Shurimal @ Shurimal @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The problem with Google's passcodes:

1. I don't use Google account on my phone. In a rare occasion I need to access gmail outside of my home, I just log in via a browser, either on my phone or work computer or wherever.
2. My home PC has no authentication whatsoever. The three physical locks on my apartment's door is the access control. Couldn't lug it around for authentication, anyway.
3. I have no other devices that could be used for this passcode thing, and my phone is usually laying around somewhere, probably shut off with empty battery.

In fact, I have not bothered even with 2FA for google accounts. At this point these are just "garbage collection accounts" for spam and youtube subscriptions/playlists, anyway.

relativistic kill vehicle.

You see it coming, omae wa mou shindeiru.

Only thing more scary would be triggering a vacuum decay event. But these tend to backfire quite spectacularly.

Geometrically speaking, if you draw a really, really big triangle between, say three galaxies, the angles of the triangle add to 180° in a flat universe. In a non-flat space, this would not be the case. For example, if you draw a triangle between, say, New York, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro on the surface of the Earth, the three angles between the lines would add to more than 180° since Earth is topologically a sphere and not flat. And if you draw three lines beween three points on a saddle shape like a Pringles chip, you'll find that the angles add up to less than 180°.

Fun fact: topologically speaking, no matter how you fold or bend a sheet of paper, it remains flat. A cilinder is a flat surface with zero curvature!

In that Expanse clip Kamal is leaning around just like I am when in combat or hooning in Elite.

In both cases, neither Kamal nor I feel any extra acceleration, sitting in a comfortable 0 or 1 G constantly. Leaning around is just a human thing. (While Kamal is using attitude thrusters to rotate the ship around, assuming the pilot's station is at or near the ship CoM as would be desireable for a spaceship, he would feel very little acceleration from that)

But in my case, if I were actually pulling these maneuvers in real life, I'd need to be highly trained on a centrifuge, strapped in tightly, wear a G-suit, have some cybernetic enhanchements and still not only moving around in the seat but black out regularly. Ships in Elite can easily pull 20 or 30 G-s, 3 to 4 times more than modern jet fighters can and 30 to 50 times more than any near-future spaceships can. Realistically, with currently viable drive tech (which includes nuclear propulsion schemes from NERVA to nuclear pulse drive) we're talking about 0.1...0.5 G accelerations for spaceships. Torchships could handle maybe 1 or 2 G-s, comparable to what a street-legal sports car can do.

Lem's Eden was one of my favourites as a kid and works on many levels:

• Cool action and adventuring on a mysterious alien planet.
• Plenty of gadgetry of both human and alien origin. Including some of the earliest description of nanotechnology.
• Social commentary about interfering with an another civilization, oppression, totalitarianism and control of information.

Niven's Known Space series, especially short stories like Neutron Star.

Clifford D. Simak has two fabulous stories, They Walked Like Men and The Goblin Reservation which have the perfect mix of action, humour and societal commentary. It's hard to beat the latters main cast consisting of a university professor searching for dragons, a neanterthal man, a girl with a pet sabertooth tiger and a ghost with amnesia. Hilarity is quaranteed to ensue.

These are machines, though, not human beings.

What's the difference? On the most fundamental level it's all the same.

just reinforcement learning models

...like the naturally occuring neural networks are.

exception of GPUs

To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn't even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?

I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.

Perfection.

In the big picture, more conflict, more human rights violations, more fascism. While crisis brings people together locally, when the going gets real tough for everyone, tribalism and us vs. them will inevitably rear its ugly head.

Tens of millions of people needing to migrate because the areas they live now will become literally uninhabitable (as in not "it'll be a little uncomfortable and hot" but "you will die if you stay there") will be an absolute horrorshow. Genocide, really—I'm fully expecting criminalization of all rescue orgs, "sink on sight" orders for migrant boats and absolute ban on saving any migrant castaway on the Mediterranean.

Briar.

