drosophila @ drosophila @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.

Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.

This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4

Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8

Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.

Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.

it’s basically a slug at that distance and will %100 go through drywall.

Hey it's gotta go through some fiberglass, glued-together wood chips, and plastic siding too. They just need a few layers of wet tissue paper on there as well and they'll be golden.

This is more psychotic than any of the dialogue in American Psycho.

Who’s to say that the medical benefit of many friends or relatives visiting is worth less than a house.

Doctors and medical researchers are in a position to say what the effects of public policy are on public health. And they're saying that car-centric urban design has a negative impact on it, and that we should be building transit and pedestrian oriented urban environments instead.

In general activities that have a negative impact on society should be discouraged, and certainly not subsidized so that they're favored over the alternatives. There are many ways to make it easy to visit a hospital, not the least of which is simply allowing people to live in close proximity to one, which is something that has a positive impact on medical outcomes.

There's an opportunity cost associated with using land for parking, particularly in dense urban areas.

In many cases a parking spot uses more space than the person who parked there uses to do their job (if they work in a cubicle for example). But they also need to be able to park not just at their job, but at their home, at the store, at their doctor's office, etc. In the US there can be as many as 8 parking spaces per car, which collectively take up one third of the urban area.

This is the case for many things in the US, not just healthcare.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/why-building-us-highways-expensive/724730/

I've noticed this happening when i get really really high FPS in a game. Like running something from 1998 on a modern system and hitting over 1000 FPS.

Now I have my framerate capped externally so I'm not wasting power rendering thousands of frames for no reason.

I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything

The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job.

This is my experience in the US as well. Also nobody knows anything about anything.

Doctor A puts you on a medication, doctor B doesn't know until you tell them and then he says "he put you on that!? You shouldn't be on that, I'm taking you off it."

You go to have a surgery and say "hey guys, did you know that I'm difficult to intubate? Because I could die if you don't take that into account", they didn't know.

"Hey guys, I have reason to believe that the insurance card I was issued in the mail isn't completely correct, can anyone help me with this?", 4 different people at the company that issued the card have no idea what's going on, don't even know about the policy tied to the card in question and think you must have accidentally called the wrong company (you didn't).

"Hey guys how much is this going to cost?" it is literally impossible to say.

If you're curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com

Back in 1999 a lot of websites would consist of a full-page Adobe Flash program (something that no longer works in modern browsers) a bit like how a lot of websites now are basically JavaScript apps. Because the speed of internet connections was so low back then it could take a long time for those flash apps to load all their content, so while you were waiting they might play a little animation or something that served as an "intro".

Zombo com was a parody of those websites. There was no actual content, it just played a really really long intro that consisted of colorful blinking circles and audio of a guy saying variations of "welcome to zombo com, you can do anything here, anything at all" over and over again.

Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn't have as much global warming denialism.

Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn't come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

But I think you're right though. I've given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it's clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it's better to use an electric car if they're not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it's better to be vaccinated if they're not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they're unwilling to understand what federation even is?

The first STALKER game. Near the beginning when I had hardly any ammo.

I saw a pack of feral dogs in the distance and while they didn't sound friendly I didn't know whether they would be hostile or how close I could get before they would aggro. Since I had so little ammo I resolved to not take any shots unless they got close.

Well, one of them did start running towards me, but before it got that close it cut off and ran away at a 90° angle. Then another, and another did the same thing. "Maybe they're not hostile?" I thought to myself, "Do they just run around randomly?".

Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.

Someone doesn't like windows because they put ads in their start menu: aww you're sweet

Someone doesn't like Ubuntu because they put ads in their start menu: hello, human resources?

It could be related to this video.

Go to his channel and sort by oldest. You'll see that he started out making the absolute worst type of vacuous clickbait slop.

You know how they say "the people most likely to seek and gain power are the ones most ill suited to having it"? That applies to celebrities as well.

You remember that article about how almost every second of Mr Beast's waking life was devoted to content creation? That's what happens when you select for the top 0.001% of the population that want to be famous the most.

That makes me imagine penguins writing Java code.

Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

"Prepare derivative works" means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. "Entertainment" or "because I like the series and these characters" are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

This is not how "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work" part of fair use works.

A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn't matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word "potential" in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said "no". Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it's completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it's not taken down it's either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can't be bothered to deal with it.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let's plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn't been extensively argued in court because most game companies don't want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let's plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn't stop Nintendo from using YouTube's copyright system to claim videos of their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

There's a video about this that explains it pretty in depth.

One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it's own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.

That wouldn't help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.

I would add Project Gutenberg and Open Street Map to your list.