tal

tal , 5 hours ago

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooming_onion

tal , 5 hours ago

He’s punning on the multiple meanings of “revolting”.

Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/revolting

Adjective

revolting (comparative more revolting, superlative most revolting)

repulsive, disgusting

The most revolting smell was coming from the drains.

tal , 4 hours ago

Humans as they discovered they made a small continent out of trash in the ocean.

It’s just an area of higher density particulate matter in the water.

en.wikipedia.org/…/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/cu yd)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area. This is because the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting primarily of suspended “fingernail-sized or smaller”—often microscopic—particles in the upper water column known as microplastics.[4] Researchers from The Ocean Cleanup project claimed that the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles)[5] consisting of 45,000–129,000 metric tons (50,000–142,000 short tons) of plastic as of 2018.

NOAA stated:

While “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name “Pacific Garbage Patch” has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter – akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case. — Ocean Facts, National Ocean Service[57]

tal , 12 hours ago (edited 10 hours ago)

googles

I mean, I’m not gonna get too worked up either, but just to be clear, California’s bar for use of deadly force is that it has to be to protect against expected severe bodily injury or death.

codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-835a/

(c)(1) Notwithstanding subdivision (b), a peace officer is justified in using deadly force upon another person only when the officer reasonably believes, based on the totality of the circumstances, that such force is necessary for either of the following reasons:

(A) To defend against an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or to another person.

(B) To apprehend a fleeing person for any felony that threatened or resulted in death or serious bodily injury, if the officer reasonably believes that the person will cause death or serious bodily injury to another unless immediately apprehended. Where feasible, a peace officer shall, prior to the use of force, make reasonable efforts to identify themselves as a peace officer and to warn that deadly force may be used, unless the officer has objectively reasonable grounds to believe the person is aware of those facts.

(2) A peace officer shall not use deadly force against a person based on the danger that person poses to themselves, if an objectively reasonable officer would believe the person does not pose an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the peace officer or to another person.

So that’s the bar that a court is gonna expect the male officer to need to meet. I imagine that it’s not impossible that a court could find that that didn’t meet the bar. The article doesn’t say that the guy who got shot actually attempted to pull the weapon.

That being said, the guy was hiding a weapon and was attempting to overpower an officer, and I imagine that a court is gonna be (not-unreasonably) inclined to give the benefit of the doubt in a situation like that.

tal , 16 hours ago (edited 16 hours ago)

As mammals go, we’re probably pretty good in terms of the direct effects of heat. Humans are exceptional at dumping heat. We have sweat glands all over our body, little hair, and are among the physically-most-capable critters out there capable of sustained physical exertion in hot environments.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Persistence hunting, also known as endurance hunting or long-distance hunting, is a variant of pursuit predation in which a predator will bring down a prey item via indirect means, such as exhaustion, heat illness or injury. Hunters of this type will typically display adaptions for distance running, such as longer legs, temperature regulation, and specialized cardiovascular systems.

Humans are some of the best long distance runners in the animal kingdom; some hunter gatherer tribes practice this form of hunting into the modern era. Homo sapiens have the proportionally longest legs of all known human species, but all members of genus Homo have cursorial adaptions not seen in more arboreal hominids such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

Persistence hunting can be done by walking, but with a 30 to 74% lower rate of success than by running or intermittent running. Further while needing 10 to 30% less energy, it takes twice as long. Walking down prey, however, might have arisen in Homo erectus, preceding endurance running. Homo erectus may have lost its hair to enhance heat dissipation during persistence hunting, which would explain the origin of a characteristic feature of the genus Homo.

We may not be super-fast. We’re not poisonous. Our teeth aren’t all that impressive, nor our “claws”. But we are really good at keeping on going in extreme heat conditions.

tal , 15 hours ago

There are limits, but we’ll be outdoing pretty much everything out there in hot conditions.

tal , 18 hours ago

• Probably eliminates a lot of the problems with making a tank amphibious.

tal , 17 hours ago (edited 16 hours ago)

There (shouldn’t) be any blast from the gun firing released inside the tank itself. So, you’ve got vibration that’ll pass through the water. It might increase that, but that’s not direct exposure to the blast.

There’s still air around the muzzle. Maybe water makes up some of the distance, but there is still a buffer of compressable air in there.

I’m not sure that it wouldn’t cause problems, but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t, either. I don’t think that it’d just be the “depth charge near people in the water” issue.

EDIT: Though some artillery has that recoil-compensating mechanism where the breach moves back when the gun fires. I dunno whether that’s true of the main gun on an MBT, but if so, that might cause issues.

googles

Yeah, here’s an Abrams doing it. That might suck.

youtube.com/watch?v=sC2ePKRvo9k

tal , 18 hours ago (edited 15 hours ago)

I’d encourage people to actually read the article. I know that the title kind of inspires a kneejerk reaction, but legally, this is kind of interesting and I believe has broad implications.

