

This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.
Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.


This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.
Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.
One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.


As someone who spent years as a ‘big company engineer’, the reason I don’t write code until the bosses have clear requirements is because I don’t want to do it twice.
That and it isn’t just me, there’s 5 other teams who have to coordinate and they have other things on their roadmap that are more important than a project without a spec.
I think this is from Berserk, but it’s been years and I can’t quite tell.


It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.
As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.
The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point
Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…
Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.
Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.


Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.
I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.
The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.


Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.
That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.
This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.


The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.
This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.


The terms seem agreeable?
The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, … The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?
Those terms seem agreeable?


A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.
The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.


The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.


With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.
These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.
An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.
The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.
The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.
To make a crude concrete example:
Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.
Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.
Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?
One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.
Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.
A renderer in Python has to be slow AF


The OG Crysis wanted hardware that still doesn’t exist. They built the game and engine under the assumption that clock speeds would keep increasing, and instead we moved to high core counts.
Even today, at 4K and max settings, the original (2007) release can drop below 100 fps on the best possible hardware.


Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.


it’s not spontaneous
Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.
So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.
The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.
There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.
Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.
Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.
Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.


Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.
A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.
This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.
I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose’s theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it “seems weird” for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.


It’s almost like the law doesn’t protect equally
Got the second years ago when it launched because I was looking for a new rpg to play. Bounced off it immediately because the gameplay was far too passive – I didn’t feel like I was doing anything – and the fucking quote spam POPPY WILL PROTECT MASTERPON is branded on my soul.