jbattle

I had a lot of fun with Sailwind, maybe give it a try

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1764530/Sailwind/

There are a couple of ships you can sail with a simple economic engine - you start small and work up. It has some simple sail handling - its not enough to just turn right/left and manage sails up/down. Multi-sail ships are an interesting challenge but manageable.

It's pretty slow-paced, but like I said, I had a lot of fun with it for ~20 hours.

I just want to say it blows my mind we're likely to literally land on the moon before we get a proper KSP 2

Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called Balance of Power -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)

I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.

The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.

Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.

I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.

All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!

Biden's inaugural address was full of this

"To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America. The right to dissent peaceably. Within the guardrails of our republic, it's perhaps this nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly: disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you, I will be a president for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you, I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did."

I dread the idea. The leaf blowers running nonstop 10 months a year are noisy enough.

Maybe I can convince all my neighbors to fly barrage balloons in all the back yards.

Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to keep in touch.

I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize “cavemen” had come before?

I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this topic. Im no historian but i felt like he gave it a serious grounded exploration (no ancient aliens!)

https://youtu.be/4jRbHhOOjw4

Lake Michigan is BIG. The location of this thing isn't public but Chicago is closer to Cleveland than the middle of Grand Traverse Bay. Washington DC and NYC are closer together than Chicago and G.T.B.

I'm no expert in the Great Lakes but I'm surprised they found something that far north that old. From a little reading the glaciers were retreating from that area around the same time frame. I guess +/- 1,000 years is a big deal.

There are a bunch of cool signs of the precursor to Lake Michigan around Chicago from the time when the lake was "capped" in the north and drained to the south. Blue Island and Stony Island were real islands. Ridge road to the north marks where the shore once stood. Pretty cool to imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chicago

I'd argue that a suite of tests that exercise all reasonably likely scenarios is table stakes. And would have caught this particular bug.

I'm not talking about 100% branch coverage, but 100% coverage of all happy paths and all unhappy paths that a user might reasonably bump into.

OK maybe not 100% of the scenarios the entire system expresses, but pretty darn close for the business critical flows (signups, orders, checkouts, whatever).

create a subscription for a test user. delete it. Make sure you can create another subscription for the same user.

create subscriptions with and without overlapping effective windows

Those seem like very basic tests that would have highlighted the underlying issue

There are only 12,000 coal miners in WV. Only 45,000 in the whole US. Obviously there are a large cast of others supporting the miners directly and indirectly (e.g. truck drivers, manufacturers of mining equipment, etc).

There are 341 million other Americans that have an interest in where our energy comes from (and what goes into our atmosphere).

(I'm all for generous support for any American facing major disruption because of macroeconomic changes btw. Getting rural places a fair share of national prosperity is a national problem)

There's an old video game called Seven Cities of Gold wherein you play a european explorer poking about the new world. It has procedurally generated game worlds, and claims to use some plate techtonics. I don't remember if you could actually circumnavigate the world, but it gave a great experience of gradually uncovering an absolutely massive map, packed with things to see. Designed for platforms with SERIOUS technology constraints, the author packed a LOT of game play. Given the historical subject, it also offers up some serious topics for thought / conversation.

As always, the Digital Antiquarian has a great article about this game: https://www.filfre.net/2013/08/seven-cities-of-gold/

I have little fear about AI generating propaganda. It's cheap to write a crappy article and fake a photo or two - or choose a real photo but twist the story around the photo.

What I worry about is "artificial / generated consent". You read some upsetting story, and your skeptical brain holds it at arms length. Then you read commentary in a forum you trust and you see message after message of thoughtfully worded support for some position. I think reading gobs of "informed real people" commentary is far more persuasive - and subtly so - than reading an article from someone you KNOW is pushing a specific perspective.

I like to believe I'm an independent thinker, but a big part of my process is to seek out many different points of view and judging which feel well supported and well reasoned. Consensus DOES play a role in my judgement forming. If consensus is easily faked, yikes.

I'll throw in a couple more good pieces of music by Ethiopians:

This is from an album of older pop music. From the little I've read this is something like live bar music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSUuqP7RFj0 https://open.spotify.com/track/1yInD7kgqru084JKE3Bqyz?si=b31...

A dutch ~punk band called the Ex recorded some music with a famous saxophonist named Getatchew Mekurya. The whole album is great, this is my favorite song:

https://theex.bandcamp.com/track/che-belew-shellela

And this piano piece by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a lady who led a seriously interesting life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKU7iz9RYV0

Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs.

Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?

Fabulous writing - I have tons of work to do tonight but read both parts, chuckling the whole way down and up the Mississippi.

To be pedantic, these aren't really the "ancient Egyptians" people usually imagine. King Ramses and Tut and that lot. When these people were buried, Egypt had already been ruled by Greeks and Romans for 300 years (longer than the USA has been a country).

Beautiful art nonetheless. It is mind-blowing how old Egyptian culture is, my mind has never been able to wrap around it. And then the centuries or millennia of settled prehistory before that!

If you have a VR headset, VTOL VR is amazing. All the controls you interact with by reaching out and flipping toggles. The graphics are good enough. You get three aircraft with the base game and there's a DLC available that adds an AH64 analogue.

The complexity of the game hits a sweet spot for me. To get into the air you have to go through some startup steps (maybe 8, most of which involve hitting "power" buttons). There is some light air traffic control simulation that you can interact with (or just take off yolo style). Mission design is diverse and there are a decent number of fan made missions.