So, basically, there’s a company, Bright Data, scraping X comments for stuff like training AI.

X went after them because X wanted to (and does) sell those comments.

But while I think that it’s fine for X to attempt to disrupt Bright Data’s scraping attempts using technical means, they can’t use the law to restrict them on copyright grounds.

That might have implications for all sorts of things. Reddit’s legal position, as Reddit likes selling access to Reddit comments. Training AI on discussion in general. The ability of organizations like archive.org to archive publicly-available comments. Maybe it’ll make social media companies have their content not-publicly-accessible, if creating a closed club gives X more control over selling that content.

tal , 15 hours ago

businessinsider.com/elon-musk-drug-tests-smoking-…

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, said the federal government required him to undergo random drug testing for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018, adding that the “whole of SpaceX” was impacted.

During an appearance on the “Full Send podcast,” released Thursday night, Musk said that he got “a lot of backlash,” including from SpaceX competitors, because weed isn’t legal on a federal level and SpaceX has federal-government contracts.

“The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good,” the tech billionaire said on “Full Send,” adding that he hadn’t expected so much criticism. The 2018 interview with Rogan — which went viral at the time — took place in California, where marijuana is legal for both medical and recreational use.

“I had to have like random drug tests and stuff after that, to prove that I’m not like a drug addict,” Musk said, adding that the tests were required by the federal government. “They drug tested me for everything, and randomly. It wasn’t like ‘pick a day.’ I had like a whole year of random drug tests.”

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t just me but the whole company, the whole of SpaceX had to have random drug tests,” Musk continued. It’s unclear exactly how many workers this affected, but SpaceX had around 6,000 employees in early 2019.

Under the Drug-free Workplace Act of 1988, workers at any company that receives a federal contract of $100,000 or more are prohibited from using or distributing drugs in the workplace, and the firm must have a drug-free workplace policy.

Huh.

tal , 19 hours ago (edited 17 hours ago)

So, I think that this is just political showboating (though I don’t approve of legislators doing this, normalizes it), but to take it more seriously…

My kneejerk reaction is that it’d be unconstitutional, but I’m not sure, upon further thought.

So, there are a couple isssues that I see.

Can you send an American citizen abroad as a form of punishment?

There’s the question of whether this violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

So, exile is definitely unconstitutional. You can’t simply kick an American citizen out of the US and keep them out, and there’s case law supporting that. You can’t take their citizenship away as punishment; that’s an Eighth Amendment violation.

But…you can draft people to the military, and compel people to go abroad. Sentencing someone to six months of service is sort of like that. I don’t know whether there’s case law as to whether that can constitutionally be used as a punishment, however. And I don’t know whether it’s constitutional to compel someone to enter a non-US legal jurisdiction as a punishment, because I can imagine a lot of ways in which one could avoid constitutional restrictions if one could, as part of a sentence, just move someone out of the legal jurisdictions where those restrictions apply.

My guess is that this might be permissible, but I can’t think of actual examples where something like this was done.

Ex post facto laws

The second is whether it amounts to an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law law. Generally-speaking, you cannot make something retroactively-illegal, nor make the sentence more-severe.

I’m pretty confident that this would violate the ex post facto restriction, as it specifically applies to past actions as well as future. It might be possible to provide for making doing community service in Palestine as an alternative sentence for someone convicted of a crime that occurred in the past, to let someone convicted opt in to a new form of punishment rather than the one that existed at the time that they committed the crime. But this is a mandatory punishment being added. Note that this is specific to the portion making it retroactive. Generally, if a law is severable – that is, the remainder of it can reasonably stand on its own – part of it being invalid doesn’t make the whole invalid. My guess is that the retroactive portion of such a law would fail the ex-post-facto restriction, but due to severability, it could still be applied to people who commit a crime moving forward, so would remain partially enforceable.

Safety

Gaza probably isn’t all that safe, and some of the issue with being sent to Gaza might be physical risk. That might run afoul of the Eighth Amendment as well.

So, we do have the death penalty – someone can explicitly be condemned to death. But aside from that, going from memory, there are some constitutional requirements for the conditions in which prisoners may be kept. You can’t just say “you’re going to prison for an N year sentence” and make the prison environment have a 50% mortality rate.

googles

Yeah, there’s Eighth Amendment criteria on prison conditions:

www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/165

The Eighth Amendment imposes certain duties on prison officials: (1) to provide humane conditions of confinement; (2) to ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care; and (3) to “take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates.” Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832 (1994) (citing Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526-27 (1984)).

I’m not sure exactly the legal rationale there. It may just be that you cannot have the executive treat a sentence of prison as something akin to a death sentence, can’t basically “upgrade” the severity of a law. It might be okay to do if the legislature’s intent is for the sentence to be dangerous. Could be an issue or not.