At least Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, had actual classes (let's not talk about the leveling system, shall we?) and spell making. Plus some really, really good questlines (including the main quest, and the whole Shivering Isles expansion was rad AF). The cities also felt larger than in Skyrim and the Arcane University was an actual university, not a random village school with 3 students. Role-play wise Skyrim was the weakest of the three modern ES games.

Due to how TV, monitor, laptop, phone and loudspeaker manufacturers specify things, most europeans operate quite freely with inches. 15" laptops are still marketed as 15" laptops here, not 38cm laptops. We just got used to it.

Just dont start speaking to europeans about fluid ounces, bushels of wheat and other such weird things🙃

Have you seen Renault Master, one of the most popular work vans in Europe? Shit's huuuge inside😉 You can fit a 3-seat coach, 2 armchairs, coffee table and a floor lamp inside, along with a 100" TV.

The only game that scratches the space exploration itch Elite doesn't quite scratch (I mean, Elite is very good, but has it's shortcomings when it comes to on-foot stuff). Ship interiors, base building and having actual life on planets, not just some fungoida and bacterium patches, alone are a reason to be excited about Starfield. Also, jetpack combat.

Funny how Elder Scrolls veterans are enjoying the game for what it is while bitter Playstation diehards, wishful thinkers with gigabyte-sized dreams.txt and bandwagon-o'-hate jumpers are complaining about things that never were to be so loud you can clearly hear the "Reeeeeeeeeee...." from Alpha Centauri😏

I think Ridley Scott did it best in his Alien. The bugger is quite vulnerable to bullets and blades, but you really, really don't want to put a hole in it if you're either close range or trapped in a spaceship with one. And all the arsenal in the world still doesn't guarantee success if they're swarming you and using the environment to their advantage.

Making something invulnerable to weapons is an easy way out, making something so that you don't want to use weapons on it is much harder, but much more rewarding.

A vastly overrated movie in my opinion. Not to mention the questionable actions and decisions made by the main characters at pretty much every step, the premise of some creatures being totally immune to modern weapons (even if one is able to suspend their disbelief enough to accept the whole "surviving 20+ km/s atmosperic re-entry on an interstellar asteroid" thing) is just silly.

I mean, we've got munitions meant to penetrate the armor of a modern MBT, no organics will stand a chance, and if they do, tactical nukes are a very real thing. Although I think LORAD-s would have sufficed to deal with the bloody things. Or just set up a few Tom Danley's J5-4015 playing grindcore.

The fridge logic was strong with this one, and I didn't even make it to the fridge.

While the picture of the PCB is just blurry enough to be virtually illegible, it should also be a black-and-white photocopy of 13th generation for maximum effect.

Honestly, the best platform to play Bethesda games is PC anyway. What makes Bethesda special is their embracing of modding, and PC being an open platform allows for much, much more in that respect. IIRC, on Playstation one couldn't even use custom assets in mods, and console makers will never allow script extenders, .NET frameworks and ENB series that allow for amazing stuff on PC.

Didn't have time to go into details in my last post. I think the most important traits of technofeudalism are regulatory capture of the government and ubiquitous rent-seeking—"you'll own nothing" (I highly doubt in the "...and be happy" part).

The big corpos have realised that extracting value is easier and more profitable than creating value. Hence subscription everything including heated seats and better acceleration in cars, platform economy (Uber, Air BnB et al.). The latest Unity fiasco is also an example of a company trying to extract as much value from the game developers as possible, and it will not be the last attempt at this.

What makes technofeudalism possible is the IT infrastructure of the world (hence "techno"). Uber-like platforms and subscription services for hardware were not practical half a century ago, but ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones and DRM makes it easy today.

In short, just like the peasants in the old feudal ages had to pay to the lord to have a place to live and make a living off the land (and realistically had nowhere to go to where this was not the case), in technofeudalism you have to pay for your techno-lord corporate middlemen to have a place to live and be able to use the tools (software or hardware) you need to make a living with no realistic alternatives due to regulatory capture.