How surprising that’s my birthday too!

On a PC that isn’t so hard to do. The problem though is that online services will start requiring the os level check

Easy peasy, the browser checks the OS them reports it to the website

I feel like Civ always punished you too much for being too successful in repelling another civ’s attacks. Like, what do you mean they can take a couple of cities but when I do it it sours my relations with every single civilization on the map? Always pushes me to a domination victory when that happens. Sometimes I can manage it without gaining too much of a warmonger reputation, but it’s too much of a balancing act

ETS2 is getting a bus expansion too so you can drive buses instead of trucks of you prefer. The American counterpart ATS (same game engine, same studio and updated in lockstep with ETS2) is similarly getting a road trip expansion, where you can drive many classic American cars on a road trip.

Honestly I highly recommend the games because they’re incredibly chill driving simulators

I was going to say similar. Gonna start laying track on my new micro model railroad this evening.

I acquired some German models by pure happenstance but they’re in a different scale from all of my other stuff so I need to build a small home for them. I’ve got a track plan for a basic little 1x4 foot micro layout and just got the last few pieces of track that I needed

So they have found ways to travel that we are not aware of, perhaps light speed travel or possibly wormholes, teleportation, who knows.

I think you’re missing that you’re hand waving away literally the laws of physics. Light speed travel runs into a relativity problem (and relativity is so well understood at this point your phone’s GPS receiver will make adjustments to the GPS data it receives because the exactness of the data actually exposes some relativistic differences between the satellites and the ground) which I’ve already described (a few years of near-light speed travel is thousands of years on the ground)

The light speed barrier appears to be entirely unbreakable. Conservation of energy is proven in transportation and the energy sector constantly and is why near-light speed travel is highly unlikely is the amount of energy required to propel a vehicle to such speeds is absolutely immensely impossibly big, and therefore breaking the light speed barrier if it is even possible would require orders of magnitude more energy.

Oh and Wormholes and teleportation are literally pure fiction

I guess the reason people think so different about this is that they assume that aliens would travel with only human knowledge of space travel

No no. It’s because we assume aliens would be bound to the same physics as the rest of the universe is

If they are here, they have had space travel for at least thousands of years, probably much more

That is how long they would need to travel to get here from any other solar system. If aliens are coming it ain’t going to be a couple of little green men in a saucer the size of a truck, it’s going to be a generation ship, a cryoship or entirely robotic, and the current alien mythos really doesn’t fit that.

Circling back to the core claim that aliens have been visiting the earth and may or may not be abducting random farmers and probing them, the entire alien mythos is easily explained with previously-classified aircraft that were being built by the US during the cold war, drugs and mental illness, and largely doesn’t exist before the 1950s. If you read some of the very first reports of UFOs before the mythos really received much media attention they entirely don’t match the now classic imagery of little green men with giant bug-like eyes flying a circular ship, because these people didn’t already have that imagery to apply to whatever weather balloon or classified aircraft they happened to get a glance of.

There’s definitely benefit in going further up market (the $600 range tends to be where diminishing returns really kick in, where the differences between a $300 phone and a $600 phone are pretty obvious, the $600 and the $1000 phone are much harder to spot the differences) and if you buy a used generation or two old device you can really save some cash. My wife and I both got Pixel 7s last year for about $250 a pop, and they’ve still got several years of updates left on them

I’ve totaled 3 cars in the last 5 years (one deer on a blind curve on a county highway, 2 from hail) and the only change is this year they raised my deductible by $500…which given my only claims have been total losses I’m not sure how that really lowers their risk but I’ll take it

I don’t think people realize just how big the universe is. Or even just our solar system. The nearest star is multiple light-years away, and as far as physicists can tell, the speed of light is basically the speed limit of all things in the universe, so at minimum they traveled for multiple years at near-light speed (already basically impossible due to the quantity of energy required) just to…??? in our atmosphere?

It took over 50 years for the Voyager probes to travel a single light minute, and Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us is 4.24 light-years away. Which means the Voyager probes will take thousands of years to travel a fraction of the distance of Proxima Centauri.

Another problem is time dialation. Suppose you happened upon a craft that could take you to Proxima Centauri at close enough to the speed of light that you would arrive there within a human lifespan, the time that would have passed on earth is actually thousands of years. So any aliens visiting the earth now would have set off during the ice age at the very latest. They absolutely wouldn’t be popping by for a quick visit then running off every few years, they would either be visiting then leaving again and not returning for many more millenia or they would be arriving and setting up permanent shop in our solar system, which we’d likely have observed by now given how many probes we send around the solar system and how many telescopes we have pointed at the sky all the time

Are we alone in the universe? Almost definitely not, considering the sheer number of planets and stars the random chance that created sentient life on earth is extremely likely to have repeated a few times, but sentient life evolving close enough to us physically and in time that both can become aware of each other and maybe even communicate? Basically impossible, at least certainly not within a timeframe that any of use can truly comprehend

Illinois is funky because about a quarter of the state (by land area) is heavily influenced by Chicago but the rest of the state is just generic rural Midwest dotted with small railroad towns and farming communities

That’s potentially useful then at least!

