ajuc

They will do that anyway. No amount of pandering will change their minds.

The time for this debate was 100 years ago. Now only people who can't be convinced aren't convinced, so there's no point convincing.

So why not make fun of them? There's no downside.

Strength of fibers scales with crossection area, mass scales with volume.

I really liked Stanisław Lem's take on this in the short story "The Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon".

https://www.oocities.org/stanislaw_lem/opowiadania/opowiadan...

A solution for a military AI gone awry that built a terrifying electro-dragon was obviously to build a super-electro-dragon.

There's a pretty cool article about trying to understand electronics and fix a radio the way we try to understand biology. https://mappingignorance.org/2014/07/02/biologists-cant-unde...

So now instead of improving the tools of biology so we can actually understand it deeply - we increase complexity of IT so we have to rely on muddy, side-effecty tools of biology to try to infer some of the properties of the systems we made. That's depressing.

Unpopular opionion - Dostoyevsky is just russian Kipling. Empire apologist who pretended to write about deep stuff but in the end always got the convenient result.

People in Europe tow stuff with 120 HP sedans or combis all the time. Driving a vehicle that you can't park, that's unsafe for pedestrians and burns 50% more every day just so you can tow something marginally easier on these 2 occassions a year when you need to tow something larger than a 500kg trailer makes 0 sense.

And if we're talking businesses, building crews etc. - this is what they actually need: https://img.linemedia.com/img/s/flatbed-truck-3-5t-Volkswage...

Or just a regular van more likely, cause rain is a thing.

VW crafter with dual cab uses 57% of its length for the flatbed, largest F150 - 39%. Notice how the engine fits into this tiny vedge-shaped hood.

https://i.imgur.com/KopGeTi.png

Same idea as American trucks, more cargo space, higher usable load, can be loaded from all sides, completely flat bed, no wheel cutouts, fits 6 people inside, burns less fuel. All because there's no ridiculously huge hood, wheels and engine.

Let's be honest here. American pickup trucks are not about the usability, they are about ego.

What's more comfortable about SUV or a truck than a minivan or combi?

How is a tall hood increasing your family comfort? It only increases your ego.

Id we wanted to do sth similar for SUVs and Trucks it would be a special driving licence required, with additional requirements and more expansive insurance.

Going from 90% to 95% efficiency you're halving the thermal loses, thus reducing the need for cooling by half. It's a big deal.

Same with going from 99% to 99.5% efficiency. It still reduces the cooling needed by half.

Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features.

Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.

PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.

They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.

Give people the docker file.

A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

That's more AAA stuff not indie.

Commit messages are usually more useful than code comments. For one thing they change when the code changes, so they are much less likely to lie.

If you need to search for a variable named i - you should have named it something else (and no, jj is NOT an improvement in that case).

One letter variables are supposed to be used in scopes that fit on the screen completely. You might as well search for "for"

TL; DR: it's on purpose.

1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations.

2. you're comparing unfairly (looking at the most complex examples from the past and comparing them to modern average). There were LOTS of very simplistic games in the past. You just don't think about most of them. Some genres went extinct because of how simplistic they were (see the dungeon crawlers where there was no dialogue or story whatsoever - just moving at 90 degree and hitting monsters) - it's the "old music was better" fallacy - you don't remember the old music that sucked.

If you compare most complex modern games they blow out of the water anything from the past. Let's say Baldur's Gate 3 or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft compared to let's say Elite or Betrayal at Krondor.

No mention of the Witcher? The whole franchise is based on moral dilemmas like that.

Yeah I started walking a lot since 2021 (before I walked but just a few km to/from work, and sometimes I'd take a bus), since 2020 I worked remotely and I realized how much I need these walks, started walking around 7km daily on average, with 20-30km walks on weekends.

It fixed my back pains. It made me lose weight. It gave me time to reflect on my long-avoided problems. Productivity is like the least important benefit.

Not enough trust to do business.

I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.

If you make cities more concentrated without balooning them with parking lots - everything's closer. If you restrict cars - there's less traffic jams, which makes commute faster.

If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.

US has much higher crime levels than other developed nations. It's also the most car-dependant of them.

People often think public transport creates crime, because criminals use it to move (like everybody else). But public transport mainly lets non-criminal people to move, which reduces the number of criminals overall.

AI will consume any amout of energy if you have enough demand.

Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.

It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.

In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop?

Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime. If you have whole groups in society that cannot get what they need working within the system - some of them will work outside the system. Public transport makes working within the system easier (barrier to entry to work/study in the good places gets lower). It also smooths around the strict urban class divisions (it makes sense for rich people to live in the city, which makes the elites more likely to invest in the city, which makes it more likely for non-elites to be able to work with the system).

The opposite is car-dependand suburbs + crime-ridden inner cities with no way out other than crime.

It will become an issue in 150-200 years even if we just continue on our current trajectory.

WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.

What's your problem with the "we" word, again?

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO28...

Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.

There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.

There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.

Also f.lux and other software that changes color temperatures depending on time of day :)

If it's a considerate decision, I support people's right to ending their own life.

I support euthanasia after proper waiting period and psych evaluation.

But if I see someone trying to end their life on a street I'm trying to stop them. It's far more likely it's impulsive and not a rational, thought-out decision.

Same with not using seatbelts. There's basically zero reasons not to, so the probability of it being someone exercising their freedoms after a careful consideration is basically zero.

So the seatbelt mandate should only apply when kids are in the car, or only to kids?

It should apply always, because the benefit is literally life and death, and the cost is basically nothing. Why complicate law, then?

Same reason you try to save somebody who wants to jump from a bridge? Cost is marginal and potential benefit is huge.

Additionally if it was optional people would forget to do it more often even if they don't consciously choose to risk their lives for no reason.

BTW they are not only endangering themselves - they also endanger their kids.

Saving hundreds of thousands of lives was a weird decision?

You don't need to ask for it. They default to validation.

Might be as simple as cost/effect in resource-constrained environment.

Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survive ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.

Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.

Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.