The Culture seems like the obvious choice. You can be whoever you want, do whatever you want (or not do much of anything, if you prefer), live as long (or as short) as you want… There are no downsides, really, unless you object to living in a society where the Minds are so vastly more intelligent than humans that you’re functionally their pet. I can see how some people might find that unsettling.

deleted by creator

the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));

the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).

Uhhh is it just me or is it impossible to follow the first requirement without violating the second one? The logo requirement seems engineered to make sure that you can’t actually fork the project: if you include the original logo, they can hit you for trademark violation, and if you don’t include the logo they can say you violated their license terms.

I wash graphic tees and other printed clothing inside out because I was told it does less damage to the image. No idea if it actually helps.

Low function day. I am supposed to be finishing cleaning my room, but by the time I did laundry and went shopping and made lunch I ran out of energy and had to lie down, and that was the end of that plan.

This is bad because my roommate is very unhappy about the state of my room, which is abysmal (the mice that live in my walls shit on everything and it stinks), and I would like to fix it so that he feels better about it. I tried to hire a maid service to come clean the apartment, but the one I contacted said they wouldn’t come out if we had mouse droppings, I guess because of the risk of sickness. So the plan is to get things clean enough that I can tell them the mouse droppings are cleaned up so that they can come out, but obviously I struggle to clean which is why I needed help in the first place… I wanted to get it done over the weekend but the weekend has now ended, so we’ll have to see if I can get it done tomorrow.

Let’s see… when I was 4 I got a Sega Genesis for my birthday. It came with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Granddad took me shopping to pick out two other games for it. I picked Sonic the Hedgehog and Ms. Pac-Man, and both were bangers. The Genesis port of Ms. Pac-Man had a bunch of alternate modes with different mazes.

I became a big fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog games. I got Sonic 3 for my next(?) birthday, and Sonic and Knuckles the Christmas after that(?). I was convinced that Lock-On Technology was going to be the future of video games!

Also my recollection is that Sonic 2 wasn’t actually packed in with the system, Granddad had to fill out like a rebate form to claim it from the retailer and it came in the mail. It had a NOT FOR RESALE sticker on it which I now understand meant “only for use in the promotion, don’t put this on the shelf” but as a kid I was very confused about what peril would befall me if I sold it to someone else.

Not particularly, no. Unless doing the things I want to do, and not doing things I don’t want to do, counts as principle.

I never understood being grounded. When I was a kid, we just snuck out anyway because what are they gonna do, super ground us?

Surely this is just a marketing stunt they pulled in the hopes of temporarily pumping share prices or something? Despite their claims that it can be optimized before release, I think there is basically no way they get it running at playable frame rates without a second dedicated graphics card on current gen hardware. They’re going to release it with terrible performance, promise to improve it, a few people who have dual 5090 setups will try it but almost everyone will ignore it, and the promised optimizations will either never materialize or they’ll be much less impactful than promised.

“The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI,” Huang continued.

He seems to be thinking of it as basically a post-processing effect, but it’s certainly the least performant one ever devised. Even if it’s true that the art teams can tweak it to get exactly the effect they want, I find it hard to believe they’d ever be able to get it running on the hardware they’re targeting, so it will just be an expensive novelty for games that want to promise the most bells and whistles.

Edit: Wait I just saw this,

“It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,” he said.

What is he on about? Surely it’s not really mucking around with stuff earlier in the rendering pipeline? That would make it completely different from all previous versions of DLSS, why would they call it DLSS 5? I don’t think he understands how it works at all.

EU leaders stressed the importance of resuming oil flows to preserve market stability and to meet the 2027 deadline for ending Russian oil imports.

Man what? “We have to repair the pipeline that imports oil from Russia so that we can stop importing oil from Russia.”

“Tubular” is from surfer lingo right? It makes a lot of sense when you realize they’re comparing whatever cool thing you’re talking about to a wave like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1mXQaSA3-rE

I don’t need $1M. I’ll take just the $1000, if the other box has a million in it they can put it towards the next experiment.

I think the whole idea of grading kids like they’re show dogs is pretty gross in the first place. “Welcome to the world, kiddo, the first thing you need to learn is that we’re here to judge you, and if you don’t bark on command you will be deemed to be a failure.”

Fuck that shit.

That seems to be correct!

The original announcement was on their Facebook page, and links to https://www.getyourfuckingmoneyback.com/

Note that they didn’t raise their own prices (they absorbed 100% of the tariffs on products they make), so if you bought directly from them or through their Amazon listing, you didn’t overpay and don’t need a refund. If you bought from a retailer like Wal-Mart or Target, they’ll start by refunding people who have a receipt, and then if there is money left over they’ll try to refund anyone else who thinks they overpaid.

“In possession of a tremendous amount of unauthorized materials?” Surely what they’re actually objecting to is distribution of the materials, unless they think he never bought Diablo and those are illicitly acquired .pngs? Also what’s the “unless” part, surely any settlement would require him to remove the material anyway? The tone of this email reads like something I’d find in my spam folder trying to get me to send gift cards to the “IRS.”

It looks like the patch has improvements for the server, so you might look into upgrading!

This reminds me of the bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide where Zaphod unwittingly gets into the torture device that forces you to see exactly how small and short lived you are compared to the vastness of existence, and somehow comes out of it even more convinced that he’s the most important person in the universe.

One option:

• Every time an item is unloaded, save the in-game date and time as part of its data.
• Every time an item is loaded that has historical data, check that timestamp.
• Use the time difference between now and then to calculate whether fires have burned out, whether the temperature should have returned to the ambient temperature, etc. You could also assume some kinds of contaminants wear away after a certain time: water dries up, biological substances degrade, etc. If item degradation is ever implemented, potentially you could roll for damage to items that have been unloaded for very long periods of time, although you’d want to know if they were supposed to be exposed to weathering, etc. and you might not have good data on this. Or if food spoilage is ever changed so that items being carried or stored in barrels should still spoil, you can check for rot this way too.

This is how Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead checks if food has rotted or fires have burned out while you were away from an area. There’s a possible edge case here where an unloaded unit acquires an item that should still be dangerous, but then is saved by it taking long enough for them to return that the item becomes safe, but that’s probably okay—it’s hard to imagine how you’d set it up, and even if it happened the player probably wouldn’t notice.