• 5 Posts
  • 418 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now.

    Eeeeeh. First of all, all the stuff you liked is still there.

    But also good stuff is rare. You really need to know where to look and which tips to follow. For example, if you disregard anime as a whole, you’ve probably missed absolute 10/10 media experiences you can’t find anywhere else. Sometimes it’s about leaving your comfort zone and trying something new.

    But then also, about the only really good star wars content we got in the last… 30 years is Ep. 3, the clone wars animated series (later seasons) and Andor. And they made SO MUCH.

    Also, maybe you should make your own. If you like the old stuff so much, try to make it yourself and give it a spin. get close to it, recapture, reinterpret, re-imagine. Maybe you’ll do that for 15 years, go back to your inspiration and find that your “imitation” has surpassed it.

    Necessity is the mother of invention. If you’re bored make your own.

    You have all the blueprints for the stuff you like. What else are you going to do? You can watch reruns, of course… not sure if it will be equally satisfying though.



  • the entire purpose of the article is to present their work, data, & findings (ie, evidence).

    I know, that that is the claim, that’s what I’m attacking. They’re garbage at doing this. There is no agreed upon standard of doing it. and because they are so utterly shit at it, all that is left is the appeal to authority, because “our methodology works”.

    (And if I’m wrong, point me to the template and standard formatting that was agreed upon. Show me the standardized procedures that meta analysis studies have to pass to be considered “acceptable”.)



  • The real problem is that “actual scientific journal” 's quality control is shit too.

    There are no actually real standards on how to write a paper, or which citation style to use. Sources aren’t hyperlinked, if the source isn’t machine readable or just a book, that’s just an “eh, oopsie, go read it then”. There are no automatic setups that check for AI use, corruption and “cooperation” between companies or other “public benefit organizations”, study conducting bodies and potentially favorable outcomes.

    If you look at any research institute or university, they will brag front and center about who much tradition they have, but they’re real quiet about how many studies they’re publishing and how many of them get reproduced. And don’t get me started on the whole publishing industry that somehow everyone has to pay into for everything and the people and institutions that actually do the work don’t see a dollar of the profits that those companies rake in.

    That doesn’t mean that there aren’t relatively even worse sources. That is definitely the case. But it’s very much not a “just believe the scientists” either.


    Way too serious rant for a comic over.







  • Theoretically yes, but in practice nuclear is very complicated technology that requires a lot training, expertise, care, maintenance and oversight.

    Putting it into military ships and ice breaking ships makes sense because of their unique circumstances.

    With cargo ships there are a lot of additional complicating factors: cargo ships regularly break and sink. Not a lot, but frequently enough that it is a legitimate concern. We already have trouble regulating regular cargo ships sea-worthiness and issues like environmental pollution through ship breaking, notably in india. That’s another issue btw…

    The biggest problem is the sheer number of cargo ships. Any risk of an accident gets multiplied by that.

    You can browse the wiki page on nuclear propulsion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion (btw, if it was economic to do it they would have done it already) It’s “obvious” that the number of ships with nuclear propulsion are in the low hundreds. Meanwhile we have more than 100.000 merchant ships in operation at the moment. https://www.ener8.com/merchant-fleet-infographic-2023/

    Operating “a few” ships safely is one thing, doing it with literally hundreds of thousands is something completely different.


  • We can’t replace it fully.

    We can replace it with cars. We can replace it with trains as well, but electrified track is more expensive than just plopping a diesel engine there and filling her up. Track for that is just steel+concrete and rocks and stuff.

    We can not replace it with air planes, helicopters, rockets. At all. We could reduce air travel and stuff like fighter jets.

    We can also not replace it for cargo ships. And that’s pretty bad news. Luckily ships are crazy efficient, so the actual CO2 and other pollution per ton and kilometer is very very low. If you get a delivery, that delivery comes in a fossil fuel truck to your doorstep, that truck will emit more CO2 than the ship will, going either from china to Rotterdam or the US westcoast. And also global transportation is probably more than necessary.

    Anyway, the big problem we can solve are cars and planes.

