If it makes you feel any better not every climatologist agrees that a nuclear exchange will result in an apocalyptic cooling event. Its unclear how much soot will make it all the way into the stratosphere, how long it will persist, and how many fire storms would be created in the first place.

I’m still planning to off myself in the event of nuclear war though.

When you pick up an apple, do you consent to the pesticides used on them?

THAT’S the example you choose?

There are no informed here, only pitchfork wielders.

Absolutely stunning. You actually unironically do not understand what consent is. You need to take an ethics class.

I’ll give you the really basic version:

#1: People are allowed to say no to you for any reason or no reason at all. It doesn’t matter if you think their reasons are invalid or misinformed. No means no.

#2: A lack of a “no” does not mean “yes”. If a person cannot say “no” to what you are doing because they have no idea you’re doing it in the first place then that, in some ways, is even worse than disregarding a “no”. At least in that case they know something has been done to them.

That, by the way, is what the “informed” in “informed consent” means. It doesn’t mean “a person needs to know what they’re talking about in order for their ‘no’ to be valid”, like you seem to think it means.

Doctors used to routinely retain tissue samples for experimentation without informing their patients they were doing this. The reasoning went that this didn’t harm the patient at all, the origin of the tissue was anonymized, the patient wouldn’t understand why tissue samples were needed anyway, and it might save lives. That’s a much better justification than trying to develop a web browser, and yet today that practice is widely considered to be deplorable, almost akin to rape.

The concept of informed consent continues to evade tech bros. It makes me wonder how many other areas of your life you apply this line of reasoning to.

When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

Or like this.

So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird.

Imagine if the 5th season was just a sitcom about the daily lives of the characters after the conflicts were resolved.

If someone were to visit Vermont is there anywhere you’d recommend they go?

Out of curiosity, how does it work and what do you like about it?

Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable)

So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.

Mozilla is a nonprofit (or it at least it should be, technically it’s a for profit corporation that’s wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, shady asf).

They shouldn’t be trying to make a profit, they should make enough money to pay their programmers to maintain the browser.

They should not be dumping money into more executive hires and AI bullshit like they are doing.

There’s never enough money to maintain the browser but there’s always enough to dump more into executives pockets.

So, keep in mind that single photon sensors have been around for awhile, in the form of avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes. And avalanche photodiodes are pretty commonly used in LiDAR systems already.

The ones talked about in the article I linked collect about 50 points per square meter at a horizontal resolution of about 23 cm. Obviously that’s way worse than what’s presented in the phys.org article, but that’s also measuring from 3km away while covering an area of 700 square km per hour (because these systems are used for wide area terrain scanning from airplanes). With the way LiDAR works the system in the phys.org article could be scanning with a very narrow beam to get way more datapoints per square meter.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the system is useless crap or whatever. It could be that the superconducting nanowire sensor they’re using lets them measure the arrival time much more precisely than normal LiDAR systems, which would give them much better depth resolution. Or it could be that the sensor has much less noise (false photon detections) than the commonly used avalanche diodes. I didn’t read the actual paper, and honestly I don’t know enough about LiDAR and photon detectors to really be able to compare those stats.

But I do know enough to say that the range and single-photon capability of this system aren’t really the special parts of it, if it’s special at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony's_Chocolonely

Dutch chocolate which is very good, and uses a slavery-free supply chain.

I think there’s a sort of perfect storm that can happen. Suppose there are two types of YouTube users (I think there are other types too, but for the sake of this discussion we’ll just consider these two groups):

• Type A watches a lot of niche content of which there’s not a lot on YouTube. The channels they’re subscribed to might only upload once a month to once a year or less.

• Type B tends to watch one kind of content, of which there’s hundreds of hours of it from hundreds of different channels. And they tend to watch a lot of it.

If a person from group A happens to click on a video that people from group B tend to watch that person’s homepage will then be flooded with more of that type of video, blocking out all of the stuff they’d normally be interested in.

