can observe the same gap in the discussion: People liking certain progressive ideas generally talk about the advantages of the concept, while people hating that same progressive idea talk about the failures of implementation.

For example I have seen a lot of social media posts with people expressing their astonishment that anybody could oppose DEI, because diversity, equity, and inclusion are all obviously good things. But the people that do oppose DEI don't actually oppose the idea, they oppose the implementation. There is sufficient evidence and data that for example DEI programs in US academics has led to exclusion instead of inclusion, with a demonstrable discrimination against Asians and White Americans. That has led to weird events, like White people falsely claiming to be Black, seeing that as their only means to have an academic career.

The same gap in discussion between a positive progressive idea and people opposing the negative points of its implementation exists for "wokeness", on which Americans are divided whether that is a compliment or an insult. That is mostly because the people who consider woke to be a good thing define it as being informed, while the people who consider woke to be a bad thing define it as the resulting censorship due to political correctness. Like with socialism, it is impossible for people to agree on something they don't even share a common understanding of the definition.

I generally think that we should discuss more and fight less. But that discussion requires a certain openness to what exactly the concerns of the other person are. Otherwise we get two people who are both in favor of tolerance calling each other intolerant, because they simply have very different definitions of a word describing a progressive idea.

Then the streaming wars happened, and a lot of companies stopped licensing their content to Netflix in order to fill their own streaming service with exclusive content. Netflix responded by both producing far more own shows, and by buying shows from a wider, more international selection of providers with less license restrictions. The overall result was that the content I get now in Belgium is a lot more international than it was a decade ago.

A year or two back, my wife started to watch a lot of Asian TV series, often costume dramas. Not really my favorite genre, and I don‘t liked that they usually aren‘t dubbed, but are in their original Chinese or Korean with English subtitles. Nevertheless I watched the latest Netflix Asian costume drama hit show, Pursuit of Jade. I liked that one, because a part of it is about how regular people lived in a small town in China. It isn‘t really historical, but it gives you some idea. Pursuit of Jade is a huge success, with over 80 million people watching each of its 40 episodes, for a total of over 3 billion views.

Personally I found Pursuit of Jade interesting to watch, speaking as somebody who hasn‘t watched other Asian TV shows. There are cultural differences in how a story is told that I needed to get used to, but overall it was a good experience. And I like the fact that I can get TV shows from all over the world on Netflix now, and it is much less US-centric.

In Heroes of Might and Magic games, you have few armies. Often one hero is transporting basically all the troops you have, while other heroes are running around without troops to gather stuff. The reason why you want to concentrate all your troops in one spot is because the more powerful you are, the fewer losses you will incur when fighting. Ideally you have a doomstack that kills all enemies before they can even kill a single unit of yours. Splitting your army in half and doing pitched battles with two heroes would be much worse, as you would lose too many units, and be weaker afterwards.

The problem of that is that playing this way isn't all that much fun. Pitched battles might be more fun, but you do your very best to avoid them. There is fun management gameplay involved, but actually not much tactics. Units in the Heroes of Might and Magic series don't even have zones of control, which further limits tactical options. Other than the clever use of the waiting mechanic to move twice in a row (something the AI in HOMM: Olden Era is good at), combat is mostly trivial if you do the management part right.

Having said this, HOMM: Olden Era is certainly a good representative of the HOMM series, building on the strengths of part III. There is a heavily scripted campaign, and a great single game mode, where you can choose the general layout of the cities without having to get into details of map editing. The game is fun for some time and true to its origins, but doesn't overcome the basic limitations of those origins either.

Of course, Windrose is still in the first phase of early access, and I assume that more additional biomes will be added, and maybe the leveling curve smoothed a bit. Enshrouded, which is a good bit further on in the development cycle, occupied me for nearly 90 hours before I got bored. But I find I get bored after X hours with every survival crafting game, and there is very little motivation to either continue or replay them from the start.

I believe that this is due to how much you depend in these games on the tech tree, or what you could call resource evolution. These games are often divided into different biomes, and to develop your character further you need to get to the next biome with the next set of resources and unlock the next set of crafted items. The link between what your character does and can do with the tech tree is far more direct than in other genres of games where you might have a tech tree or talent tree, but do a lot of things independently from that.

