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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)D
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  • Even if it takes 100+ years for quantum cryptanalysis to become viable I would rather we start switching over to better algorithms now.

  • r(ul)etro

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  • The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.

    Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?

    We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).

    The foliage you see in that forest demo is Nanite geometry.

  • r(ul)etro

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  • The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.

    Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.

    This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4

    Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8

    Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.

    Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.

  • You'd want to save the 7th part for later. Just show the child emerging at the very end of episode 1 so you can have a cliffhanger.

    Episode 2 is where the laser happens as part of the unethical experiments and the child discovering / being forced to develop their powers. You'd want a B plot and maybe even a C plot running during this episode so it's not just 30 minutes of child lasering though.

  • This is more psychotic than any of the dialogue in American Psycho.

  • Who’s to say that the medical benefit of many friends or relatives visiting is worth less than a house.

    Doctors and medical researchers are in a position to say what the effects of public policy are on public health. And they're saying that car-centric urban design has a negative impact on it, and that we should be building transit and pedestrian oriented urban environments instead.

    In general activities that have a negative impact on society should be discouraged, and certainly not subsidized so that they're favored over the alternatives. There are many ways to make it easy to visit a hospital, not the least of which is simply allowing people to live in close proximity to one, which is something that has a positive impact on medical outcomes.

  • There's an opportunity cost associated with using land for parking, particularly in dense urban areas.

    In many cases a parking spot uses more space than the person who parked there uses to do their job (if they work in a cubicle for example). But they also need to be able to park not just at their job, but at their home, at the store, at their doctor's office, etc. In the US there can be as many as 8 parking spaces per car, which collectively take up one third of the urban area.

  • Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

    Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn't have as much global warming denialism.

    Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn't come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

    But I think you're right though. I've given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it's clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it's better to use an electric car if they're not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it's better to be vaccinated if they're not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they're unwilling to understand what federation even is?

  • Go to his channel and sort by oldest. You'll see that he started out making the absolute worst type of vacuous clickbait slop.

    You know how they say "the people most likely to seek and gain power are the ones most ill suited to having it"? That applies to celebrities as well.

    You remember that article about how almost every second of Mr Beast's waking life was devoted to content creation? That's what happens when you select for the top 0.001% of the population that want to be famous the most.

  • That makes me imagine penguins writing Java code.

  • The tires are a really terrible idea that makes it much harder to ram the rammed earth. That increases the labor demands of something that's already extremely labor intensive (not to mention what trying to swing a sledgehammer at an angle into the wall of a tire you're standing over probably does to your back).

    They also can only really be used in the desert.

    But the way the various parts of the earth ship support each other's functions is pretty good. We really ought to make our city's systems work like that though, instead of building isolated self-contained houses.

  • Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

    "Prepare derivative works" means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

    https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

    Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

    Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. "Entertainment" or "because I like the series and these characters" are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

    What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

    This is not how "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work" part of fair use works.

    A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

    Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn't matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word "potential" in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

    A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said "no". Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

    Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

    EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

  • People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

    This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

    If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it's completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it's not taken down it's either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can't be bothered to deal with it.

    EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

    People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let's plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn't been extensively argued in court because most game companies don't want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let's plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn't stop Nintendo from using YouTube's copyright system to claim videos of their games.

    https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

    https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

  • One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it's own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.

    That wouldn't help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.

  • This is a symptom of the absolutely insane way digital payments work.

    You give a company your card details and they're able to charge whatever they want, whenever they want, by default. That's like paying at a restaurant by handing the waiter your entire wallet and telling them to take out the cost of the meal.

  • A lot of crazy "supernatural mystery" stuff consists of listing a bunch of things that are more-or-less true, but omitting one or two really important facts in an attempt to make the other details seem odd.