IMO YouTube’s algorithm has vacillated wildly over the years in terms of quality. At one point in time if you were a type A user it didn’t know what to do with you at all, and your homepage would consist exclusively of live streams with 3 viewers and family guy funny moments compilation #39.

At to end of the day it comes down to this:

Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity in a battery farm?

Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?

I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.

EDIT: I guess there’s a third factor which is transmission. We could build transmission cables between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, is it cheaper to build and maintain enormous HVDC (or even superconducting) cables than it is to do either of the two things above? And how do governments feel about being made so dependent on each other?

We can do a combination of all three of course, picking and choosing the optimal strategy for each situation, but like I said above I tend to think that one of those strategies will be disproportionately favorable over the others.

The commercial version of practically everything is better than the consumer version (or at least bullshit-free).

The reason being that a large company has negotiating power far beyond that of an individual consumer.

Specifically they are completely incapable of unifying information into a self consistent model.

To use an analogy you see a shadow and know its being cast by some object with a definite shape, even if you can’t be sure what that shape is. An LLM sees a shadow and its idea of what’s casting it is as fuzzy and mutable as the shadow itself.

Funnily enough old school AI from the 70s, like logic engines, possessed a super-human ability for logical self consistancy. A human can hold contradictory beliefs without realizing it, a logic engine is incapable of self-contradiction once all of the facts in its database have been collated. (This is where the SciFi idea of robots like HAL-9000 and Data from Star Trek come from.) However this perfect reasoning ability left logic engines completely unable to deal with contradictory or ambiguous information, as well as logical paradoxes. They were also severely limited by the fact that practically everything they knew had to be explicitly programmed into them. So if you wanted one to be able to hold a conversion in plain English you would have to enter all kinds of information that we know implicitly, like the fact that water makes things wet or that most, but not all, people have two legs. A basically impossible task.

With the rise of machine learning and large artificial neural networks we solved the problem of dealing with implicit, ambiguous, and paradoxical information but in the process completely removed the ability to logically reason.

That sounds absolutely fine to me.

Compared to an NVME SSD, which is what I have my OS and software installed on, every spinning disk drive is glacially slow. So it really doesn’t make much of a difference if my archive drive is a little bit slower at random R/W than it otherwise would be.

In fact I wish tape drives weren’t so expensive because I’m pretty sure I’d rather have one of those.

If you need high R/W performance and huge capacity at the same time (like for editing gigantic high resolution videos) you probably want some kind of RAID array.

Is this supposed to mean that I secretly liked it or else I wouldn’t have played it as long as I did? Would you rather I stopped after 10 minutes so you can say I didn’t give it a fair chance?

What’s good about it then? I don’t mean that as an insult to you or your taste, I am genuinely asking because I’m the sort of person that likes to think about games. I’ve spent hours listening to GDC talks on game design, hours looking at map viewers for some of my favorite games. When I play a new game I take screenshots and make notes about my thoughts while playing it.

From what I saw playing Skyrim there’s basically nothing there in terms of NPC dialogue, very little in terms of environmental storytelling, world design, and worldbuilding, and usually not very much atmosphere or sound design. And that’s on top of the completely vacuous gameplay. If the game did even a single one of these things well I would have considered it to be good, but for me there’s just nothing there.

I am aware that the Elder Scrolls series in general has interesting lore and metaphysics based on Hindu mythology. But it’s my understanding that the person who came up with most of that no longer works at Bethesda. And while I was playing Skyrim even googling some of the things I encountered (such as “why do the draugr attack you”) failed to elicit feelings of intrigue.

I did like the amount of verticality you experience ascending the main mountain though. That was cool map design IMO.

EDIT:

Skyrim isn’t good because it’s not your idea of a specific kind of rpg game

Most of the games that I listed are pretty vastly different from each other, but they all do at least one thing that’s interesting. Skyrim not being “a specific kind” of RPG has nothing to do with it.