I’m sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won’t do anyone any good.

Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn’t actually correspond to any useful economic activity.

An alien cat is something alien & undefined

Dear journal, today I received yet another shock to my sensibilities as I beheld a sight that was as ghastly as it was queer; made all the more troubling by the bucolic setting in which it appeared. I found that my child had drawn a cat that was not a cat. The unnameable thing had all the features of a feline and yet it was not of this world. I can scarcely describe the effect that viewing such an image has on the human mind, and to spare anyone who might read this journal in the future I will not attempt to do so.

Support for this feature would lessen the need for such players though, and anything that lessens the amount of JavaScript in the world is an objective moral good.

I really don’t understand why people are so weird about coffee. And I don’t mean “why are people so judgmental” I mean “why are people so weirdly defensive about it”.

If you post a picture of a well done steak online people will verbally skin you alive.

People will travel to be able to go to some of the few restaurants with chefs that know how to prepare fugu without killing you.

People will pay hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars for certain alcoholic beverages.

And yet coffee is seen as this uniquely smug thing, even if you’re pouring water into a $10 plastic funnel or mixing coffee grounds in a glass jar. Like, yeah, if you have $10,000 worth of equipment you’re clearly a wealthy person with a hobby, but again, pour over and a French press is literally just a funnel and a jar respectively.

How about Deus Ex: Transcended?

I think that was the patch I ended up using my first playthrough (I’m away from my computer at the moment or else I’d check), but I might want to use something else my second time.

How does this compare to other community patches in your opinion?

Quick, get in contact with the physicists, they need the insight that you got from thinking about a sentence in a pop sci article for 30 seconds.

lol you call me hyperbolic after your “arbiter of the funny” comment?

Here, I’ll say what I guess I should have said instead of trying to make a joke: you’re allowed to have an opinion but other people are allowed to have one too. People posting differing opinions in a comment section that reflect their own subjective perspectives is what comment sections are for. And yes that includes comments like “I don’t like posts like this and I think we should try to have less of them”. Nobody is censoring you or acting as an “arbiter” by voicing that perspective; and, in fact, there’s nothing I or anyone else you were arguing with could do to that effect.

“You have to admit” is a very common figure of speech.

I’m sorry that made you think I was going to come to your house and beat you up if you disagreed with me.

The situation presented in the comic is true, but you have to admit that this is the millennial equivalent of a boomer comic.

Thanks for the cannibalism tips.

For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.

The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.

Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn’t be well suited to full motion video, the user interface could be text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display static images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they’d probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep a device like that charged with a solar panel built into the case.

Such a device would have very little computing power compared to even a smartphone, but it could still be useful for a lot of things. Besides things like text editors or spreadsheets, you could replicate the functionality of the Wiki Reader and the Cybiko (imagine something like the Cybiko with LoRaWAN). You could maybe even keep a copy of Open Street Map on there, though I don’t know how computationally expensive parsing its data format and displaying a map segment is.

Does a larger MRI produce more data than a smaller one (same data density over a larger volume), or is it the same resolution spread out over a larger space?

Crysis is roughly as old now as Super Mario Bros 3 was when Crysis first released.

It is from 2018, but how do you imagine that this was written by AI given that LLMs barely existed at the time and weren’t accessible by the general public?

I’m surprised that the difference is apparently that low considering the efficiency of photosynthesis vs the photovoltaic effect, the fact that not all of the plant gets turned into ethanol, and the efficiency of the combustion process.

Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.

There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny organisms and plants. As such they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.

Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.

Modern day chemists have succeeded where the alchemists of old failed by finally isolating phlogiston.

It might be less the quality of the research and more this:

(This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).

Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.

Also i think people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.