No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
14d ago
Used to be the case. Very much used to be the case. Not the case anymore. Lot of science talent has gone to China. Lot of white scientists have gone to China, where there's no DEI, and ideology in science is restricted to having students take a few hours monthly. They have no problem with insane school policies, homeless junkie schizos etc. China is cleaning up the air. Closing down old power plants, building up wind & solar in inner Mongolia, building new coal power plants with an eye to be converted to modular nuclear. They're currently in lead in nuclear reactor tech - having learned everything the West forgot, building up old & new types, more than the rest of the world combined. Cost of living is a lot lower in China, and wages are getting better.
Assuming you're american, China is extremely cheap, the RMB undervalued by 50%. You can go see for yourself. If you've got foreign SIM card, your internet isn't even gated behind the great firewall. With machine translation, you wouldn't even really be lost. Don't think they install shit on your phone unless you enter from one of the 'stans where they have an insurgent problem.
You could just go take a look. Or look around for someone who works there.
Guy here has a number of episodes interviewing whites who work or worked in China. https://www.manifold1.com/episodes
Finally got it working.
Had to make the nutrient belt look whether all the fruit processing, flux making and nutrient making machines are running, and only then start feeding the rest of the factory. Sequence related issues, having to gate all the flows to parts unless they're working..
If I had to do it all over again, I'd leave more space between the segments, and also pre-install some belts.
Gleba is really OP if you get it to work, the amount of iron and copper you get from bacteria is nuts.
No_one
14d ago
The US machine moves more slowly but once it gains momentum it tends to get there.
It was not the case back in the glory days of WW2. Today, it took Americans 15 years to solve oxygen issues in an oxygen generator for pilots.
The only possible case of this happening is if both are true a) US develops AI, and it's not a matter of compute but some special sauce (it has a proverbial moat). b) US manages to get around all the legal issues in expanding industry - endless wrangling over backyards, enviromental issues
If a) is not true, China will boost their manufacturing likewise. If b) is not true, US won't be able to expand its own manufacturing.
Also, unless AI at the level of hypersonic aviation researcher become available, China will have an edge population wise. Chinese aren't as imaginative but are less easily distracted - way more engineers. Furthermore, rivalry will drive out Chinese ethnic workers out of the US, quite likely.
No_one
15d ago
EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
My gas bill went up 2.5x times in '23. US LNG is, at the very least, 3x more expensive intrinsically compared to piped gas. It's quite likely following the war, Nord Stream is going to be repaired (currently 3/4 pipes are broken) and put back into order.
Gas prices have already devastated German industry, we could just shutter everything and keep buying US energy, but I don't think that's likely. Not everyone's like me and considering leaving this place.
China wants to work peacefully with us
That's what you heard. What the Chinese meant is that they're not Khorne enthusiasts, they don't consider shedding blood the point of war and want to see US bow out of the contest over who gets to call the shots in East Asia peacefully.
Their plan is, build up the army and the army's navy to the point US is going to be facing insurmountable odds - overwhelmed with masses of precision weapons. According to simulations, US is almost always losing the war anyway because it has no good missile defense, not enough interceptors and all local bases are in range of Chinese missiles.
In addition, likely China can blockade Japan and Korea from, at least tankers, without ever leaving home. If Iran can make a few 100 ballistic missiles, Chinese can make thousands and thousands of accurate ones. US is making ~150 ABM interceptors a year. No contest.
So a protracted war would hurt everyone, not just Chinese, and ever more so, as China's moving to using more EVs and building up their domestic grid.
No_one
15d ago
It's missing some stuff like building physics, and tbh, I am just never buying that game unless it gets insanely appealing.
Wish normal Factorio was more combat-oriented. Like playing Rampant, the only problem is most people avoid that mod and it's hard to find anyone to play with.
I was thinking about buying Satisfactory but their community manager was posting woke shit on Twitter, and I decided to simply not give my money to people who are in my opinion stupid enough to pander to the worst people in the known universe.
3d and grid based are orthogonal concepts.
Captain of Industry is both grid based, for building, and fully 3d. They might even add on tunneling (I'd love it).
Vehicles have bounds defined by the grid, but they don't move on it.
the second step is to fight with the actual construction because first-person gameplay is a terrible way to translate your thoughts into (virtual) reality.
You know, I was actually considering going to the forums to bitch to ask for a FPS perspective, or more precisely, being able to zoom in really close and really down - it'd cost them not much because trying to stick another conveyor belt in a big mess of other belts, from a bird's eye view is pretty hard. Despite the snapping code being very,very good!