The big challenge with AI generated summaries is that LLMs are so prone to innaccuracy that a summary that’s never checked for accuracy by a human who has read the source material that’s being summarized, it just exists in a weird limbo state of maybe-false maybe-perfectly-fine and the onus is still on the reader to read the source material to make their own decision just as it is without posting an AI summary

LLMs are brilliant first draft machines. Unless there’s a major breakthrough that improves accuracy they will need to stay that way

The worst aspects of the fediverse are really just the worst aspects of people rather than the worst aspects of people plus the worst effects of profit motives that you find on corporate social media. Also folks are really inclined to try to shun bad behavior rather than reward it with engagement that can directly lead to money for the poster

That and the way companies have been building AI they have been doing so little to optimize compute to instead try to get the research out faster because that’s what is expected in this bubble. I’m absolutely fully expecting to see future research finding plenty of ways to optimize these major models.

But also R&D has been entirely focused on digital chips I would not be at all surprised if there were performance and/or efficiency gains to be had in certain workloads by shifting to analog circuits

The article is like 5 paragraphs, not even a single sheet of paper if printed (with the unneeded images and ads excluded of course). Why does it need a summary‽

Probably by getting hired in a companies marketing department. Realistically these astroturfing campaigns are either farms of accounts managed by ad agencies to push whatever they’re getting paid to push at the moment, or smaller campaigns run by individual companies marketing departments, and not just random people getting paid to mention specific products on their personal accounts

Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.

Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it

1.7.10 (or 1.6.4, or 1.5.2 for that matter)

1.3 was another nasty one. That was the one where multiplayer and singleplayer were merged and LAN play was introduced. Before that mods were released specifically for either single or multiplayer and authors would have to specifically build 2 versions of every mod if they wanted to enable use in multiplayer. This shift killed a ton of mods and version 1.2.5 was a peak for mods like Red Power for example

If you use an alternate launcher like Prism Launcher it is trivial to install tons of modpacks for any version of Minecraft and manage many different mod loadouts (with handy search and auto-download of both modpacks and individual mods, plus it makes it super easy to modify a modpack you downloaded and add/remove mods) Its really the best way to play modded Minecraft (and has been since the fork from MultiMC) plus unlike most launchers which are super-simplified to not scare newbies, Prism Launcher also exposes tons of handy technical stuff if you want to dive deeper, such as optionally displaying full logs, java version and argument management, world edit and other tool integrations and more.

It goes so bad that when I recently loaded a newer version, I was like “what the hell is going on here” :D

Duude. I was super big into reading all of the changelogs and learning all of the undocumented changes from the wikis for every version and preview from when I first started playing back in Beta 1.7.3 until around version 1.6.4 or so. Booting up modern… 1.20something? I can’t even remember whats currentish anymore…anyways I’m so lost and then I try to play like a Beta 1.7.3 player and everyone else just goes “the fuck are you doing?”

I’d say its more like going to a fancy ice cream shop with amazing ice cream and ordering vanilla (hehe see what I did there?) or a fancy pizza place known for their amazing topping combinations and just getting a slice of cheese pizza. Its perfectly fine and probably better than some other places you’ve had vanilla ice cream or cheese pizza, but holy crap are you missing out!

Fuschia did get used on some of their smart home stuff that they’ve shifted focus away from. I suspect they were just building a dedicated embedded OS to standardize on for non-phone gadgets that don’t need full fat android

I watched part of one video a few years ago because the title said something about crashing a train and I just wanted to see what kind of equipment they were destroying and how they managed safety. Instead my main takeaways were

1. The videos have such insanely fast pacing I needed a proper break from the screen after skipping through a few minutes of it
2. They had some guy spending shitloads of money to try to protect a pile of cash from a pile of explosives (and whatever cash he protected he got to keep), also dubious on safety but with the way they edited and of course basic knowledge of explosive safety (such as, everybody stay away from the explosives and don’t leave random explosives lying around in disorganized piles), I’m guessing the pile of explosives was entirely digital
3. The train was in fact nothing special. Just some old equipment from the 80s that already have some examples in preservation. Also I’m guessing they weren’t aware that most American trains do not have much in the way of crumple zones due to FRA regulations because they really set it up for what would be an impressive crash for a car which is built with tons of crumple zones and instead the train got dented up as it bounced