ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
2d ago
As a side note, I remember the onion being much more relevant sometime in the past. I wonder if its decline is related to it becoming just another mouthpiece for the democrat agenda, or if I'm totally off track.
Babylon Bee feels grounded in a way that the Onion isn't. Practically all of their articles start with an actual piece of news: The CEO of Polymarket was raided, Matt Gaetz was appointed, Cabinet picks were protested, etc.
The Onion relies more on completely-fabricated articles (1, 2, 3) which simply don't have the same impact. The ones that do contain factual content are unbearably blunt at promoting the establishment (or farther left) stance on the issue.
Relatedly, I couldn't find a single Onion article against the Left, while Babylon Bee articles against the Right are a dime a dozen. That type of hardline political stance turns me off, and I suspect it does the same for others.
ulyssessword
8d ago
I chose to move to a moon just to see what happens rather than any well-considered reason, but I think it worked well.
The lack of core miners wasn't an issue given the ease of importing materials (I ran out of local copper and uranium, and local oil was very very insufficient) because the other planets had nigh-infinite amounts of ore. I got copper from the belt, uranium and oil from the oil moon, and all of the advanced materials from around the system. Low gravity is extremely important for using spaceships, as it allows you to use just one fuel tank for a full set of chests (to 300 integrity) and still have enough range to make a round trip.
I hadn't thought of the respawn trick, but I'm not sure if I would use it if I had. It feels like an exploit IMO.
ulyssessword
8d ago
Double-check where your nearest fire extinguisher is. Make a mental note.
Also: If it's far away, just buy one. I'm renting an apartment, and the nearest fire extinguisher is (or at least was) the entire apartment length and half the building's hallway away from me. Now there's one about 3/4 of the apartment length away in the worst case.
ulyssessword
8d ago
The only downside is, it's not 3d.
Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games? AFAICT, that's what ties together my preference for 2d grids and turn based gameplay.
Do you know what one of the earliest improvements I do in Satisfactory is? I build foundations for my factory, so that it can be grid-based. Same with any basebuilding in Fallout 4 or Valheim: The first step is to build foundations to remove the unique geography and provide a consistent grid, and 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.
ulyssessword
8d ago
SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains.
Leave Nauvis and settle on the smallest non-dry, non-vitemelange moon in the system. You need to build a ground base somewhere, but the planet with a deep gravity well, no special resources, and many biters isn't that good of a choice.
ulyssessword
9d ago
One of my favorite half-joking proposals: Either the US should get 50 seats at the UN, or the EU should get one. They are both unions of sovereign states under the umbrella of a larger entity, after all.
ulyssessword
9d ago
The literature reviewed suggests that high levels of exposure reduce IQ's by 2 to 5 points.
Huh, I was worried that they were making a mistake like recreational ketamine (3g/day) causes bladder problems, therefore we must be wary of psychiatric ketamine (280mg/month), but the effect showed up at 1.5 mg/l vs. the EPA's limit of 4 mg/l in drinking water. Canada's recommendation of 0.7 mg/l is still pretty close to the studied dose.
ulyssessword
10d ago
Aside: Someone Please Hire The Guy Who Names Playstations (about LLMs not USB, but the point stands)
ulyssessword
11d ago
had seals discovered broken
It's significantly worse than that: Half were discovered defeated but not broken. With a tiny bit more effort, an attacker could have hidden the evidence that they accessed the machines.
How hard is it to select a tamper-evident seal that actually makes it evident when it is tampered with?
ulyssessword
11d ago
Here in Antifa-land there is already a helicopter hovering within earshot. Oh, the memories.
I had to laugh at Scott, here:
The market defines “major [election riot]” as five hundred participants causing either $1 million in damage or 10 hospitalizations/deaths. This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the Democrats riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).
His calculation was to set the chance of (presumably rightwing) riots if Trump loses to 100% and assign the remainder to Trump's victory. That's not an assumption I share, to put it lightly.
ulyssessword
12d ago
Should a sentence of "16 years with the possibility of parole after 8 years of good behavior" be rephrased to "8 years with the possibility of extension to 16 years upon bad behavior", to avoid confusion?
No, for the same reason that a product/service should be "Regular $10, on sale for $5!" instead of "Regular $5, surge pricing to $10!". The headline number you choose matters, and if you go worse than the baseline you had better be prepared to rigorously defend your choice.
ulyssessword
12d ago
"To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized,"
That's bullshit, and the government should be held to a higher standard of honesty.