I mean, I like grids because we're not neanderthals and lacking incredible memory we need things neatly laid out if we're not to keep getting sidetracked looking for stuff. Neanderthals didn't put their stuff in any sense of order whatsoever, suggesting either improbable stupidity (bulk of our ancestors wasn't likely much smarter at the time), or more likely, far better memory. Having to align stuff is a pain.
No_one
15d ago
The real problem isn't the spoilage, it's that there's so many feedback loops needed.
And the issue is, if you let your fruit to spoil, you lose the seeds. If you lose the seeds, you lose possibility of sowing them. So.. Yeah.
This got me like 4x due to certain bugs. I've decided to, at the very least, used bots with fruits and seeds. The rest is nuts, the devs purposefully went with absurd amounts of stuff like nutrients to discourage botting.
In the end I decided that this kind of shit needs a modular approach - don't even want to deal with calculations, so I made small units that each does one thing and then just connect them together.
The outer loops is nutrients and waste removal, the straight-thrugh belt is the actual processing.
The issue is mainly that I the fruit cycles were unsynced, so sometimes it'd stop working bc one wasn't available in quantity.
No_one
15d ago
The enemies are no threat - they only appear if you're farming the trees hard enough.
Don't care about pollution - care about the spores.
I mean, you can automate the space platform. I dumped like 15k iron on Gleba purely working out the bugs on mine.
No_one
15d ago
Gleba is really driving me nuts. Unless you do pure bot logistics, the entire thing is a nightmare to automate.
It's deeply irrational trying to do it, but the whole thing has so many edge cases. E.g. I converted all my spoiled vegetation into nutrients. But that means the mechanical nutrient cycle starter plants can't provide nutrients to even start everything else.
etc.
No_one
15d ago
The implementation I'm using - stable diffusion - is written in Python, leaks memory like a sieve and basically somehow eats up 32 gb of ram even though the process only ever uses up to 16 gb.
The only practical thing to do while it's running is shitposting, I've found.
No_one
15d ago
I mean, assuming you have a career and a family, you can moderate your heart's desire for freedom and also your gaming time. If you do some planning and analysis off-game, you can probably complete the game in 2-3 months of 1-2 hours in the evenings.
I think the devs are obsessed with the quality of the code and design in the game to such a degree that they believe 3D will never allow such precision and control of the player's viewpoint. I think they're right.
You can always just do a grid. Even if player POV was in a 3d grid, that'd still be improved. And 3d has way more options.
Especially in space, 2d just looks fucking weird. We are all flatlanders down here but up there?
No_one
16d ago
Short review: Factorio: Space Age is .. pretty good. It's kinda like Space Exploration mod but somewhat lite & polished.
There's a whole bunch of new mechanics, such as spoilage of certain items on Gleba, grave-robbing on Fulgora and industrially excavating the ruins of an entire civilization and turning it into recycled materials and reusing some of it. Spaceships can't use logistic bots and have only one chest, requiring a whole additional way of building stuff.
Item quality, unlocked by said grave-robbing is a replacement for the upper tiers of materials Bob & Angels used to have. It doesn't seem critical so far, but it's nice to have and makes things more efficient. Might be critical for late game, who knows.
All in all, if you like automation games, this is a worthy DLC for the one that started the genre.
The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you, seems to me the entire belt-related code could be pasted into a 3d game bc essentially, the belts on a 3d grid are the same as on a 2d grid (if you had infinite belt-types for interleaving).
No_one
16d ago
This belongs to the WW thread, I think.
And yeah, social media is a great timesink good for.. very little.
No_one
16d ago
I don't even know who a single of these people is.
How does one even get exposure to pop girls?
No_one
16d ago
I spent almost all the entirety of its free time playing Factorio: Space Age. Even to the point of neglecting the imaginary girls and thus giving my GPU a well-deserved rest.
Yeah, fun week.
No_one
16d ago
Thx. I also note the UA numbers are probably bullshit - we can be reasonably sure how many Russians died, but no one's counting Ukrainians and it's a state secret too.
No_one
17d ago
What about the basics ? What's the death-toll like. What's the % GDP decline and starvation rates in comparison to before the war?
No_one
17d ago
No, you're not cherrypicking.
It was the golden period when game devs were still making games for people like them-not insulting the intelligence of players, but they had much bigger budgets because gaming was expanding towards the dimmer types.
