You did 200k years. You need to do 200k years as seconds (the 6.311e12 they mentioned). Their math is right.

Not sure why you’re acting like they claimed to invent the logarithm, either…

No, we are both dreaming butterflies.

Such a choom.

The cult of personality thing is the big part IMO. If it was just him being a piece of shit without any influence, then whatever. But he has a cult following that are influenced by him and his actions (plus Twitter seems now designed to push his thoughts). It’s important that the vast majority of people understand that Musk is an idiot and a piece of shit. It needs to be lame and gross to like him.

My best guess is that they hope some agriculture or GMO company might have a use for it. Basically crops + future theme. Maybe they were trying to stand out from the likely vastly more common corn + person in lab coat?

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

It really is far harder to write short things than long things. I have to make conscious choices to remove things, even when it feels like “if I remove this, it’s technically wrong in [niche edge case]” or “but what if it comes across as [some negative]”.

There’s also that moment in No Man’s Sky when you figure out what the story is implying. I’m being vague here to not spoil it for anyone. But it doesn’t have a single point in time where you piece it together. There’s a growing amount of evidence before the game outright tells you what’s going on.

Casters often feel at a massive disadvantage for casual fights. For a boss fight, casters are often the strongest, since you’ll blow all your spell slots. But for smaller fights, you want to preserve your spell slots and cantrips simply cannot keep up with martials. I mean, a single attack roll for a spell cantrip vs getting 2-3 attack roles that also do more damage total? Heck, my strongest martials can usually do at least double the damage of a spell caster’s cantrips.

Though at the same time, when I can blow the spell slot, no martial can outdo the AoE damage of reliable ol’ fireball or the likes. Just I can’t justify using my spell slots on a small number of weak enemies.

Second playthrough, trying out dark urge and being evil. It’s really hard, honestly. I’ve lost half of my beloved companions and slaughted some favourite NPCs. It feels really fucked up. Minthara better be worth it lol.

Despite the fact I tried to be a completionist in my first playthrough, I’ve still been discovering lots of things I missed. The biggest so far is that there was a massive amount of the creche to explore on the exterior. I missed that before and basically only went into the basement. I also last time missed that there were 2 mythrils, among many other smaller things.

There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.

In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).

It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).

We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.

Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can’t even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they’re theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?

A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn’t cash means we can’t take it away.

If they try to leave to another country, arrest them for tax evasion and seize every asset they have. Don’t let them do any business in the country without paying their share. Get other countries to band together on this until there’s nowhere for them to run except shitholes. Even if we can’t stop them from being rich in Ireland (and on that note, we should punish tax havens with sanctions), we can stop them from using their wealth to affect other countries.

Yeah, it’s so weird that they’re sooooo in love with Russia and China. They claim to be communist and/or socialist, but those countries aren’t what I’d consider to be either of those things. They’re just… regular ol’ dictatorships full of human rights abuses. Why the hell would they want to support them?

Even if we did develop fusion, how long would it take to switch to it and would it even be economical? A ton of places still use coal and other fossil fuels simply because they’re cheap or were already built. It’s hard to make assumptions about how much fusion would cost when we still don’t have it. Nuclear fission’s fuel is cheap (cause so little is needed), yet nuclear is still insanely expensive because building the plants is a difficult task mired in red tape and the general public is afraid of it (on that note, I’m not sure how many people even have a concept of fusion beyond perhaps what Spiderman 2 made them believe).

There’s also the divide in the world. Even if the rich western countries got fusion, would everyone? The west also got covid vaccines early while much of the rest of the world had to wait. And further drawing on the covid analogy, some countries pretended there wasn’t an issue, which already is going on with climate change.

Some of these I get, but I don’t get the T9 thing. T9 was so bad! It took ages to type many words. Today’s predictive keyboards are miles better.

Also, no software updates? Sure, every now and then there’s a shitty update, but most updates are great. New features and especially bug fixes are amazing. Used to be that if something had a bug, you just had to deal with it. There’s no guarantees it’ll be fixed today, but many companies do fix their bugs at least eventually. The ability to iteratively develop is huge for software quality. These days, unless you’re developing something that absolutely cannot fail (like a mars prober or radiation therapy machine), it’s widely agreed upon that iterative design is superior to “waterfall” design of trying to plan it out all ahead of time. Part of why is so you can get feedback continuously instead of only after you’ve committed to months of tech debt.

Doesn’t apply to every climate, but Stardew also doesn’t make you face the physical pain of air that hurts your face.

Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there’s plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.

Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn’t matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.

When I completely replaced my PC, I intended to use my old PC as a media box. But in reality, I’ve basically used my Chromecast for everything. One of these days I’ll probably want to watch something that isn’t on one of my streaming sites, but I’ve been surprisingly resistant to that so far.

Chromecast is the ideal smart device so far, for me. No ads or anything. I use my phone as a remote and basically every video app supports it easily. Open app, press cast, select what I want to play. Exactly what a smart TV should have been like.

That’s a great idea. I’d probably reconsider some choices if the right party member asked me to. And if Astarion disapproves, then I know I must be doing something right lol.

Yeah, your last 3 examples are the ones I usually reload for and don’t feel bad about. I try to avoid save scumming just to redo rolls, but in particular, some dialogue choices are really poorly explained. I don’t feel guilty reloading for those because I don’t think they would happen with a human DM, where I get to actually word what I say and can get clarification if needed.

There was one battle against a blatant evil character where they tried to negotiate when they were close to death. The dialogue choices were confusing and I accidentally somehow chose an option that would have let them go. I ended up reloading and doing the whole battle again just so I could kill them, as intended.

Ugh, there’s some parts of YAML I love, but ultimately it’s a terrible format. It’s just too easy to confuse people. At least it has comments though. It’s so dumb that JSON doesn’t officially have comments. I’ve often parsed “JSON” as YAML entirely for comments, without using a single other YAML feature.

YAML also supports not quoting your strings. Seems great at first, but it gets weird of you want a string that looks like a different type. IIRC, there’s even a major version difference in the handling of this case! I can’t remember the details, but I once had a bug happen because of this.

Performance wise, both YAML and JSON suck. They’re fine for a config file that you just read on startup, but if you’re doing a ton of processing, it will quickly show the performance hit. Binary formats work far better (for a generic one, protobuffers has good tooling and library support while being blazing fast).