I sometimes even feel in other genres, e.g. grand strategy games like EU5, the fact that the tech tree is always the same or nearly the same lowers my motivation to replay the game. In survival crafting games the closer connection to the tech tree means that due to the tech tree being exactly the same, a second game would play out almost identically to a first game. So why bother? It isn't as if I could go down a different route and do things very differently when playing the game again.

I've been doing my own laundry for decades now. For a long time I even ironed my shirts, but since retirement I decided I can lower my dress code and live with unironed shirts. That resulted in the sorting of socks becoming the most time-consuming part of the laundry process. Being lazy, I wondered whether there wasn't a better solution. And I found a pretty trivial one: I got rid of all of my old socks, and bought 100 identical pairs of black socks on Temu. So now I can stock them as single socks, as the solution of the sock drawer problem mathematically is trivial if X equals 1. No more sock sorting after laundry for me!

The added advantage of this solution is that buying socks in bulk is rather cheap. My previous solution, of throwing socks away when they had a hole, and occasionally buying a new pair of socks when shopping for clothes, was a lot more expensive. I bought those hundred pairs of socks for less than $1 per pair. It is likely that they will last less long than more expensive socks, but with brand socks being sometimes ten times more expensive, it isn't obvious that they would last ten times as long.

I very much support the freedom of everybody to make life choices. But it is equally important to think those life choices through, and ultimately assume the consequences of those choices. If you tattoo "Fuck You!" on your forehead, you don't get to complain that people you meet the first time have a negative attitude towards you.

One life choice I am very supportive of, because I took it myself, is the choice to not have children. Random chance is certainly involved here, and both unwanted pregnancies and unwanted childlessness happens; but between birth control and fertility treatment, the part that choice plays in having children has been growing. If global fertility rates are dropping precipitously, that is largely due to individual choices. Young people these days are increasingly likely to be single, increasingly likely to not have sex, and increasingly likely to not want children. These are all valid life choices. I just would wish that everybody would stop complaining about the logical consequences of those life choices.

Big global problems like the housing crisis, the uncertain future of pension systems, or immigration are directly related to these aggregated life choices. In 1940, under 8% of all households in the US consisted of only one person; today it is 29%. Which means that the same number of people these days need 21% more housing units to live in. That doesn't help when there is a shortage of housing. It is also significantly more difficult to finance housing with one income rather than two. I'm not saying that everybody marrying would solve the housing crisis, but this is certainly a contributing factor that nobody ever mentions. You might look at the 1950's core family model as outdated, patriarchal, or otherwise bad; but the model does have advantages in terms of both financial and emotional stability, especially for the children. Different models of living are all valid, but one has to be aware of the likely consequences.

I just started to get a state pension, and in my case I will never get more money out of that pension than I paid into the system over my career. I don't know how safe my state pension is over my remaining years. But I do know that I shouldn't complain, as my decision to not have children contributed to the problem, due to the pay as you go pension system that many first world countries have. I will complain about the fact that politicians took my money out of public pension funds for other stuff when those were producing surpluses, instead of covering the predictable future. But I can't help to notice the irony of millennials now complaining about having to pay boomer pensions, before they wake up to the fact that their own pensions are in even more peril due to their even lower childbirth rates.

The potentially highest hypocrisy of not assuming the consequences of life choices is in the subject of immigration. A large number of people oppose immigration. But both the life choice of not having children, and the life choice of going preferably for white collar jobs, in aggregate make immigration inevitable. We only get the choice between replacing missing population with immigrants, or replacing them with dolls, and the dolls are less productive, economically speaking. In Germany, over 40% of jobs in the hospitality sector are filled by people with an immigration background, and there is still a shortage of workers there. If we want fewer children, and if we want our children to all have white collar jobs, we need to answer the question of who is going to do the menial labor.

I don't claim my life choices are somehow superior to the choices other people made. But I am okay with my life choices, and the consequences. I object to the maximalist position, in which some people want to have the freedom to make any life choice they want, but do not want to live with the logical consequences if everybody else makes the same choices. It is Kant’s categorical imperative that we shouldn't make life choices that we don't want everybody to make.

Politics have an increasing gender gap, the progressive left is increasingly female. And they hold world views that are increasingly hostile to men. Not just feminist or anti-sexist. But world views like strong male protagonists being inaceptable per se, and it being impossible that an adult male has a relationship to a female child other than that being pedophile. So they project their world views onto Pragmata, and come up with these ridiculous stories. It is culture war, and that culture war is increasingly a gender war.

