Itty53

It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.

It’s this. It’s a business decision. You don’t spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there’s contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven’t even looked at it.

That sounds a lot cooler than “civilizations have to do something with their poop”.

I think this is worse, arguably. Don’t get me wrong, Wakefield wasn’t good. But this is actually worse.

Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn’t care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.

So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.

This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there’s frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn’t saying any of that. It’s simply saying “here’s a reason not to trust climate science at all”. That’s the argument. That’s way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.

Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn’t take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.

Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.

“gamers are doing with a new Bethesda game what they’ve done with every previous Bethesda game! You won’t believe what comes next!”

This has big “I voted the general election in three states and then complained about voting security on Fox News” energy.

Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

“Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?

Had the same thought. Got sidetracked sniffing pens.

Jokes aside, any of y’all remember the scented markers for kids? Holy shit talk about grooming children for addictions. Whole classrooms of kids just sniffing chemical markers. The gas station rose vial of the kindergarten.

Ah yes, rather than address your inconsistent arguments, call me a racist. Clever one you are, why didn’t I think of that?

Jokes aside you can be mad all you like, you’re still wrong. We can talk about the awful shit America does and has done, but it won’t be the same as what China has done.

Enjoy your second year of community college.

That’s a highly generalized take that doesn’t hold water at all. The American government sucks but they’re not operating organ farms in concentration camps targeting religions, they’re not redrawing their maps to include parts of neighboring nations like Mexico and Canada, they’re not funding North Korea as the DPRK launches missiles over South Korea and Japan, they don’t have social credit scores, they don’t systematically harass and threaten their own citizens abroad…

We can keep going if you want. And we can talk about the terrible shit America does too.

But “these two entities are both bad and therefore they do the same exact things” is fucking dumb, naive, myopic, childish, and a bunch of other pejoratives I could think of. Grow up.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater wants you to remember it. The game that launched an entire music genre into the mainstream.

This is far, far from a first.

Great, we’ll have nanoplastic waste brought about by using solvent and high heat furnaces - furnaces that are totally green we pinky swear.

This just takes the eco waste and turns it into smaller eco waste by virtue of wasting more energy. I’m sure the exhaust isn’t something you’ll wanna breathe either.

Stop subsiding oil. It’s real fucking simple.

The steam deck is already right there at the limit with it’s weight. This thing looks significantly heavier.

Also can’t wait for Nintendo to sue. This article even called them “joy-cons” as if desperately calling out to Nintendo, “yep, pull that trigger”.

The amount of energy we’d need to pull from those flows even to power the full need of the world is likely pretty trivial compared to the amount those flows actually contain. Oceans are world engines, literally. There’s a lot of energy in there.

These wouldn’t prevent flows either, just leech a little and slow it down. Worth exploring.

The biggest issue is upkeep. Oil rigs require a massive amount of upkeep because salt water really wants to destroy most structural material, fast. Then you factor in costs of getting crews out there for maintenance, etc … it adds up. Costs not just financially but in carbon as well. Material advancements help but you’re back to the carbon costs with those in a big way too.

That’s very cool. I personally hate watching vlog videos and would always prefer to read.

But this tool also desperately needs punctuation. I feel like that’s an actual great use case for an LLM: feed it the transcript and tell it to punctuate it. Just a thought.

Grain of salt, rather than skepticism.

No normal person can waste their time being truly skeptical of everything they see. The reality is we don’t have to (nor often do we) believe everything we see in normal situations. So take everything you see online, on TV, from afar with a grain of salt. Don’t put too much faith in it. Shit this is important even with actual real video footage, context can change everything. You get twenty seconds of a twenty minute video and you can make it say anything you want. Just cut the context to suit.

In situations where evidence counts, such as a court room, custody of that evidence is considered. Any old mp4 can’t be provided to the court as evidence without it being thrown out by the other team. So there really, truly is hardly any concern whatsoever about generative AI in the courts.

And the other side of that coin is confirmation bias. I don’t care how shitty the fake is, if you show a MAGA a video of Biden eating a baby that person will insist it’s real. Against any evidence to the contrary, they’ll argue its real and reality won’t matter.

That’s what’s been meant by the “post truth world”. It isn’t a problem of establishing what is and isn’t truth. The problem is that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra

Yeah this all smacks hard of a con then. You don’t publish except to get replication. That’s the entire point.

Publishing while being intentionally vague about replication is a huge red flag.

Right now a lot of the electricity we send from A to B gets lost as heat energy, among other sciency shit. So for every watt of power you use, it takes more than that to get it to you. You’re phone heats up because of this. Computers all require ventilation and heat sinks because of this. LED screens are even warm and they’re meant to be as not warm as possible.

Super conductors at room temperature addresses that fundamental problem of moving electricity.

This doesn’t even touch the magnet factor. Super conducting magnets can levitate. This is literal cars without wheels territory. Maglev roads. Railgun shuttle launches. The abundance of the materials one question is also highly promising. We’re not talking rare earth.

If this is true it’s the biggest discovery since the transistor, no sweat.