Restriction on speech

The First Amendment generally does not let the government criminalize speech. It’s possible to a very limited degree, but compared to virtually all other countries, the US Constitution has a very low tolerance for this.

So, I thought “okay, that’s a sentence for a non-content-neutral speech restriction”, so it’d violate the First Amendment. But…I’m not totally sure about that. Because in this case – and I haven’t looked at the bill text – they aren’t actually criminalizing anything new. The only association with content is the time, that there are currently protests on a particular topic happening. Like, if you were convicted for something unrelated to Israel-Palestine, it’d still apply (and in fact, the article authors complain about this). So I don’t think that it raises First Amendment issues.

That being said, my guess is that there’s some level of sufficiently-close association where linking a crime or punishment to speech even if the link isn’t explicit probably does violate the content-neutral restriction. Like, you can’t go out and come up with criteria that just happens to only punish the people involved in certain speech. But my guess is that this wouldn’t reach that level, given how broad it is.

Overall

My guess is that the ex post facto portion would be struck down as unconstitutional. But I’m not at all sure that the remainder wouldn’t stand, were we to hypothetically assume that it actually were passed and signed into law.

tal , 15 hours ago

Assuming the US military is even deployed to Gaza, they generally don’t want people pressed into service.

The requirement isn’t that people serve in the military – it’s community service, not military service. I’m just using the military as an example of a situation where Congress can compel people to go abroad (albeit not as a punishment).

tal , 1 day ago

Well, if people don’t like inflation – a source of major popular complaint – paying down the national debt will tend to tamp down on it, I suppose.

tal , 21 hours ago

I was disappointed by Frostpunk. It checks a ton of boxes that should make me like the thing, but I just did not like the game that much in practice.

I dunno, just felt like it was too much on rails, more-restricted in layout than something like a typical Sim City-ish game.

Like, I felt less like I was just experimenting with how a lot of levers interact, as I do in a typical city-builder, and more like I’m just sussing out the right order of levers to pull.

tal , 21 hours ago (edited 18 hours ago)

Not sure if it’d quite qualify as “city builder”. I’d call it “base builder”. But since others mention them:

• Dwarf Fortress
• Rimworld
• Oxygen Not Included

The above games focus on the interactions of various things you build. They have a very high degree of replayability. Dwarf Fortress has a very high bar to entry, but for all of them, you’re going to be reading wikis and spending a lot of time understanding mechanics. I think that they all give very good value for money.

• Cities: Skylines (the original). It’s not bad. It’s quite expensive, if you’re going to buy a lot of the DLC – it’s a typical Paradox game, where the cost of the base game isn’t a large chunk of the overall price, where there is a lot of not-cheap DLC that really adds up. It currently has a lot of its content on sale on Steam, and even on sale, a purchase of all of it is $250. But…there’s a lot of neat stuff there. It’s one of the few relatively-modern citybuilders. It has curved roads. I don’t care that much about this – and I think that the focus on graphics was a major contributing factor to Cities: Skylines II doing poorly – but it is relatively-pretty.
• Sim City 4. It’s not new, but it should still be perfectly-playable. I still don’t feel that there’s a game series that has really replaced the Sim City series.
• The Tropico series. This really hasn’t changed all that much (other than Tropico 2). I don’t think I’ve played Tropico 6, but I’d probably recommend that as just being the latest in the series. It looks like they pulled the campaign from the latest, which is basically fine from my standpoint. More focus on individual characters than most city-builders. A lot of the city-builder genre feels like of Star-Trek-y, kind of a focus on creating a utopian society, so this focus on running a banana republic can be a refreshing change thematically.
• Lincity-NG. Not technically the best, but it’s free and open-source, which may appeal. Focus mostly on dealing with freight congestion and achieving sustainability, which is a significant shift from most of the genre in terms of goals.

tal , 20 hours ago

but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder.

You do spend more time being reactive to problems the game throws at you, but I’d note that you have a lot of ability to adjust that when starting the world in selecting a storyteller and difficulty level.

tal , 20 hours ago

I kind of wish that it’d support higher simulation rates and try to multithread at least some of the stuff (like, maybe they can have the pathfinding or temperature propagation span multiple cores or something, which has historically been a drag).

tal , 1 day ago (edited 23 hours ago)

I think that it’s hard to find a level of content control that everyone is happy with. I’d favor fewer restrictions.

But that’s one thing that’s nice about the Threadiverse model – it’s federated. You can have one set of restrictions on one instance, and another on another.

Beehaw has pretty good conversation. I enjoy my discussions on their communities. They have a pretty upbeat mood. It also has an extremely low bar for defederation – it’s defederated with even lemmy.world. I don’t like that, would not use that as my home instance.

My home instance is lemmy.today. The admin there is aiming for not defederating with anyone. I like that. But…not everyone wants that.

