vimacs2

There is no good reason to think that we will in fact scale to the point where we can "simulate physics to the smallest quantum details, at a universal scale, at a fraction of the energy cost of our own universe". Computing cannot scale infinitely - we already have various limits based on our incomplete models of physics and there may be even more limits that emerge with further research. Even with a quantum computer, it's unlikely that we can really simulate chaotic systems with any real semblance of accuracy. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't approximate such behavior by implementing optimizations and abstractions on top of elementory particles but if our universe is indeed a simulation, it seems to not be employing any of these.

Indeed, the only two aspects of your universe that make the idea that it's a simulation even remotely possible is the fact that there at least appears to be an ultimate smallest division of physical attributes - the plank units and the fact that there is also a specific limit on the speed of causality - c. Neither of these are a slam dunk.

"CONTROLLER SUPPORT in steam

valve never encouraged people to support controllers, WORSE, 99% of games expect you to use XBOX controller, as a result XBOX controller are displayed even if you use a DUALSHOCK one

valve could have provided APIs so they can feed games with proper icons etc etc, but nothin"

Out of all of your rather dubious points against Valve's plans, this is by far the most absurd. Have you heard of a little thing called Steam Input? Valve in fact have provided an API that does everything you've listed including feeding the "proper icons". It's up to the developers to use it. That would not change even if the game was 100% native because xinput is still the industry standard. Controller support on Steam is second to none.

"you don't come up with such a device over night, they had years to think about that, they focused on emulation

we will see who was right in the end, i think i am"

No, I think it's safe to conclude that you are wrong even from this date. You're asking Valve to compete with a platform that has all the games available. You're also assuming that native is always better than non-native but as I've already seen, a crappy native port is often beaten in both performance and feature set by Proton. Instead of asking developers to gamble away valuable time on the OS of a device that could be a flop, it makes a lot more sense to release the device with the games currently available in the market in mind and then give developers an incentive to add special support for a device that is actually out in the wild in the hands of paying customers.

You also really do not need to implement every Windows API, you only need to translate draw calls to Vulkan and then a small subset of API's that actually relate to games such as sound. Your example doesn't make a lot of sense, the only way a security API would matter for Proton is if the game is from the Windows store but most people do not in fact use the Windows Store even on Windows so games tend to get released on Steam as well - including even many Microsoft titles.

At the end of the day though, Valve's approach has made it so that I already do not miss Windows for gaming even with the current non-ideal situation with anti-cheat. If they adopted your approach, we would have likely had a small increase in the number of native games but most of the industry would have probably ignored such a call. It would also be very unlikely to magically make desktop Linux a real competitor. I think we need to stop chasing that dream because frankly, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The only way you would be able to compete with Windows and Mac is by having a similar marketing and UX budget and by removing or downplaying many of the attributes of desktop Linux that likely drew us towards it in the first place - package management, hyper-extensibility, the terminal, GPL licensing, etc.

I do not think it's worth it frankly. There is nothing wrong with being "niche".

In orders of questions asked, probably not and probably not. There isn't really a particularly strong case to be made for the simulation hypothesis because it's unfalsifiable and the entire premise of it's alleged liklihood rests on some major assumptions with no evidence.

The fact that it's been given more consideration than as an idle philosophical thought experiment has more to with our current's culture's fixation on computers than a particularly strong argument.

The original thought experiment from Nick Bostrom has also at this point been paraphrased incorrectly by both Neil Degrass Tyson and Elon Musk so the public discourse surrounding it has lost much coherence.

While I actually do believe in the Dryas impact hypothesis myself, there is definitely quite a bit of stigma surrounding the idea, especially since controversal figures like Graham Hancock have embraced it.

While I think a lot of his ideas are pretty out there, I do agree with him that I would need substantially more evidence than there actually is for concluding that civilisation really is only 6000-10000 years old. Modern humans have been around for more than 10 times that length and our actual fossil records are incredibly spotty.

This seems more like an opportunistic rant about Valve's marketing than a sincere response to the particular situation. The name makes perfect sense given its a slab that plays steam games and if you'd pay attention to the website beyond the background colour (???), you may notice how it has several pictures, animations and videos illustrating the product in far more detail and clarity than many console launches. It worked for me anyway because I studied the site cover to cover so to speak.

Granted, I agree that Valve did a genuinely poor job with the Steam Controller and Steam machines but in the former case, it was because even Valve themselves didn't quite understand what they had just made and in the latter, things were complicated by having to deal with multiple third parties.

Why on earth would you think trying to incentivise developers to release native Linux builds would be a more worthwhile investment than simply improving Proton? Linux desktop probably occupies about 2% of the steam market and that's being generous and assuming that their actual steam hardware surveys are underreporting adoption.

Even assuming wild success on this products part, that would only drive that number up a few percent since I don't see production for these running particularly high.

It might make more sense to encourage developers to provide proton support for anti cheat (like what Valve are actually doing leading up to this device's launch) rather than asking AAA developers to invest additional time on support that is arguably a waste of resources and certainly something of low priority.

Aside from that, my own experiences with Proton are far more positive than yours. I've hardly ever had to tweak things for it to work. Occasionally, I need to use an older proton version for a game but that's hardly a chore.

