troyunrau

troyunrau, 8 days ago

Humanitarian crisis for sure.

Tangent. If I was a mad genetic scientist with no ethics, there are a few things I’d do – engineering a virus to deliver a few “software patches” to our DNA. One of those things would be to engineer the production of cellulase as an enzyme in our digestive system – so we can get energy from grass and such in an emergency. Probably the Law of Unintended Consequences will make this worse for humanity somehow (Begun the Grass Wars have!). Mosquitos also get blood sucking removed, in an attempt to make them purely pollinating insects. Vote for Troy as mad scientist!

Won’t help the hungry in Sudan now, though. So I’m open to better ideas. Sadly, I largely have bad ideas. If I’m on the side of full external military intervention, it would be considered “colonial”. It’s hard to propose any solution that isn’t just “send aid” – and you don’t want to do that because it gets seized by the parties involved to support their conflict. Do we just watch it play out and accept refugees? That’s lame – how many millions will die in each of the above scenarios. Fuck.

troyunrau, 6 days ago

Nope. Just so that you don’t starve in a crisis. Grass tastes gross. ;)

troyunrau, 18 days ago

No one commenting on your playlist? You’re cathartic music experience is showing :)

troyunrau, 1 month ago

NSFW, but the next obvious thing to do is…

www.xnxx.com/search/Josephine+Jackson

troyunrau, 1 month ago

All people who think porn is bad are bad. They are projecting their own unhealthy suppressed sexualities onto others because of the shame they associate with their own sexuality

– DancingBear, 7 days ago

Thus I am concluding you are pro Russian and taking all opportunities to block all porn starring Ukranians. Which will be basically every site on the internet. A pity, since you seem to like it a lot.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Not after reading their comment history.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Lithium as well, if I recall correctly. Most lithium is theorized to date to the big bang. There are no current pathways to create it, and only pathways that destroy it.

Most helium also dates to big bang, but some was created through fusion or alpha decay.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

I spent an hour today trying to find a real source for this quote, often misattributed to Churchill. And failed. Found some sources saying it predates Churchill, but no direct references. Seems an adage that is quite old though.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

In Canada, it might work. There was a court case where an airline had to honour its chatbot.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Fair. :)

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Easier to infiltrate terrorist networks – networks are, well, networks. Most school shootings are independent actors, even if radicalized online.

Now, if you’re asking about why they haven’t implemented decent gun control laws…

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Brains are sexy

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Out of curiosity, how is this ratio relative to some place like North Korea?

troyunrau, 1 month ago

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

Keep going, I’m almost there

troyunrau, 1 month ago

That reminds me…

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

I still go to Reddit for some communities that don’t have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.

But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.

troyunrau, 1 month ago

I like this :)

troyunrau, 2 months ago

I’ve met the devs in person. They keep turning down literal suitcases full of cash from people who want to bundle adware and crap in one of the most popular programs ever. Don’t assume VLC is going down that road – they’ve stuck to their ethics for decades.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Fire control is going to be a major engineering challenge on a civilization scale in the upcoming centuries if we want to preserve our carbon sink forests. Should be an interesting challenge, politically, to direct money into it. It’s large scale geoengineering…

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Hopefully not too depressing of a take, but:

On the scale of the planet as a whole system (looking at the forest, and not the trees): humans are commodity – there are billions upon billions of humans. But there is only one planet, with one atmosphere. If we wait for every human life to have unlimited value in every jurisdiction on earth – we will wait forever. And then it will be too late and we’re all going to fry in our utopian hell on earth.

In whatever jurisdiction you’re in, you should be pushing for large scale planet-affecting changes to how the civilization behaves with regard to our stewardship of the planet.

And yes, you can do both at the same time.

(I’m a huge fan of Iain M Banks’s Culture series. There is a Utopian future that is possible, where everything is simultaneously carefully managed, but individual freedom and prosperity coexists.)

troyunrau, 2 months ago

So – pure curiosity… Which countries could yet still potentially join NATO.

Switzerland doesn’t join anything ever, so it’s the dark horse. But since everything is done by referendum there, it could change on a dime if the public demanded it.

Austria literally has it in their constitution that they aren’t allowed – but in theory they could change their constitution (unlikely).