Point is, there can be multiple levels of content moderation on the Threadiverse, both at the instance and community level, and people who have different preferences can have the level of moderation that they want. Some people take a free-speech-absolutist position. Others want a safe space. Some people don’t want pornography on their forums. Some people only want certain types of pornography. Some people take issue with certain types of political radicalism. Some people want to associate with Threads users, and others do not.

I think that that’s maybe the best of all worlds.

tal , 1 day ago

The group also wants to highlight environmental destruction in countries such as Argentina or Bolivia brought about by lithium mining, according to a Disrupt Tesla spokesperson, Ole Becker. Lithium is a key resource for electric vehicle batteries.

Germany does have a substantial chunk of Europe’s known lithium reserves. So if Germany would mine it, if you feel that it can be done in a less-detrimental way, that’d avoid (or at least mitigate) the problem.

tal , 1 day ago

I’m pretty sure that the commenter isn’t American, as he’s using spaces as a numeric group separator.

tal , 1 day ago

loved the first 2

Like, the isometric games? Not the 3D ones?

I’d consider Wasteland 2 and 3 as being similar to Fallout and Fallout 2. Fallout was inspired by Wasteland.

The Wasteland series has a very similar setting. Not exactly the same, less-heavy nuclear and vault theme.

But l’d seriously consider trying the 3D Fallout games too. I think that the series did a pretty good job of making the jump to 3D.

tal , 1 day ago

I wish that there were an easier route to just let a random player get a reasonably modded install. It’s nice, but getting there is a big barrier. Something like what Wabbajack does, but at a Steam level, like “install community DLC”, and in a way that one could manage mods from that point.

There are hundreds of mods that reasonably improve the gsme, and sorting through and comparing all of then is time-consuming.

That is, make it really accessible to users not familiar with modding who don’t want to put a lot of time in, but let it be a “new base install” for most Fallout 4 players that could itself be nodded.

tal , 1 day ago

Heh, I’m probably the opposite. I like the settlement building capability in the engine, but don’t feel that Bethesda’s done a lot with it in any of their games.

In Fallout 4 you can make pretty settlements, but there’s a very minimal degree to which layout interacts with the game. Putting some walls up around expensive stuff and making enemies need to go past turrets or guard posts helps a bit, but it’s basically just SimArchitect. Lay out stuff how you want for fun. That’s not bad as such, but I’d like to have more interaction with the game world. Also, using settlements without the Local Leader ability to let settlements trade goods was a pain, which was one of the few useful things in the Charisma tree. There is one quest where one does lay out defenses for a significant fight, bur that’s about it.

The Sim Settlements mod introduces settlements that build themselves, which gives you elaborate, evolving things without having to manually do all the work of building them (and can take advantage of newer hardware with larger settlements). That’s nice, but it really just provides an opportunity to rebuild nice-looking stuff in without the scrap-hauling and placement drudge work. The mod adds a (fairly extensive) questline, but the actual layout of the cities again doesn’t matter much. Avoids the need for Local Leader as a quality-of-life perk, so provides more character build flexibility.

Fallout 76 has some game-important roles to a player’s CAMP, but it’s basically providing convenient access to workshops and a player vendor. Defensive layout does matter somewhat-more, as attacks when a player isn’t present are actually simulated in the game world. You can take and hold certain map locations, sorta a tower defense mode, but there’s minimal reward in the game for it. The point is still mostly being Sim Architect for player CAMPs, except now you can show your creations to other players. CAMPs are much smaller than Fallout 4 settlements. You can also have Shelters, which are little areas to free-build off the main world. Like CAMPs, but with a few restrictions, like the inability to have resource-producing items (and automated resource production is very limited, rarely worthwhile). Some players have done neat things that add to the game, but again, just doesn’t feel like there’s much “game” to it. Fallout 76 has some hard limits on ability to store things in a CAMP – inventory limitations are a core part of the game.

Starfield has multi-base spanning automated production, and automated production matters, more like a very limited Factorio. However, you can pretty much play the game and ignore that aspect, as the main purpose of getting resources is…building more bases. IIRC, bases don’t get attacked when you’re away, and defenses aren’t an issue. I guess that’s nice for people who don’t like base-building, but it felt like kind of a pointless loop to me. Not like, oh, Egosoft’s X series, where you build out a space empire to get more stuff that unlocks more things. You can buy player homes, but they never felt as useful to me as Home Plate in Fallout 4, as I just usually wasn’t passing by the player homes, and the ships are generally more available. I think that those are more aimed at people who want to do interior decoration. Starfield does let you modify ship interiors, but there just isn’t a lot of gameplay point to it, though it’s probably where I spent the most time. There just isn’t that much that happens in your ship.