    There are also a bunch of chemical and industrial processes that need coal. Fertilizer and steel are two big ones.



  • The US dollar technically isn’t backed by anything either

    No, it is. it’s not “hard backed” by X dollars to Y grams of gold, but it absolutely is backed in the sense that McDonalds (and hundreds of other companies) does it’s accounting in USD and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future and doesn’t expect wild fluctuations in ingredient prices or wages and wants to prevent those from fluctuating, because when that happens, their business math gets harder.

    You can go outside the door with 100$ in your pocket, vanish for 3 months, come back and it’ll still be usable to buy food, a hotel room or a transportation ticket.


  • Not much to say. I’m glad one more person got out.

    Crypto is still an interesting concept. Maybe not the exact same way that bitcoin does it, but nevermind that. The problem with bitcoin is, was and probably will be, that it is not actually materially backed by anything. Could be real estate, could be agriculture, could be some kind of industry that says, you can always get our product for exactly _______ many bitcoins and we change prices every 6-24 months.

    Doing it doesn’t make sense because it would drastically over or undervalue the thing and without that kind of backing the currencies will never stabilize enough to be useful.

    The concept of having a single mathematically verifiable, unchangeable record of ownership that doesn’t depend on a nation state is still theoretically useful and interesting though. But obviously none of the current implementations are all that useful. Or they would have “won” by now.


  • The engine doesn’t matter too much.

    The problems and how you solve them are usually sort of the same, in terms of 2d and 3d. Meaning:

    If you’re doing a 2d platformer or a 3d platformer, you will still need to thing about colliding with the floor and the solution will be similar too. For art, it’s the same. if you start from scratch, learning 2d art and learning 3d art is both new to you. But you will have animations in both and engines usually just use some “playanimation” function. So 2d vs. 3d is completely up to you and what you want to make.

    I can recommend pygame and panda3d if you like python. They’re not new engines and they’re “code only”. Other engines give you an editor, but I prefer the “code only” approach, because there are no hidden settings that you have to search for in the GUI, it’s just code.

    But the other engines like godot and unity have a ton of learning material too, so that’s probably easier to get started with.


  • I came ready to hate with bias because I often don’t like wrappers, but at least the .format seems like an objective improvement.

    But I never understood why matplotlib insists on ax, fig and that’s still in there…

    Directly working with matplotlib classes tends to be more clear and concise than pyplot, makes things easier when working with multiple figures and axes, and is certainly more “pythonic”.

    I disagree.


    Looks like a solid project overall! Thanks for your effort!


  • Oh yeah. My favorite (and only) plugin so far is the https://github.com/twibiral/obsidian-execute-code

    Let me explain: Obsidian is basically a very fancy wrapper around a folder with markdown files in it. (which makes it git compatible, which is one of the upsides). In Markdown, you can define codeblocks, with syntax highlighting, because of course you can, programmers will improve their own tools first. Now, there are two cases when you would do this:

    1. you want to execute the code because it’s actually driving something. Like some kind of interactive, “this is the manual, but also, you can just do it right away by executing this code” and then they give you the code.
    2. you’re actually building it as a document, and you want something in your document that is actually the output of some program that’s producing some output. Like… analyzing numbers and creating a graph. You can now just put the code in the document, hit “execute” and you get your output in the document right then and there. And that concept isn’t new, it’s what “jupyter” also does, but jupyter uses a weird bytecode, xml zip format or something, in obisidian, because of the markdown base, it stays just code. (which again, makes it git compatible where jupyter isn’t) AND you can do it not just with python but with…
    • JavaScript
    • TypeScript
    • Python
    • R
    • C++
    • C
    • Java
    • SQL
    • LaTeX
    • CSharp
    • Dart
    • Lua
    • Lean
    • Shell
    • Powershell
    • Batch
    • Prolog
    • Groovy
    • Golang
    • Rust
    • Kotlin
    • Wolfram Mathematica
    • Haskell
    • Scala
    • Racket
    • Ruby
    • PHP
    • Octave
    • Maxima
    • OCaml
    • Swift