Tossrock

30 ms·

301.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Sorry, you said the reef looks "indistinguishable to what it looked like 20-odd years ago." which implies it looks basically the same, but that seems at odds with the rest of what you're saying. Did you mean something besides
302.
by Tossrock 10y ago
It's fiction, but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle features many coffee house intrigues in this exact setting (Restoration England)
303.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I agree with most of this post but Solaris is truly painful to watch. A five minute long shot of a freeway is really pushing the line between "slow, subtle artistry" and "banal, cheaply produced filler" (and yes, I'
304.
by Tossrock 10y ago
That's an interesting critique that is very opposed to my own reading. Do you have specific examples? From my perspective, things like the Sax/Anne debate about terraforming Mars, or Frank's resentment at living in Boone&#x27
305.
by Tossrock 10y ago
So, you think this http://i.imgur.com/MAy4Pgl.jpg is more legible than this http://i.imgur.com/xrBPKda.jpg ? I disagree! And Starcraft 2 has a fixed isometric viewpoint. While it is technically possible to
306.
by Tossrock 10y ago
The Starcraft 2 modding is incredibly in-depth* and that scene is slowly dying. * I am pretty sure that Blizzard actually made an entire other game, Heroes of the Storm, using those same tools
307.
by Tossrock 10y ago
If you were to read the article, you would see that your initial question is covered: "So, what does the tasteful, expert connoisseur Roger Ebert have to say about the relationship between the cinema and art? Just this: “Hardly any mov
308.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Twitch seems to be an existence proof against the idea that playing video games produces nothing of benefit to society. Clearly, people playing video games has produced in excess of $1B benefit to society. "Make something people want&q
309.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Because there aren't enough women applying. At my previous job, I interviewed 50+ people, and fewer than 10% were women. For the record, I advocated strongly for most of them, and contributed to several being hired, including one of th
310.
by Tossrock 10y ago
SpaceMonger is one of the rare pieces of consumer shareware so good that I was compelled to pay for it. Being able to zoom with the mousewheel, google maps style, is incredibly satisfying and useful.
311.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Quantcast does this - they train a model based on your converters and then find more people like them. It's quite effective. Disclosure: I worked there for some time.
312.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I think automatic rice cooking is a solved problem. There's a device called a "rice cooker", where you pour in the rice and water, press a button, and then later you get cooked rice. No wifi necessary!
313.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I think the author is strawmanning a bit here. The central premise they're attacking is that tech should not be called upon to solve social problems, and they assume this is what the pull quote at the top is implying. They then spend t
314.
by Tossrock 10y ago
No it wouldn't. At a constant 1g acceleration, you're in the .9c range in less than a year. So to get to Alpha Centauri would take < 6 years, accounting for acceleration and deceleration. And because you're constantly acce
315.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Because most people use computers to consume content (ie video), which is largely produced in widescreen.
316.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I'm very familiar with appeal to authority, which is not what I've done. Appeal to authority is when you argue "Statement X is true because authority Y said it is". This is not what I said - I listed examples of successf
317.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I downvoted you because your comment was gimmicky and needlessly antagonistic while not making a substantive point. Do you think Burning Man attendees don't live in the real world? Do you think you've achieved that much more than
318.
by Tossrock 10y ago
What were the circumstances around your playing of a Strad? Are there special protocols for handling it, traveling with it? That sounds pretty interesting.
319.
by Tossrock 10y ago
It's interesting to note that Burning Man started out as a much more freewheeling, libertarian kind of place (shooting guns, driving around wherever you wanted, etc), and that as it grew, it encountered the natural outcomes that requir
320.
by Tossrock 10y ago
If you're using SI prefixes, yes. If you're using the latin sense of "centi" meaning "hundred", as in centipede, then it means "hundred million". Dollars are not (yet) an SI unit.
321.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I disagree on the point of no other games having the same level of user generated content. Specifically, Starcraft and then Warcraft III modding birthed multiple centi-million dollar industries (Tower Defense, MOBAs). Minecraft didn't
322.
by Tossrock 10y ago
True, but orthogonal to the argument. Elon's pro-simulation argument is fundamentally grounded in our reality ("video games have progressed a lot and there are lots of video game consoles, so eventually we could run the types of s
323.
by Tossrock 10y ago
I think Elon is wrong, but for technical reasons, not philosophical ones. For one, we do not have photorealistic simulations for real-time games. We're not even close, frankly. Still-renders can pass the photorealism barrier, as in ind
324.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Can you give a brief overview of the diet you mention, and maybe link some resources on it? The website I found was basically un-navigatable.
325.
by Tossrock 10y ago
If you like Neal Stephenson, yes. If you dislike Neal Stephenson, probably not. If neither of the above, could go either way.
326.
by Tossrock 10y ago
Hmm, my understanding was that he was from Eastern Europe, but I could be wrong about that. I want to say it was in his location line on the wc3c forums for a while.
327.
by Tossrock 10y ago
The map was called Pudge Wars
328.
by Tossrock 10y ago
It was called Pudge Wars! The DotA 2 version is here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=29683... where you can see its subscriber count (and my name cited as the originator)
329.
by Tossrock 10y ago
People still play the Warcraft III map I made in 2006, mostly in Russia. It relied heavily on an extension of the scripting language called vJass created by a genius eastern european hacker named Vexorian and was one of the most advanced o
330.
by Tossrock 10y ago
One of my favorite stories about Alpha Centauri was from a person on the PA forums called Wallhitter: I learned the word Atrocity from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri My dad and I had a horrible discussion in the car about the word, even

More ›