Steal My Sunshine: Episode 16

I'm Pickle Vinny!

Is this show getting better and better each week? I think so.

Oh my God, Dan disappeared.

Thanks, folks.

AWWWWW YEAAAAA

@blitzrules240 said:

He is a magician now, after all.

Hype!

This series is beginning to resemble 10 Cloverfield Lane. Everyone just keeps playing along because if they don't Dan will dump them in a plastic barrel of acid.

After the conversation at 52:40, rewind back to 37:05

We still need that "Abby was right" shirt

Vinny's beard is noticeably more gray than it was when this series started.

A productive stream

Every shine is a relief now. No celebration. No joy. Just ughh... good, fine.

Regarding the automated trucking thing, I listened to an interview on the radio about that recently. They said human truck drivers aren't going away (for now) as companies want the trucks to have a human monitor even if the driving is being handled by the CPU. Apparently that can manifest in a couple different ways depending on the company and the insurance situation: 1. human monitor physically in truck at all times, or 2. human monitor watching the truck remotely from an office desk. In the case of #2 the possibility of a single human monitoring several trucks at once remotely could be something to consider.

I tend to think insurance will be the major roadblock with that stuff. Couple catastrophic collisions involving faulty auto driving trucks and insurance is going to start charging massive premiums to cover them, potentially to the point that human driver is cheaper.

Please don't tell me the gunk on Vinny's mustache is there the whole episode.

If 3D World/Land is a spinoff due to the perspective, Sunshine is a fan game...

Looking forward to tomorrow's Hitman QL though :D

BTW, @ybbaaabby - GiantBomb.com was blocked at one point:

Abby stared into the void today.

"IT'S A ME", the void said.

Jesus I feel bad for Vinny this episode. People will just find jobs? Really?

I try not to shill for my silly Arnold Schwarzenegger podcast too much on here, but seeing as we watched both Kindergarten Cop 2 and Jingle All the Way 2 in the past year, I can assure everyone, speaking as an authority on direct-to-video sequels of Schwarzenegger comedies, both of those movies are absolutely dreadful.

Lynryrd Skynrd is Icelandic, y'all.

I want to know what Alex liked that they all instinctively did.

Professional gamer Abby "Abby Russell" Russell

A lot of people assume that people will invent new jobs when there's none more, not realizing that we've actually been very fortuitous for the last century that new industries required a human workforce.

I agree with everyone saying the Odysseys after credits endgame is whatever. People did hype that up.

Cya next year Sunshine crew!

Abby too-sweeting at the end is my favorite thing

I watched an interesting thing about some of the philosophical issues that come up with automated driving. Basically if there's a malfunction and an accident happens what does the code running the car decide to do? Does it try to protect the driver at all cost or is it utilitarian about it. If all the cars are connecting and it knows that there's a family in an oncoming car, but you are alone does it prioritize their lives? Or a more cynical example would be if it knows that the oncoming car contains someone who is more wealthy/powerful compared to you.

It's completely hypothetical and automated cars would definitely save more lives. It's just interesting to think that some programmers could potentially be ranking the value of human lives in lines of code.

Watching Alex get 100 coins is painful... Love you Alex.

What do you think of Last Action Hero? As an Arnold fan growing up I didn't really cared for it, but I tried rewatching it a few months ago and I thought it was abysmal. I will grant Dan that it is a cool concept, an action comedy with a satirical view of cop films told through the eyes of a boy transported inside a movie via a magic ticket - could be fun, if well executed. I just don't think it is fun at all, everything in the execution of that film is terrible. The acting across the board is awful, the writing/dialogue is cringe inducing. They make the most obvious joke they can every time, in the most juvenile way possible. And everything about how that film is shot from the cinematography, CGI, the choreography of the action scenes is amateurish at best. Dan just keeps bringing it up like it's this underrated gem, like Mario Sunshine, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

@curryspiced: Well considering that my friend and I basically started doing a Schwarzenegger podcast because we couldn't stop talking to each other about how much we loved Last Action Hero, I'd have to say I'm with Dan on this one.

Does Vinny have a bloody lip?

I'm baffled by all the slobbering of Odyssey. It's a dull game that's offensively easy. The cap gimmick is awful. The music is bland. The realistic looking locales are out of place in a Mario game. It's just all so uninspired.

Playing it, I was reminded of just how much more outstanding Sunshine is in every respect.

New saddest short story: Bidet for sale, never used.

When Vinny explains the possibility of your pizza delivery showing up in a self-driving car and the pizza man is dead, and Dan's only concern is how hot the pizza is. I don't think I've laughed that hard at any other GB content in at least a year.

@danryckert when you buy your new house get a real separate bidet, not the toilet japanese thingy. Leave the rest of the barbarians behind and join us in the true civilized life. Your wife, female-genitalia owning guests, and your own ass will thank you.

I never understand who's on who side when one person says "I bet you he will not get it" and the other side responds with "OK I bet you he will not get it".

I thought Abby was on the under 15 minute side from that language, but maybe I don't understand gambling speak. At the very least, I'm sure both of them assumed they were on the over 15 minute side from the start.

The difference between this game and Odyssey is insane. Every single time I get a moon in Odyssey, even one of the more annoying ones (looking at you jump rope and post game bound race)I'm happy and relieved. With this game it just feels like you're glad it's over.

Abby was right, Vinny said yes to her saying "I bet he -will not- get it in 15 minutes". Vinny agreed, then muttered "He won't get it in 15 minutes". Abby spoke clearly and Vinny agreed. Vinny owes Abby a shine.