It is as simple as that. Excellent games still do get made - e.g. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has an almost worthy successors - but they never get a lot of attention because AAA is kinda dumb now. Word of mouth only. I recommend watching Sseth's videos - he reviews a lot of such.
No_one
21d ago
I played NWN.. back around when it came out, but I do remember being disappointed. Not sure why.
BG2, on the other hand..
I feel one can get used to almost any kind of graphics as long as it's not 320x240. Young people have no idea what they're missing if they haven't played modded BG2+ToB. With the anti-cheese patches and stratagems(I think) it was an amazing game.
No_one
21d ago
The people who criticize it as more of a Larian game than a BG game are probably right - but there's also some of what you call post-5e culture. (I think- I avoided that like the plague). Marvel-speak and such is mostly related to certain companions, but the overall writing isn't that good.
Don't think it'll ruin it - the games really do feel a lot different, but you're going to be regularly disappointed in the writing. It's really a shame that people let to write something that expensive are just.. meh. Same as with Fallout 3 & 4.
Personally, I'm not going to even consider anything AAA ever again. I also probably only played BG3 bc a friend bought it for me. Maybe the new Cyberpunk - at least the main game had good writing. There's 'Atom RPG', a not so new Soviet Fallout-inspired game. I'll get into that once I learn cyrillic.
Amazingly I found some actually quality TV. And from my native land! I thought this would never happen. In 2019, HBO produced a Czech TV series. Labelled as fiction, but ..more thoughtful Czechoslovaks would have many a word to say there.
It's called 'The Sleepers' (2019).
Sort of a spy drama, though spies (or sleeper agents) are not the main characters. Almost no James Bond nonsense(implausible feats) except a very little in the middle. You do get to see state-security plainclothes agents casually bullying a lot of people while investigating, British diplomats being unhelpful and so on. A bit like 'True Detective' but about 1980s Czechoslovak dissidents, state security and politics. You have to pay attention because details matter-you'll be bewildered if you're treating it as background. The Czech title 'Unconsciously' is more fitting.
Acting is great - they got 75% of good local actors, the sets are almost perfect - if you want to show some US planned economy enjoyers how eastern bloc looked in 1980s, this is perfect. The screenplay is pretty good. There are a few hiccups, one implausible coincidence and one piece of laughable nonsense, but for TV or cinema it's really, really good. There's even a personal connection: one of the major characters is played by a grand-daughter of 1968-69 minister of planning.
It was produced by HBO but is no longer in their catalogue even in former Czechoslovakia, due to either some merger and sell-off of rights or because it's a 'conspiracy*'.. ThePirateBay has a copy which we watched. There are subtitles to be had here.. Unless you are fluent in Czech, English and Russian you'll need them.
EDIT: fixed some typoes.
No_one
22d ago
If you never played BG2, then you may play BG3 and find it okay.
It is a retarded, drooling cousin of the older games. The first Dragon Age was already huge step down compared to BG2 in the terms of combat. I can't even imagine how dumb this game is now. BG3 had some okay writing and the tactial gameplay was fun, but it's overall a huge let down.
No_one
22d ago
You think small police departments around the US are going to get much value out of fucking MRAPs.
Bullshit.
You think Gaza experience will help American police oppress Americans - ignoring that Americans are far more heavily armed and have far, far less police officers than say, Europeans.
What are we even talking about?
No_one
24d ago
Every podunk pd has an MRAP now.
It's useless for them.
If that's the level we're sinking to - [your demographic group] are a bunch of smelly morons.
You said that- not me. PISA scores and results speak for themselves. Arabs underperform.
I have no idea what you are talking about or what it has to do with the topic at hand but it sounds like it'll involve a lot of radioactive fallout.
Probably, but that's not bad. Fallout decays fast.
... who do you think caused European energy policy ?
Midwit unaccountable apparatchiks ruining entire continents is SOP. Germany's disastrous energy policy started when the fucking Greens got two secretaries or undersecretaries to the ministry of economy, iirc, cca 2000.
Try to show me Energiewende, based on wishful thinking, was sound policy. It wasn't. It was pie in the sky, cost must falls, we'll make it nonsense, that led to what everyone predicted. Sky high energy prices, burning more coal, spending megabucks on keeping standby plants running so you don't have brownouts.
Yet that doomed an entire continent. No one was ever asked.
I ask you again who in the US wanted infinity migration and 7% of population of Haiti moved in?
At least the CCP has somewhat sound priorities: having power and getting rich. Not turning China into Brazil with worse weather.
More options
Context Copy link