Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn’t produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a “true” map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.

I don’t really know what this post is on about, but science is not truth. It’s a system of prediction. The closest you can get to “truth” would be observation and data. Science is the process of interpreting these facts to better understand what things will look like in the future. It is obvious that science is not ‘true’, because by its nature it requires change over time as our models of the world improve.

A couple years old, hopefully most of the websites on here are still alive:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NO-05LM-SakbwqNajBXgIO4HuCSkBd6n/view https://alinachin.github.io/onlineboardgames.html

It might be because they are part of the Order ‘carnivora’, so in that sense they are carnivores even though they are omnivorous.

Managed it in 5 somehow. Very cool.

the game we should have had at launch

DLSS, frame-gen and massive CPU/GPU performance boosts

I don’t think the performance is Starfield’s biggest problem.

Maybe you’ve read it before and you want to skip to the good parts. Maybe it’s non-fiction and you’re only interested in something specific. Maybe there are parts of the story that make you uncomfortable, but you’re enjoying it overall. Maybe a page is missing. Maybe it’s an abridged version and it’s not up to you, that’s just what was available.

And to the original point, what of translations? Maybe the original author is dead, and somebody translated their book. Are you ‘circumventing’ the author’s original intent to ‘gain an advantage’? I mean, yes. Does that mean you’re ‘cheating’?

What about audio books? Was the book intended to be read on a page? Are you cheating by having the book read to you?

Calling these things ‘cheating’ is silly and unnecessarily loaded, and they assume that the goal of a work is completion. That the only reason you would start a thing is to finish it. I don’t believe that’s the case for any art. One might say that the challenge in a game is the point, but that’s only sometimes true, and challenge is relative. If something comes naturally easier to you, is it ‘cheating’ to use mods to make the game more difficult, because you’re gaining the advantage of improving your experience, against the original intent of the game? I don’t think so, so I don’t see why it is any different the other way around.

To think about it another way: if you subtract that paragraph from that book, does it cease to be a book? No, it’s just a different book, and that can still have value to people. You’re not ‘cheating’, you are making a new experience for yourself.

I could go on and on so I’m gonna stop myself here.

Is it cheating to skip a paragraph in a book?

Feel like the inverse is more apt: where old people go, the young run the fuck away from.

An “Everything App” is just an operating system.

The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.

The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.

I tried to pick ratios that wouldn’t cause riots in the streets, haha. Interestingly, 7-3 is still less work overall than the current standard 5-2. I could get behind a 3-1-4-2 system.

This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.

Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:

• 3 on 1 off: working 25% of the time
• 5 on, 2 off: working 23.8% of the time
• 4 on, 2 off: working 22.2% of the time
• 5 on 3 off: working 20.8% of the time
• 4 on 3 off: working 19.0% of the time

I got the award for the “most unlucky, anti-lucky, possible player”…

So there’s that.

I suck at math, but if the mean is sufficiently over the “positive” threshold, and there’s a low standard deviation across reviews, wouldn’t this have the problem I describe? The more certain people are about the quality of good games, the less relevant the ratio becomes, which is perhaps the opposite of what you would want.

I played it - and if it was truly only made by two people is quite impressive - but it’s just alright. The world is very cool, and is structured around multiple levels of a tower each with their own language that you need to learn to progress. My main issue with the game is that the differences between these languages, and the puzzles built around them, aren’t particularly interesting or deep or varied. There are a few gems, but overall it’s much closer to a traditional adventure game than you might expect on first glance.

That said, the art and world design are very cool.

Edit: As an aside, it’s worth noting that the Steam Reviews metric is a tad misleading in a similar way to Rotten Tomatoes, in that it only gauges ratio of positive reviews, over what those reviews are actually saying. A universal consensus of a game being a 7/10 (if we assume 7/10 is positive) will appear “better” than a game where 99% of people believe it is a 10/10, but 1% think it sucks. It’s good at predicting whether you will like it, it is bad at predicting how much.

From what I understand, there’s (at least) two kinds of free speech. There’s free speech as in the government will not restrict your speech, which is important for criticizing the state without fear of being locked up. Then there’s the fanatical idea of maximizing speech: that the marketplace of ideas requires minimal limitations on what can be said anywhere, and the ‘best ideas’ will naturally rise to the top.

The problem with the latter is that it is incredibly noisy, easy to manipulate, and often an illusion anyway. Proponents of the latter in the US will use the former as cover, but they are different things. The 2nd 1st Amendment has nothing to do with your ability to moderate private spaces. Removing trolls, enforcing rules, and focusing discussion are all necessary for engaging in useful dialogue.

The Elon Musks of the world are both wrong and fuckin’ nuts, in my opinion. Often, what they really want is for the consensus of a place of discussion to more closely align with their own ideals. They think, “I am right, others disagree, therefore there must be some fundamental flaw in the system.” The simpler explanation is that they’re a moron.

I have two podcasts in my rotation currently:

• Remap Radio; previously Waypoint Radio, sometimes their politics feel overly dogmatic, perhaps as a reflection of the audience and culture they have cultivated, but the vibes are good and they have insightful things to say. I’d say they are currently in a transition period so they’re still finding their rhythm.
• 8-4 Play; Started by a localization company based in Tokyo, you’ll get a unique perspective of life in Japan, Japanese games, and industry connections that you can’t really get anywhere else, at least not in English.

Used to listen to the Bombcast, but none of the splinters from what it was appeal to me much. New Bombcast, Nextlander, solo Gerstmann, are all flawed in different ways imo.

I’m guessing they don’t want non-qualified individuals benefiting monetarily from mental health services. I can only assume it’s a legal can of worms.