None of those are bad things, but the base-building aspects just feel kind of decoupled from the game, like a kind of bolted on architectural program. If you want to create your dream space home, I guess that that’s fine, but I was kind of hoping for something that heads more in the Sim City or Caesar direction, where there’s real gameplay associated with the settlement you build. If one wanted to do just aesthetics, maybe in Fallout 76, let players build new stuff in contests and then whoever builds the neatest gets some award and the structure gets incorporated into the base game, something like that.

tal , 1 day ago (edited 19 hours ago)

So, I’d like it to be even more approachable, so that most people who play Fallout 4 and the DLC can have a reasonable shot at also experiencing a fully-nodded environment. I guarantee that only a tiny fraction of people who have played Fallout 4 have tried a heavily-modded run, be it Wabbajack or mod-manager based.

I also had headaches working on it, but that’s probably because I was trying to run it on Linux.

Lastly, I’d like to be able to use that as a base point for modding. Like, have Wabbajack just essentially creating a Mod Organizer 2 configuration or something like that, so that one can use it as a base for further changes, so that the people who want to really spend the time tweaking their setup can also benefit. I’d just like to get players over the hump of getting a working, heavily-modded environment that can still be modded as easily as possible. Creating a working modded environment with hundreds of mods where one can tweak further as one wants is just a large, time-consuming undertaking that requires some familiarity with the system, as things stand.

tal , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I don’t agree with the people who bash Fallout 4, but it’s true that it does have annoyances not present in the previous title…but every title in the series has that. The dialog system was changed in a very unpopular way – one couldn’t see fully what one’s responses were prior to choosing them from the response menu, and the only effect of most dialog was to alter one’s relationship with one’s current companion. The plot interactions based on the player’s actions were much less complicated than in Fallout: New Vegas. And at very late game, high player levels, the enemies turn into bullet sponges due to how the game scales. Doesn’t feel as satisfying to shoot something. And the “legendary” item and enemy system was transplanted from the Elder Scrolls series, and at least to me, feels a bit weird in a non-swords-and-sorcery context thematically. I personally preferred the American Southwest setting where Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: New Vegas took place over the eastern US, where Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 took place. I liked the characters in Fallout: New Vegas more. Fallout 4 felt something like a bunch of mini-stories glommed together, less thematically-consistent than Fallout: New Vegas.

But Fallout 4 also has some things that I really like about it. It had base-building, and – while it still had its share of bugs – was considerably less-buggy than Fallout: New Vegas – which was godawful from a stability standpoint and loaded and saved increasingly-agonizingly-slowly the further one got into a game, and was prone to having the player fall through the map. On a given run, some sort of quest tended to break for me in Fallout: New Vegas. The “skill” system that had been present in the series up until Fallout 4 entirely went away, leaving the stat and perk systems, and I think that that was a good move – the small increases to skills felt grindy, where each increase didn’t produce a meaningful impact. The combat aspect is generally-considered to be better. New Vegas had solid DLC, but I’d rank Fallout 4’s DLC more-highly. Fallout 4 is a little more open in terms of the order in which you play the game – yeah, they’re all technically open-world, but Fallout: New Vegas tries hard to nudge you in at least some general, rough directions. Fallout 4 is closer to just letting someone go and adventure where they want, in whatever order they want. The scale was bigger, had more people running around, felt a little closer to being a “real world” environment. The game was prettier, partly due to just being a newer game – Fallout: New Vegas suffered significantly more from pop-up and limited draw distances, I’d say.

I think that at the time of their release, either Fallout: New Vegas or maybe Fallout were best, just in terms of how they compared to other things at the time.

If I were going to recommend that someone play just one Fallout game in 2024, though, it’d be Fallout 4, as the other games are getting pretty long in the tooth. Also, much more modding work has been done for Fallout 4 (though there are some impressive mods for earlier entries, like Tale of Two Wastelands, which basically imports Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas and makes them one game).

tal , 1 day ago

There are mods that alter the enemy scaling, but it’s gonna change the game balance.

tal , 1 day ago

Nuka World is a ton of fun and

Thematically, I prefer Far Harbor. And Nuka World’s big selling point was letting you play as a raider, which didn’t appeal much to me. But I’m pretty sure that Nuka World has more stuff.

tal , 22 hours ago

Just out of curiosity, if you don’t mind sharing, which mods did you use? Like, just stuff that adds more items to the world, or stuff that changed gameplay linked to the settlement-building stuff?

tal , 22 hours ago (edited 21 hours ago)

not many games go for the scavenger fantasy like fo4. Throw some mods on top of the shaky base and you’ve got the only real good post apocalyptic survival game i can think of.

Not the same genre at all – it’s a turn-based open-world roguelike – but have you played the open-source Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? I mean, it’s directly got some Fallout-inspired content, like power armor, but above-and-beyond that, it’s a post-apocalyptic survival scavenger fantasy, and it’s a hell of a lot more complex.

