“The aunties, continually mulling it over. A process akin to repetitious dreaming, or the protracted spinning of a given fiction. Not that they’re invariably correct, but over a sufficient course they do tend to find the likely suspects.”
4,851 karma · joined May 19, 2008
Also since the Sun-Earth distance varies and so does the Earth-Moon distance, the coverage of the Sun varies. We sometimes get annular eclipses where the Sun is not totally covered.
The software is being written to teach the user something, but it’s not novel software, or a novel problem, and the creator doesn’t actually care about the process of making the software, or actually thinking about how to solve the question. But they have access to an automatic wheel reinvention machine and so...
Holographic gravity is no less fanciful if there’s no practical experiment to prove it.
But if decommissioned properly, most of the ash inside the building can be collected and mixed into soil and bricks at a safe concentration not far above background radiation level.
In a nuclear power plant, there is no release of radioactive materials, but it’s possible for parts of the structure to absorb radiation and become radioactive itself, and that’s much harder to deal with.
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.
The doc itself is a good high level spec, useful as a walkthrough and for testing, but the detail in each puzzle description isn’t deep enough for someone to implement it.
I think this is indeed a doc pitched at higher-ups, where they want to know that the detail has been worked through, as the game exits the design phase and moves to full production, but don’t want the low level details.
I’d love to see a detailed process of how one of those puzzles was designed though.
(Actually the longest lockdown in Melbourne was the second one, but it was only a couple of weeks after the first, I misremembered it as being one continuous lockdown.)
Subsequent lockdowns were shorter than elsewhere in the world because they reacted faster.
As a result, they had relatively short periods of lockdown compared to other countries, such as the UK, which had comprehensive vaccination but dithered about going into lockdown.
People were poor, wages had hardly grown after years of austerity following the 2008 crash. A huge campaign pointed the finger squarely at the EU: they are taking our money, they are the reason you’re poor, you would be richer without them.
People believed them.
It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
I understand that they communicated and coordinated via some online message board, but how did multiple agents know to visit that same board, how did they know what language to post in that would make it identifiable to other agents, how did other agents know that said instructions were from other valid agents, how did they then ‘persuade’ an agent to do the job, etc.?
It seems to me that the agents must at least have some inherent mechanism for communicating in the field, as it were.
“A plausible hypothesis for the emergence of those concerning behaviours is a conflict between goals.”
A conflict of goals was, of course, the reason why HAL9000 killed the crew of the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Hence the robot dogs
The cars seem to twist towards me as they approach and away from me as they recede, but from my initial stationary position, which is below the roof of the lowest car, I feel that I shouldn’t ever be able to see light from the top surface of a car’s roof?
If I toggle ‘L’ off then indeed, I can’t see the top of any of those cars. But I feel that even with it on, and in the absence of gravitational lensing, I feel the path of light from that top surface would always be blocked?
It’s difficult to measure objectively, due to being physically younger and in an earlier stage of my career and so worser-paid, but adjusting for that, I think quality of life 20 years ago was pretty much the same as now, slightly better in some regards, slightly worse in others.
Of course there are fun new gadgets and gizmos and TV on demand and social media and such, but honestly they’re just toys, and in some cases have made my quality of life worse.
The biggest tangible improvement I can think of is one particular medical advancement, which has allowed a family member to survive a disease when they absolutely would not have 20 years ago. That’s incredible.
But otherwise the quality of life change over the last 20 years is minimal by most important metrics I can think of. Which makes one wonder what the dogged pursuit of GDP growth has achieved for the last decade or two.
If people’s wages are below subsistence levels they’ll sell their investments to survive. There can be no possibility of upward class mobility in this scenario.
NMS really is an exception, that they sold well enough at launch that they can keep providing free major updates for 10 years.