Its so easy to forget all the garbage games that got churned out 20 years ago. Even the good games - your FF7s and Warcraft 2s - had their share of notorious glitches.
The ability to patch a game after release has definitely not improved first-iteration releases. But you can go out and get a copy of Skyrim or Resident Evil 7 or Dragon Quest 9 and play it with a very reasonable degree of confidence that it will work end-to-end as intended. You can't say the same thing about Super Mario 64 or Mortal Kombat 3. Hell, the whole speedrunning community has to distinguish between "glitched" and "glitchless" runs, precisely because finding glitches in classic games is such a pivotal part of beating them in record times.
Adding 30 years to a cast that was already in their 30s/40s when the original aired was hard enough with Picard, when the people were supposed to look like people. And that series wrapped last year.
Curious to see what they do with the remake, but folks aren't getting any younger.
I hate these takes, because they always open with "What would happen if a large volume of matter vanish?!" And yes, removing anything on the scale of "All the salt in all the oceans instantaneously" would be catastrophic entirely on the grounds that any instant movement of enormous mass is going to destabilize natural systems.
But the question that people are looking to answer is "What would the world look like if the Atlantic was a bigger version of Lake Michigan?" Not "what would hitting the oceans with a Star Trek teleporter do?"
Kinda grazes at the edges of this, but doesn't really seek to distinguish what a fully-desalinated ocean system would look like relative to a salty one. It just describes a transitional period in which freshwater life migrates out to the ocean. But it doesn't discuss what a deep-sea fresh water world would look like.
Also, the "eventually the sea would re-salinate" gets us to a more fundamental question "Why is the sea salty to begin with?" And that gives us insight into where salts come from and why they are fundamental to the ocean ecosystem.
On arrival the 302 Germans were split into several groups. A large group of 99 specialists from the Zentralwerke was installed in Podlipki in the north east section of Moscow as part of Korolev's NII-88, 76 design engineers were transferred to Gorodomlya Island, and 23 specialists to Khimki as part of Glushko's OKB-456 for the development of rocket engines.
But once the Germans had been pumped for info, they fell by the wayside. The difference between Russians and Americans was that the Russians didn't put German scientists in administrative positions. They just squeezed them for their findings and retired them. The scientists didn't end up running the fucking departments.
yeah, the comic describes it as "the virtually impossible"
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a "bird detecting algorithm" by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being "some dude at a computer filling out captchas".
I'm not saying we aren't building on centuries of work, i'm saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled "birds" and ask if there's a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that's camouflaged, or even just a bird that's out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the "Is this a bird?" test.
It's a bit like saying "I wonder how the dinosaurs died?" in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.
Listen. First of, China #1 Stay Winning Go Xi Go Mets Love You China #1.
However, Taiwan is very clearly occupied territory. US military and business interests are crawling all over it. Japan and Korea both have stakes in the island, via economic and political channels. Nevermind all the international trade that hinges on the island's perceived independence.
Whatever side of the "Taiwan Question" (why do we need to make this feel antisemetic, btw?) you fall on, it clearly isn't an internal affair. There is way too much international trade and military traffic in and around Taiwan for that to be the case.
![zifnab25 [he/him, any]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/16834d2e-60b9-423e-8882-6552cb49486b.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Its so easy to forget all the garbage games that got churned out 20 years ago. Even the good games - your FF7s and Warcraft 2s - had their share of notorious glitches.
The ability to patch a game after release has definitely not improved first-iteration releases. But you can go out and get a copy of Skyrim or Resident Evil 7 or Dragon Quest 9 and play it with a very reasonable degree of confidence that it will work end-to-end as intended. You can't say the same thing about Super Mario 64 or Mortal Kombat 3. Hell, the whole speedrunning community has to distinguish between "glitched" and "glitchless" runs, precisely because finding glitches in classic games is such a pivotal part of beating them in record times.