Like, you’ve got regional weather (fog, precipitation, wind) simulated, several nutritional meters (including stuff like going too far over and getting something like iron poisoning), fat reserves and hydration, several types of diseases, parasites, and fungal infections. Maybe the most-sophisticated gun collection out there in video-game-land, plus modeling firearms stuff like multiple sight and optic systems, multiple barrels, gun weight, recoil, different magazine types, different loading mechanisms (including doing things like having a shotgun or magazine-fed weapon with specific types of ammunition, like buckshot or slugs or Dragon’s Breath loaded into individual cartridge slots), carrying straps, bipods, brass catchers, Picatinny rails, grenade launchers (including attachable), rocket launchers, energy weapons, flame-projecting weapons, thrown explosives, placed traps. Food spoilage. Various types of carrying cases and aspects of them – things like straps to attach items via carabiners on some backpacks, multiple “pockets” per container that may have different volumes and maximum dimension constraints on items and may be able to contain different things, like mesh or rigid/nonrigid. Waterproof cases and water damage to some items, like dissolvable drugs or personal electronics. Vehicle construction and damage – you can build bicycles, cars, tanks, boats, helicopters. Remote cameras and displays. Electrical wiring and power generation and storage systems. Bionic implants. Mutations and associated powers. Various types of melee combat, including a wide variety of martial arts. With mods, multiple magic systems and magic items and psionic powers. Base-building. NPCs. The ability to build and manage NPC camps with NPCs producing things. Agriculture. Ranching. Thermal imaging and electromagnetic vision. Toxins, including airborne and injectable, and protection against same, as well as various environmental hazards, like acid. A cooking system. Food temperature that matters, including freezing damage to some foods. Drugs. Brewing, freezers and refrigerators (both fixed and in vehicles). Biodisel and ethanol fuel production, as well as other various fuel types, including gasoline and JP8. Morale. Sewing, including modification like Kevlar- or fur-lining items, and a material type system including things like removing buttons or zippers or fabric of certain material types (leather, wool, synthetic, cotton, etc) clothing to create something else. Crafting armor. Remote-control vehicles. Quests. Addictions. Radiation. A skill system, with separate “theoretical” and “practical” knowledge in each area. A proficiency system. A perk system. Stats. Personal electronics, like time, temperature-measuring, camera-enabled, display screens (e.g. one can scan books into tablets or smartphones or augmented reality glasses and then read them later). Lighting and shadows. Ocular adjustment time to dark or light conditions. Dwarf Fortress-like underground digging. Procedural map generation including subterranean maps. Enemy tracking via visual, auditory, and olfactory methods (not all of which can use all of these), and methods to mitigate one’s signature in these fields. Corpse dissection and resource extraction. Optional “innawoods” play, where one does a no-civilization survival play, just using primitive technology and food preservation. Achievements. Progressive content unlocking. Scenarios, like playing as a prisoner in a prison. Modeling of fires and smoke; one can have wildfires or buildings burning down. Various enemy factions; these can fight or otherwise interact; for example, a fungal faction can “take over” zombies. Water-gathering via raincatchers. Breaking into computer systems. Automated movement (to reduce drudgery of hiking from one map location to another). A configurable notification system. Rules-based searching through recipes and visible items. Ability to have the character perform automated sorting of items. Multiple competing audio and graphical packs.

tal , 20 hours ago

Yeah…I guess I shouldn’t be so negative. I mean, I had fun with it, and I certainly think that it’s a worthwhile purchase, along with the other Fallout 4 DLC. Just that I didn’t want to play through a fair bit of the content, whereas in the base game, I was fine playing any of the “faction” routes.

And, I dunno. If someone does want to play as a raider and enslave settlements, they can do that. I don’t have a moral objection to someone else doing that, and I know that many people do feel like they don’t get to play “evil” routes enough in games. Just wasn’t something that I wanted to do.

tal , 18 hours ago

For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable

I believe that the character movement animation engine in Fallout 4 is capped at something like 30 or maybe 60 fps, can’t tween. When I’m running on my 165 Hz monitor, Fallout 4 animation definitely feels slightly jerky. Starfield doesn’t have this issue, so somewhere along the line, they upgraded the engine.

tal , 16 hours ago

The legendary system isn’t transplanted from Elder Scrolls, is it?

looks

I thought that Skyrim had legendaries, but apparently I misremembered. It’s got weapons with attributes – like, you can get a weapon that causes additional fire damage – but those apparently are the same as the weapon enchantment system, not distinct from it.

There’s enemies, sure, but they don’t exist past being targets for me to destroy so that I can loot them and whatever structure they’re functionally just guarding. I can’t really influence most of them past killing them and putting the Minutemen there instead.

That’s pretty true of Fallout 3 or New Vegas too, yes? I mean, a deathclaw is a deathclaw.

tal , 1 day ago (edited 23 hours ago)

I’d actually broaden the concern. Like, having sockpuppet accounts bullying a maintainer is one form of attack, but more-broadly, social engineering is, I think, a real concern.