Moldova has the whole Transnistria incentive – but NATO would be shy about that one, because that could potentially immediately put them in hot conflict. However, suppose they backdoored their way in by creating a union with Romania (not impossible, but complicated).

Ireland has been neutral forever – but the public support for Ukraine is extremely high. So they might even be possible. Higher than Switzerland anyway ;)

Bosnia and Herzegovina is sort of a special case where they’re sort of partially engaged already.

Serbia is extremely unlikely while they continue to be extremely contemptuous of everyone. That’s fine. Although Kosovo is sort of under NATO protection.

In theory, Georgia or Armenia would be candidates, but Turkey would pooh-pooh Armenia right away, and Georgia has contested territory.

In order of odds, I wager: Ireland, Moldova (via Romania), Georgia+Ukraine (in that order chronologically).

troyunrau, 2 months ago

However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging circularity (waste as inputs).

Tomatos it is then ;)

It’s really hard to compete with the efficiency that economies of scale provide. So this result isn’t unexpected.

It doesn’t however negate the other positive impacts of urban gardening – in particular, the impacts on the people doing the gardening (everything from psychology, vitamin D, immune system benefits to playing in the dirt, etc.).

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Water usage is also problematic. But that’s another story. It’s a multi-parameter optimization problem, but different people weight parameters differently.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Please note that this picture is not a free picture. …

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Just so I’m absolutely clear. This is shameless self promotion, right?

troyunrau, 2 months ago

So has anyone done a read through and has thoughts? Someone in my D&D ground sent me a Tiktok video about it, but (to quote Sinatra) “my generation is showing”.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Once in a while, you think to yourself: civilization is self organizing – given enough time, it will develop institutions and such that will tend toward stability, whether that stability is autocratic or democratic or whatever. Then there is Haiti – a country that decided that The Lord of the Flies is a template for a civilization. And it seems that no amount of outside effort does anything ever. Why is that? Why Haiti in particular when pretty much all their neighbours have at least mostly figured it out? Anyone got a pet theory?

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Coup after coup

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Very cool as a tech demo. Terrible as a product.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

The kindness of admins is a requirement of pretty much all internet infrastructure. Email servers are the same, no? And it gets even harder with proprietary networks – if the admins are being unkind, you can just switch discord servers or whatever. Anyway, I digress.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Somehow they included Great Salt Lake. It is a “great” “lake” ;)

But they left out Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake because they don’t know Canadian geography. ;)

troyunrau, 2 months ago

They’d never do it. Not enough laser and nebulas. Needs more sex appeal.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Star Trek in theory could deal with speed of light limits on lasers. Like, you can miss if the objects you’re trying to hit are too far away or moving erratically. There’s no reason space battles should be like naval battles, where you sit next to each other firing broadsides. Your targets could and should be light seconds away. It’ll be more like submarine warfare, with detection and evasion being key.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

They are speaking truth to power at the moment, but people still play MTX mobile games so…

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Why is Discovery just Doctor Who level of “chosen one” plotlines that make no sense?

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Federated networks route around the damage. You’re seeing that in action here.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Hypothesis tested: critique of Discovery is back on the menu! ;)

troyunrau, 2 months ago

Unfortunately, the Banksian vision of the future requires two things we haven’t achieved: eternal benevolent dictatorship, and post scarcity. Furthermore, he also posits that for something like the Culture to emerge, civilizations need to be mobile (ships) in order to be unconquerable.

The closest we could do with current tech is some sort of Waterworld type thing in international waters with flotillas that are inherently sovereign. But the earth is small and it wouldn’t last. Plus, nukes.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

The strobe should be subtle, just to fuck with everyone. Like 25 Hz or something.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

All six people who still play Diablo 4 probably bought it though…

troyunrau, 3 months ago

Eventually there will have to be an equilibrium. We burnt something like 5-7% of all Canadian forests last year. You can’t do that every year and still have forests to burn. The burnt areas form natural firebreaks while regrowing, which also slows things down.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

Meow

troyunrau, 3 months ago

Funny headline. Heh

troyunrau, 3 months ago

One day, in the near or distant future, we will look back at blood-based and ancestry-based self-identification as being rather quaint. In the same way that sexual self-identification has changed over time.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

This is hilarious