lopsotronic

8 ms·

61.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Old Guy here calling out Planescape:Torment for directing us to perhaps the most insidious monster of all. It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older ga
62.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
FNV is peak franchise, IMHO. Master's study of how to make a sandbox tell a narrative. Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually d
63.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
The grandson of Oswald . . no way . . no waaayyyy . . clickity clickity click click Jesus tap dancing Christ.
64.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Far too late for that. It's going to take big industrial solutions, like the "L1 Space Parasol" (scary, better)[0] or the "Superdust Chemical Injection into the Upper Atmosphere" (less scary, dumber[1]). Or some sca
65.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I've always been a "power user", making little python programs and figuring out new ways to do things with seemingly unrelated systems. My knowledge is shallow, but very broad. A year and a few jobs ago I was genuinely up aga
66.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I'm not sure that's completely accurate? Vertex skinning isn't (necessarily) tied to polygons . . but to having points (or any parameterized features) that can be transformed by a weighted blend of matrices. The "vertex&
67.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
But the mesh is itself an abstraction, you just need to build that bridge. We've been leaning away from pure polygons for decades, anyway. Vertex skinning, SDFs, volumetrics, simulation, and a lot more. The meshes in a From Software ga
68.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Humans have a hard time with zeroes, as there's not really an evolutionary driver for that. In the natural world, if whatever it is has exponents, odds are you're not going to be able to do anything about it.
69.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Ah the timeless joy of falling through the floor geometry. Seriously though - it's breathtaking. The first guy who figures out the bridge between splats and dynamism - animation, editing, responsiveness - is going to be one of the immo
70.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Probably because you're watching the climax of the End of (heavily financialized, securitized, American-style) Capitalism. Assets are being converted into political power directly, as all the circuit breakers have been ripped out. I wo
71.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Being aviation-adjacent for the last few decades, I can't think of a light GA open water ditching that EVERYONE survived without a scratch. Astonishing luck and no doubt skill on everyones' part. I know, I know, Sully . . . but .
72.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Couldn't agree more. But I'd recommend solving the problem before shooting ten men and ten women into the Martian regolith forever and telling them to make babies. Alternatively, it's not the scale of problem you try and so
73.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Depends on how you define "permanent" but the closed ecological systems (CES) problem is nowhere near solved. Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There&
74.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
The resultant economic income elasticity / demand destruction from sudden "shocks" in energy costs will dull those gains for oil comopanies. And that shock has a longer signal. Witness the commodity runup from the last time
75.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Mentioned by . . the President? SecDef? Did they mention these things before munitions were released? Perhaps I have not been paying attention, but generally before exploding another sovereign nation PotUS does a little speaking thing. June
76.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Wikipedia in one tab, and SpaceEngine in the other, is one of my favorite semi-educational gaming experiences. Great game. I haven't seen anything quite as nice even though it's quite long in the tooth.
77.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I think it might be even worse than that. It's a war for nothing at all. A defense analyst said, "we can't be sure that the administration has met their war aims" and it made me scream at the radio. What aims? They didn&
78.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I think the level of irritation is proportional to knowledge of the technical art of cinema, since what makes a good "shot" is often a discussion of minutiae. There are innumerable examples of better shots in television, particula
79.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
https://www.popsci.com/environment/douglas-rushkoff-survival... It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking
80.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Yeah once payback goes below subsistence[1] - even when it gets near it- things get unstable and extremely dangerous. Ancient people understood this very quickly and built up institutions to keep the baseline above subsistence for urban civ
81.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Reading the tea leaves, directing a young person to "learn Chinese" is probably good advice. To the larger point . . . At the time of writing, all deepseek or qwen models AFAIK are de facto prohibited in defense contracting, inclu
82.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I pushed a somewhat over lengthy reply above, but short version for this context is that GPS/FPV in current EW/EMI regime has unacceptable loss rates in UA (see also many many grounded / "spared" US origin "pre
83.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
First off, disclaimer about the camera bias. Every FPV strike comes with a video. When a Ukrainian brigade drops a 152mm shell, nobody on Telegram sees it. When a $500 quadcopter lobs an RKG-3 that's a 30-second clip with a soundtrack,
84.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
It's going to be both, and it's because of physics. At this moment, the best way to put kinetic energy into an enemy is sticking some quantity of explosive on them. You have a few ways of going about this. Two we consider today: 1
85.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
* It's easy to box, if you're doing ITAR-sort of things. It's basically just an HTML file. Getting that sort of box-ability is increasingly difficult. * Abstracting one layer from pages - i.e. tiddles - is pretty dope. This g
86.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
Mmmm. Not just the worst from a moral perspective - which is still bad! - but also some of the dumbest . Ours are not the Masters of Industry from the Industrial Age[1], or the fission-missile-kings of the Nuclear Age. They're not rea
87.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
Living systems - hell, complex systems - don't do "forever" real well. You end up adding a compounding amount of energy over time, a "negentropic tax", as the universe tries to untie that complexity into radiation.
88.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
If you can figure out a Gig Economy way to get robot/remote/AI pilots into airline cockpits, you will make a mint. "What? I can save ten bucks on airfare if I accept a robot pilot? GIVE ME THAT TICKET" A mint we will the
89.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
Value proposition of an awful lot of Enterprise Software is evaluated only in hindsight, and on an institutional tidal wave of "Industry Standard!", FOMO, and all-expensed "Technical Forums". "Good" is optional
90.
by lopsotronic 6mo ago
I delight in all things that remind me of RSS and am still on the hunt for the killer. The moment when that age of technology turned - the wiki/blogger/RSS era giving way to the Facebook/Twitter one - seems to have marked som

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