My understanding is that it’s considered likely that there was a national intelligence agency behind the xz attack. Point is, if they did it once, it’s probably in the toolkit, and will come up again. Not just from them, but from other organizations who will study attacks and see what works.

The problem with being an open-source developer is that you don’t spend your days trying to figure out counters to social engineering attempts. On the other side, you’ve got people who may well be spending a lot of time, reading papers, throwing around theories on just how to best pull this sort of thing off. The result is that one side is a novice, and the other has a lot of expertise and time to create a plan.

And the problem isn’t just how to counter social engineering attempts, but how to do so without being too corrosive to the open-source development community. Like, right now there’s a certain level of reliance on trust. If there isn’t any trust, it’s gonna be harder to do open-source development.

In both the potential F-Droid attack mentioned and at least some of the people with the Jia Tan/xz attack, some sockpuppets were used that had little history. It might increase the cost of an attack to take into account someone’s history. But…then, the Jia Tan attack also had a very considerable amount of effort put into creating a false persona, the one that actually did the commits.

tal , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I know that I’ve played EA games before, but I don’t think that I’ve played stuff from them recently, so I don’t have a personal preference on their games.

As long as they also provide some option to pay more and not have ads, I don’t really see an issue. It just becomes another option to buy the game – if you want ad-supported, can do that, and if you want to pay directly, you can do that.

If they don’t have any option to pay for an ad-free experience, then it seems like it could be obnoxious for people depending upon their ad preference.

I think that all the games that I would play – setting aside the issue of EA specifically – I’d rather pay for an ad-free experience, but eh. Games with ads – as well as the option to buy an ad-supported or ad-free version at different prices – are a major thing on, say, mobile, so obviously there are people who would prefer the ad-supported route.

Back in 2022, EA patented a system that generates in-game content and ads based on a person’s playstyle.

Personally, I don’t really think that I want to have my activity logged and data-mined either way, though. I would pretty much always rather pay more than have my activity recorded. I care more about that than the ads. I’m fine paying more for that, but I want the opt-out. I’d also really prefer that vendors like Steam make it very clear that if a game is being subsidized by extracting data on a user, what data is being extracted. Right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all, and the games aren’t running in a jail, so they can do pretty much whatever. I think that just making assumptions about what they do isn’t a great idea.

I remember when I saw a comment from some guy in an airport whose phone first set off an alarm and then told him that his gate had been changed and started giving him arrows to the new gate. He hadn’t told Google that he was flying anywhere. This was also back when Location Services was pretty new, so people were less-familiar with it. What had happened was that (1) Google had his location, (2) while he was indoors, while GPS didn’t work well Google had identified the location of other fixed devices with Bluetooth and WiFi radios emitting unique identifiers based on other people’s phones reporting them and building a global database, (3) Google could infer his position from getting their signal strengths, (4) Google had been scanning his email, seen the email that the airline had sent him about a gate change, scraped the email, and determined that he’d had a gate change.

That could be a useful feature, but the point is that he had no idea that any of that was happening or that Google was making use of the data at the time. And that was many years back – I guarantee that data-mining has gotten no less-intensive.

I remember talking to one friend who was a software engineer in the video game industry who was involved with some game where – after recording your gameplay for a while – they could, with pretty good accuracy, based on correlation with past users, infer with reasonable accuracy data that included one’s IQ and a set of “employability” statistics. That’s probably got value to an employer, but I suspect that most people aren’t thinking that they’re in a job interview determining their future employment status when they’re playing a video game in their living room. Like, if you’re working out what a video game costs, you probably aren’t thinking about the potential for it to creates information asymmetries in future job situations, where a potential employer has more data about you than you do about them.

tal , 1 day ago

considers

Were they going to stock it in all stores to begin with?

Like, I assume that they don’t just use a fixed strategy to stock stores across the country. Even aside from regional fashion preferences, you’ve got varying climate as an input. Part of what they do as a retailer is gonna be recording what people buy and making optimal use of advertising and stocking space to sell to people, and in a computer era, I’d think that they’d be doing that at a more-fine-grained level than nationwide.

googles

It looks like Target pulled Confederate flag gear from their stores in the past too. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that they probably weren’t selling them in, say, their San Francisco locations, even prior to that. Similarly, I’m also guessing that they probably aren’t selling “pridewear” in rural Mississippi or whatnot. That isn’t even to deal with people getting grouchy about it being there…just that those items aren’t gonna sell well.

tal , 2 days ago

Jackson and Lee were prominent, competent military leaders. Who is Ashby, though?

googles

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Ashby

Some cavalry commander under Jackson. He doesn’t sound like that big a deal.

tal , 2 days ago

That’s a thought.

checks

I mean, same general region, northern Virginia, but not really his place of birth. Something like a hundred miles away.

It sounds like he was one of a number of people who got appointed via political connections.