There's no indication that those animals were suffering (never mind suffering to such an extent that death is the only release), so they were killed to test for rabies.
It's not like killing animals is even that bad. The government is just in the habit of lying to deflect responsibility and make itself look good.
ulyssessword
13d ago
I prefer RTwP over TB, simply because TB is too slow.
I've never been able to play RTWP as quickly as a well-designed turn based game.
I tried Pillars of Eternity, and the disconnect between my (intended) commands and the characters' (attempted) actions drove me up the wall1. I had to constantly monitor my characters to make sure that they didn't interpret "approach that enemy, then attack it" as "try to approach that enemy, notice that the direct path to the enemy has become blocked, circle around the entire battlefield, then attack it if you survived the detour".
If I wanted to change tactics, I had to review each character to see what their current WIP action is (if it's even possible), recall which commands have been carried out vs. queued vs. failed, determine the bearing, speed, and timing of all units if I'm planning on an AoE, then set the new command.
Contrast that to Divinity Original Sin, where if I commanded something, it happened, monitoring events is baked in, changing tactics is literally free (continuing them costs something instead), and actions are almost as fast as I can hit the skill hotkeys and aim them.
(1) confusion and opportunity attacks are perfectly decent ways to break the link between my commands and their actions. Bad UI and AI isn't.
ulyssessword
18d ago
What a lazy, dishonest, and incorrect summarization.
Can you share some counterexamples?
As it is, I'm stuck between believing a few paragraphs of analysis supported by links (that I didn't follow TBH), vs. a one-sentence dismissal.
ulyssessword
21d ago
I have to wonder what they were doing 8 years ago. That one was crazy because no one liked Trump. No one with any respectable position in pop culture was willing to openly hope for his victory. It seemed his only supporters were anons and the denizens of flyover country, who all did their best to make the movement very unseemly.
That honestly doesn't sound worrying if I completely ignore hindsight. Why would you exhaust yourself over some puffed up nobody who's going to go down in history as the other candidate when the first woman president was elected?
Eight years later, he has the weight of history behind him.
ulyssessword
22d ago
Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
ulyssessword
28d ago
Which reference class is the company purporting to be better than?
ulyssessword
29d ago
Sure. Selecting the correct reference class is also pretty hard, but that cuts both ways too.
ulyssessword
29d ago
"The selected children will be worse than average" seems like a simple resolution criteria? Sure, "worse" is pretty hard to define, but that cuts both ways.
ulyssessword
30d ago
Prediction: "Generation Z" and "Zoomer" will be given a false entomology of "person who used Zoom to attend school during the COVID 19 pandemic" within the next couple decades.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I found a much clearer example this morning: California officials cite Elon Musk’s politics in rejecting SpaceX launches (via here):
The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I'm not actually a programmer, and learning how to work with Windows to build a UI would be a long and annoying process relative to delegating it. On the other hand, I had already set up a script for more complex control of the laser, so creating a stripped down version was easy.
The project took me about three hours between writing my part, delegating the other, and testing them both together.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Commissioner Brendan Carr of the FCC provided a good writeup here (p14 of the "Order on Review", or the "Carr Statement") of why he believes that his committee's decision was driven by anti-Musk sentiment. (I also recommend reading the Simington statement: "...the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary [this decision] was.").
Key quotes:
President Biden stood at a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and expressed his view that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.”
...
Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the volume of government investigations into his businesses makes us wonder if the Biden Administration is targeting him for regulatory harassment.”
...
Indeed, the Commission’s decision today...cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.
Here is a story of the White House denouncing him after he "endorsed a post on X".
And-- why do you think elon musk is somehow especially and irrationally persecuted?
I don't think either of those things. It's bog-standard waging the culture war, which is instrumentally rational for the perpetrators.
I think it's bad.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Wait. Which penis pills do I have to take after the penultimate ones? Is the product name supposed to be a cliffhanger? Is it just preparation for the ultimate penis pills? Should I be looking for antepenultimate penis pills before using those? I have so many questions about a product that doesn't exist.
I'm not grading on a curve. If you say that's a 3/10, then I say apologies start being appropriate at a 2/10. You don't get any credit for even worse people existing.
Yes, emotions will be high, but that just means that you have to deal with it like an adult or apologize for your failure to do so.
More options
Context Copy link