1:31:05 Frew de gwass

I'm not quite as down on it as you, but playing Odyssey I am starting to realize how fucking aimless these 3D Mario games are. You're just left in a weird lifeless world, detached from any organized body of society or implied life (sparse random NPCs that are basically tutorial tips don't count as life), and expected to collect random items that don't really have any thematic, narrative, or logical sense associated with them.

I'm having fun playing Odyssey, but fuck if I see how anything here is substantial or saying anything significant. At least in the 2D games there is a directive and clear way forward.

That said, it's sort of brilliant in its design and how it communicates complex acts without saying shit. There is a baffling amount of weird shit to do with basically three core mechanics. The vignettes of weird character interactions or action set pieces are consistently more impressive than the grander scope of the game.

Who knows. I haven't beaten the game. With the way talk has been surrounding this thing, I half expect some crazy subversion to happen in the last act where they suddenly become self aware of all the bullshit that's been taken for granted in Mario games.

Worst case scenario, it's a pretty damn fun way to burn time while listening to podcasts.

When you don't know the meaning of the word "column"

Faceoff quotes work with google assistant

I'm with Alex, wouldn't give up driving. Sometimes I just go for an evening drive for no reason to clear my head, it has a weird therapeutic effect.

Abby, don't feel bad about "not understanding computers".

Once upon a time - around the time PONG was a thing it was possible for someone to get some real motivation and sit down with some perf board, microchips, wire and some paper and actually put together a functioning computer like PONG.

Today, computers are designed by giants, standing upon the shoulders of giants, standing upon the shoulders of giants.

According to a Eurogamer article the new XBOX One X main processor alone has seven BILLION transistors in it. I can say with as much certainty as anything else that there isn't a single person alive - or deceased - who could tell you top to bottom how that thing works. It would always be a case of "I can tell you how this but works, and what that bit does, but for the details on that you'll need to talk to that dude(ette).

All that being said I think it's still super valuable to be able to sit down at a computer and have a general idea what's happening, not just "I touch the app and magic happens!".

I dunno, life is complicated and as society advances and knowledge becomes more specialized it becomes harder to become a generalist. Is having 4k HDR video games worth I'm not finishing that sentence.

Mario Sunshine is the nightmare I look forward to - keep up the good work duders!

I love this crew and hate this game.

I've got my full heart on both things.

Dan's definition for masterpiece is literally "game I really like", which is simply not what that word means.

I'm pretty sure, or at least I hope, that by now (especially since they've talked about the term in an earlier episode) he's just saying to troll people, but that doesn't make it sound less silly.

Thanks for the rain sounds, Dan!

Abby here's a pretty basic summary of how the computer takes 1's and 0's and makes UP or Mass Effect. Sorry if it's a little long-winded or disjointed there's a lot to unpack here and if I don't touch on some of everything at least briefly it's hard to get the top-down understanding you're looking for.

1's and 0's are just how the computer stores memory. No matter how complicated a movie/game/application is the computer which programs it or plays it only understands it as huge lists of bits which are on or off (aka 1 or 0 aka true or false) because it's all controlled by electricity. How a computer or program specifically interprets those 1's or 0's depends on the operating system or programming language.

The computer reads through these bits in memory one "word" at a time (a 64-bit OS can read words that are 64 bits long) at a rate determined by the processor (more GHz = less time between words = faster computer). It works kind of like how a record needle reads through the grooves carved into an album, but analog grooves and sound waves are smooth and continuous unlike digital bits which can only model information in "steps". More than one instruction or variable can be contained within one word so the bigger the word the more you can do at once. That's why a Nintendo 64 is exponentially more powerful than an 8-bit NES, and also why the 64-bit Skyrim Special Edition runs so much better than the original 32-bit game.

But for the most part even simple instructions like adding two variables and saving the result takes a whole lot of bits/words. Game programmers and 3D modelers use really robust, feature-heavy (but less efficient) programming languages like Python and expensive professional software that accomplishes tasks that would take hours and hours of laborious coding by shifting 1's and 0's around and complicated manipulation of the CPU's instruction stack in a line of code or click and drag of the mouse.

It's hard to really see the forest for the trees when it comes down to the 1's and 0's of programming unless you're using an extremely basic language like assembly, so most Pixar animators or game designers are layers and layers of software removed from needing to get there. Understanding how those 1's and 0's are manipulated and shifted around and read by the computer is left up to the electrical engineers for the most part; we have to study all of the complicated calculus that goes into digitally representing analog signals and the minutia of the actual circuitry of a computer's basic components.

@lifejuice said:

I've heard this thought experiment a fair bit, and I've always thought it was quite strange. To me it seems obvious that self-driving cars should/will just stop when something goes wrong. It's not too difficult to build a system that has multiple levels of failsafes.

I think most people look at self-driving cars and treat them as though there's a robot sitting in the driver's seat who has all the limitations of a human. In reality it would be more like dozens of different processes controlling all the independent functions of the car, and each of those processes should have their own supervisors and multiple failsafes. If literally anything goes wrong, all power can be shut off and the brakes applied. If the brakes fail, then there should be secondary brakes that are applied. If *literally* everything fails, then an aluminum brake block can destroy the drive train.

As far as weighing up the choices of killing a family vs killing a single person, you just don't really get to that point. Swerving is almost always a bad idea, if someone steps in front of the car, then you apply the brakes, if they can't be applied fast enough, then that person gets hit.

I'm definitely simplifying the implementation details a lot here, but I just mean to say: Self-driving cars probably won't ever have to decide who to kill, mostly because computers don't usually make human mistakes, and when they do get things wrong, they can correct for it within microseconds in ways that humans can't. There will be bugs and glitches, but there won't be a trolley problem.