I’d think that if one wanted to choose a Confederate military leader who did well, there’d be a lot of better choices. Like, the North-South division ran right next to Washington, DC, due to the Maryland/Virginia split, Richmond wasn’t that far away, and so northern Virginia was the location of a lot of important Civil War stuff and my impression is that generally, Confederate forces in the east performed better than those in the west. So one would think that the northern Virginia region would have a lot of prominent options.

If you wanted to pick a Confederate cavalry commander, I’d think that I’d pick someone like J. E. B. Stuart, who really did outperform.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._E._B._Stuart

Like his intimate friend, Stonewall Jackson, General J. E. B. Stuart was a legendary figure and is considered one of the greatest cavalry commanders in American history. His friend from his federal army days, Union Major General John Sedgwick, said that Stuart was “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.”[83]

tal , 2 days ago

The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Niño climate event, which has now waned

One can maybe alter emissions, but not much that one can do about El Niño.

tal , 2 days ago

The norm in the US – lethal injection – is apparently to essentially knock someone out, then stop their heart. I don’t imagine that one feels anything.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_injection

In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousness followed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):

• Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short-action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the person unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will—even in the absence of the following two drugs—cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.
• Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, which causes complete, fast, and sustained paralysis of the striated skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.
• Potassium chloride: a potassium salt, which increases the blood and cardiac concentration of potassium to stop the heart via an abnormal heartbeat and thus cause death by cardiac arrest.

tal , 2 days ago

There are a few states that differ. Last time I looked it up, one state still permitted the condemned to request hanging, but it looks like they stopped that, probably because it was a pain to do. I recall reading that the last one that was done, the state had to dig around in old records to figure out how the heck you compute drop length for a given weight and such.

en.wikipedia.org/…/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit…

Offender-selected methods

In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:

• Lethal injection in all states as primary method, in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable
• Nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama
• Electrocution in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina (primary method)
• Gas chamber in California and Missouri

In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, gas chamber in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.

In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; gas chamber in Wyoming).

tal , 2 days ago

Apparently Vermont technically still has electrocution on the books for treason.

All 26 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. As of 2021, South Carolina is the only autonomous region in the United States of America to authorize its 1912 Electric Chair as the primary method of execution, citing inability to procure the drugs necessary for lethal injection. Vermont’s remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.

However, given that very few people in the US have ever been convicted of treason at all – despite people liking to claim that something is “treason”, it’s actually an extremely narrowly-defined crime – much less under Vermont state law, that’s probably largely academic.

en.wikipedia.org/…/Treason_laws_in_the_United_Sta…

Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as “only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, “adhering to the enemies” of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.

Death sentences for treason under the Constitution have been carried out in only two instances: the executions of Taos Revolt insurgents in 1847, and that of William Bruce Mumford during the Civil War.

Constitutionally, U.S. citizens who live in a state owe allegiance to at least two government entities: the United States of America and their state of legal residence. They can therefore potentially commit treason against either, or against both. At least 14 people have been charged with treason against various states; at least six were convicted, five of whom were executed. Only two prosecutions for treason against a state were ever carried out in the U.S.: one against Thomas Dorr and the other after John Brown’s conspiracy. It has often been discussed, both legally and in matter of policy, if states should punish treason.

Neither of those was in Vermont – one was in Rhode Island and the other Virginia, and the only instance of the two in which a death sentence was applied was in Virginia, after the John Brown uprising.

tal , 2 days ago

I believe that Zero Cool is a character in the movie Hackers, though I haven’t seen it.

googles

Yup.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)

Cast

• Jonny Lee Miller as Dade Murphy / “Zero Cool” / “Crash Override”

Apparently it’s the main character.

tal , 2 days ago

I will refuse to call most cars made in the 80s or later “vintage” even though that’s the technically correct word.

It was easier to reach the 1980s than most for TimeSquirrel.

tal , 2 days ago

The breach here is pretty minor, in my book. Name, address, specifics of computer purchased. The name and address is pretty much available and linked already. The computer isn’t, but doesn’t seem that abusable. Maybe it could help someone locate more-expensive, newer computers for theft, but I don’t see a whole lot of potential room for abuse.

tal , 2 days ago

Heh. My fault. It’s “Eternity”, not “Eclipse”

tal , 2 days ago

For some things, yeah, though in this case, a user has the option to subscribe.

tal , 2 days ago

I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.

Oh, that’s interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.

tal , 22 hours ago

considers

I think that mount the mount(1) command is probably calling the mount(2) system call, and it’s returning ENOENT, error 2. The mount(2) man page says “ENOENT A pathname was empty or had a nonexistent component.”.

Hmm. So, I expect from the cyan color there that that “luks-d8…” thing is a symlink that points at some device file that LUKS creates when that luksOpen command runs.

Maybe ls -l /dev/mapper/luks-d8… and see what it points at and whether that exists as a first step? It’s probably gonna be some device file somewhere in /dev.