I think you can have combat focused stories as long as your combat mechanics are lightweight and fast.

When I switched out my Shadowrun game to The Sprawl, and then eventually a homebrew, I actually got less afraid of letting combat happen because I knew it wouldn’t eat up ninety percent of the session. By volume of time spent, combat became much less of each session, and yet conversely combat could happen at any time and every scene could feel like a fight might break out because there was no sigh “Roll for initiative…”

With fast, lightweight combat mechanics (especially ones that do not have an initiative system) you get to weave violence into the substance of your story constantly, without the system taking place of the storytelling.

That’s not to say that less combat focused games are a bad thing. The other big change I found was that it was also much easier to run sessions where no fighting occurred, because I didn’t have to figure out how to fill the several hours that should have been taken up by a fight, and the players never felt like there was a difference between fighting and talking and everything else. It all just became part of the broader texture of the story, so a session with no fighting didn’t feel weird or out of place.

I am utterly perplexed as to why people keep posting this image with text that implies that we’re supposed to sympathise with the mass murdering serial rapist.

Yes, the bottom of the ocean is a terrible place to put a data centre. And the fact that it is, somehow, still a more practical option than space is a really good indicator of how unbelievably stupid the entire notion of space data centres is.

Seems reasonable. This case is substantially similar to previous cases that were taken up by the supreme court - in particular a finding over whether a selfie generated by a monkey was copyrightable - and the lower court decisions are in line with the previous precedents set by the supreme court. So they’re effectively just saying “Our opinion hasn’t changed.”

So you’re OK with furries as long as they’re not doing gay shit? 🤨

“My God, what are all these furries doing using an open source art program?”

Like, dude dove in the yiff pile headfirst and then had the audacity to act surprised.

Yep. Radiation is deadly to computers, and without the atmosphere to protect you there is a LOT of radiation in space.

Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you’re not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.

You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it’s safe to do so.

(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)

Why the fuck wouldn’t Krita have a furry mascot? That’s their entire userbase there.

The entire ISS has 14GW of cooling (and a lot of that just goes towards keeping the sun from cooking it). A single server rack can produce around 72GW of heat.

The ISS cost about $100 billion.

Basically, if you took the entire budget of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project (money that, to be clear, he does not have and will not get) and put it into space data centres you might, optimistically, put one rack in space.

Most data centres have dozens to hundreds.

You’re absolutely correct, but “quite big” might be the single biggest understatement I’ve seen in my life.

You need to think about how an infrared laser works. You’re taking electricity, converting it into light and then focusing the light.

So you’d need to take the heat from your GPUs, inefficiently convert it into electricity (a lot of it would remain as heat), then inefficiently convert electricity into light (much of the electricity would turn back into heat in this process) and then focus the light away from the space data centre.

Now, we already have a process for moving heat away from things as infrared light, without going through all those steps (which would just reduce the efficiency of the process). It’s called a radiator, and it’s how we cool things in space. That’s literally where the name comes from; they radiate heat away as infrared light. That’s why hot things glow in thermal cameras.

It is incredibly inefficient. Radiation (ie, infrared light) is, by far, the worst way of cooling things. But in space its the only option you have, because there’s no convection or conduction across vacuum.

A top end GPU puts out about 1,000 watts of waste heat. The entire International Space Station has enough cooling for 14 of those, if it was doing nothing else whatsoever. An average server rack contains 72. The ISS cost $100 billion dollars. So at a minimum you’re looking at around $500 billion to put one single server rack in space. And that’s before accounting for the heat from the sun, which we can’t avoid because we need solar power to run this thing. So probably closer to a trillion. In other words, twice the already ludicrous price tag of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project. For a single server rack.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is because space is an absolutely terrible place to put computers. Getting power is actually the easiest problem to solve, and is still really hard, because building any kind of infrastructure in space is hard. Then you’ve got all that radiation you have to shield against because you’re no longer protected by the Earth’s atmosphere, and worst of all you’ve got the cooling problem because Jesus fucking Christ, space is not cold!

This is why I get annoyed every time a scifi movie shows people freezing to death in space. Because it leads to this level of mass delusion and then suddenly it matters and everyone just unquestioningly believes the lie that space is cold. Space is a vacuum. A vacuum is what your Contigo travel mug uses to keep your coffee scalding hot after four hours. If vacuums are that good at keeping something hot when it naturally wants to get colder, think about what they’ll do to something that is actively generating heat. All of your components are going to cook.

There are proposals to put data centres at the bottom of the ocean that are substantially more credible than this idiocy.

Don’t buy the hype. They’re not acting in good conscience, they’ve just weighed the pros and cons and decided that the PR hit isn’t worth it.

This is just them sticking to their principles.

I’m not so sure about that one.

AI company Anthropic amends core safety principle amid growing competition in sector

AI safety leader says ‘world is in peril’ and quits to study poetry

They’re not. Conscience has nothing to do with this.

They just don’t think the PR hit is worth it.

Whenever companies choose to act in a way that we perceive as good, we were the voice of reason, not them.

Give me fifty dollars, I’ll get you an ashtray and a blowtorch.

Gentoo is just a pile of steel and aluminum beams, a few drums of oil, a cow, and a note that reads “Good luck.”

My wife and I played Haven back before we got married, and never got around to finishing it. Really ought to dust that game off again. Playing it as a couple was really fun, and actually helped us to learn things about each other.

You know what’s wild? The answer that immediately comes to mind is Warframe.

Genuinely, I’m not remotely joking, Warframe has some of the best video games romance I’ve ever encountered.

Two things really stand out to me about the conversations in Warframe.

First, the things they learn about you are often just as important as the things you learn about them. The article talks about the process of two people figuring out how they fit into each other’s lives, and that’s exactly what you get with Warframe. You need to actually show that you can be someone they can love, as well as simply showing interest in them.

Secondly, and I think maybe more importantly; most of the conversations in Warframe don’t feel “important.” They all are. But most of them are about comparatively trivial things. A lot of it is literally just people sharing shower thoughts, or jokes, or talking about dumb shit, or getting things off their brains. But how you handle those interactions matters just as much, if not more, than the heavy stuff.

Also, the way the characters interact feels distinct and different. Amir, the most obvious case of ADHD in the universe, writes five messages for every one of yours (these conversations all happen through “Not MSN Messenger”), and most of the time what he needs is for you to just listen while he unloads all the chaotic shit in his brain. Eleanor, the journalist, writes long, carefully formed sentences with correct punctuation and grammar. She poses questions, prods and pries, tries to dig secrets out of you. Aoi will sometimes just send you a string of emojis, and will be delighted if you reply the same way. She likes to be silly, but more importantly she needs to just know that you’re there and you cared enough to reply. It’s the written equivalent of squeezing someone’s hand. Some characters will pester you, others are more likely to wait for you to talk first. There’s a unique dynamic with each of them.

At this point it’s not really all that important if they’re Trump friendly or not. ICE started shooting white people, and that broke the right wing social contract; “We’ll allow any amount of authoritarian government over reach so long as we believe it will never be used against us.”