Capcom understands representation much better than the progressive left. They know that regardless of the gender of the protagonist, the majority of players for a PC/console shooter game are male. And male players do like positive male role models as protagonists. With those positive male role models having been chased out of other media, video games sometimes seem like a last bastion in which such role models are still possible. Video game journalists complaining about that doesn't tell us anything about the game in question, but only about the world views that these journalists project onto the game.

It doesn‘t have to be that way. Many European countries have for decades been working on district heating, that is systems that use waste heat from incinerators to heat water, to be sent by pipe into every household for heating. A million inhabitants in a central European city need about 2 GW of heat in winter. If that heat could be provided by two data centers, the overall CO2 emissions for heating would be a lot lower.

You start out Windrose with nothing much, but following the tutorial you will quickly build a base and a workbench, crafting your first tool. As soon as you have a stone axe, I recommend doing a shipwreck beach tour around your starting island. The idea is to do a complete tour around the island, to see where is what; and at the same time use your axe on every crate and piece of shipwreck you see. Hitting shipwrecks with an axe is more efficient for wood gathering than hitting trees with an axe, as the trees you first need to fell, and then hit again. Also the shipwrecks sometimes drop nails, which you can't make before you found copper. You can then use the wood and nails to build the treasure chest shaped storage, which is bigger than the storage bags you can make without nails.\

Before heading into the interior of the island, you might want to build a first hut. A bed is useful to skip the night to avoid stumbling around in the dark and roaming undead. Even more useful is decoration: Every different type of decoration (as in a chair and a table, not two chairs, only trophies stack) increases comfort by one. And the higher the comfort of your base, the longer the rested buff lasts.

When exploring an island and finding useful stuff like clay, peppers, or potatoes, take the time to go to your map and right click on your location to mark the spot. The resources respawn, and you will want to be able to find those vegetables again.

When you find the copper mine on your island, go there with an empty inventory, except for a stack of wood. You will want to build a lot of stand-up torches in that mine, for 2 wood each. Copper respawns after something like 6 hours real time, but the torches you placed stay. Having completely lighted the mine will make your next copper run a lot easier. Note that for later mines the same is true for scaffolding you might want to build to reach ore spots that are too high to reach from the floor. Fun fact: The ore respawns around stuff you built, so if you build a torch where some ore was, the spot will be dark at first, but light up as soon as you mined the ore around the torch.

There are three basic game loops in Windrose: The first is the xp / level game loop. This trips some people up, because you can actually play for hours without making a single xp. Neither killing mobs, nor sinking ships, nor gathering resources, nor crafting or building gives xp. The only things that give xp are quests and fully exploring locations on islands. At first all locations on islands are marked with question marks, until you approach them. Then either it is a mine, which doesn't give xp, or another location with some number under it, e.g. 0/3. That means you need to find 3 chests at that location, and when you do you get xp, and the number turns into a green checkmark.

The second game loop is your gear. You can craft some basic gear at the start, but things start to get interesting once you find rare "blue" gear randomly in chests. The trick is that you can then upgrade that gear, whether it is weapons, armor, or even ship equipment like guns or hull bracing. Just go to the upgrade tab of your respective specialized workbench (which needs to be under a roof) and see what resources you need to upgrade. That will generally be wood, copper, or rough hide, which you get from killing boars and sows. Every enemy, monster or ship, has a level; and if you attack with a weapon which has a much lower level than the enemy, you won't do very well. In the first part of the game you will want to have blue weapons and armor fully upgraded to level 5 before tackling the end of chapter boss.

The third game loop kicks in as soon as you repaired, equipped and crewed your "bigger boat", the Ketch. Sinking enemy ships gives some loot and insignias; boarding ships with a glowing chest icon floating on top of them gives additional money (piastres, a silver coin). At some point in the game, following quests, you will meet the various factions of the game. For each faction you can hand in insignias at the bounty hunter for reputation; then with the right level of reputation you can pay your silver for useful stuff, like armor blueprints, merchants you can set up in your base, or rare resources. Gold coins are used to buy blueprints for building nicer stuff.

Note that before you head out to visit other islands, you should build a fast travel bell at your base, and bring a bell to build a fast travel point on the new island. Advanced tip: When building a fast travel bell, a wharf, or any foundation, use Z plus mouse wheel to adjust the height to align it with the ground level. That way you can walk onto it, instead of having to jump on it every time.

Feel free to post any tips you want to share in the comments.