Somewhere, some patent lawyers are going to make millions debating about whether or not this constitutes “public disclosure”.

Oh… Oh no… Really?

Edit: I could have lived with it except for endorsing gwb. You don’t get to call yourself a libertarian and sign off on gitmo and patriot act. Those are like the difference between being problematic but principled ass and just an ass.

The 90s in the USA were a simpler time, but some folks got it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-O4k9jZzE

Dude, they flubbed this so damn hard by over reaching. A few years ago, when they mentioned there would be a button in word that you could use to make a slide deck of your word dock, I was so excited. The teams meeting part where it will summarize meetings is honestly fantastic in doing Roberts rules of order type stuff. My response was “I hate what this means in terms of privacy, but godamn that sounds useful”.

In turning into an everything all or nothing they massively screwed up. I have a self hosted instance of llama-gpt that I use to solve the “blank page” problem that AI was actually great at.

I have a lot of issues with AI on principle, like a lot of folks. But it blows my mind how hard they screwed up delivery (and I don’t just mean the startups, that’s to be expected). There’s plenty to be said about uber at a principle level, but it’s still bloody convenient. The entire roll out of a AI-ecosystem reeks of this meme: “but we made plans!”.

Or just… Don’t make a launcher?

You seem knowledgeable, is the FBS clonal? Like can it grow more undifferentiated or does it need to be continually harvested?

I really dislike that kind of animation style, just isn’t my taste. But in Ghibli, I love it and the stories. I run a plex server for my family and had to warn my mom. My 3 y/o niece doesn’t need to see “grave of the fire flies” just yet.

It’s still best not to bring it up. I’ve known folks that, due to series of miscarriages, didn’t talk about it until like month 6 or 7. For similar reasons some cultures are different about it. My Russian friend talked about hers, but said in Russia you really don’t. Like a family will put together a nursery but not really discuss it until after the baby is born. That was one person for the record, I don’t know a ton of Russians, but it kinda indicated different people do it differently.

Right, said Fred.

how much you can build without a complete understanding

We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?

oh I’m not shortchanging it, I work in the field. It’s crazy how “simple” it is in concept and hard to deliver. But it’s on par with antibiotics with how many lives it’s changed. Like you said, it’s like a lot of civil stuff. A solid highway system, for instance. Just some dirt with fancy rocks on it right? Righhhhhhht?

And don’t get me wrong, wastewater has tons of complications. Any plant is operated in equal parts science, engineering, and art. It’s a living, breathing, bioreactor. They’ve each got their own distinct personality.

Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you’re near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to “ground water recharge”, which is just a fancy way of saying “we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer”.

Increasingly, you’re seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn’t go “back” but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

Wastewater is funny because it’s far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.

I don’t know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they’re not allowed very much, but it doesn’t “count” if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it’s actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.

Yeah like… Netflix has peering agreements and whatnot but… It’s not 2005.

Yeah agree. They’re kind of sold as a cure all, which they’re not, but if you have a very specific problem they’ll help. I think the thing is a lot of times people use them without addressing the root cause. But it’s definitely saved me a deep clean before.

I think that’s exactly the point though. “We didn’t mark it up to mark it down, the price is just the price”. As a chronic patient gamer part of me hates that (I love finding older classics for like $10) but I don’t mind shelling out for a good game. The biggest expense is my time, and if a bunch of years later the price hasn’t moved it’s probably worth my time.

oh yeah, I didn’t want to be dismissive of the mtx stuff. It’s absolutely predatory and awful, but I don’t think it fully stands in the way of developing good games.

Which is related to what you’re saying about indies going under even after success. Game development takes time, and you need money to underwrite that time. I just think there’s going to be a split; right now AAA studios are shitifying their games, turning them more into CandyCrush skinner boxes. But the demand for good games hasn’t gone away, there’s just less financial upside than making CandyCrush. My point is, even though it’s less money, there’s still a good amount of money to be had there. Eventually the gaps going to be filled. Microsoft cant fill it because on the balance sheet, things like COD and anything from King are where they should be focused. And it sucks right now because they sucked up a stupid amount of talent and thanos snapped them, but thats not a sustainable practice.

But yes, it’s going to be painful. It’ll suck seeing really nifty indie stuff have to struggle so hard. Like I said I’m also going to miss the polish that comes with AA stuff. I’m going to miss the hell out of Arkane. Their games weren’t perfect, but they had so much soul. They didn’t deserve to have Redfall be their epitaph.

Oh I’m well aware lol. The game is a godamn miracle. But thats the thing, Bethesda has been on this trajectory for a good lonnnnnng while. Like the whole “obsidian good bethesda bad” thing isn’t quite right, but what is true is Bethesda has been incredibly strategic about shittifying their games: there’s always just enough there to keep you going “ok… one more”.

Starfield is the first one I just didn’t even bother with.

FO4 is why I waited and ultimately didn’t buy starfield. I LOVED elderscrolls, and FO:NV is like my alltime favorite. I didn’t hate FO4, there’s some fun to be had, but you can see pretty clearly from it where FO:76 came from. From what I’ve seen and read, I’m not missing anything with starfield.

NMS is tough. They did an amazing job trying to salvage it, but it will always be a game that was never meant to be that big. It’s not bad but at somepoint in the loop you just go “wtf am I doing?”. I give that team all the credit in the world, but that game never belonged where it is.

Eh, skill up had a great take on this. The thing is it’s wayyyyy easier to be a small indie developer than it ever was before. Making a game (or any art) still isn’t easy, it never was and never will be, but it’s viable without a giant publisher in a way it just hasn’t been before.

Its the AA titles that are on the most precarious footing, but I bet even those do ok. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy some AAA stuff time to time, I’ve got a stupid amount of hours in overwatch, but I’ve never once paid for a skin because… why would you?

The thing that’s going to suck is losing the studios like Arkane. Their games weren’t perfect but they were freaking cool, and they basically always got the raw end of the deal. Even Prey(2016), their masterpiece, is the product of corporate bullshitiery they had nothing to do with. So we’re probably going to miss studios like that for a while (as they get re-tasked to fortnite/cod support teams) but “indie” stuff has already been stepping up to fill that void, and is less indie all the time.

Look at Dave the Diver. That’s not exactly an indie studio. They had resources. There’s going to be a gap for a bit, but there’s still a demand for good games and art. Those AA breakthroughs are what people want. Again, I continue to spend dumb amounts of time on overwatch, but it’s not where I spend my money. Microsoft hovelled themselves by buying all these studios and not taking the leap with supporting them. Distribution just doesn’t have the value it once did. So if microsoft wants to become CandyCrush, feeding an addiction loop to grab the whales, sure, whatever, but there’s plenty of bread out there for studios doing other stuff.