The initial tutorial missions do a good job getting you up in the air, after that you benefit from watching some youtube tutorials because each weapon system and aircraft have their own unique features.

In the 'Once and Future King', the boy who will be King Arthur looses an arrow into the air, just for the joy of it. A crow comes out of nowhere and grabs the arrow. Art's foster brother believes the crow was actually a witch (Morgan le Fay?).

I'm just saying - keep an eye out for witches ;)

  "Just as [the arrow] had spent its force, just as its ambition had been dimmed by destiny and it was preparing to faint, to turn over, to pour back into the bosom of its mother earth, a portent happened. A gore-crow came flapping wearily before the approaching night. It came, it did not waver, it took the arrow. It flew away, heavy and hoisting, with the arrow in its beak."

What's the difference in this case? Doesn't seem too different from how camouflaged eggs would have developed (maybe just faster because the selection mechanism is so strong).

When I think of selective breeding I think of humans picking out which animals (cows/dogs/wheat/etc) get to reproduce.

> In other words, it could well be by nature, that recognizing black faces is harder than pale faces under the normal camera and scene settings.

This might be the crux. Why are pale-face-recognizing settings the "normal" settings? Why aren't the cameras designed and tuned to recognize darker skinned faces by default?

Cameras are designed and tuned by people - this is not a matter of fundamental physics having a preference.

I disagree. Obvs D&D evolved out of a literal wargame (chainmail). And there are a lot of influences from wargaming, but 90% of the focus (from the beginning) was on: - Characters who grew and changed each time you played - Exploring party dynamics having more to do with narrative than mechanical intricacies - Unreal places that were presented as living breathing spaces to explore - Module design was a mixed bag. Most of the places didn't make literal sense. I could see someone making the argument they were just a loose collection of wargame-like scenarios linked by hallways. But if memory serves there was a balanced mix of fighting, tricks, traps, and puzzles, as well as other non-combat encounters

I'll admit I didn't play until AD&D in about '84 - was the original edition really that different in focus?

I always tell my wife to bury me without a casket, wearing tanned animal skins, covered in shells and with a bunch of flint arrowheads scattered around. Just to give some archeologist 5,000 years from now a real cracking paper to publish and briefly overthrow the established timeline

Really good question actually!

I peeked at the javascript and it looks like when you hit `run`, it is calling the step at a setInterval (if I'm reading this right, as fast as the browser can call run)

So at the end of each run call, the interpreter figures out which setInterval timer to execute next and has the chance to pick other mazes. (I don't know much about how the JS engine resolves which "not quite thread" gets run next when there are multiple candidates)

To be fair, Cahokia was (if I remember right) the only large city for literally 1000 miles. If anything that impresses me all the more - these people may have spontaneously invented the idea of urbanism. I believe there were widespread trade networks, I'm not clear how many ideas were transmitted from mesoamerica to the mississippian culture

Given how long governments have kept records (domesday book, bablylon) and how few governments have slipped into totalitarian hellscapes, I'm not as worried about this as you are.

I'm more concerned about the patriot act & etc because a lot of those survelliance programs are actively centralized.

The system I outlined would work XX% as well if it were entirely optional and if it were managed by independent agents. You could sign up with "ID Corp", or a credit union, or whatever. And they could keep your records.

I can't tell if you are trolling. I'll assume good faith.

We show ID to enter bars. We show ID to buy certain products. I provide identifying information when I pick up tickets at will call. Some items (like houses, cars, guns) you have to register the purchase with a government authority

Asking about contraband was totalitarian because they were trying to control what information people had and made certain thoughts/books verboten. Customs/border patrol has asked for ... ever? what you are bringing into the country.

I'm not saying the government would get an automatic transcript of every purchase I've made. I'm saying individual restaurants could collect a list of unique but meaningless numbers on a piece of paper or wherever they want. If the restaurant gets tagged as a place where COVID is believed to be spread, then the government now has a way to contact everyone who had visited the store.

I'd trust this system if it were double-blind. The government issues an identifier to me (separate from SSN). I feel OK giving that number to restaurants. If there is a reason to initiate contract tracing, the restaurant hands its list of identifiers over to the appropriate government agency, which cracks open its vault of identifier --> contact information

Seems no less open to misinformation than the current system but gives vastly more protections to personal information. Doesn't even seem that hard to set up in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah there are concerns about methane being released from melting permafrost. I can't find information about how old the permafrost is - but my understanding is tens of thousands of years old. I also can't tell if the methane itself is old, or if the methane just forms rapidly with all this newly thawed rotting vegetation.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/16062174/permafrost-melting

There's evidence of times in the distant past where climate has changed very quickly, but all those predate history. There are some that even predate humanity. Here's an interesting one from ~12k years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

A) the lower bounds of climate change is now +2°C. The MWP was maybe +1°C.

B) (Possibly) I can't tell how long that change took to come into effect. One of the current concerns is how rapidly climate is changing.

C) Evidence points that the MWP only affected areas around the North Atlantic. Current climate change is having impact globally (though not equally so everywhere)

There were a ton of societal disruptions in the period of 950-1250. Vikings, Normal conquest of England, the Crusades. I'm not making an argument that any of those were caused by changing climate, but it definitely was a time of change with a heavy admixture of violence.