So weird that only 15% of Steam sessions are using controllers. I thought everyone had a controller. Most games are just better with a gamepad.

Even if that was true, not all games have the same number of players. Counterstrike and dota 2 regularly top the most played list on steam, and are terrible with a controller. It shouldn’t be surprising that most sessions have a kb/m if that’s what people are mostly playing.

I could not find the 47 grams figure on the page you linked, where is that stated exactly?

VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They’ve had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.

Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian’s production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they’re hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.

Yup, just like that

Apologies. I’m from a country where the meaning of the period and comma is reversed compared to the US, so I did it this way out of habit.

Honestly, I think it may be possible to build entire roads with enough crushed metal elements in the asphalt/concrete and a slight low power charge throughout the entire surface would be able to keep any vehicle battery at a steady charge.

You might be underestimating how much power a car consumes while driving. For example, a Tesla model 3 has an efficiency of about 130 Wh/km in mild weather at highway speeds. Assuming that on the highway you’ll travel 100 km/h, that means you’ll use 130*100 = 13.000 Wh/h, a constant power draw of 13kW. That’s enough to power perhaps 8-12 houses on average.

A km of road could have, let’s say, 200 cars on it (4 lanes, 20m per car). That means you’d need to pump about 2.6 megawatts of power into every kilometer of road to keep them all topped up.

EDIT: fucked up math

He didn’t say “most of the time” though. He said “always.”

It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren’t missing anything the game has to offer.

You’ve hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you’ve hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you’re likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.

That’s gonna be excruciating if you insist on “100% completing” the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you’d like to experience the whole game.

I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.

All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷

Do you guys get DAB+ in the US?

Just a mistake I think. Americans are so steeped in gun culture that when they hear calibur, their brain goes immediately to gun calibers. Autocorrect also might play a role.

“Theoretically” is worth very little. It is pretty much the same for every concept NPP, that once construction starts on an actual practical plant, ugly problems start coming up all over the place that were not considered or thought of in the concept stage. Corrosion is one of the biggest ones.

See also the Rickover memo.

When your audience is five years old you don’t really need to go anywhere with it.

Is it safer to stay inside without AC or go outside in shade? Isn’t the ambient air temperature still too dangerous in the shade?

Humidity is a big factor, if humidity is low then evaporative cooling (e.g. sweating) is quite effective. Even more so in a breeze.

xAI just finished up a funding round worth $6bn, he doesn’t need to use his own money. It’s the usual bunch of VC funds: Fidelity Sequoia, Kingdom Holdings (that’s a Saudi fund).

True but disingenuous. This statement is often used to mock blue origin for just going 100km straight up into space and then back down, which is very far from reaching orbit. But the flight profile of IFT-3 was so close to orbital velocity, it’s not a significant difference.

Pharmaceutical companies just aren’t interested in it.

Intuitively speaking, how many times does half of a thing fit into a quarter of a thing? The answer is, exactly one half time.