It’s a gorgeous game experience. Not to mention they put so many other gamedevs to shame with their technical accomplishments (especially in the expansion – flooding waves in a ringworld!).

Don’t look up spoilers. Get yourself a copy and play it. Find somewhere to land your spaceship :)

Comedy prediction: SD2 releases overseas, but Australia is used to sell remaining stocks of SD1s for a few years before the SD2 is released here.

The whole thing is vaguely and noncomittally worded, it promises basically nothing.

Take this bit for example:

taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it

In other words: talk to the individual publishers of each game and get their permission :P At which point GOG’s involvement is almost irrelevant, if you have the publisher’s consent then they might as well give you a copy.

Title of PCGamer’s article is misleading, they want a court order to do it. Proof of death is not enough.

“In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”

They have to do that anyway. Court orders overrule a company’s policies in most (all?) legal systems.

Suicide Squad: Less interesting than discussing linguistics xD

Took me a few tries to understand.

A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It’s much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor’s memory through DMA.

I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?

Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.

(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)

Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn’t affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

AMD, a leading AI semiconductor design company in the United States

Ouch

Bad bot. Several of your selected sentences are verbatim repeats.

There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

“holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.

A good search term is “SSD over-provisioning”

The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024

No, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.

but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.

Only if you assume people can’t access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you’re handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it’s completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.

I assume you’re joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.

The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).

Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that’s vendor specific, not documented and I don’t think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).

Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.

In Kerbal Space Program your ships sometimes catch the NaN virus. If one fuel tank level is reading NaN then whatever you do DON’T try and fill it from another (full) tank. I’m not sure if it can spread to physics (thrust, mass, etc) EDIT: Yes it can happen to physics, oh dear.

I wonder what would happen if you landed a NaN-infected spaceship on a planet.

Agreed - you need to tell users why you exist, don’t expect them to know everything.

Conversations

Aerodynamic drag increases with the square of speed. Other frictional losses might follow a similar pattern.

Cars have other sources of inefficiency too (such as idle power consumption), so all cars have a different optimum speed for maximum range (which depends on wind speed, direction & temperature too).

Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.

“Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!”

“Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?”
“No Thomas, that would just make them lazy.”
“Then shouldn’t you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?”
“No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy”

I thought my monitor was broken – the grey it tends to show looks like an LCD from a bad angle. If it were not for this Lemmy post then I’d never know it was a feature, not a bug.

It’s much easier to watch with it off (it’s really distracting). Settings icon (where you find video quality) -> Ambient Mode.