Yes but that's not really the same thing as real nationwide public healthcare. Going by my experiences in the UK at least, people tend to have a lot of pride with them even if they also will complain about issues with it.

It's considered political suicide to even openly discuss dismantling the NHS which is why even the Tories continue to tip toe around the issue even after having been in control of government for more than a decade at this point.

I'm aware of that workaround but there shouldn't be any need for a workaround in the first place. Valve shouldn't get to freeze my entire library when I want to share a single game with a family member or friend.

My personal number one issue with Steam (aside from the obvious fact that it's still DRM at the end of the day) is that I think their family sharing feature is kind of bullshit. You cannot let somebody play a game in your library and be able to play yourself another game in that same library at the same time.

There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.

I wonder how well would things turn out if people were given the choice to opt out of public healthcare. You don't get taxed on it but also cannot use it (except in ER situations obviously).

I'd imagine that most people would stay signed on but it does give people who either distrust public institutions or just don't feel like they would benefit from a public option a choice.

Full disclosure: I am firmly on the side of socialised medicine.

Agreed, great movie. Only thing that I dislike is it does that trope where it makes a waaaaaay bigger deal out of somebody killing the villain than would actually be realistic, almost implying that somehow the protagonist has somehow become as bad as the guy who [REDACTED] his [REDACTED].

"Terrible" might be a little extreme but it's a little hard to argue that Wikipedia has not seen better days. The moderation culture has seemingly been taken over by deletionists who seem more concerned about some arbritary metric of "notability" than if an article is of high quality.

https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

Oh right, the controller has a gyro as well - something which for some reason Valve completely failed to advertise. You can use it both to aim and as a kind of spatial D-Pad (among a lot of other options).

He also hired a private investigator to target the guy. I'm a huge fan of his work with SpaceX but let's not downplay what a petty asshole he was during that whole thing.

I am definitely a SC Stan too. I learned how to truly master it playing Hollow Knight funny enough. Have a setup where I literally do not need to use anything but the trackpads and the occasional turning over of the whole controller to invoke the map. Absolutely love it.

Only things I don't like are the bumper buttons and I'd much rather USB C than micro usb.

I wish they would make an SC 2 with fixed bumpers, ditching the thumbsticks for bigger trackpads with more advanced haptics and a doubling of paddle buttons like with this new device.

A shame because I personally found it funny and completely non-offensive as an Emacs user. This weird fake editor war is part of the culture of both editors and I'd prefer this kind of banter to the boring and tired jokes of "it's a great operating system that just lacks a decent text editor".

> claiming Assad never used chemical weapons

You mean the assertion made by western governments without any actual evidence and which was later confirmed to be politically motivated by OPCW whistleblowers? Where have I seen this script before? Oh right, it's because it was the same one used in Iraq.

Your view of gaming laptops is a couple of years out of date. There are plenty of capable gaming laptops now with slim profiles and while battery life is still not their forte, that's only when they are actually gaming which isn't usually something you engage in without at least being relatively close to an outlet.

. . . That's not what people mean when they say "half finished". It's when a game with a defined scope fails to meet that scope. You might not like the dearth of content with those titles but there is no indication that they were ever meant to go beyond what was provided on release.

Not to mention much of traditional media are geared against the interests of the tech giants. It's older villains going after the newer villains.

I do not disagree here. That being said, I fucking hate wasps so while I wouldn't hold a grudge over it, I'd definitely have mixed feelings about having a wasp named after me myself.

I agree that it was petty of her but unless if anybody else steps up in her place in a substantial way and fight the major publishers, I think we should be a little lenient on her idiosyncracities. I don't know what the real story behind the block is but something tells me there was a lot of other baggage on her mind prior to hearing about the wasp.

The nice thing is that we got plenty of time to study Venus since we do not really even need to terraform Venus to colonise it in the short term.

At a high enough altitude, both the pressure and temperature drops to Earth's equivilent. If you have a large enough structure that is relatively airtight (it doesn't need to be perfect), you only need a small temperature gradient to keep it aloft in the upper Venusuean atmosphere.

You could have cloud cities with open air balcony areas where you can walk around with only some basic protective gear and an oxygen supply to protect against the corrosive air and perhaps enjoy gliders or other airborne amusements. It's also good practice for when we decide to attempt something similar with Saturn and some of the other gas giants.

>He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.

This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.

When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.

And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.

>Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.

While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.

In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.

The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.

Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.

I think their point was your joke doesn't make much sense when only a small subsection of the entire telescope was ever replaced.

Considering that they themselves made the telescope, do you consider all forms of self expression propoganda?

You can "protest" sure for a given definition of the word but the US absolutely will go after any organisation or group that plan anything beyond ineffectual picket waving.

While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.

This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.

This is one of the main reasons why I vape.

I first got interested in the nootropic properties of nicotine long before I took up the pen when I came across Gwern's article on it. In particular, the possibility of reinforcing habits using it was the biggest thing that made me look into it. However, he uses gum instead.

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

You're correct in the short term but Venus only has four times the nitrogen content of Earth which might sound like a lot for now but in a fully developed Dyson swarm, will prove to be inadequate. It might turn out to be a non issue since we might be able to simply transmutate it into existence by recycling more abundant materials with fusion but there is still a lot of unknowns with the actual engineering constraints of controlled fusion.